Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

Because I could do with a fag but I don’t want to offend.”
    Salvatore emptied the ashtray he kept on his desk and handed it to her. She said, “Ta,” and began to dig round in a massive shoulder bag she’d set on the floor. She muttered and damned this and bloody helled that—these words he knew—and finally he reached in his jacket for his own cigarettes and handed them to her. “
Ecco
,” he said. To which she replied, “See? I said you looked like a merciful bloke.” And then she smiled. He was taken aback. She was, as an object of femininity, quite appalling, but she had an extraordinarily lovely smile and, unlike what he’d come to think of as the English predilection for doing nothing to improve the state of their dentition, she also seemed to care about her teeth, which were very straight, very white, and very nice. Before he knew what he was doing, he smiled back. She handed the cigarettes back to him, he took one, offered one to Marcella, and they all lit up.
    She said, “C’n I be honest with you, Chief Inspector Lo Bianco?”
    “Salvatore,” he said. And when she looked surprised, he said in English, “Not so long,” and he smiled.
    “Barbara, then,” she replied. “It’s shorter as well.” She inhaled in a masculine fashion and seemed to let the smoke settle into her blood before she said, “So c’n I be honest, Salvatore?” And when he nodded at Marcella’s translation, “From what I c’n tell, you’re building a case against Taymullah Azhar. But c’n you put
E. coli
into his hands?”
    “The conference in Berlin—”
    “I know about Berlin. So he was at a conference? What difference does it make?”
    “None at all till you look into the conference and discover that he was on a panel along with a scientist from Heidelberg. Friedrich von Lohmann, he’s called, this man. There, at the university in Heidelberg, he studies
E. coli
in a laboratory.”
    Barbara Havers nodded, her eyes narrowing behind the smoke from her cigarette. “All right,” she said. “The panel bit? I didn’t know that. But ’f you ask me, it’s just coincidence. You lot can’t go into court with that, can you?”
    “Someone has gone to Germany to interview this man,” Salvatore told her. “And you and I know that it would not be impossible at a conference of this kind for one scientist to ask another for a strain of bacteria to look at for some reason.”
    “Like asking to see his vacation snaps?” she asked with a laugh.
    “No,” he said. “But it would not be difficult for him to create a reason that he needed this bacteria, would it: the project of a graduate student whose work he is supervising, his own shift in interest perhaps. These are merely two examples he could have used with the Heidelberg man.”
    “But bloody hell, Inspector . . . I mean, Salvatore, you
can’t
think these blokes carry samples round with them! What d’you have? Azhar giving Mr. Heidelberg—What was his name again?”
    “Von Lohmann.”
    “Right. Okay. So d’you see Azhar giving von Lohmann the word in Berlin and von Lohmann fishing the
E. coli
out of his suitcase?”
    Salvatore felt himself growing hot. She was either deliberately misunderstanding his words, or Marcella was not translating them correctly. He said, “Of course I do not mean Professor von Lohmann had the
E. coli
with him. But the seed of Professor Azhar’s interest was planted at that conference and once Hadiyyah was kidnapped by means of the London detective, then further plans were laid.”
    Marcella’s translation arrested the sergeant’s cigarette on its way to her mouth. She said, “What’re you saying, exactly?”
    He said, “I’m saying that what I have in my possession is proof from London that the kidnapping of Hadiyyah Upman was engineered there, not here. This detective in London who sends me the information? He would like me to think that a man called Michelangelo Di Massimo developed the scheme in Pisa, with the solitary assistance of Taymullah Azhar.”
    “Hang on right there. There’s no bloody way—”
    “But I have documents here that prove otherwise. Many records that—compared to the earlier records which I also have—have been altered. My point is this. Things are not simple and I am not stupid. Professor Azhar has been charged with murder. But I suspect this is not all he will be charged with.”
    The sergeant twirled her cigarette, using her thumb and her index and middle fingers in a way that