Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

or lie. Who could blame him? Salvatore thought. Nine times out of ten in the country and particularly in Tuscany hadn’t it happened that an arrest was made first and then facts were pounded into shape to fit the case afterwards? This was especially the situation when a public minister like Piero Fanucci had a range of vision that was limited to a single suspect from the moment it was decided that a crime had occurred. Mura would know that, and he would wonder why no one was arresting anyone for anything in the matter of the deaths of his lover and their child.
    Salvatore said to Mura, “The
fact
of murder has to be established in a death such as that of your Angelina. This has been made more difficult because she was ill in the weeks leading up to her death. We now know what caused her to die—”
    Mura took a step towards him, reaching out. Salvatore held up a hand to stop him.
    “—but this is something we are not speaking of yet.”
    “He did this. I knew it.”
    “Time will tell.”
    “How much time?”
    “This is something we cannot know. But we move forward, keeping what we learn close to our hearts. Still, that I have come to ask you about arrangements of the care of Hadiyyah . . . I would hope that this tells you how near to the end we are.”
    “He came to us, he built her trust, and when he had it . . .
somehow
he did this. You know it.”
    “We are speaking today, the professor and I. We have already spoken and we will also speak tomorrow. Nothing, Signor Mura, is being left unturned or going unnoticed. I assure you of that.” Salvatore inclined his head towards the door. He said in an altogether different tone, “You raise
asini
, no? This I have learned from the London detective. Will you show them to me?”
    Mura’s face grew cloudy. “For what reason?”
    Salvatore smiled. “For the reason of purchase. I have two children who would love such an animal to keep as a pet in the countryside where I have a small cottage. They
are
pets,
vero
?, these animals you breed? Or if they are not, they are gentle enough to become pets, no?”
    “
Certo
,” Lorenzo Mura said.
    LUCCA
    TUSCANY
    In the end, Salvatore had accomplished his mission. The sight of Lorenzo Mura’s donkeys in the olive orchard had prompted his request to talk to someone who had bought one of the docile-seeming creatures most recently so that he could reassure himself that they were gentle enough to be his children’s pet at the family’s nonexistent cottage in the country. Mura had given him the name of his most recent customer, and Salvatore had taken matters from there.
    A call upon the man had eliminated him as a possible source of the
E. coli
that had killed Angelina Upman. Not because there would have been no bacteria on his farmland near Valpromaro but because he confirmed during their conversation that he had indeed recently purchased a foal from Signor Mura and that he had paid in cash so as to allow Signor Mura to avoid one of the myriad ways in which Italians were taxed. He gave the date of his purchase of the animal, which coincided perfectly with the presence of the man that Ispettore Lynley had reported passing an envelope of something to Mura at the
fattoria
.
    When he returned to the
questura
, it was to gather more information from Ottavia Schwartz and Giorgio Simione, still slogging their way through the congregation of scientists who’d met in Berlin in April. They’d located a scientist from the University of Glasgow who studied
E. coli
, Ottavia reported. It was likely that there would be others if the
ispettore
wished them to continue.
    He did, he told her. He wasn’t about to go Fanucci’s route. He wanted to know it all, inside and out, before he made his next move. To Salvatore,
indagato
meant more than just naming a suspect.
Indagato
meant that the investigators were certain they had their man.
    PISA
    TUSCANY
    In the end, it turned out that flying into Pisa was the easiest. Barbara could have flown into one of the regional airports, utilising one of the many budget airlines that appeared to pop up every month or so, but she wanted the peace of mind that came with a brand-name airline unlikely to lose her limited baggage and an airport labelled with the word
international
.
    When she landed in Italy, she was assaulted by the foreign experience. People shouted at one another incomprehensibly, signs made announcements in a language she couldn’t read, and—once she worked her way through customs