Deception on His Mind (65 page)

Barbara side-stepped, ready to duck out of the office before the DCI raised her head. But that was movement enough. Emily looked up and lifted her hand to keep Barbara where she was, one finger indicating that she was bringing the conversation to a close.

“All right, yes,” she said. “Half past ten. And don't forget the condoms this time.”

Without embarrassment, she rang off. She said to Barbara, “What did you give them?”

Barbara examined her, knowing full well that her face was flaming. For her part, Emily was all business. Nothing in her expression even began to suggest that she'd just been arranging an assignation with a married man for later in the evening. Yet surely that was what she'd been doing: lining up for some energetic mattress activity the very same bloke whom she'd given the brush on Sunday night. She might have been setting up a dental appointment.

Emily appeared to read Barbara with an excruciating precision. She said, “Fags, booze, ulcers, migraines, psychosomatic illness, or promiscuity. Choose your poison, Barb. I chose mine.”

“Yeah. Well,” Barbara said with a shrug, intending the movement of her shoulders to indicate her own membership in the sisterhood of women who casually crushed cobblers for stress reduction. The reality was that she was dying for a fag—not a man—and she could feel the need for nicotine building from her fingertips to the backs of her eyeballs, despite having sucked down three and a half cigarettes during her meeting with Azhar and his cousin. “Whatever works.”

“This does for me.” Emily blew out a breath and raked her fingers back through her hair. A small curtain of sodden paper towels draped over the unlit lamp of her desk, and she took one of them, rubbing it on the back of her neck. “I swear to God, this weather feels like summer in New Delhi. Have you ever been there? No? Good. Don't waste your money. It's a real pit. What did you give them?”

Barbara made her report. She'd told the Asians that the police had tracked down and acquired the contents of Querashi's safe deposit box at Barclays, that Siddiqi had confirmed Azhar's translation of the Qur'aan page from Querashi's hotel room, that they were working on his incoming and outgoing telephone calls, and that they had a suspect—beyond Kumhar—who was being held for questioning at the present time.

“Malik's reaction?” Emily said.

“He pressed.”

Which mildly understated the case. Muhannad Malik had demanded to know the race and identity of the second suspect. He'd asked for a list of the contents of Querashi's safe deposit box. He'd demanded a complete definition of what it meant to be “working” on incoming and outgoing telephone calls. He wanted to be put in touch with Professor Siddiqi in order to make certain that the man understood the nature of the crime that was being investigated in Balford-le-Nez.

“Christ. He's got such bloody nerve,” Emily remarked upon Barbara's conclusion. “What did you tell him?”

“I didn't have to tell him anything,” Barbara replied. “Azhar did it for me.” And he'd done it in his usual fashion, with the aplomb that came from obviously having had more than one occasion to deal with the police, with PACE, and with that law's ramifications. Which made Barbara wonder anew about her London neighbour. She'd labelled him
university professor
and
father of Hadiyyah
during the nearly two months of their acquaintance. But what else was he? she asked herself now. And what were the depth and the breadth of information that was missing from her knowledge of the man?

“You like this other bloke, this Azhar,” Emily said astutely. “Why?”

Barbara knew she should say Because I know him from London, we're neighbours, and his daughter is special to me. But what she said instead was “Just a gut feeling. He seems honest. He seems like he wants to get to the bottom of what happened to Querashi as much as we do.”

Emily gave out a sceptical bark of laughter. “Don't put money on that, Barb. If he's thick with Muhannad, he's got an agenda that has nothing to do with getting to the bottom of what happened on the Nez. Or did you miss the subtext in our little rendezvous with Azhar, Malik, and Fahd Kumhar?”

“What subtext?”

“Kumhar's reaction when those two walked into the interrogation room. You saw it, didn't you? What do you think that meant?”

“Kumhar was bricking it,” Barbara admitted. “I've never seen anyone so rattled in custody. But that's the real point, isn't it, Em? He's in custody. So where are you heading with this?”

“I'm heading to a connection between these blokes. Kumhar took one look at Azhar and Malik and nearly wore brown trousers.”

“You're saying he knew them?”

“Perhaps not Azhar. But I'm saying that he knew Muhannad Malik. I'm saying it's dead cert that he knew him. He was shaking so badly, we could have used him to make martinis for James Bond. And believe me, that reaction had nothing to do with being locked up in the nick.”

Barbara sensed her certainty and met it with caution. “But, Em, look at his situation. He's in custody—a suspect in a murder investigation—in a foreign country, where his language skills wouldn't get him as far as the edge of town if he wanted to scarper. Isn't that reason enough for him to be—”

“Yes,” Emily said impatiently. “Right. His English wouldn't serve him to call a dog to a bone. So what was he doing in Clacton? And, more to the point, how did he get there? We're not talking about a town teeming with Asians. We're talking about a town with so few of them that all we had to do was ask about a single Pakistani at Jackson and Son and the proprietor knew we were looking for Kumhar.”

“So?” Barbara asked.

‘This isn't exactly a culture of free spirits. These people stick together. So what's Kumhar doing in Clacton by himself when the rest of his kind are here, in Balford?”

Barbara wanted to argue that Azhar was in London alone despite, as she had so recently learned, having a large family elsewhere in the country. She wanted to argue that the Asian community in London was centered mostly round Southall and Hounslow, while Azhar lived in Chalk Farm and worked in Bloomsbury. How typical is that? she wanted to ask. But she couldn't do that without jeopardising her position in the investigation.

Emily went on insistently. “You heard DC Honigman. Kumhar was fine till those two blokes walked into the room. What do you suppose that means?”

It could mean anything, Barbara thought. It could also be twisted to mean what one wanted. She thought about reminding the DCI of what Muhannad had said: The Asians hadn't walked into the room alone. But arguing over a mere surmise seemed fruitless at the moment. Worse, it seemed inflammatory. So she backed away from Kumhar's state of mind. She said, “If Kumhar already knows Malik, what's the connection between them?”

“Some sort of skulduggery, you can depend upon it. The same sort of thing Muhannad was up to as a teenager: something dodgy that can never quite be traced back to him. But his teenage offences—those minor infractions of the law—have given way to the big stuff now.”

“What sort of big stuff?”

“Who the hell knows? Burglary, car rings, pornography, prostitution, drugs, smuggling, running guns from the East, moving explosives, dabbling in terrorism. I don't know what it is, but I know one thing: There's money involved. How else do we explain that car of Muhan-nad's? That Rolex watch? The clothes? The jewellery?”

“Em, his father owns an entire flaming factory right here in town. The family's got to be rolling in lolly. And he'd have got a handsome dowry from his in-laws. Why wouldn't Muhannad put some of it on display?”

“Because that isn't their way. They may be rolling in lolly, but they're rolling it right back into Malik's Mustards. Or they're sending it to Pakistan. Or they're using it to bankroll other family members’ entry into the country. Or they're saving it for dowries for their females. But, believe me, they are
not
using it for classic cars and personal baubles. Absolutely no way.” Emily tossed her damp paper towels into the wastepaper basket. “Barb, I swear to you, Malik's dirty. He's been dirty since he was sixteen years old, and the only change from that time to now is that he's upped the stakes. He uses
Jum'a
as a front these days. He acts the part of Mr. Man of His People. But the truth is that this is a bloke who'd slice his mother's jugular open if it would put another diamond in his signet ring.”

Classic cars, diamonds, a Rolex watch. Barbara would have given one lung to have had a cigarette at that moment in Emily's office, so taut did she feel her nerves being pulled. She wasn't so much disturbed by the DCI's words, but by the unacknowledged—and hence potentially dangerous—passion that ran beneath them. She had walked this road before. It was signposted Loss of Objectivity, and it didn't lead to a destination in which a decent cop wanted to head. And Emily Barlow was a decent cop. She was one of the best.

Barbara sought a way to keep the case in balance. She said, “Wait. We've got Trevor Ruddock without an alibi and an hour and a half of free time on Friday night. We've got his dabs under scrutiny. I've sent his spider-making paraphernalia to the lab for some tests. So do we let him walk and go after Muhannad instead? Ruddock had wire in his bedroom, Em. He had a whole bleeding roll of it.”

Emily looked past her, at the wall of her office, at the china board hanging there, at its scrawl of notations. She said nothing. Into her silence, telephones rang and someone hooted nearby, “Jesus, mate. Stop kidding yourself.”

Right. How about it? Barbara thought. Come on, Em. Don't fail me now.

“We need to check the log.” Emily's words were decisive. “Here and in Clacton. We need to see what's been reported and what's going unsolved.”

Barbara's spirits sank. “The log? But if Muhannad's into something big, d'you think we're really going to find it sitting there unsolved on the police log?”

“We're going to find it somewhere,” Emily responded. “Believe me. But we won't find it at all if we don't start looking.”

“And Trevor? What'll I do with him?”

“Let him go for now.”

“Let him …?” Barbara dug her fingernails into the skin on the underside of her arm. “But, Em, we can do with him what we're doing with Kumhar. We can let him stew till tomorrow afternoon. We can put him through the paces every quarter of an hour. I swear to God, he's hiding something, and until we know what that something is—”

“Let him go, Barbara,” the DCI said steadily.

“But we haven't heard about his fingerprints yet. And that wire of his has been sent to the lab, and when I talked to Rachel …” Barbara didn't know what else to say.

“Barb, Trevor Ruddock isn't going to do a runner. He knows that all he has to do is keep his gob shut and our hands are tied. So we'll let him go till we've got the word from the lab. And in the meantime, we work the Asians.”

“Work them how?”

Emily ticked off items. The police log in Balford as well as the logs in surrounding communities would show if anything dodgy—connectable to Muhannad—was going on; the contents of Querashi's safe deposit box had to be looked into; the offices of World Wide Tours in Harwich needed to be visited by someone with Querashi's picture in hand; a Polaroid of Kumhar had to be shown round the houses that backed onto the Nez; as a matter of fact, a Polaroid picture of Fahd Kumhar should be taken to World Wide Tours as well, just for good measure.

“I've a meeting with our team in less than five minutes,” Emily said. She rose, and the inflection in her voice clearly indicated that their interview was over. “I'll be making the assignments for tomorrow. Is there any of this that you want to take on, Barb?”

The implication was crystalline: Emily Barlow was directing the course of the investigation, not Barbara Havers. Trevor Ruddock would walk within the hour. They would begin to home in on the Pakistanis. On one particular Pakistani. On one Pakistani with one very good alibi.

There was nothing more that she could do, Barbara realised. “I'll take World Wide Tours,” she said. “I suppose I could do with a drive to Harwich.”

B
ARBARA SAW THE
classic turquoise Thunderbird the moment she turned into the car park at the Burnt House Hotel ninety minutes later. It was hard to miss, sleek, pristine, and exotic among the dusty Escorts, Volvos, and Vauxhalls. The convertible looked as if someone spit-polished it every day. From its glittering hubcaps to the chromium curve of its windscreen's border, it could have been used as a mobile operating theatre, so unbesmirched was its every inch. It was sitting at the end of the row of cars, straddling two of the parking bays so as to keep anyone from scratching its paint job when disembarking from a lesser machine. Barbara considered using her recently purchased lipstick to scrawl
selfish
across the car's windscreen as an unsubtle commentary on the driver's commandeering more than his share of the car park's spaces. But she settled for a suitable imprecation, and she squeezed her Mini into a slot at the rear of the hotel, fragrantly located near the kitchen rubbish.

Muhannad Malik was within, doubtlessly scheming with Azhar after having had his every request to examine evidence turned down flat with no court of appeal. He hadn't liked that. He'd liked it less when his cousin had informed him that the police were under no obligation to meet the Asians at all, let alone put evidence on display for them. Muhannad had gone all tight-lipped at that, but if he'd felt at cross-purposes with his cousin, he hadn't let on. Rather, he'd directed his antipathy and scorn towards Barbara. She could only guess with what joy he would now greet her arrival at the hotel should she run into him. Which she fervently hoped to avoid doing.

The combination of wisps of cigarette smoke and fragments of muted conversation told Barbara that the hotel residents were gathering in the bar for preprandial sherry and the ritual study of the daily menu. That the menu was as unvarying as the tide—pork, chicken, plaice, beef—seemed to have no impact on the residents’ desire to peruse it with the intensity of devoted biblical scholars. Barbara could see them as she turned towards the stairs. A shower first, she decided. Then a pint of Bass with a whisky chaser.