Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

and Bob’s the rest of it.
That’s
your story.” So bloody well write it, she thought, so that the Italian press would pick up on it, run with it, and batter the cops till the real source of the
E. coli
was located. Because the one thing she could and would absolutely bet her life on was that Azhar had nothing to do with Angelina Upman’s death.
    On his end of the call, Mitch Corsico was acting thoughtful. He hadn’t got to where he was without being careful with his stories. He might be employed by a deplorable rag that was more suitable for lining rubbish bins than it was for printing valuable information, but he didn’t intend to spend his entire career at
The Source
, so he had a reputation for accuracy that he had to maintain. He said, “Seems to me you’re not thinking this through. Far ’s I can tell, there’s not a hint of pasta-eating lads and lasses dropping like flies because of some mass food poisoning over here unless the health officials for the whole effing country’re in on a cover-up, which, you ask me, isn’t bloody likely. So are you trying to suggest the Upman woman dipped into a plate of steaming
E. coli
on her own?”
    “Who knows how high the cover-up goes? For all we know, there
are
other
E. coli
victims and no one is talking about them.”
    “Bollocks. There’ll be laws about that. Reporting a potential epidemic or something. Like when someone shows up in casualty coughing blood and bloody-hell-we’ve-got-a-case-of-TB-on-our-hands. They don’t let that go. They wouldn’t let this go.”
    Barbara jammed her fingers into her wet hair. She looked round for her fags, didn’t see them, realised that she hadn’t brought them into the bathroom, remembered that she’d had a shower primarily to wash the stench of them off her, and wanted one anyway.
    She said, “Mitchell? Will you listen to me? Or at least to yourself? One way or another you’ve got a story, so why the hell don’t you bloody write it?”
    “I expect it comes down to my not quite trusting you.”
    “Christ. What more do I sodding have to tell you?”
    “Why you’re so hot to have this story hit the paper for a start.”
    “Because they should be telling their own papers about it and they’re not. They’re not warning anyone. They’re not looking for the source.”
    “Uh . . . That’s where you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. You and I both know why the professor’s been stuck in the
questura
. This conversation’s gone back to where it started. He was there yesterday. Chances are very good he’ll be there today, and ’f you ask me, there’s a pretty good chance they’re not talking to him about how he likes the weather in Tuscany and the
farro
soup in Lucca. Come on, Barb. I did a little digging on our good professor: the ins, the outs, and the whereabouts. He was rubbing elbows with his fellow bacteria lovers just last month. Berlin, this was. Now, if I know that—because it wasn’t exactly a top secret, eyes-only confab, Barb—the cops know that. They find someone among that crowd who’s studying
E. coli
and it’s one hell of a very short trip from that information to someone passing along a petri dish of that stuff to Azhar for use on his lover.”
    “Mitchell. Are you listening to me?”
    “Okay. His former lover, if that’s where I’ve gone wrong.”
    “Stop it,” she said. “Have you been listening? This is a story in which the Italian health services and the Italian police—”
    “Barb, you’re the one not listening. Uncle Mitchell here has colleagues there. Where you are. In London. And those colleagues have sources elsewhere, even in Berlin. And their sources in Berlin have easy access to that conference of bacteria bigwigs. And what do you think they’ve uncovered for me? In twenty-four hours, Barb, so you can rest bloody well assured that the Italian coppers will be right behind them.”
    Barbara’s throat was so tight that she could barely get the word out. “What?”
    “We’ve got a woman from University of Glasgow who’s a major player in the
E. coli
field. We’ve got a bloke from University of Heidelberg who’s right behind her. Both of them have serious operations going in laboratories on their home patches. And both of them were at the conference. You can connect the dots on that one if you want to.”
    No, Barbara thought. No, no, no.
    She said, and she tried to sound determined, “You’re heading in the wrong direction. This is a woman who had more