Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

than one lover at a time. She had Azhar and another bloke while she was living with Azhar here in London. And then she had Lorenzo Mura as well. Three lovers at once. She left Azhar for Lorenzo Mura and I’m telling you that it’s a fairly sure thing she picked up someone over there once the fires burnt low with Mura. That’s who she was.”
    “You’re slithering all over the map, Barb. You can’t be trying to tell me this bird had a former lover with access to
E. coli
and a current lover with access as well. How d’you expect that ship to get out of port?
And
you’re contradicting yourself anyway. This is either a grand Italian cover-up or it’s cold-blooded murder, but it isn’t both.”
    She was as out of ideas as she was out of steam. She was reduced to saying the one thing she knew had no chance at all of winning him to her thoughts. She said, “Mitchell, please.”
    He said pleasantly, “At the end of the day, this is going to be a very big story, so I s’pose I have to thank you, Barb. I give it another twenty-four hours before they arrest him. They call that
indagato
here. The coppers turn their eyes on you as the principal suspect and the news goes out and you’re
indagato.
Taking his passport was the first step. That’s the second. So you put me on to a very big story, Barb. Rod might even increase my expense account to include a plate of spaghetti Bolognese.”
    “You’ll destroy him if you start speculating about him in the press. You know that, right? You’ve already done the Love Rat Dad piece. Wasn’t that enough? You’ve got nothing but circumstantial rubbish to build a story on.”
    “True enough,” he said. “But circumstantial rubbish is our bread and butter. You knew that when you brought me on board.”
    VICTORIA
    LONDON
    Barbara forced herself to eat. She even went for something with more nutritional validity than her usual fare. In place of a strawberry Pop-Tart, she opted for a soft-boiled egg and brown toast. She gave in to jam, but that was it. She felt virtuous for five minutes until she sicked up the entire mess.
    Luckily that happened before she left Chalk Farm for the Met. She was forced to change her tee-shirt and scrub her teeth and mouth three times. But none of that resulted in her being late for work, which she reckoned counted in her favour.
    She tried not to smoke en route. She failed. She tried to divert her mind with chat from Radio 4. She failed. Twice she came close to finding herself on the responsibility end of a roadway crash. She self-talked and tried to get her breath even and her heart beating normally. She failed there as well.
    She had two fags in the underground car park, the first to still her nerves and the second to build her courage. What she was attempting to come to terms with was having saved Azhar from a kidnapping charge only to have him charged with murder. In the realm of pyrrhic victories, she reckoned she’d just been crowned its bloody empress.
    And where was Hadiyyah? What in God’s name had been done with Hadiyyah if Azhar was spending hours on the grill in gaol?
    She’d rung his mobile: twice before she left her bungalow in Chalk Farm, once on her way to Victoria Street, and a final time in the underground car park. No reply told her he was probably back at the
questura
, as Mitch had predicted. What she couldn’t understand was why he had not rung to tell her what was going on.
    She couldn’t work out what this meant except that he didn’t want her to know he was being questioned in the first place. He’d already deceived her about his participation in Hadiyyah’s kidnapping. It wasn’t inconceivable that he’d not wanted her to know he was being questioned about Angelina’s death.
    What she didn’t want to toss round in her mind was whether she ought to be concluding that he was involved. Instead, she concentrated on Hadiyyah and on the state of fear and confusion the little girl had to be in. Her young life was in shambles. In six short months, she’d gone through more than most children endure in a lifetime. After being snatched from her father and taken to Italy, after being kidnapped and held for days at an obscure location in the Italian Alps, after losing her mother . . . now her father was under suspicion for murder? How was she to navigate this? How was she to navigate it alone?
    When Barbara reached her desk, she checked for messages. She saw that she was under the watchful eye of John Stewart as usual,