Deception on His Mind

  She went for the small packet of old fashioned rainbow rock first, popping a piece of it into her mouth and beginning the hike back to her car. She'd left the Mini parked on The Parade, a strip of seafront road that climbed towards the higher section of the town. Here, a row of Edwardian villas not unlike Emily's overlooked the sea. They were Italianate in design, with balconies and arched windows and doorways, and in 1900 they would have been regal. Now, much like Emily's house, they needed renovation. Bed and breakfast signs hung in every front window, but curtains sagging with grime and woodwork shedding paint onto the pavement doubtlessly put off the less hardy adventurer. They looked completely unoccupied and more than half ready for the wrecking ball.

  At her car, Barbara paused. This was her first real opportunity to survey the town from the vantage point of the seafront, and what she saw wasn't very appealing. The road along the shore rose prettily enough, but the buildings that fronted it were like the villas: in disrepair. Years of sea air had eaten away paint and had rusted through metal. Years of isolation from the tourist trade—as inexpensive package holidays to Spain became more alluring than a drive to Essex—had leeched the lifeblood from the local economy. The result lay before her like an urban Miss Havisham, jilted and frozen in a fragment of time.

  The town was in desperate need of exactly what Akram Malik was providing: a source of employment. It was also in need of what the Shaw family apparently had in mind: redevelopment. Looking it over, Barbara wondered if there was a point of conflict between the two that Balford CID ought to be exploring.

  As she thought of this and meditated on the picture that the seafront provided, she saw two little dark-skinned boys—perhaps ten years old—come out of Stan's Hot and Cold Snacks. They were eating Cornettos, and they wandered in the direction of the pier. Like children who've been instructed well, they paused for traffic at the edge of the pavement. A dusty van braked to let them cross.

  Partially hidden behind a filthy windscreen, the driver waved them towards the other side of the street. The boys nodded their thanks and stepped off the kerb. Which is what, it seemed, the van's occupants wished.

  With a blare of its horn, the van shot forward. The roar of its engine echoed against the buildings. Startled, the children jumped back. One dropped his ice cream and in a reflex, bent to retrieve it. The other, a hand on his companion's collar, quickly jerked him out of harm's way. “Fuckin’ Pakis!” someone shouted from the van, and a bottle flew out. It hadn't been sealed, so its contents arced into the air as it sailed. The boys dodged but didn't quite make it. Yellow liquid splashed into their faces and across their clothes before the bottle broke at their feet.

  “Bloody hell,” Barbara muttered. She dashed across the street.

  “My ice cream!” the smaller boy cried. “Ghassan, my ice cream!”

  Ghassan's face was a study in disgust, but he was directing it towards the fleeing vehicle. The van was tearing up the shore road, which curved out of sight beneath the shade of a cypress tree. Barbara tried—but failed—to make out its number plates.

  “You all right?” she asked the boys. The smaller child had begun to cry.

  The blistering street and pavement quickly heated the liquid that had been tossed. The sharp odour of urine seeped upward. The boys had it on their clothes and their skin, nasty yellow stains against their white shorts and yellow droplets speckling their brown legs and their cheeks.

  “I lost my ice cream,” the smaller boy wailed.

  “Shut up, Muhsin,” Ghassan scowled. “They want you to cry. So shut up!” He shook him roughly, one hand on his shoulder. “Here, take mine. I don't want it.”

  “But—”

  “Take it!” He shoved the Cornetto at the other boy.

  “You all right?” Barbara repeated. “That was a rotten thing to do.”

  Ghassan finally looked her way. She could have tasted the scorn in his expression, had it had a flavour. “English cunt.” He said the words so distinctly that she couldn't have mistaken them for anything else. “Get away from us. Come on, Muhsin.”

  Barbara felt her mouth drop open, and she snapped it shut as the boys walked off. They went in the direction they'd intended from the first, towards the pier. No one, it seemed, was going to stop them from doing what they had planned to do.

  Barbara would have admired them had she not seen how the entire episode—as brief as it had been—served to underscore all of the racial tensions in Balford, tensions that only a few nights previously might have led to murder. She watched the boys descend the path to the pier before she returned to her car.

  She didn't have far to drive to Trevor Ruddock's house. She didn't, in fact, have to drive there at all. A quick purchase of a town map at Balford Books and Crannies revealed that Alfred Terrace was less than a five-minute walk from the High Street and the bookstore itself. It was also a five-minute walk from Racon Jewellery, a detail that Barbara took note of with interest.

  Alfred Terrace comprised a single line of seven saltbox-sized dwellings that ran along one side of a little square. Each house was decorated with derelict window boxes, and each possessed a front door so narrow that inhabitants of the terrace doubtless had to consider their daily food intake and how it might affect their ability to gain access to their sitting rooms. The houses were uniformly dirty white, their faded doors the only distinguishing feature about them. These were each painted differently, in colours that ran from yellow to puce. The paint had faded over time, however, for the terrace faced west and it took the very worst of the day's sun and heat.

  Which is what it was doing at the moment. The air was still and the temperature seemed ten degrees higher than it had been on the pier. Egg frying on the pavement was called for. Barbara could feel her skin cooking where it was bare.

  The Ruddock family lived along the terrace at Number 6. Their choice of door colour had at one time been red, but the sun had reduced it to the shade of raw salmon. Barbara rapped on this sharply and gave a quick peek to the single front window. She could see nothing through its net curtains, although she could hear rap music playing somewhere in the house and the loud chatter of a television accompanying it. When no one answered her first knock on the door, she gave it a more meaningful assault.

  This got results. Footsteps clattered against an uncarpeted floor, and the door swung open.

  Barbara found herself looking at a child playing dress-up. She couldn't tell if the creature was male or female, but whatever the case, Dad's clothes had apparently been appropriated for the game. The shoes were clown-size and, no matter the day's heat, an old tweed jacket hung down to the knees.

  “Yeah?” the child asked.

  “Wha’ is it, Brucie?” a woman's voice shouted from the back of the house. “You at the door? Someone here? Don't you go outside in your dad's gear. You hear me, Brucie?”

  Brucie observed Barbara. The corners of his eyes, she noted, could have done with a thorough cleaning.

  She gave the child her happiest hello, to which he responded by wiping his nose on his father's jacket sleeve. Underneath it he wore only underpants with the elastic stretched beyond redemption. The pants hung perilously on his bony frame. “I'm looking for Trevor Ruddock,” she explained. “Does he live here? Are you his brother?”

  The child turned in his clown shoes and shouted into the house. “Mum! It's some fat bird asking for Trev!” Barbara's hands itched to become acquainted with the circumference of his neck.

  “For Trev …? It's not that grotty thing from the jewellery shop again, is it?” The woman came from the back towards the door, trailed by two more children. These were girls from the look of them. They wore blue shorts, pink halter tops, and white cowboy boots with rhinestone decoration, and one of them carried a sequined baton. She used this to bop her little brother on the head. Brucie screamed. He flew to the attack, hurtling past his mother and catching his sister in the midriff. His jaws locked over her arm.

  “Wha’ is it?” Mrs. Ruddock appeared not t
o notice the shrieking and scuffling that was going on behind her as the other sister endeavoured to disengage Brucie's teeth from her sibling's arm. The two girls began yelling, “Mum! Make him stop!” Mrs. Ruddock continued to ignore them. “You looking for my Trevor?” She looked old and tired, with washed-out blue eyes and lank bottle-blonde hair that she'd tied away from her face with a purple shoe lace.

  Barbara introduced herself and dangled her warrant card before the woman's face. “Scotland Yard CID. I'd like a word with Trevor. Is he home?”

  Mrs. Ruddock seemed to stiffen even as she reached for a feathering of loosened hair and tucked it behind her ear. “What d'you want with my Trevor? He i'n't in trouble. He's a good boy.”

  The three wrangling children behind her lurched into the wall. A picture above them crashed to the floor. A man's voice yelled from upstairs. “Jesus! Can't a bloke sleep round here? Shirl! Jesus! What're they on to?”

  “You! That's enough!” Mrs. Ruddock grabbed Brucie by the collar of the jacket he wore. She grabbed his sister by a handful of hair. All three children howled. “Enough!” she shouted.

  “She hit me!”

  “He bit me!”

  “Shirl! Shut them up!”

  “Now you've gone and waked your dad up, haven't you?” Mrs. Ruddock said, giving the warring parties a good shake. “You get into the kitchen, all three of you. Stella, there's ice lollies in the fridge. See everyone gets one.”

  The promise of a treat seemed to mollify the three children. They trotted as one in the direction from which their mother had come. Above their heads, someone's feet thudded across the floorboards. A man cleared his throat violently and hawked with enough force to make Barbara wonder if he was engaging in a do-it-yourself tonsillectomy. She couldn't understand how he'd possibly been asleep in the first place prior to her arrival. At a committed volume, a rap group was chanting about Gettin it, doin it, havin it, WOE-man. And in competition with this, two regulars were having a heads together about some floozy on Coronation Street, and at a roar that left nothing to the imagination.

  “Not exactly trouble,” Barbara said. “I have just a few questions to ask him.”

  “About what? Trev gave back them jars of whatever-it-was. Okay, so we sold a few ‘fore the coloureds caught on, but it's not like they really missed the money. He's rolling in beans, that Akram Malik. You seen where they live, the lot ’f them?”

  “Is Trevor here?” Barbara was striving for patience but with the sun bearing down on her, what little she had was evaporating quickly.

  Mrs. Ruddock favoured her with a marginally hostile look, apparently realising that her words were making little impression. She shouted, “Stella!” over her shoulder, and when the older of the two girls returned from the kitchen with an ice lolly plugged into the centre of her mouth, she went on with “Take her up to Trev. And tell Charlie to turn down that racket while you're at it.”

  “Mum …” Stella's whine made the appellation two syllables, a difficult feat to manage round the ice lolly, but she looked like a girl who was up to any challenge.

  “Do it!” Mrs. Ruddock barked.

  Stella removed the ice lolly from her mouth and blew out a breath that flapped her lips together noisily. “Come on, then,” she said, and began to trudge up the stairs.

  Barbara felt Mrs. Ruddock's inimical gaze following her as she walked in the trail of Stella's clomping white cowboy boots. It was clear that no matter what offence had caused Trevor to lose his job at the mustard factory, it was no offence to his mum.

  The guilty party himself was in one of the two bedrooms on the first floor of the house. The raucous chanting of rap music throbbed right through the door. Stella opened this unceremoniously, but six inches only because something hanging above it seemed to prevent its further movement. She shouted, “Charlie! Mum says you're s'posed to turn that the fuck down!” She said to Barbara over her shoulder, “He's in here if you want him,” as Mr. Ruddock shouted from behind the other door, “Can't a man bloody sleep in his own bloody house?”

  Barbara nodded her thanks to Stella and ducked into the bedroom. Duck was an action of necessity because the object that prevented the door's complete mobility drooped downward like a fishing net. The curtains were drawn over the windows, so the lighting was dim. The heat throbbed within like a beating heart.

  The noise was deafening. It reverberated between the walls against one of which was a set of bunk beds. The upper of these was occupied by a teenaged boy armed with a set of wooden chopsticks which he was using against the bed's footboard to accompany the music. The lower was empty. The room's other occupant was seated at a table on which a fluorescent lamp was shedding a shaft of bright light on balls of black yarn, various spools of coloured cotton, a pile of black pipe-cleaners, and a plastic box filled with round sponges of differing sizes.

  “Trevor Ruddock?” Barbara shouted over the din. “Could I have a word with you? CID. Police.” She managed to emphasise her identity in such a way as to get the attention of the boy on the bed. He saw her extended warrant card and, perhaps reading either her lips or the expression on her face, he reached for a knob on the boom box at the foot of his bed and lowered the volume.

  “Hey Trev!” he shouted despite the sudden quelling of the boom box's noise. “Trev! The cops!”

  The boy at the table stirred, turned in his chair, and saw Barbara. His glance dropped to her warrant card. Slowly, he raised his hands to his ears and began to unscrew from them a pair of wax earplugs.

  As he did so, Barbara studied him in the dim light. He had National Front written all over him: from his bare scalp where the faintest shadow of dark hair merely stubbled the skin, to his heavy and unmistakably military boots. He was clean shaven: utterly, in fact. He was devoid of facial hair, even of eyebrows.

  His movement had revealed what he'd been working on at the table. It appeared to be the model of a spider, from what Barbara could surmise from three spindly pipe cleaner legs that had been affixed to a black and white striped sponge body. It had two sets of eyes fashioned from black beads: two large and two small semi-circling the head like an ocular tiara.

  Trevor flicked a look at his brother, who'd squirmed to the edge of the upper bunk and was swinging his legs and watching Barbara uneasily. “Clear out,” he said to Charlie.

  “I won't say nothing.”

  “Bugger off,” Trevor said.

  “Trev.” Charlie offered what appeared to be the family's signature whine: He turned the first syllable of his brother's name into two.

  “I said.” Trevor shot him a look. Charlie said, “Shit,” managing it monosyllabically, and hopped from the bed. Boom box under his arm, he passed Barbara and left the room. He shut the door behind him.

  This gave Barbara the opportunity to see what had been pressing against the top of the door when she entered. It was indeed an old fishing net, but it had been crafted into an enormous web upon which a collection of arachnids cavorted. Like the spider being assembled on the table, these were not garden-variety bugs: brown, black, multi-legged, and suitable for devouring flies, ticks, and centipedes. They were exotic in both colour and shape, featuring bodies of red, yellow, and green, prickly legs with speckles, and ferocious eyes.

  “Nice work,” Barbara said. “Studying entomology, are you?”

  Trevor made no reply. Barbara crossed the room to the table. There was a second chair to one side of it, stacked with books, newspapers, and magazines. She set these on the floor and sat. She said, “Mind?” and casting a glance at the cigarettes in her hand, he shook his head. She offered the pack, and he took one. He lit it with a match from a book. He left her to see to her own.

  With the absence of rap music, the other sounds in the house gained amplification. Coronation Street's nymphs continued their gossip at a pitch that would have served for calling the score at a football match, and Stella began shrieking about the theft of a necklace, apparently having been perpetrated by Charlie, whose name she was managing to w
ail in three syllables.

  “I understand you got the sack from Malik's Mustards three weeks ago,” Barbara said.

  Trevor inhaled, eyes narrowed and fastened on Barbara. His fingers, she noted, bore angry-looking hangnails.

  “So what?”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  He exhaled a snort of smoke. “Like I got the option, you mean?”

  “What's your side of the story? I've heard theirs. You couldn't deny pilfering the goods, I understand. You were caught with them. Red-handed, as it were.”

  He reached for one of the pipe-cleaners and wound it round his index finger, the cigarette between his lips and his glance directed at the half-assembled spider on the table. He reached for a pair of wire cutters and snipped a second pipe-cleaner in half. Each half became a leg of the spider. Glue served to hold the leg to the body, and he meticulously applied this from a tube.

  “Malik's make it sound like grand larceny or something? Jeez, it was less than two boxes of the stuff. Thirty-six jars in a box. It's not like I broke the bank. And anyways, I didn't take straight mustard or jelly or sauce, did I, which might've cocked up some major punter's big order. I mixed it all up.”

  “Creating a variety pack. I get it.”

  He shot Barbara a black look before giving his attention back to the spider. It had an authentic-looking segmented body created out of differing sizes of sponge. Glancing at it, Barbara wondered idly how the body segments were attached to one another. With glue? With staples? Or had young Mr. Ruddock used wire? She looked for a spool of it on the table, but in addition to the spider paraphernalia, the surface was a jumble of insect books, unfolded newspapers, half-melted candles, and tool boxes. She couldn't see how he managed to locate anything on it.

  “I was told that Mr. Querashi sacked you. Is that the story?”

  “I guess it is if that's what you've heard.”

  “D'you have a different version, then?” Barbara looked for an ashtray but didn't see one. Trevor shoved an empty custard carton in her direction. Its insides were gritty with ash. She added to this.