Deception on His Mind (66 page)

“Barbara! Barbara!” A clatter of feet on the parquet floor accompanied the cry of her name. Hadiyyah, dressed to the nines in sunset silk, had caught sight of her from the bar's window seat and was leaping into immediate action.

Barbara hesitated, wincing inwardly. If she'd hoped to fumble her way through an evening's unexpected encounter with Muhannad Malik by pretending not to be acquainted with his cousin outside Balford-le-Nez, the gaff had just decidedly been blown. And Azhar was not quick enough to stop his daughter. He rose, but she was already dancing across the room. A limp white shoulder bag shaped like the moon dangled from her elbow to the floor.

Hadiyyah said, “Come and see who's here. It's my cousin, Barbara. He's called Muhannad. He's twenty-six and he's married and he's got two little boys who're still in nappies. I forget their names, but I know I'll remember when I get to meet them.”

“I was just about to pop up to my room,” Barbara told her. She averted her eyes from the bar, irrationally hoping that by doing so, she would not be noticed in conversation with the girl.

“Pooh. It'll only take a minute. I want you to meet him. I asked him if he'd eat here with us, but he said his wife's waiting for him at home. And his mum and his dad. He's got a sister as well.” She sighed with pure pleasure. Her eyes were vivid. “Imagine, Barbara. I didn't even know before tonight. I didn't know I even
had
a family besides Mummy and Dad. And he's ever so nice, my cousin Muhannad. Will you come and meet him?”

Azhar had come to the door of the bar. Behind him, Muhannad had risen from a cracked leather wing chair that faced the window. He held a drink, which he raised to his lips and finished off before setting the glass on a nearby table.

Barbara telegraphed her question to Taymullah Azhar.
What to say?

But Hadiyyah had latched onto her hand, and any pretence of their having only two evenings’ acquaintance predicated on a mutual love of the Burnt House Hotel's culinary masterpieces was quickly mooted by her words.
“You
thought the same, didn't you, Barbara? That's because we never much act like we have a family anywhere at all. I expect we'll see them in London now. They c'n come for weekends. And
we
c'n invite them to one of our barbecues, can't we?”

Sure, Barbara wanted to say. Muhannad Malik was no doubt chomping at the bit this very moment, desperate for an opportunity to tuck into Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers’ grilled kebabs.

“Cousin Muhannad,” Hadiyyah was singing out. “Come and meet my friend Barbara. She lives in London. We have the ground floor flat, like I told you, and Barbara lives in the sweetest little cottage round back of the house. We met her cause her refrigerator got delivered to our flat by mistake. Dad moved it for her. He got grease on his shirt. We got most of it out, but he doesn't like to wear it to the university any longer.”

Muhannad joined them. Hadiyyah caught his hand. Now she stood with her hands locked to both of them—Barbara and her cousin—and she couldn't have looked more pleased had she just successfully arranged their nuptials.

Muhannad's face was a study in active assessment, as if a computer in his brain were in the process of tallying information and placing it in appropriate categories. Barbara could well imagine what they were labelled:
betrayal, secrecy, deception.
He spoke to Hadiyyah, but he looked at her father.

“How very nice to meet your friend, little cousin. Have you known her long?”

“Oh, weeks and weeks and
weeks,”
Hadiyyah crowed. “We go for ice creams on Chalk Farm Road and we've been to the cinema and she even came to my birthday party. Sometimes we go to see her mum in Greenford. We have ever so much fun, don't we, Barbara?”

“How coincidental it is, then, that you should find yourselves in the same hotel in Balford-le-Nez,” Muhannad said meaningfully.

“Hadiyyah,” Azhar said, “Barbara has only just returned to the hotel, and it appears that you waylaid her on her way to her room. If you—”

“We told her we were going to Essex, you see.” Amiably, Hadiyyah offered the information to her cousin. “We had to, because I left a message on her answer machine. I invited her for an ice cream, and I didn't want her to think I would forget. So I went to her cottage to tell her and then Dad came and then we said we were going to the sea. Only Dad didn't tell me
you
lived here, Cousin Muhannad. He made it a surprise. So now you can meet my friend Barbara and she can meet you.”

“That's been done,” Azhar said.

“But perhaps not as soon as it might have been,” Muhannad said.

“Listen, Mr. Malik,” Barbara put in, but the appearance of Basil Treves supervened.

He was coming out of the bar in his usual bustle, the evening's dinner orders clutched in his hand. He hummed as always. The sight of Barbara with the Pakistanis, however, silenced him on what sounded like the fifth note of the title song to
The Sound of Music.

“Ah! Sergeant Havers,” he said. “You've had a phone call. Three, in fact, all from the same man.” He cast a speculative glance at Muhannad and then at Azhar before he added mysteriously but with an unmistakable air of importance that served to underscore his position as the compatriot, fellow investigator, and general soulmate of the Scotland Yard detective, “You know, Sergeant. That little German concern of ours? He left two numbers: home and direct line into his office. I've put them both in your cubbyhole, and if you'll just wait a moment …”

As he scuttled away to fetch the telephone messages, Muhannad spoke again. “Cousin, we'll speak later, I hope. Hadiyyah, good evening. It was—” His face softened with the truth of his words and his other hand cradled the back of her head in a tender gesture. He bent and kissed her crown. “It was truly a pleasure to meet you at long last.”

“Will you come again? C'n I meet your wife and your little boys?”

“Everything”—he smiled—”in good time.”

He took his leave of them, and Azhar—casting a quick look at Barbara—followed him out of the hotel. Barbara heard him say urgently, “Muhannad, a moment,” as he got to the door. She wondered what on earth he was going to say to his cousin by way of explanation. No matter how one examined the situation, it didn't look good.

“Here
we are.” Basil Treves was back with them, Barbara's messages fluttering from his fingers. “He was most courteous over the phone. Quite surprising, for a German. Will you be joining us for dinner, Sergeant?”

She told him that she would be doing so, and Hadiyyah said, “Sit with us, sit with us!”

Treves didn't look any happier at this turn of events than he'd looked at breakfast on Monday morning when Barbara had blithely crossed the invisible barrier that the hotelier erected between his white guests and his guests of colour. He patted Hadiyyah on the head. He looked at her with the special sort of superficial benignity one reserves for small animals to which one is violently allergic. “Yes, yes. If she wishes,” he said heartily, past the aversion in his eyes. “She can sit anywhere she wishes to sit, my dear.”

“Good, good, good!” Reassured, Hadiyyah scampered off. A moment later, Barbara heard her chatting with Mrs. Porter in the hotel bar.

“It was the police,” Treves said confidentially. He nodded at the telephone messages in Barbara's hand. “I didn't want to say as much in front of …those two. You know. One can't be too careful with foreigners.”

“Right,” Barbara said. She quelled the desire to smack Treves’ face and tramp on his feet. Instead, she went up the stairs to her room.

She tossed her shoulder bag onto one of the twin beds and went to the other. She slouched down onto it and examined her telephone messages. Each was made out to the same name: Helmut Kreuzhage. He'd phoned at three that afternoon, then again at five and at six-fifteen. She looked at her watch and decided to try him in his office first. She punched the German number into the phone and fanned herself with the plastic tray that she took from beneath the room's tin tea pot.

“Hier ist Kriminalhauptkommisar Kreuzhage/’

Bingo, she thought. She identified herself slowly in English, thinking of Ingrid and her modest command of Barbara's native tongue. The German switched languages immediately, saying, “Yes. Sergeant Havers. I'm the man who took the telephone calls here in Hamburg from Mr. Haytham Querashi.” He spoke with only the barest hint of an accent. His voice was pleasant and mellifluous. He must have driven Basil Treves half mad, Barbara thought, so little did he sound like a postwar cinema Nazi.

“Brilliant,” Barbara said fervently, and thanked him for returning her call. She quickly made clear to him all of the circumstances surrounding her having tracked him down.

He made a grave clucking sound on his end of the phone when she told him about the trip wire, the old concrete steps, and Haytham Querashi's fatal fall. “When I had a look at his phone records from the hotel, the number for Hamburg police was among them. We're checking into every possible lead. I'm hoping you can help us out.”

“I fear I have little that would be of help,” Kreuzhage said.

“Do you remember your conversations with Querashi? He phoned Hamburg police more than once.”

“Oh,
ja,
I do remember quite well,” Kreuzhage answered. “He wished to share some information about activities which he believed to be ongoing at an address in Wandsbek.”

“Wandsbek?”

“Ja.
A community in the western sector of the city.”

“What sort of activities?”

“That, I fear, is where the gentleman became rather vague. He would describe them only as illegal activities involving both Hamburg and the port of Parkeston in England.”

Barbara felt her fingertips tingle. Bloody hell. Could it actually be possible that Emily Barlow was right? “That sounds like a smuggling operation,” she said. Kreuzhage coughed phlegmily. He was a brother smoker, Barbara realised, but heavier on the fags than she. He held the phone away from his face and spat. She shuddered and vowed to ease up on the weed.

“I would be hesitant to limit my conclusions to smuggling,” the German said.

“Why?”

“Because when the gentleman mentioned the port of Parkeston, I arrived at the same conclusion. I suggested he phone
Davidwache an der Reeperbahn.
This is the harbour police here in Hamburg. They would be the ones to deal with smuggling, you see. But that, I am afraid, he was loath to do. He wouldn't even entertain the notion, which suggested to me that his concerns did not revolve around smuggling at all.”

“Then what
did
he tell you?”

“He would say only that he had information about a felonious activity that was ongoing, operating out of an address in Wandsbek, although he did not know that it was Wandsbek, of course. Just that it was in Hamburg.”

“Oskarstrafie 15?”
Barbara guessed.

“You've found the address among his things, I take it.
Ja,
that was the location. We looked into it, but found nothing at all.”

“He was on the wrong track? Did he have the wrong German city?”

“There is no real accurate way to know,” Kreuzhage replied. “He may well have been correct about the illicit goings on, but
Oskarstrafie 15
is a large apartment building with some eighty units inside, behind a locked front door. We have no cause to inspect those units and could not do so on the unfounded suspicions of a gentleman phoning from another country.”

“Unfounded suspicions?”

“Mr. Querashi had no real evidence to speak of, Sergeant Havers. Or if he had it, he was not willing to share it with me. But on the strength of his passion and sincerity, I did place the building under surveillance for two days. It sits on the edge of
Eichtalpark,
so it was easy enough to place my men in an area where they could not be seen. But I have not the manpower to …how do you call it …sit out a building?”

“Stake out a building?”

“That American term,
ja,
this is it. I have not the manpower or the financial resources to stake out a building the size of
Oskarstrafie 15
for the length of time it would take to ascertain if illegal activity is going on there. Not, I am afraid, with so little to go on.”

It was hardly an unreasonable position, Barbara thought. Doubtless, stormtrooping one's way into people's private homes and apartments had gone out of fashion in Germany after the war.

But then she remembered.

“Klaus Reuchlein,” she said.

“Ja?
He is …?” Kreuzhage waited politely.

“He's some bloke living in Hamburg,” Barbara said. “I don't have his address, but I have his phone number. I'm wondering if there's any chance that he lives at
Oskarstrafie
25.”

“This,” Kreuzhage said, “could indeed be ascertained. But beyond that …” He was good enough to sound regretful. He went on to tell her—in the sombre tone of a man with a thorough knowledge of the evils that other men do—that there were many arenas of misbehaviour which could possibly span the North Sea and tie England to Germany. Prostitution, counterfeiting, gun running, terrorism, extremism, industrial espionage, bank robbery, art theft …The wise policeman did not confine his suspicions to smuggling when two countries were connected in a criminal way. “This I tried to point out to Mr. Querashi,” he said, “so that he might see how difficult was the task he wished me to perform. But he insisted that an investigation of
Oskarstrafie 15
would provide us with the information we needed to make an arrest. Alas, Mr. Querashi had never been to
Oskarstrafee
25.” Barbara could hear him sigh. “An investigation? Sometimes people do not understand how the law regulates what we as policemen can and cannot do.”

How true. Barbara thought of the police dramas she'd seen on the telly, those programmes in which the rozzers regularly wrestled confessions from suspects who went from defiant to compliant within the convenient space of an hour. She made noises of agreement and asked Kreuzhage if he would check on Klaus Reuchlein's whereabouts. “I have a phone call into him as well,” she explained, “but something tells me he's not going to return it.”