Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

thought you wanted me here to get to the truth.”
    “So get to the truth,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Azhar.”
    LUCCA
    TUSCANY
    The outskirts of Lucca made it seem like any other overdeveloped place in any other country in the world. Aside from the fact that the street signs and advertisements were in Italian, everything else was fairly standard. The streets held apartment buildings, inexpensive hotels, tourist restaurants, takeaway food shops, assorted boutiques, and pizzerias. There was a great deal of traffic and congestion. Women with pushchairs took up too much room on the pavements, and adolescents who should have been in school were instead hanging about engaged in the three activities common to adolescents nearly everywhere: texting, smoking, and chatting away on mobile phones. Their hairstyles were different—far more elaborate and excessively gelled—but other than that they were the same. It was only when the centre of the town was reached that Lucca suddenly became unique.
    Barbara had never seen anything like its wall, encircling the oldest part of the town like a medieval rampart. She’d been to York, but this was different, from the enormous grassed-in ditch that lay before it and could at one time have done duty as a moat, to the roadway atop it. Mitch Corsico drove them round it on a shady boulevard whose purpose seemed to be to show the wall to its best advantage. Half of the way round, however, he made a quarter circle in a huge piazza and turned into a short length of roadway that took them beneath and through one of the wall’s huge gates.
    Here, there was another piazza. Here, they vied with tourist buses debouching elderly people in Bermuda shorts, sun hats, sandals, and black socks. Near a shop hiring bicycles, they found a parking bay. Mitch climbed out of the car with “It’s this way,” and he left her to wrestle with her duffel once more.
    She thought she’d packed light, but as she struggled to keep up with him, Barbara gave serious thought to dumping everything in the nearest wheelie bin. There was no wheelie bin in sight, though, so she was left heaving and dragging the thing as Mitchell led her out of the piazza, past a church—“First of hundreds, believe me”—and into a throng of people who appeared to comprise tourists, students, housewives, and nuns. Lots of nuns.
    Thankfully, she wasn’t in Mitch’s wake for long on this narrow thoroughfare. Ahead of her, she saw him make a turn into another street, and when she finally got there, it was to find him leaning against the wall of a car’s-width tunnel. This tunnel, she saw, led into yet another large piazza upon which a merciless sun was blazing.
    She thought he was taking a rest in the shade or perhaps even waiting to offer her help. Instead, when she reached him with her heart pounding and sweat dribbling into her eyes, he said, “Don’t travel much, eh? Basic rule, Barb. One change of clothes.”
    He ducked through the tunnel, then, and into the piazza. It was circular, she saw, and Mitch told her it was the town’s ancient amphitheatre. Shops, cafés, and habitations formed its perimeter. In the bright light of the day, Barbara wanted to head for the nearest shade to buy something very cold and very wet. In fact, that was what she thought they’d come to do until the journalist pointed to a mass of cacti and succulents displayed in neat ranks in front of a building and told her that was Azhar’s
pensione
.
    “Time to pay up with the interview,” he said. And when she was about to protest, he played the best card last and with considerable skill: “I’m making the rules, Barb, and maybe you need to think about that. I c’n just leave you here to sort out who speaks English and can help you out. Or
you
c’n be a bit more cooperative. Before you make up your mind on that one, though, I’d like to point out that the coppers here don’t speak our lingo. On the other hand, loads of the journalists do and I’m happy to give you an introduction to one or two of them. But ’f you ask for that, you owe me. Azhar is how you’re going to pay.”
    Barbara said, “No deal. I reckon I can make myself clear to anyone I want to talk to.”
    Mitch smiled. He nodded towards the
pensione
in question. “If that’s how you want to hang the laundry,” he said.
    That should have told her, of course. But Barbara wasn’t ready for Mitchell Corsico to be dictating the terms of their working