Deception on His Mind (74 page)

“Then I don't talk.”

“Mr. Hegarty,” Barbara interposed, “we had the i.d. on your dabs off S04 in London. My guess is that you know the score: A London i.d. means you're sitting on a record of arrest. D'you need it pointed out that it looks a little dicey for a bloke if a felon's prints are associated with a murder and the bloke and the felon are one and the same?”

“I never hurt anyone,” Hegarty said defensively. “In London or in anyplace else. And I'm not a felon. What I did was between two adults, and just because one of the adults was paying, it wasn't like I ever had to force anyone into it. Besides, I was just a kid then. If you coppers paid more attention to stopping real crime and less attention to rousting blokes trying to make a few honest quid by using their bodies just like a coal miner or a ditch digger uses his, then this country would be a better place to live.”

Emily didn't argue with the creative comparison between manual labourers and male prostitutes. “Look. A solicitor can't keep your name out of the paper, if that's why you want one. And I can't guarantee that someone from the
Standard
won't be camped on your doorstep when you go home. But the quicker we get you in and out of here, the less likely that possibility is.”

He considered this, lizard-tonguing his lips once again. His biceps tightened and the phallus posing as the lily's stamen flexed suggestively. He finally said, “It's like this, okay? There's another bloke. Him and I, we been together awhile. Four years, to be specific. I don't want him to know about …well, about what I'm going to tell you. He already suspects but he doesn't know. And I want to keep it that way.”

Emily consulted a clipboard that she'd picked up from reception on her way downstairs. She said, “You have a business, I see.”

“Shit. I
can't
tell Gerry you been after me about the Distractions. He already doesn't like me making them. He's always after me to be doing something legit—legit according to his definition of legit—and if he finds out that I've had some aggro from the cops—”

“And I see this business is in the Balford Industrial Estate,” Emily continued unperturbed. “Which is where Malik's Mustards is. Which is where Mr. Querashi was employed. We will, of course, be speaking to every businessman in the industrial estate in the course of our investigation. Does this meet your needs, Mr. Hegarty?”

Hegarty blew out the breath he'd taken in order to voice further protest. Clearly, he'd received the implicit message. He said, “Yeah. It does. Okay.”

“Right then.” Emily briskly switched on the cassette recorder. “Begin with how you knew Mr. Querashi. We
are
correct in assuming you knew him, I take it?”

“I knew him,” Hegarty said. “Yeah. I knew the bloke all right.”

They'd met in Clacton market square. Cliff had taken to going there when he was caught up at work. He went for the shopping and for what he called “a bit of larking about, if you know what I mean. It just gets to be such a drag when you're with one bloke day in and day out. Larking about cuts the boredom, see? And that's all it was. Just larking about.”

He'd seen Querashi checking out some counterfeit Hermés scarves. He hadn't thought much of him—”dark meat not gen'rally being my preference”—until the Asian raised his head and gave him the eye. “I'd seen him round Malik's before,” Hegarty said. “But I never met him and I never gave him much of a thought. But when he looked at me, I knew what was what. It was a ginger look, and no mistaking. So I went to the toilets. He followed directly. And that's how it started.”

True love, Barbara thought.

He'd thought it would be a one-off, Hegarty explained, which is what he wanted and what he usually got when he went to the market square. But that's not how Querashi had wanted it. What Querashi had wanted was a permanent—if illicit—liaison, and the fact that Cliff was committed elsewhere served the Pakistani's essential needs. “He told me he was engaged to Malik's daughter, but the deal between them was going to be on paper only. She needed him to be legit. He needed her for the same reason.”

“To be legit?” Barbara interjected. “Is the Malik girl lesbian?”

“She's in the club,” Hegarty answered. “Least, that's what Hayth told me about her.”

Bloody hell, Barbara thought. “Was Mr. Querashi certain that she's pregnant?” she clarified.

“The bird told him herself, he said. She told him straightaway when they met. He figured it was fine because while he could've shagged her, he knew that shagging a woman was going to be a real chore. So if they could pass the kid off as his, the better. He'd look like he'd done the husband business on his wedding night, and if the kid was a boy, he'd be in clover and not have to bother with the wife any longer.”

“And all the time he'd have his assignations with you.”

“That was the plan, yeah. It suited me as well because, like I said, having only one bloke day in and day out…” He lifted his fingers by way of a shrug. “This gave me a bit on the side, so it wasn't always Gerry, Gerry, Gerry.”

Emily continued taking Hegarty through his paces, but Barbara's mind was on overdrive. If Sahlah Malik was pregnant, and if Querashi wasn't the father, there could be only one person who was.
Life begins now
took on a whole new meaning. And so did the fact that Theodore Shaw had no alibi for the night of the murder. All he'd needed to do was sail his cabin cruiser from Balford Marina down the main channel so as to round the north point of the Nez and gain access to the area where Haytham Querashi fell to his death. The question was: Could he have taken the boat from the marina without being seen?

“We used the pillbox on the beach,” Hegarty was explaining to Emily. “No place else was safe enough. Hayth had a place in the Avenues—where he was supposed to live once he and the girl got spliced—but we couldn't go there cause Gerry's working nights on it, fixing it up.”

“And on Gerry's work nights, you met Querashi?”

“That's how it was.”

They couldn't meet at the Burnt House for fear that Basil Treves—“that limp-dick Treves” was how Hegarty identified him—would tell someone, specifically Akram Malik, his fellow town councillor. They couldn't meet in Jaywick Sands because the community was small and word could get back to Gerry, who wasn't about to put up with his lover doing the business with other blokes. “AIDS and all,” Hegarty added as if he felt the need to explain Gerry's incomprehensible position to the police.

So they met in the pillbox on the beach. And that's where Cliff was, waiting for Querashi, on the night he died.

“I saw it happen,” he said, and his eyes grew cloudy as if he were revisiting what he'd seen that night. “It was dark, but I saw the lights of his car when he got there cause he parked near the edge of the cliff. He came to the steps and looked round, like he'd heard something. I could tell that, because I could see his silhouette.”

After a pause at the top of the steps, Querashi had begun his descent. His fall began not five steps from the top. He went down hard and toppled—head over heels over head over heels—all the way to the bottom of the cliff.

“I just froze.” Hegarty had begun to perspire. The bauble on his lip ring danced. “I didn't know what to do. I couldn't believe he'd fallen. … I kept waiting for him to get up …dust himself off. Maybe laugh about it or something, like he was embarrassed. Anyway, that's when I saw the other one.”

“Someone else was there?” Emily said quickly.

“Tucked behind some gorse just at the cliff top.”

Hegarty described the movement he'd seen: a figure slipping out of the shrubbery, descending a few steps, removing something from round an iron banister at either side of the concrete steps, then slipping away.

“That's when I figured someone'd done him in,” Hegarty concluded.

R
ACHEL SIGNED HER
name with a flourish on every line that Mr. Dobson ticked off for her. It was so scorching in his office that her thighs were sticking to her chair and droplets of sweat plopped from her eyebrows onto the documents like tears. But she was far from crying. On this day of all days, crying was the last thing on her mind.

She had used her lunch hour to pedal over to the Cliff top Snuggeries. She had pedalled furiously without regard for heat, traffic, or pedestrians, working herself into a lather in order to get to the Snuggeries and Mr. Dobson before someone else purchased that one remaining flat. Her spirits were so elevated that she didn't bother to duck her head from the stares of the curious as she usually did when out among strangers. What was their gawping when at last her future was being settled?

She had honestly believed her final words to Sahlah on the previous day. Theo Shaw, she had said, would come round. He wouldn't leave Sahlah to fend for herself. It wasn't in Theo Shaw's nature to desert someone he loved, especially not during a time of need.

But what she hadn't counted on was Agatha.

Rachel had heard the news about Mrs. Shaw's stroke within ten minutes of opening the shop that morning. The old woman's condition was the talk of the High Street. Rachel and Connie had no more than uncovered the necklaces and bracelets in the main display case, when Mr. Unsworth from Balford Books and Crannies popped round with an oversized get-well card for them to sign.

“What's this, then?” Connie wanted to know. The card was shaped like an enormous rabbit. It looked more suitable for wishing a child Happy Easter than for sending fond regards to a woman teetering on the edge of death.

Those three words were all Mr. Unsworth needed to hold forth on the subject of “apoplectic seizures,” which is what he called Mrs. Shaw's stroke. That was typical of Mr. Unsworth. He read the dictionary between customers, and he always liked to puff himself up by using words that no one except him understood. But when Connie—not only unintimidated by his vocabulary but also unimpressed with anything that didn't directly relate to swing dancing or selling a bauble to a customer—said, “Alfie, what'n hell're you squawking about? We got work to do,” Mr. Unsworth dropped Mr. Chips in favour of a more direct manner of communicating:

“Old Agatha Shaw blew a brain fuse, Con. It happened yesterday. Mary Ellis was with her. They got her in hospital, and she's hooked up to machines every which way to Sunday.”

A few minutes’ conversation was enough to glean the details, the most important of which was Mrs. Shaw's prognosis. Connie wanted to learn it because of what the elderly woman's continuing health meant to the redevelopment of Balford-le-Nez, a plan in which the owners of the High Street shops had a natural interest. Rachel wanted to learn it because of what Mrs. Shaw's present condition could mean to her grandson's future behaviour. It was one thing to be certain that Theo would do his duty to Sahlah under normal circumstances. It was another to expect him to take up the burden of marriage and fatherhood in the midst of a family crisis.

And what Rachel had learned from Mr. Unsworth—who'd had it from Mr. Hodge at Granny's Bakery, who'd had it from Mrs. Barrigan at Sketches, who was Mary Ellis's paternal aunt—was that Mrs. Shaw's current situation constituted a family crisis of major proportions. True, she would live. And while this at first made it likely that Theo would indeed come round to accept his manly responsibilities to Sahlah Malik, when Mr. Unsworth had expounded upon Mrs. Shaw's condition at greater length, Rachel saw things differently.

He used words like
constant care
and
intensive rehabilitation,
words like
devotion of a loved one, thank her lucky stars
and
she's got that boy.
Hearing all this, it didn't take long for Rachel to understand that whatever his responsibilities were to Sahlah, Theo Shaw faced greater responsibilities to his grandmother. Or at least that was how he was likely to see it.

So all morning long, Rachel had watched the clock. She'd been too much at odds with her mother recently to ask for time to go to the Snuggeries. But the moment the second hand swept past twelve, she was out of the shop and bent over her handlebars, pumping like a cyclist in the
Tour de France.

“Brilliant,” Mr. Dobson said as she affixed her signature to the final line of the purchase agreement. He removed it from the table and waved it in the air, as if drying the ink. He beamed at her and said, “Brill-i-ant. Very nice indeed. You won't regret the purchase for a moment, Miss Winfield. A tidy investment, these flats are. ‘Nother five years and your money will be doubled. Just see if it won't. Clever of you to snap up this last one before someone else got to it, ‘f you ask me. But I expect you're a clever girl about most things, aren't you?”

He went on to chat about mortgage advisors, building societies, and investment officers at the local Barclays, Lloyds, or NatWest. But she wasn't really listening. She nodded and smiled, wrote the down-payment cheque that would decimate her account at Midlands, and thought of nothing but the need to complete this piece of business as quickly as possible so that she could ride over to Malik's Mustards and be there to offer Sahlah her support when the news of Agatha Shaw's condition reached her ears.

Doubtless, Sahlah would interpret this news exactly as Rachel herself had done, seeing it as an immovable impediment to a life with Theo and their baby. There was no telling what sort of tailspin this piece of information would send Sahlah into. And since people in tailspins of worry and confusion were liable to make hasty decisions which they later regretted, it only made sense that she—Rachel Lynn Winfield—be in the immediate vicinity should Sahlah begin to think it necessary to do something rash.

Despite the need for haste, however, Rachel couldn't help taking just a minute to have a peek at the flat. She knew she'd be living in it soon enough—
they'd
be living in it soon enough—but still it seemed like such a dream to actually have the flat at last that she knew the only way to make the dream real would be to walk from room to room, to open cupboards, and to admire the view.

Mr. Dobson parted with the key, saying, “‘F course, ’f course,” and adding
“Naturellement, chére mademoiselle,”
with a waggle of his eyebrows and a leer that, Rachel knew, were supposed to demonstrate that he wasn't the least put off by her face. She ordinarily would have responded curtly to a display of such spurious
bonhomie,
but this afternoon she felt only good will for her fellow man, so she shook back her hair to unveil the worst of her deformities, thanked Mr. Dobson, clutched the key in her palm, and took herself off to Number 22.