Deception on His Mind (94 page)

Barbara told him how. Yumn had been to see the murdered man, and she'd done this without the knowledge of the Malik family. She'd gone in a
chā
—either her bow to propriety or her need for disguise—and she'd managed the trip without anyone from the Malik household being aware that she'd done so. A good look at the structure of their house, particularly at the position of the driveway and the garage in relation to the sitting room and the bedrooms upstairs, demonstrated the ease with which she could have taken one of the cars without the rest of the family ever knowing. And if she'd done this when the boys were in bed, when Sahlah was occupied with her jewellery making, when Akram and Wardah were at their prayers or in the sitting room, no one would ever have been the wiser. How, after all, could Yumn have failed at what the police had concluded was simplicity itself: watching Haytham Querashi long enough to realise that he went regularly to the Nez, taking a Zodiac round to the east side of the promontory on the night in question, stringing a single wire across a crumbling stairwell, sending him to his death?

“We knew all along and we said all along that a woman could have done it,” Barbara said. “We just failed to see that Yumn had a motive and the opportunity to carry the plan out.”

“But what need did she have to kill Haytham Querashi?” Azhar asked.

And Barbara explained that as well. But when she'd recited Chapter and verse on Yumn's need to be rid of Querashi in order to keep Sahlah in her position of subordination in the household, Azhar looked doubtful. He lit a cigarette, inhaled, and examined the tip of it before he spoke.

“Does your case against Yumn rely upon this?” he asked cautiously.

“And upon the family's testimony. She wasn't in the house, Azhar. And she claimed to be upstairs with Muhannad when Muhannad was miles away in Colchester, a fact that's been confirmed, by the way.”

“But to a good defence counsel the family's testimony will be minor points. They could be attributed to confusion about the dates in question, to animosity towards a difficult daughter-in-law, to a family's desire to protect whom the defence might call the real killer: a man conveniently on the run in Europe. Even if Muhannad's brought back to this country for trial on smuggling charges, a prison term for smuggling would be shorter than a term for premeditated murder. Or so the defence can argue, seeking to prove that the Maliks have reason to wish guilt upon someone other than Muhannad.”

“But they've disowned him anyway.”

“Indeed,” Azhar agreed. “But what Western jury is going to understand the impact that being cast out of one's family has for an Asian?”

He looked at her frankly. There was no mistaking the invitation in his words. Now was the time that they could talk about his own story: how it had begun and how it had ended. She could learn about the wife in Hounslow, the two children he'd left behind with her. She could discover how he'd met Hadiyyah's mother and she could learn about the forces that had worked within him, making a lifetime of disjunction from his family worth the experience of loving a woman who had been deemed forbidden to him.

She remembered once reading the seven-word excuse that a film director had used to explain the betrayal of his longtime love in favour of a girl thirty years his junior. “The heart wants what the heart wants,” he had said. But Barbara had long since wondered if what the heart wanted had, in reality, anything to do with the heart at all.

Yet had Azhar not followed his heart—if that, indeed, had been the body part involved—Khalidah Hadiyyah would not have existed. And that would have doubled the tragedy of falling in love and walking away from love's possibility. So perhaps Azhar had acted for the best when he'd chosen passion over duty. But who could really say?

“She's not coming back from Canada, is she?” Barbara settled on asking. “If, in fact, she's even gone to Canada at all.”

“She's not coming back,” Azhar admitted.

“Why haven't you told Hadiyyah? Why're you letting her cling to hope?”

“Because I've been clinging to hope as well. Because when one falls in love, anything seems possible between two people, no matter the differences in their temperaments or in their cultures. Because—most of all—hope is always the last of our feelings to wither and die.”

“You miss her.” Barbara stated the fact, so readily apparent beneath his tranquil reserve.

“Every moment of the day,” he replied. “But this will pass eventually. All things do.”

He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray. Barbara tossed down the rest of her Irish whiskey. She could have done with another one, but she took that feeling as an uneasy warning sign. Getting soused wouldn't clarify anything, and feeling the need to get soused in the first place was a fairly good sign that something inside her needed clarification. But later, she thought. Tomorrow. Next week. Next month. In a year. Tonight she was just too bloody exhausted to mine her psyche for the valuable ore of understanding why she felt what it was that she felt.

She rose. She stretched. She winced at the pain. “Yeah. Well,” she said in conclusion. “I expect that if we wait long enough, troubles sort themselves out, don't they?”

“Or we die without understanding them,” he said. But he softened the words with his appealing smile. It was wry but warm, making an offer of friendship.

Barbara wondered fleetingly if she wanted to accept the offer. She wondered if she really wanted to face the unknown and take the risk of engaging her heart—there it was again, that flaming, unreliable organ—where it might well be broken. But then she realised that, insidious arbiter of behaviour that it was, her heart was already entirely engaged and had been so from the moment she'd encountered the man's elfin daughter. What, after all, was so terrifying about adding one more person to the crew of the largely untidy ship upon which she appeared to be sailing in her life?

They left the lounge together and started up the stairs in the darkness. They didn't speak again until they'd reached the door of Barbara's room. Then it was Azhar who broke the silence.

“Will you join us for breakfast in the morning, Barbara Havers? Hadiyyah will want that especially.” And when she didn't answer at once, considering—with some guiltless delight—what another morning of dining with the Asians would do to throw a spanner into Basil Treves’ separate but equal philosophy of innkeeping, he went on. “And for me, too, it would be a pleasure.”

Barbara smiled. “I'd like that,” she said.

And she meant those words, despite the complications they brought to her present, despite the uncertainty they gave to her future.