Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

.”
    “Emails?” Lynley asked.
    Lo Bianco quickly explained in Italian: that Angelina’s sister had manufactured emails putatively from the little girl’s father. In these he promised to come to Italy. In these he broke those promises.
    “Was she able to access his email account in some way?” Lynley asked.
    “She created a new account for him, through a friend of hers at University College,” Angelina told him. “I told my sister what to say in the emails. She said it.” Angelina turned to Lo Bianco. “So Hadiyyah had no reason to dislike Lorenzo, to think that he was going to stand in place of her father and to realise from this that her life was permanently altered. I made sure of that.”
    “Still, there could be . . . It could be the daughter and Signor Mura . . .” Lo Bianco seemed to search for the word.
    “Friction?” Lynley said. “There might have been friction between them?”
    “There was no friction,” Angelina said. “There is no friction.”
    “And Signor Mura, he likes your Hadiyyah?”
    Angelina’s jaw loosened. If she could have gone paler than she already was, she would have done so. Lynley could see her taking in Lo Bianco’s question and drawing a conclusion from it. She said, “Renzo loves Hadiyyah. He would do nothing to harm her, if that’s what you’re thinking. Everything he’s done, everything I’ve done, it’s all been
because
of Hadiyyah. I wanted her back, I was so unhappy, I’d left Hari to be with Renzo here but I couldn’t do it without Hadiyyah, so I returned to Hari for those few months and waited and waited and Lorenzo waited, and it was all for Hadiyyah, because of Hadiyyah, so you can’t say Lorenzo . . .”
    Lo Bianco produced the Italian version of tsk, tsk, tsk. Lynley tried to follow Angelina’s story. She’d woven, it seemed, quite a web of deceit to engineer her new life in Italy. This brought up a point of interest for him, one that might have implications from the past that reached into the present.
    “When did you meet Signor Mura?” he asked her. “How did you meet him?”
    She’d met him in London, she said. She’d been without an umbrella on a day with sudden rain, so she’d ducked for protection into Starbucks.
    Lo Bianco made a noise of moderate disgust at this, and Lynley glanced at him. It was Starbucks, however, that was apparently garnering the Italian man’s disapproval and not the fact of Angelina Upman’s meeting someone inside the place.
    The coffee house was crowded with other people having the same idea. Angelina purchased a cappuccino for herself and was drinking it on her feet by the window when Lorenzo entered with the same idea in mind: to get out of the rain. They began to chat, as people sometimes do, she explained. He’d come to London for three days’ holiday and the weather was maddening to him. In Tuscany at this time of year, he said, the sun is out, the days are warm, the flowers are blooming . . . You should come to Tuscany and see for yourself, he told her.
    She could see that he looked for a wedding ring on her in that casual way that unattached people sometimes do when they meet one another. She did the same to him. She didn’t tell him about Azhar, about Hadiyyah, or about . . . other things. At the end of their time in the Starbucks when the rain had ceased, he handed her his card and said that if she ever came to Tuscany, she was to ring him and he would show her its beauties. And so, eventually, that was what she did. After a row with Hari . . . another row with Hari . . . always the nighttime rows with Hari, spoken in fierce whispers so that Hadiyyah wouldn’t know there were difficulties between her mother and father . . .
    “‘Other things’?” was Lynley’s question at the end of her story. In his peripheral vision, he saw Lo Bianco’s sharp nod of approval.
    “What?” she asked.
    “You said that at that first meeting you didn’t tell Signor Mura about Hadiyyah, Azhar, or other things. I’m wondering what those other things were?”
    Clearly, she didn’t want to go further, as her gaze moved away from Lynley and dropped to the table and the computer printouts upon it. She made a poor show of inauthentic concentration upon Lynley’s question. He finally said to her, “Every detail
is
important, you know,” and waited in silence. Lo Bianco did likewise. Water dripped in the enormous kitchen sink, and a clock ticked loudly. And she finally spoke.
    “At that time, I didn’t