Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

and I write to him and p’rhaps he can come for summer hols . . .
    “D’you think her dad came to take her home to London?” Bianca had asked Salvatore, her great dark eyes reflecting a worry that an eight-year-old’s eyes should never reflect.
    “Possibly,
cara
,” Salvatore had said. “Possibly indeed.”
    The question now was whether he was going to share this information with Piero Fanucci. It would, he decided, all depend on how his meeting with the magistrate went.
    Fanucci’s secretary was the first person Salvatore encountered when he climbed the great staircase. A long-suffering seventy-year-old, she reminded Salvatore of his own mother. Instead of black, though, she always wore red. She dyed her hair the colour of coal, and she possessed an unattractive moustache that—in the years he had known her—she’d never bothered to remove. She’d maintained her position in the magistrate’s office because she was completely unappealing to Piero, so he hadn’t once molested her. Had she been even marginally attractive to
il Pubblico Ministero
, she would not have lasted six months, as Fanucci’s career was littered with the spiritual and psychological corpses of the women who’d been victimised by him.
    Once inside the office suite, Salvatore learned that a wait for the magistrate would be necessary. For a junior prosecutor had been taken into the presence in advance of Salvatore’s appearance, he was told. That meant someone was being dressed down. Salvatore sighed and took up a magazine. He flipped through it, noted which closeted homosexual American celebrity was currently attaching himself to a conveniently stupid supermodel twenty years his junior, and tossed this
rivista idiota
to one side. After five minutes he requested that Fanucci’s secretary let the magistrate know that he was waiting.
    She looked shocked. Did he truly want to chance an eruption of
il vulcano
? she asked. He did, he assured her.
    But it turned out that interrupting Fanucci was not necessary. A pale-to-the-gills young man emerged from the magistrate’s office and scuttled on his way. Salvatore strode in, unannounced and not wishing it otherwise.
    Piero eyed him. His facial warts were pale excrescences against skin inflamed by whatever had gone on between him and his underling. Apparently deciding to say nothing about Salvatore’s unheralded entrance into his office, he gave a sharp and wordless nod to a television on one of his office bookshelves, and he clicked it on without preliminaries.
    It was a recording of a broadcast, made that morning by England’s BBC. Salvatore spoke very little English and was thus unable to follow the rapid-fire conversation between the two presenters. They were engaged in a strange discussion about UK newspapers, it seemed, and one at a time they held them up to the camera.
    Salvatore saw quickly that no translation of this broadcast was actually going to be necessary. Piero stopped the recording when the presenters reached the front page of a particular tabloid.
The Source
, it was called. It had the story.
    This, he knew, was not a good development. One tabloid meant many. Many meant the possible incursion of British reporters into Lucca.
    Fanucci clicked the recording off. He indicated that Salvatore was to take a seat. Piero himself remained standing because standing was power, and power, Salvatore thought, could be demonstrated in so many ways.
    “What more have you learned from this street beggar of yours?” Fanucci asked. He meant the poor drug addict, him of the
Ho fame
sign. Salvatore had brought the youth once into the
questura
for a formal interrogation, but Fanucci was pressing for another. This would be, he’d instructed Salvatore, a more serious one, a lengthier one, one designed to “encourage” the unfortunate’s memory . . . such as it was.
    Salvatore had been avoiding this. While Fanucci believed drug addicts capable of anything to support their habit, Salvatore did not. In the case of this particular drug addict, Carlo Casparia had been occupying that same spot at the entrance to Porta San Jacopo for the past six years without incident, a disgrace to his family but a menace to no one but himself.
    He said, “Piero, there is nothing more to be learned from this man Carlo. Believe me, his brain is too addled to have planned a kidnapping.”
    “Planned?” Fanucci repeated. “Topo, why do you say this was planned? He saw her, and he took her.”
    And then?