Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

bloke spoke English. And since he spoke English, he was the answer. He was the plan.
    For Dwayne Doughty, aside from heartburn and caffeine nerves strung out like wires for a tightrope walker, all was finally well.
    LUCCA
    TUSCANY
    What Barbara hadn’t anticipated was Hadiyyah’s desire to be with her father. She’d been so anxious to get her away from Lorenzo Mura and to protect her from whatever might occur should her foul grandparents show up to fetch her that there had been nothing else on her mind but scooping her up and dashing back to Lucca with her.
    That had been enough at first. They’d had dinner in Lucca, at a multinational restaurant/cafeteria in Via Malcontenti, where upon the walls hung placemats decorated by past clientele extolling the virtues of the pizzas, the goulash, and the hummus in various languages. They’d had gelato afterwards, from a vendor near the main tourist office in Piazzale Giuseppe Verdi. Then they’d walked up from that office to a section of the ancient wall among the Italians enjoying their evening stroll. When at last they’d returned to Pensione Giardino, Hadiyyah had been more than ready just to sleep in the second bed in Barbara’s room.
    Bullets were not dodged for long, though. The first was from Corsico, who rang at half past seven in the morning wanting the next story for his editor, which, he told her, needed to be along the lines of
English Child’s Agony with Dad in Prison
. He said he’d be happy to make it all up—“par for the course, Barb”—if Barbara just produced the kid for a picture looking soulfully out of the window of the
pensione
. “Missing her dad and all that rubbish, you know what I mean,” he said. Barbara foisted him off with the information that Hadiyyah was still asleep and she would ring him when the child awakened. But that put her into contact with the second bullet, which was Hadiyyah’s desire to see her father.
    That, Barbara knew, was the last thing Azhar would ever want: his beloved child getting an eyeful of him in prison garb, sitting alongside the other inmates on visiting day. She wasn’t about to do that to either of them, so she told Hadiyyah that her dad was helping Inspector Lo Bianco look into a few things about her mummy’s death. He was out of town just then, she explained to the child, and he wanted her to remain in Barbara’s care. This was true so if she had to expand on the story at a later time, she could do so without having to retrace her steps. She didn’t like keeping the full truth from Hadiyyah, but she didn’t see any other course.
    What she knew was that she had to make some sort of arrangement to keep Hadiyyah out of the hands of the Upmans. The investigation into Angelina’s death was never going to lead to Azhar, but until the Italians saw things that way, he was going to stay in prison, giving the Upmans the ability to claim her if they chose to do so. She had to make Hadiyyah unavailable to them, and the best way to do that was to get her out of Italy and in a location where she couldn’t be found.
    It didn’t take her long to come up with that location. She needed Lynley, though, in order to arrange it. So she suggested to Hadiyyah that they ask Signora Vallera if she could, perhaps, watch television in the family section of the
pensione
while Barbara made a few pressing phone calls, and when Hadiyyah said with an anxious but eager crumpling of her forehead, “Could I watch the film of Mummy, Barbara?” Barbara snatched at the idea as the best possible plan. It would soothe the little girl at the same time as it would occupy her. She said, “Let’s see if we c’n sort out a DVD player, then,” and she hoped Hadiyyah’s Italian was good enough to do so.
    It was. In short order she and the Vallera toddler were side by side on a sofa watching Angelina Upman and Taymullah Azhar speak to the camera, and Barbara was back in the breakfast room, ringing Inspector Lynley’s mobile.
    Before he could say anything other than “Isabelle’s had an appointment with Hillier, Barbara,” she cut in.
    “I’ve got Hadiyyah. I need to get her back to London. Mura’s rung Angelina’s parents to fetch her, and in advance of that, we need to—”
    He cut in irritably with “Barbara, do you ever listen to me?
Did
you hear me? I’ve no idea what they talked about, but whatever it is, it’s probably not good.”
    “What you still don’t understand is that Hadiyyah is what matters,” she