Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

although she felt as if the pain of doing so might actually drive a sword through her heart, “You still have family there, Azhar. They’ll welcome her. They’ll welcome you. She speaks the language. Or at least she’s been learning it. You’ve seen to that.”
    “She won’t understand,” he said in an agonised voice. “How can I do this to her after what she has been through?”
    “You don’t have a choice. And you’ll be there for her. You’ll ease her way. You’ll see to it her life there is an extraordinary one. And she’ll adjust, Azhar. She’ll have aunts and uncles. She’ll have cousins. It will be okay.”
    “How can I—”
    Barbara cut in, choosing to interpret the rest of his question in the only way possible now. She said, “Salvatore has your passports, probably locked away in the
questura
. He’ll hand them over, and you and Hadiyyah and I will head to the airport. Fond farewells to him and all the rest. He may take us there, but he won’t stay to see where we go or even if we depart. I’ll go to London. You’ll go . . . wherever you can go to get a flight to Lahore. Just
out
of Italy. Paris? Frankfurt? Stockholm? It doesn’t matter as long as it’s not London. You’ll do what you have to do at this point because it’s the only thing left. And you know it, Azhar. You bloody know it.”
    He looked at her. She saw his dark eyes fill with tears. He said, “And you, Barbara? What about you?”
    “Me?” She tried to sound lighthearted. “I’ll face the music back in London. I’ve done it before, and I’ll survive. Facing the music is what I do best.”
    LUCCA
    TUSCANY
    First was Torre Lo Bianco, where Hadiyyah leapt into her father’s arms and buried her face in his neck. He held her close. She said, “Barbara told me you were helping Salvatore. Did you help him a lot? What did you
do
?”
    Azhar cleared his throat roughly. He smoothed back wisps of her hair and said with a smile, “Many, many things did I do. But it is time for us to go now,
khushi
. Can you thank the signora and Inspector Lo Bianco for taking such good care of you while I was away?”
    She did so. She hugged Salvatore’s mamma, who kissed her, got teary, and called her
bella bambina
, and she hugged Salvatore who said “
Niente, niente
” as she thanked him. She asked them both to tell Bianca and Marco
arrivederci
, and she said to Barbara, “D’you get to come home as well?”
    Barbara told her that indeed she did, and in very short order, they’d taken their bags to where Salvatore had left his car and they were on their way to the
questura
. At every moment, Barbara looked for some sign that Mitch Corsico’s page-one story had somehow broken in Italy. She also looked for the Upmans on every street corner and behind every bush as they coursed the route along the
viale
outside the town wall.
    At the
questura
, things moved rapidly and Barbara was immensely grateful for this. Passports were returned to Azhar, Hadiyyah was left in the company of Ottavia Schwartz, and the buxom translator was called in so that Azhar might hear Salvatore’s explanation of how Angelina Upman had come to die of ingesting a devastating strain of
E. coli
. He covered his mouth with his hand as he listened, and the pain in his eyes was evident. He pointed out that, had he been the one to drink the affected wine, it was likely he would have survived the subsequent illness. But because it had been Angelina who’d drunk it, Angelina who was already unwell with her pregnancy, things had been misinterpreted by her doctors until it was far too late. “I wished her no ill,” he concluded. “I would have you know that, Inspector.”
    “Plenty of ill was wished towards you, Azhar,” Barbara put in. “And I wager you wouldn’t have gone to hospital had you got ill. You would’ve thought you’d picked up a bug: on the flight, in the water, whatever, eh? You’d’ve got over the first bout with this stuff, but then the next step would’ve been a worse bout and losing your kidneys and probably dying as well. Lorenzo might not have known all that, but it wasn’t important to him. Making you suffer was what he had in mind, with the hope that making you suffer would lead to making you gone from Angelina’s life.”
    Salvatore listened to the translation of all this. Barbara cast a look in his direction, saw once again the solemnity of his expression, but also read the great kindness in his eyes. She knew that there was