Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

relationship in Italy. So she marched across the piazza with her duffel weighing down her shoulder, and she rang the bell outside of Pensione Giardino. Its windows were shuttered against the heat, as were all of the windows in the piazza save one at which a housewife was hanging pink bedsheets on a line that extended across the front of her apartment. Every place else looked deserted, and Barbara was at the point of concluding this same thing about the
pensione
when its front door opened and a dark-haired pregnant woman with a winsome-looking child on her hip gazed out at Barbara.
    At first, all seemed well. She noted Barbara’s duffel, smiled, and beckoned her inside. She led her into a dimly lit—and, praise God, cooler—corridor, where, on a narrow table, a candle flickered at the feet of a statue of the Virgin and a door opened into what looked like a breakfast room. She gestured that Barbara was meant to place her duffel on the tiled floor, and from a drawer in the table, she brought out a card that looked like something one was meant to fill out in order to stay in the
pensione
. Fine and dandy, Barbara thought, taking the card and the offered Biro. Sod you, Mitchell. There wasn’t going to be a problem at all.
    She filled the card out and handed it over, and when the woman said, “
E il Suo passaporto, signora?
” Barbara handed it over as well. She was a little concerned when the woman walked off with it, but she didn’t take it far—just to a buffet inside the breakfast room—and when she rattled off a few sentences in an incomprehensible lingo that Barbara reckoned was Italian, it seemed as if what she was saying was something along the lines of needing the passport for a bit of time in order to do something with it, which Barbara could only hope was not sell it on the black market.
    The woman then said, “
Mi segua, signora
,” with a smile, and hoisted her child higher on her hip. She headed towards a stairway and began to climb, and Barbara reckoned she was meant to follow. This was all well and good, but there were questions she needed to ask before she got herself established in this place. So she said, “Hang on just a minute, okay?” and when the woman turned to her with a quizzical expression, she went on with, “Taymullah Azhar is still here, right? With his daughter? Little girl about this tall with long dark hair? First thing I need to do—well, aside from having a wash—is to speak to Azhar about Hadiyyah. That’s the little girl’s name. But you probably know that, right?”
    What these remarks did was unleash in the woman a veritable flood. She came back down the stairs firing on all linguistic cylinders. None of them, however, were distinguishable to Barbara.
    Immediately morphing into the metaphorical deer illuminated by an oncoming car’s headlights, Barbara stared at the woman. All she could pick out from the inundation of language was
non, non, non
. From this, she worked out that neither Azhar nor Hadiyyah was in the
pensione
. Whether they were permanently gone she couldn’t tell.
    Whatever her recitation meant, the woman was agitated enough to prompt Barbara to dig her mobile phone from her bag and hold it up, if only to silence her. She punched in Azhar’s number but got no joy from that once again. Wherever he was, he still wasn’t answering.
    The woman said, “
Mi segua, mi segua, signora. Vuole una camera, sì?
” She pointed up the stairs, from which Barbara took it that
camera
meant
room
in Italian and not an instrument of photography. She nodded and heaved her duffel off the floor. She trudged behind her hostess up two flights of stairs.
    The room was clean and simple. Not an en suite, but what would one expect in a
pensione
? She got herself established in shorter order than she had previously intended—a cool shower would obviously have to wait—and she scrolled through her mobile’s address book to find the phone number of Aldo Greco.
    Luckily, his secretary’s English was as good as Greco’s. The solicitor wasn’t in his office at present, Barbara was told, but if she left her number . . .
    Barbara explained. She was trying to locate Taymullah Azhar, she said. She was a friend from London now here in Lucca, and she had come because for the past two days she’d been unable to reach Azhar by phone. She was dead concerned about him and, more to the point, about Hadiyyah, his daughter, and—
    “Ah,” the secretary said. “Let me have Signor