Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

that and meantime lives hang in the balance but what do you care because one of those lives isn’t yours.” She waited for him to reply to this and when he did not, she went on. “Well. Right, then. I won’t ask you to hold back information for a day or two. That wouldn’t be doing your
duty
, would it?”
    “For the love of God, Barbara.”
    “It has nothing to do with God. Or with love. It has to do with what’s right.”
    She cut off the call. She found her eyes were stinging. She found her palms were wet. Christ, she thought, she had to get herself
sorted
. She went to the breakfast room, downed a glass of orange juice still on the sideboard, sardonically thought, Whoops! Must be careful. Someone could’ve put
E. coli
in there. And she wanted to weep. But she had to think and what she thought first was that she would ring Simon and Deborah St. James. She would ask them. Or p’rhaps Winston. He lived with his parents, right? They could mind Hadiyyah, couldn’t they? Or a girlfriend of his could do the minding. He had to have dozens. Or Mrs. Silver back in Chalk Farm who minded Hadiyyah during school holidays. Except of course Chalk Farm would be the first place anyone would look for her, inside one of the other flats in the converted Edwardian house.
    Something, something, something, she thought. She herself could take the child back to London, but that left Azhar to his fate and she couldn’t have that. No matter what anyone said or anyone believed, she knew the truth of who the man was.
    She went in search of Hadiyyah. For now she would keep the little girl with her. It was the best she could do. Come hell or whatever, she had no intention of allowing her to fall into the hands of the Upmans.
    Hadiyyah was still in the family area. Signora Vallera had joined her to watch the DVD, which looked to Barbara as if it was on its third or fourth time through the interview.
    She sat in a straight-backed chair to watch along with the others as Angelina Upman and Taymullah Azhar talked about their missing child. The camera showed Angelina’s exhausted face. The camera showed Azhar. The camera dollied back to show where they sat at the table beneath the arbour in the company of the man with the wart-infested face. He talked with such velocity and such passion that it was difficult to notice anything save him. The other two people, the table, the background . . . it all faded away as the man spat and roared.
    Which, Barbara realised with a bolt of understanding, was why the film had played on television, had been given to Hadiyyah, had been watched and watched without a single person involved seeing what was in front of them the entire time.
    “Oh my God,” she murmured.
    She felt dazed and her mind began to spin as she tried to come up with a next step and then another and then a third, all of which could evolve into a plan. Lynley, she knew, would not help her now. That left only one possibility.
    LUCCA
    TUSCANY
    Thus, Mitchell Corsico was the proverbial port in the storm that was brewing. He’d been in Italy long enough to acquire the sort of sources Barbara needed now, but she knew he was going to want a deal. He wouldn’t hand anything over to her unless he had his picture of Hadiyyah. So she rang his mobile and she prepared herself for a round of bargaining with the bloke.
    “Where are you?” she asked him. “We need to talk.”
    “Your lucky day,” he told her. He was just outside in the piazza at that very moment, enjoying a
caffè
and a brioche as he waited for Barb to come to her senses in the matter of Hadiyyah Upman. He’d been working on the story, by the way. It was a real tearjerker. Rodney Aronson was going to love it. Page one guaranteed.
    Barbara said sourly, “You’re the confident one, aren’t you?”
    “In this business, you’d better be confident. ’Sides, one gets to know the scent of desperation.”
    “Whose?”
    “Oh, I wager you know.”
    She told him to stay where he was as she was coming out to meet him. She found him as promised: beneath an umbrella at a café table across from the
pensione
. He’d finished his coffee and pastry, and he was busily tapping away at his laptop. His remark of “Christ, I’m brilliant” as she reached him told her he was working on his Hadiyyah story.
    She took from her bag the school photo of Hadiyyah that she had showed Aldo Greco on the previous day. She laid it on the table, but she didn’t sit.
    Mitch looked at the photo and