Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

she becomes docile, used to her captivity, and reconciled to it and to her situation. She’s in a foreign country; her ability to speak the language is, perhaps, limited. Within time and in order to survive, she needs to learn to see her captors as her saviours. She needs to learn to depend upon them. But all of this works to our benefit. It puts time on our side and not on theirs.”
    “Yet if she is not to be handed to another family for purposes of adoption,” Azhar pointed out, “then I do not see—”
    Lynley cut him off quickly, to spare him speculations. “She’s young enough to be schooled in any number of things a child might be wanted for, but the point isn’t what those things are so much as it’s she’s alive and must be kept safe and well.” He didn’t add the more horrifying kind of scenario that was possible in this situation of Hadiyyah’s potential imprisonment, however. He didn’t point out that she was the perfect age to be held prisoner for a paedophile’s pleasure: in a basement, in a house with a carefully hidden and even more carefully soundproofed room, in a cellar, in an abandoned building high in the hills. For someone to have taken her so successfully from a market in the middle of the day, someone had to have prepared the abduction. Preparation for abduction also indicated preparation for use. Nothing could have been left to chance. So while time was on their side, the truth of the matter was that circumstances were not.
    Yet there was one hope which could be to their benefit, and it came from Hadiyyah herself. For not everyone behaved as human psychology otherwise indicated she would behave. And there was a relatively simple way to ascertain if Hadiyyah was, potentially, among those people who acted differently from what might otherwise be expected of them in similar circumstances.
    “May I ask,” Lynley said, “how likely is it that Hadiyyah would fight her situation?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Children are often extremely resourceful. Might she raise a ruckus at an opportune moment? Might she draw attention to herself in some way?”
    “In what way?”
    “Behaving other than she’s told to behave. Trying to escape her captivity. Throwing herself into an attack on her captors. Producing a convenient tantrum. Setting a fire. Slashing a vehicle’s tyres. Anything other than being docile.” Anything other, Lynley didn’t add, than being a little girl.
    Azhar seemed to go within himself to find a reply. Church bells rang somewhere in the town, joined by other church bells echoing off the narrow Lucchese streets. A flock of pigeons circled overhead, domesticated homing birds by the close formation they kept in the sky.
    Azhar cleared his throat. “None of those things,” he said to Lynley. “She has not been brought up to be a trouble to anyone. I have—God forgive me—been very careful about that.”
    Lynley nodded. It was, unfortunately, the way of the world. So often little girls—no matter their culture—were taught by their parents and by society to be pliant and sweet. It was little boys who were taught to use their wits and their fists.
    “Inspector Lo Bianco,” Azhar added, “seems to feel there is . . . despite a week . . . there is hope . . . ?”
    “And I agree,” Lynley said. But what he didn’t point out to the other man was that, with no word from kidnappers or anyone else, the hope he was clinging to was fading ever faster.
    VICTORIA
    LONDON
    Barbara Havers put it off as long as possible. Indeed, she tried to restrain herself altogether. But by early afternoon she could no longer wait for her first report from DI Lynley. So she rang his mobile.
    She knew he was unhappy with her. Any other officer would have kissed her feet for having bulldogged the circumstances of Hadiyyah’s disappearance in such a way that he ended up getting sent to Italy as a liaison officer for the girl’s family. But Lynley had other matters on his mind that went far beyond travelling to Italy at the expense of the Met. He had roller derby matches to attend and Daidre Trahair to . . . to
whatever
he was attempting to do with the large animal vet.
    When Lynley answered with a single word—“Barbara”—she said in a rush, “I know you’re cheesed off. I’m bloody sorry, sir. You’ve got things on your . . . on your mind or whatever and I’ve put a spanner and I know that.”
    He said, “Ah. As I suspected.”
    She said, “I’m not admitting to