Deception on His Mind (91 page)

Azhar gazed at her a long moment and then nodded slowly before he turned to Emily. “Inspector, I have no idea what Barbara has told you about our acquaintance. But I'm afraid you might have misunderstood her involvement with my family. We're neighbours in London. Indeed, she's been so kind as to befriend my daughter in her mother's …” He hesitated, shifted his eyes away, brought them back to Emily. “In her mother's absence. And that's the extent to which we know each other. She had no idea that I came to your town to assist my family in a police matter. Equally, she had no idea that my experience isn't limited to my work at the university, as I've never told her that. So when you requested that she assist you during her holiday, she was completely innocent of any knowledge that might have—”

“I what?” Emily said. “I did what?”

“You phoned her? You asked for her help?”

Barbara closed her eyes briefly. It
was
one hell of a tangled web. She said, “Azhar, that's not what happened. I lied to you both about how I happened to be in Balford. I came because of you.”

He looked so perplexed that Barbara wanted to sink through the floor rather than have to explain anything further. But she muddled on.

“I didn't want you in over your head. I thought if I was here, I could keep you out of trouble. Both you and Hadiyyah. Obviously, I failed. At least in Hadiyyah's case. I completely blew it.”

“No,” Emily said. “You got us out on the North Sea, Sergeant. Which is where we needed to be to learn the truth.”

Surprised, Barbara shot her a grateful look, embraced entirely by relief at last. No accounting had to be made. What had passed between them on the sea could be forgotten. Emily's words told Barbara that the DCI had learned richly from the experience, that no report to her superior officer was going to have to be made.

There was a moment of silence among them. Into it came the sounds of the CID team pulling information together, working through the evening and into the night. But there was a sense of lightheartedness to their work, the sound of men and women who knew a trying job was winding down.

Emily turned to Azhar. “Until we have Malik in interrogation, we can only sketch out the details of what happened. You can help us with that, Mr. Azhar. As I see it, Querashi twigged to the smuggling ring by accident when he came across Muhannad in Parkeston on the night that he himself was there at the Castle Hotel. He wanted in on the action. He threatened to talk if he wasn't included in a way that earned him big money. Muhannad stalled. Querashi grabbed Kumhar and got him to go along by telling him the plan was to put an end to the entire smuggling business. He installed Kumhar in Clacton as leverage for his scheme to make the Maliks pay up. But things didn't work out the way he'd hoped. He got the chop instead.”

Azhar shook his head. “That cannot be.”

Emily bristled.

Back to normal indeed, Barbara thought.

“After what Kumhar said about Muhannad, you can't think Malik's not involved in this murder. The man just dumped your own daughter into the sea.”

“I'm not disagreeing about my cousin's involvement. It's Mr. Querashi's that you've misunderstood.”

Emily frowned. “How exactly?”

“By not taking our religion into account.” Azhar indicated one of the chairs in Emily's office, saying, “May I? I find that I'm rather more exhausted than I expected to be.”

Emily nodded. All of them sat. Barbara wished—yet another time—for a cigarette, and she expected that Azhar had much the same longing because his fingers went to the breast pocket of his shirt as if with the thought of finding a packet of fags therein. They would have to make do with a roll of fruit pastilles scavenged from the depths of Barbara's shoulder bag. She offered him one. He took it with a grateful nod.

“There was a passage marked in Mr. Querashi's copy of the Qur'aan,” Azhar explained. “It was about fighting for the feeble among—”

“The passage we got Siddiqi to translate,” Emily cut in.

Azhar went on quietly. As Sergeant Havers would confirm, Mr. Querashi had made several phone calls to Pakistan from the Burnt House Hotel in the days leading up to his death. One was to a
mulla,
a Muslim holy man from whom he sought a definition of the word
feeble.

“What's feeble got to do with anything?” Emily asked.

Feeble, as in helpless, Azhar told her. As in without force or effectiveness. A word that could be used to describe a friendless soul newly arrived in this country and finding himself trapped in an enslavement that appeared to have no end.

Emily nodded cautiously. But her doubtful expression telegraphed that she still would have to be convinced of the weight of Azhar's comments.

The other phone call was to a
mufti,
Azhar continued, a legal scholar. From this man he'd sought the answer to a single question: Could a Muslim, guilty of a grave sin, remain a Muslim?

“Sergeant Havers has told me all this already, Mr. Azhar,” Emily pointed out.

“Then you know that one cannot remain a Muslim and live in defiance of Islam's tenets. And that's what Muhannad was doing. And that's what Haytham wished to stop.”

“But wasn't Querashi doing it as well?” Barbara asked. “What about his homosexuality? You said that it's forbidden. Couldn't he have been phoning the
mufti
to talk about his own soul and not Muhannad's?”

“He could have been doing that,” Azhar acknowledged, “but taken with everything else that he did, it doesn't seem likely.”

“If Hegarty's to be believed,” Emily told Barbara, “Querashi intended to keep up his double life after his marriage, Islam or not. So he couldn't have cared much about his soul.”

“Sexuality's powerful,” Azhar admitted. “Sometimes more powerful than personal or religious duty. We're willing to risk everything for the sake of it. Our souls. Our lives. All that we have and all that we are.”

Barbara met his glance. Angela Weston, she thought. What must it have felt like: that desperate resolve to fly in the face of all one knew, believed, and had previously upheld in order to possess the unattainable?

Azhar continued. “My uncle—a devout man—would have known nothing about this scheme of Muhannad's, and I suggest to you that a complete search of his factory as well as a scrutiny of the papers of his Asian employees will prove this fact.”

“You're not suggesting that Muhannad's in this business alone,” Emily said. “You heard Kumhar earlier. There were three men. A German and two Asians he said. And there may have been more.”

“But not my uncle. Muhannad would have had partners in Germany, true. Other partners here, no doubt. I don't question Mr. Kumhar's word on that. This scheme could have been in place for years.”

“He could have cooked it up in university, Em,” Barbara pointed out.

“With Rakin Khan,” Emily acknowledged. “Mr. Alibi. They were at university together.”

“My money says that a recce of Klaus Reuchlein's past will show a history among all three of them,” Barbara added.

Azhar shrugged his shoulders in acceptance of this theory. “Whatever the genesis of the scheme, Haytham Querashi uncovered it.”

“With Hegarty, as he himself told us,” Barbara noted. “That night when they were at the Castle Hotel.”

“Haytham's duty as a Muslim required he put a stop to it,” Azhar explained. “He pointed out to Muhannad that his immortal soul was at risk. And at risk for the worst possible reason: his lust for money.”

“But what about Querashi's own immortal soul, if it came to that?” Barbara persisted.

Azhar looked at her directly. “I should guess he would already have dealt with that problem, by justifying his behaviour in some way. It's easy for us to excuse our physical lust. We call it love, we call it seeking a soul mate, we call it something bigger than and beyond ourselves. We lie that we might have what we want to have. And we call our behaviour answering the demands of the heart, preordained by a God who stimulates hungers within us that are meant to be satisfied.” He raised his hands, palm upward, a gesture of acceptance. “No one is immune to this sort of self-deception. But Haytham would have seen Muhannad's sin as the greater one. His own sin affected only himself. People
can
do good in one area of their lives even when they're committing a wrong in another area. Murderers love their mothers; rapists treasure their dogs; terrorists blow up department stores and then go home to rock their children to sleep. Haytham Querashi could have worked for the betterment of the people enslaved by Muhannad and still lived a sinner in one small area of his life that he set aside and excused. Indeed, Muhannad himself did that, organising
Jum'a
on the one hand and the gangmaster scheme on the other.”

“Jum'a
just kept him looking good,” Emily argued. “He had to demand an investigation into Querashi's death
because
of
]um'a.
If he hadn't, everyone would have wondered why.”

“But if Querashi wanted to bring an end to Muhannad's scheme,” Barbara said, “then why didn't he just expose it, turn him in, and get the police involved? He could have done all that anonymously. It would have served the same purpose.”

“But it would also have served to destroy Muhannad. He would have gone to prison. He would have been cut off from his family. And I expect that Haytham didn't seek that. He sought a compromise instead, with Fahd Kumhar as the guarantee that he got it. If Muhannad had closed down the operation, nothing more would be said about it. If he didn't, Fahd Kumhar would come forward and expose the smuggling ring from Karachi to Hamburg to Parkeston Harbour. I expect that was the plan. And it cost him his life.”

Motive, means, and opportunity. They had it all. What they didn't have was the killer himself.

Azhar rose. He would, he said, return to the Burnt House. Hadiyyah had been sleeping peacefully when he left her, but he did not wish her to awaken without finding her father at her side.

He nodded to them both. He went to the office door. Then he turned back, hesitantly. “I've forgotten altogether why I came here,” he said apologetically. “Inspector”—this to Emily—”there's one thing more.”

Emily looked wary. Barbara saw a muscle move in her jaw. “Yes?” she said.

“I wanted to say thank you. You could have kept going. You could have captured Muhannad. Thank you for stopping and saving my daughter instead.”

Emily nodded stiffly. She moved her eyes away from him to the filing cabinets along one wall. He left her office.

E
MILY LOOKED DEAD
knackered. The incident on the sea had drained them both, Barbara thought. And Azhar's words of gratitude—so completely misplaced—could only have added another weight to the DCI's conscience, in addition to the other burdens that she was already carrying. Her own character had been revealed to her on the North Sea. That exposure to her own darker side and base inclinations had to have been a painful one.

“We all grow with the job, Sergeant,” DI Lynley had said to her more than once. “And if we don't, we need to turn in our warrant cards and walk away.”

“Em,” Barbara said to ease her load, “we all cock up sometimes. But our mistakes—”

“What happened out there wasn't a mistake,” Emily said quietly.

“But you didn't intend to let her drown. You just weren't thinking. And you told us to throw the life jackets out. You just didn't realise that they wouldn't reach her. That's what happened. That's all that happened.”

Emily turned from her scrutiny of the filing cabinets. She levelled a cool gaze onto Barbara. “Who's your superior officer, Sergeant?”

“My …? What? Who? You are, Em.”

“I don't mean here. I mean in London. What's his name?”

“DI Lynley.”

“Not Lynley. Above him. Who is it?”

“Superintendent Webberly.”

Emily picked up a pencil. “Spell it for me.”

Barbara felt a chill pass through her. She spelled out Webberly's name and watched the DCI write it. “Em,” she said, “what's going on?”

“Discipline is what is going on, Sergeant. Or in more specific terms, what's going on is what happens when you pull a gun on a superior officer, when you decide to obstruct a police investigation. You're responsible for a killer's escaping justice, and I intend to see that you pay the price.”

Barbara was dumbstruck. “But, Emily, you said …” Her words died off. What, indeed, had the DCI said?
You got us out on the North Sea, Sergeant. Which is where we needed to be to learn the truth.
And the DCI was living that truth. Barbara had merely failed to understand what it was, until now.

“You're turning me in,” Barbara said hollowly. “Jesus, Emily. You're turning me in.”

“I am indeed.” Emily continued writing steadily, a living demonstration of those qualities that Barbara had so admired. She was competent, efficient, and completely relentless. She'd made it to DCI so quickly on the strength of her willingness to wield the power that went with her position. No matter the circumstances and no matter the cost. What, Barbara thought, had ever prompted her to conclude that she herself would be the single exception to the rule of Emily's performance on the job?

She wanted to argue with the DCI, but she realized that she didn't have it in her. And Emily's steely expression told her that even if she had, there would be no point.

“You're a real piece of work,” Barbara finally said, “Do what you have to do, Emily.”

“Believe me, I intend to.”

“Guv?” At the door to the DCI's office, a detective constable stood. He held a telephone chit in his hand. His expression was troubled.

“What is it?” Emily asked. Her glance sharpened on the paper he held. “Damn it, Doug, if that bloody Ferguson's—”

“Not Ferguson,” Doug said. “We've had a call from Colchester. Looks like it came in round eight and the chit got put with some others in communications. I only got it ten minutes ago.”

“What about it?”

“I just returned the call. Tidying up loose ends. I did Colchester the other day, about Malik's alibi, remember?”

“Get on with it, Constable.”

He flinched at her tone. “Well, I did it again today when we were trying to track him down.”