Deception on His Mind (78 page)

A man of his word, Barbara thought. A man of more than one word, in fact.

She considered the answers he'd given her in response to her questions about his culture. She saw now how they applied to him. He'd been cut off from his family just as he declared Querashi would have been had his homosexuality come into the open. He'd been so cut off from his family that his daughter's existence was not acknowledged. They were—the two of them—an island unto themselves. No wonder he'd only too well understood and been able to expound upon the meaning of being an outcast.

Barbara processed all this with a fair degree of rational thinking. But she wasn't up to processing what this information about the Pakistani man meant to her personally. She told herself that it couldn't mean anything at all to her personally. She didn't, after all, have a personal relationship with Taymullah Azhar. True, she played the role of friend in his daughter's life, but when it came to defining a role in
his
life …She really didn't have one.

So she didn't understand why she felt somehow betrayed by the knowledge that he'd deserted a wife and two children. Perhaps, she concluded, she was feeling the betrayal that Hadiyyah would feel should she ever learn the truth.

Yes, Barbara thought. Doubtless that was it.

The lavatory door opened and Emily bounded inside, striding directly to one of the wash basins. Hastily, Barbara squashed her cigarette on the sole of her trainer and surreptitiously tossed the dog end out of the window.

Emily's nose twitched. She said, “Jesus, Barb. Are you still on the weed after all these years?”

“I was never one to ignore my addictions,” Barbara confessed.

Emily turned on the tap and thoroughly soaked a paper towel beneath it. She applied this to the back of her neck, oblivious of or uncaring about the water that dribbled down her spine and dampened her tank top. She said, “Ferguson,” as if the super's name were an execration. “He has his interview for the assistant chief constable's job in just three days. He expects an arrest in the Querashi case before he faces the panel, thank you very much. Not that he's doing a single bloody thing to help move the investigation forward. Unless threatening me with Howard Bloody Presley and dogging every step I take now constitute lending a helping hand. But he'll be happy enough to bow to the applause if we bring someone in without more public bloodshed. Fuck it. I despise that man.” She wet a hand and shoved it back through her hair. She turned to Barbara.

It was time to take on the mustard factory, she announced. She'd made application for a search warrant from the magistrate, and he'd come through in record time. Apparently, he was as anxious as Ferguson to bring the case to a close without another battle in the streets.

But there was a detail unrelated to the factory and to Emily's conviction about illegal activity going on within it, and Barbara wanted to pursue it. She couldn't ignore the fact that Sahlah Malik was pregnant, nor could she overlook the import this fact had in the case. “Can we make a stop at the marina, Em?”

Emily glanced at her watch. “Why? We know the Maliks don't have a boat, if you're hanging on to an arrival at the Nez by water.”

“But Theo Shaw has. And Sahlah's pregnant. And Theo got that bracelet off Sahlah. He's got motive, Em. He's got it loud and clear, no matter what Muhannad and his mates are up to at Eastern Imports.”

Theo also didn't have an alibi, while Muhannad did have one, she wanted to add. But she held her tongue. Emily knew the score, no matter her determination to run Muhannad Malik to ground for one offence or another.

Emily frowned as she considered Barbara's request. She said, “Right. Okay. We'll check it out.”

They set off in one of the unmarked Fords, making a turn into the High Street, where they saw Rachel Winfield teetering towards Racon Original and Artistic Jewellery from the direction of sea. The girl was red in the face. She looked as if she'd spent her morning in the bicycling third of an Iron Woman event. She paused to take a breather next to the signpost indicating that Balford Marina was just to the north. She waved happily as the Ford passed her. If she was guilty of something, she certainly didn't look it.

Balford Marina was perhaps a mile along the lane that ran perpendicular to the High Street. Its lower end comprised one-quarter of the little square whose opposite side was Alfred Terrace, where the Ruddock home stood in semi-squalor. It passed Tide Lake and a caravan park and, ultimately, the circular mass of a Martello Tower that had once been used to defend the coast during the Napoleonic Wars. The lane ended at the marina itself.

This consisted of a series of eight pontoons at which sailing boats and cabin cruisers were tied in the placid water of a tidal bay. At the far north end, a small office abutted a brick building that housed lavatories and showers. Emily drove in this direction and parked next to a tier of kayaks above which hung a faded sign advertising East Essex Boat Hire.

The owner of that business also acted the role of harbour master, a limited line of employment considering the relatively small size of the harbour in question.

Emily and Barbara interrupted Charlie Spencer in the midst of a perusal of the racing forms from Newmarket. “You catch anyone yet?” were his first words when he looked up, saw Emily's identification, and shoved his teeth-gnawed pencil behind one ear. “I can't sit here nights with a shotgun, you know. What's my taxes going for if I can't get service from the local constab. Eh? You tell me.”

“Improve your security, Mr. Spencer,” Emily responded. “I expect you don't leave your house unlocked when you aren't at home.”

“I got a dog takes care of the house,” he retorted.

“Then you need another to take care of your raft.”

“Which one of those is the Shaws?’” Barbara asked the man, indicating the lines of moored boats that lay motionless in the harbour. There were, she saw, very few people about, despite the hour of the day and the heat that encouraged travel to the sea.

“Fighting Lady,”
he replied. “The biggest one at the end of Pontoon Six. Shouldn't keep it here, the Shaws, you know. But it's convenient for them and they pay up regular and always have done, so who'm I to complain, eh?”

When they asked him why the
Fighting Lady
didn't belong in the Balford Marina, he said, “Tide's the problem,” and went on to explain that anyone who wished to use a boat that large would be better served with a mooring that wasn't so dependent on the tide. At high water there wasn't a problem. Plenty of water to keep a large boat afloat. But when the tide went out, the bottom of the cruiser rested in the mud, which wasn't good for it since the cabin and the boat's machinery bore down on the infrastructure. “Shortens the life of the craft,” he explained.

And the tide on Friday night? Barbara asked him. The tide between ten and midnight, for example?

Charlie set aside his racing forms to consult a booklet next to the till. Low, he told them.
Fighting Lady
—not to mention every other large pleasure craft in the marina—wasn't going anywhere on Friday night. “Each one of them boats needs a good eight foot of water to manoeuvre in,” he explained. “Now, as to my complaint, Inspector …” And he turned to take issue with the DCI on the efficacy of training guard dogs.

Barbara left them in discussion. She went outside and wandered in the direction of Pontoon Six.
Fighting Lady
was easy enough to spot. It was the largest craft in the marina, gleaming with white paint, its woodwork and its chromium fixtures shrouded in protective blue canvas. When she saw the boat, Barbara realised that even if the tide had been high, there was no way that Theo Shaw or anyone else could have moored the craft anywhere close to shore. Mooring it off the Nez would have meant swimming to the beach, and it didn't seem likely that someone bent upon murder would begin his evening's task with a dip in the sea.

She headed back towards the office, studying the other craft in the harbour. Despite the marina's size, it served as a landing spot for a bit of everything: motor boats, diesel fishing boats, and even one snappy Hawk 31—winched out of the water—that was called the
Sea Wizard
and looked as if it belonged somewhere along the coast of Florida or Monaco.

In the vicinity of the office, Barbara saw the craft that Charlie hired out. In addition to motor boats and kayaks resting on tiered racks, ten canoes and eight Zodiac inflatables sat on the pontoon. Two of these last were occupied by sea gulls. Other birds circled and called in the air.

Looking at the Zodiacs, Barbara recalled the list of dodgy activities that Belinda Warner had compiled from the police log. Previously, her interest had been directed towards the beach hut break-ins and how they applied to Trevor Ruddock and his alibi for the murder night. But now she saw that the dodgy activities had another point of interest as well.

She walked onto the narrow pontoon and examined the Zodiacs. Each, she saw, was equipped with a set of paddles, but each also could be fixed up with a motor, a set of which were positioned on racks near the end of the pontoon. However, one of the inflatables was already in the water with a motor attached, and when Barbara turned the key to this, she discovered the motor was electric, not gas, and virtually noiseless. She examined the blades hanging into the water. They extended downward less than two feet.

“Right,” she murmured when she made this assessment. “Too bloody right.”

She looked up when the pontoon bobbed. Emily had joined her, one hand shading her eyes. From the expression on her face, Barbara could tell that the DCI had reached the same conclusion as her own.

“What did the police log say?” Barbara asked rhetorically.

Emily responded anyway. “He's had three Zodiacs nicked without his knowledge. All three were later found round the Wade.”

“So how rough a go would it be, Em, pinching a Zodiac at night and manoeuvring it through the shallows? If whoever took it also returned it before morning, no one would be the wiser. And it doesn't look like Charlie's security is much to speak of, does it?”

“Sure as hell doesn't.” Emily turned the direction of her gaze until she was looking northward. “Balford Channel's just on the other side of that spit of land, Barb, just where you can see that fishing hut. Even at low tide there'd be water in the channel. And enough water here in the harbour to get to it as well. Not enough for one of the larger boats. But for an inflatable …? No problem.”

“Where does the channel lead?” Barbara asked.

“Directly along the west side of the Nez.”

“So someone could have taken a Zodiac up the channel and round the north point of the Nez, beaching anywhere along the east side and walking south to the stairs.” Barbara followed the direction of Emily's gaze. On the other side of the little bay which sheltered the marina, a series of cultivated fields rose to the back of an estate whose main building's chimneys were plainly visible. A well-used path etched the land from the estate along the northern perimeter of the fields. It ran eastward and ended at the bay, where it turned south and followed the coast. Seeing this walkway, Barbara asked, “Who lives in that house, Em? The big one with all those chimneys.”

“It's called Balford Old Hall,” Emily said. “It's where the Shaws live.”

“Bingo,” Barbara murmured.

But Emily resolutely turned from such a facile solution to the equation of motive-means-opportunity. She said, “I'm not ready to tie a bow on that package. Let's get on to the mustard factory before someone gives Muhannad the word. If,” she added, “Herr Reuchlein hasn't already done so.”

• • •

SAHLAH SPENT HER
time in the hospital corridor watching the door to Mrs. Shaw's room. The nurse had informed them that only one person at a time was allowed to see the patient, and she was relieved that this injunction prevented her from having to see Theo's grandmother. At the same time, she felt enormous guilt at her own relief. Mrs. Shaw was ill—and desperately so if the glimpse Sahlah had had of the hospital machinery in her room was any indication—and the tenets of her religion directed her to minister in some way to the woman's need. Those who believed and did good works, the Holy Qur'aan instructed, would be brought into the gardens underneath which rivers flowed. And what better work could be done than to visit the sick, especially when the sick took the form of one's enemy?

Theo, of course, had never directly stated the fact that his grandmother hated the Asian community as a whole and wished them ill individually. But her aversion for the immigrants who'd invaded Balford-le-Nez was always the unspoken reality between Sahlah and the man she loved. It had divided them as effectively as had Sahlah's own spoken revelations about her parents’ plans for her future.

Sahlah knew at heart that the love between Theo and herself had been defeated long before its inception. Tradition, religion, and culture had acted in conjunction to vanquish it. But having someone to blame for the impossibility of a life with Theo was a temptation that had sought to beguile her from the first. And how easy it was to twist the words of the Holy Qur'aan now, moulding them into a justification of what had happened to Theo's grandmother:
Whatever good befalleth thee (O man) it is from Allah, and whatever of ill befalleth thee it is from thyself.

She could thus stoutly proclaim that Mrs. Shaw's current state was the direct result of the loathing, bias, and prejudice that she fostered in herself and encouraged in others. But Sahlah knew that she could also apply those same words from the Qur'aan to herself. For ill had befallen her as surely as it had befallen Theo's grandmother. And just as surely, the ill was a direct result of her own selfish, misguided behaviour.

She didn't want to think about it: how the ill had happened and what she was going to do to bring it to an end. The reality was that she didn't know what she was going to do. She didn't even know where to begin, despite the fact that she was sitting in the corridor of a hospital where activities euphemistically labelled Necessary Procedures were probably performed all the time.