Deception on His Mind (54 page)

“If,” Barbara said. “He's got motive enough to kill Querashi himself, and I haven't checked on his alibi yet. I want to have a look at his time card for last week. And I want a talk with Rachel as well. A lot of roads seem to be leading to her. It's curious, if you ask me.”

Emily gave her approval to the plan. For her own part, she'd work the homosexual aspect of the case. With the market-square angle to be explored and Fahd Kumhar to be located, other roads appeared to be leading to Clacton. She didn't want to ignore them. “If he exists, that witness is our key,” she said.

They parted company in the patch of tarmac that served as the old police station's car park. At one side, a corrugated metal lock-up acted as the digs of the evidence officer. In his shirt sleeves and with a blue handkerchief tied round his head to soak up the perspiration, he sat on a stool. He appeared to be in the process of checking evidence bags against a logbook. The temperature was beginning to reach heights that felt suitable for grilling bacon. That poor bloke, Barbara thought, had the worst job of all.

In the time that she'd been in the station, Barbara found that the Mini—even with its windows wide open—had soaked up enough heat to make breathing difficult once she was inside it. The steering wheel was fiery to the touch, and the car's seats sizzled through the thin material of her trousers. She looked at her watch and wondered at the fact that it wasn't yet midday. She had little doubt that by two o'clock she'd feel like an overcooked Sunday joint.

Racon Original and Artistic Jewellery was open for business when she arrived. Beyond the gaping front door, both Connie Winfield and her daughter were at work. They appeared to be in process of arranging a new shipment of necklaces and earrings for display, because they were removing baubles from a cardboard box and using straight pins to mount them on an antique folding screen whose panels had been fashioned from cream-coloured velvet.

Barbara watched them for a moment without making her presence known. Idly, she noted two details. Between them they had the artistry to make the arrangement of jewellery enticing and attractive. And they worked in what seemed to be an inimical silence. The mother cast baleful looks upon the daughter. The daughter countered with haughty expressions indicative of her indifference to her mother's displeasure.

Both women started when Barbara said good morning. Only Connie spoke.

“I got my doubts that you're here to make a purchase.” She stopped what she was doing and went to the counter, where a cigarette burned in a quarter-moon ashtray. She tapped off ash and brought the cigarette to her mouth. She watched Barbara over it, eyes hostile.

“I'd like a word with Rachel,” Barbara said.

“Have it, then. And good luck to you. I'd like a word with the slag myself, but I'm getting nothing out of her. You may as well have a go. I can't hardly wait to hear what she's got to say for herself.”

Barbara didn't intend the mother to be in on the questioning, however. She said, “Rachel, can you step outside? Can we have a walk?”

“What's this, then?” Connie demanded. “I di'n't say she was free to go off somewheres. We got work to do. What you got to say to her, you c'n say here. While we do our unpacking.”

Over one of the folding screen's six finíais, Rachel draped the necklace she'd been holding. Connie seemed to realise what this action implied. She went on, “Rachel Lynn, don't you dare even think—”

“We c'n walk up to the park,” Rachel said to Barbara. “It's not far, and I could do with a break.”

“Rachel Lynn!”

Rachel pointedly ignored her. She led the way out of the shop and onto the pavement. Barbara heard Connie bark her daughter's name once more—and then cry it out pleadingly—as they headed in the direction of the Balford Road.

The park in question was a square of sun-parched lawn a short distance beyond St. John's Church. A freshly painted black wrought-iron fence surrounded it, but its gate stood open. A sign on this bade everyone welcome and named the place
FALAK DEDAR PARK.
A Muslim name, Barbara noted. She wondered if it was indicative of the inroads that the Asian community was making into Balford-le-Nez.

A cinder path that edged the lawn took them to a bench, partially shaded by a laburnum tree heavy with cascades of yellow flowers. A fountain trickled in the centre of the park, a veiled girl rendered in cloud-coloured marble, who poured water from a tipped urn into a shallow pool that formed a shell at her feet. After arranging her filmy skirt, Rachel gave her attention to this fountain, not to Barbara.

Barbara told the girl why she was there: to ascertain her whereabouts on the previous Friday night. “Four nights ago,” she reminded Rachel, lest the girl feign an inability to recall. Four nights hardly comprised a substantial enough leap in time to dim one's recollection, she was implying.

Rachel obviously was skilled in inference. She said, “You want to know where I was when Haytham Querashi died.”

Barbara agreed that this was her purpose. She added, “Your name's come up more than once in relation to this case, Rachel. I didn't want to say as much in front of your mum—”

“Ta,” Rachel said.

“—but it never looks good when one's name pops up in any way during a murder investigation. Smoke?”

Rachel shook her head and returned her gaze to the fountain. She said, “I was out with a boy called Trevor Ruddock. He's a bloke from the pier. But I expect you know that already. He told me last night that you talked to him.” She smoothed her hand along a design in her skirt, a peacock's head that was cleverly camouflaged in the material's swirls of colour.

Barbara altered her position to pull her notebook from her shoulder bag. She flipped through the pages to find her notes of the earlier interview with Trevor Ruddock. As she did this, she saw Rachel's eyes catch the movement in her peripheral vision. The girl's hand stopped smoothing her skirt, as if she'd suddenly realised that any motion was liable to betray her.

Barbara refreshed her own memory on the subject of Trevor's evening with Rachel, then she turned to the girl. She said, “Trevor Ruddock claims you were with him. He gets a bit vague with the details, though. And details are what I'm trying to suss out. So perhaps you can fill in his blanks for me.”

“I don't see how.”

“It's easy enough.” Barbara held her pencil in an attitude of expectancy. She said, “What did you two do?”

“Do?”

“On Friday night. Where'd you go? Out for a meal? For coffee? To a film? Perhaps you went to a caff somewhere?”

Two of Rachel's fingers pinched the peacock's crested head. “You're making a joke, aren't you?” Her tone was bitter. “I expect Trev told you where we went.”

“He might have done,” Barbara admitted. “But I'd like to have your version, if you don't mind.”

“And if I mind?”

“Then you mind. But minding's not such a good idea when someone's been murdered. When someone's been murdered, the best thing to do is to tell the truth. Because if you lie, the rozzers always want to know the reason. And they generally keep chipping away at you till they get it.”

The girl's fingers pinched her skirt more tightly. If the camouflaged peacock had been real, Barbara thought, he'd be gasping his final breaths.

“Rachel?” Barbara prompted. “Have we got a problem? Because I can always let you go back to the shop if you need to have a think before we talk. You can ask your mum what you ought to do. Your mum seemed real concerned about you yesterday, and I'm sure if she knew that the cops're asking about your whereabouts on the murder night, she'd give you all the advice you want. Didn't your mum mention to me yesterday that you—”

“All
right.”
Apparently, Rachel didn't need Barbara to offer more clarity on the subject of her mother. “What he said is true. What he told you is true. All right? Is that what you want to hear?”

“What I want to hear are the facts, Rachel. Where were you and Trevor on Friday night?”

“Where he said we were. Up in one of the beach huts. Which is where we are most Friday nights. Cause no one's around up there after dark, so no one sees who Trevor Ruddock's decided to let blow him. There. Is that what you wanted to know?”

The girl's head turned. She was red to her hair. And the harsh and unforgiving daylight emphasised each of her facial deformities with a brutal precision. Seeing her fully, neither hidden by shadows nor in profile any longer, Barbara couldn't help thinking of a documentary film she'd once watched on the BBC, an exploration of what constitutes beauty to the human eye. Symmetry, the film concluded.
Homo sapiens
is genetically programmed to admire symmetry. If that was the case, Barbara thought, Rachel Winfield didn't stand a chance.

Barbara sighed. She wanted to tell the girl that life didn't need to be lived the way she was living it. But the only alternative she herself had to offer was the life she was leading, and she was leading it alone.

“Actually,” she said, “what you and Trevor were up to doesn't much interest me, Rachel. It's your call who you want to do and why. If you're chuffed at the end of an evening with him, more power to you. If you're not, move on.”

“I'm chuffed,” Rachel said defiantly. “I'm properly chuffed.”

“Right,” Barbara said. “So what time did you find yourself so chuffed that you staggered home? Trevor tells me it was half past eleven. What d'you say?”

Rachel stared at her. Barbara took note of the fact that she was biting her lower lip.

“What's it going to be?” Barbara asked her. “Either you were with him till half past eleven, or you weren't.” She didn't add the rest, because she knew the girl understood it. If Trevor Ruddock had spoken to her, he'd have made it clear that her failure to corroborate his story in every detail would shine suspicion's spotlight on him.

Rachel looked away, back to the fountain. The girl pouring water was lithe and graceful, with perfect features and downcast eyes. Her hands were small and her feet—just visible at the bottom of the drapery that she wore to cover her body—were shapely and delicate like the rest of her. Gazing upon the statue, Rachel Winfield seemed to make up her mind. She said, “Ten o'clock,” with her vision fixed on the fountain. “I got home round ten.”

“You're sure of that? You looked at a clock? You couldn't have misread the time somehow?”

Rachel gave a weary one-note laugh. “You know how long it takes to blow some bloke? When that's all he wants and that's all you're likely ever to get? From him or anyone? Let me tell you. It doesn't take long.”

Barbara felt all the wretchedness of the girl's painful questions. She flipped her notebook closed and considered how best to reply. Part of her said that it wasn't her job to hand out advice, to salve psychic wounds, or to pour oil generously where soul waters roiled. The other part of her felt a kinship with the girl. For Barbara, one of life's most difficult and most bitter lessons had been the slow recognition of what constitutes love: both giving it and receiving it in turn. She still hadn't learned the lesson completely. And in her line of work, there were times when she wondered if she ever would.

“Don't put such a give away price on yourself,” she finally settled on saying to the girl. She dropped her cigarette to the ground as she spoke, extinguishing it with the toe of her high top trainer. Her throat was dry, from the heat, the smoke, and the tautness of muscles fighting to hold back what she didn't particularly want to feel and even less want to remember about her own low prices and when she'd offered them. “Someone's going to pay that price, sure, because it's a bargain. But the price you pay is bloody well higher.”

She rose without giving the girl a chance to reply. She nodded her thanks for Rachel's cooperation and began to head out of the small park. As she followed the path to the gate, she saw a young Asian man affixing onto one of the wrought-iron railings a yellow paper that he took from a stack which he carried. By the time she reached him, he'd moved on and she saw him farther down the street, fixing another notice to a telegraph pole.

Curiously, she read the poster. The large black letters on yellow were hard to miss, and they spelled out a man's name across the top:
FAHD KUMHAR.
Beneath this was a boldly rendered message in both English and Urdu,
BALFORD C.I.D. WANT TO INTERROGATE YOU. DO NOT SPEAK TO THEM WITHOUT LEGAL REPRESENTATION.
JUM'A
WILL PROVIDE THIS. PLEASE PHONE.
These four sentences were followed by a local telephone number, which was repeated across the bottom of the page vertically so that it could be torn off by a passer-by.

At least they now knew what Muhannad Malik's latest move was, Barbara thought. And she felt a mixture of satisfaction and relief at what the yellow notice inadvertently revealed to her. Despite having good reason for doing so, Azhar hadn't betrayed to his cousin her slip of the tongue of the previous night. Had he done so, the only town in which the notices would have gone up was Clacton, and they'd have been concentrated round the market square.

She owed him one now. And as she walked back in the direction of the High Street, Barbara couldn't help wondering when and how Taymullah Azhar would call in the debt.

C
LIFF HEGARTY COULDN'T
concentrate. Not that concentration was really required in applying the jigsaw to the coupling men who would form the latest puzzle on offer from Hegarty's Adult Distractions. The machinery was programmed to run on its own. All he had to do was set the prospective puzzle in the correct position, choose which one of half a hundred designs he wanted the jigsaw to work in, turn a dial, flip a switch, and wait for the results. All of which he was used to doing as part of his daily routine when he wasn't taking telephone orders, preparing his next catalogue for the printer, or packing off one or another innocently wrapped item to some randy bloke in the Hebrides with an appetite for tasty diversions that he'd rather his postman not know about.

But today was different and for more than one reason.

He'd seen the cops. He'd even talked to them. Two detectives wearing plain clothes and lugging a tape recorder, clipboards, and notebooks had gone into the mustard factory right at opening time. Two others had arrived twenty-one minutes later, also in plain clothes. These two started making visits to the other businesses in the industrial estate. So Cliff had known it was only a matter of time—and not very much of it—till they got to him.