“It's more than okay,” Barbara said. “But I plan to hold you to the invitation. Where strawberry ice cream's concerned, I draw the line at letting friends off the hook.”
Hadiyyah's face brightened. She gave a little skip. “We'll go when Dad and I get back, Barbara. We're going away for a few days. Just a few days. Dad and I. Together. Did I already say?”
“You did.”
“I didn't know about it when I rang you, see. Only what happened is that Dad got a phone call and he said ‘What? What? When did this occur?’ and the next thing I knew, he said we were going to the sea. Imagine, Barbara.” She clasped her hands to her bony little chest. “I've never been to the sea. Have you?”
The sea? Barbara thought. Oh yes indeed. Mildewed beach huts and suntan lotion. Donning damp swim suits with scratchy crotches. She'd spent every childhood summer holiday at the sea, trying for a tan and managing only a mixture of peeling skin and freckles.
“Not recently,” Barbara said.
Hadiyyah bounced to her. “Why don't you come? With me and Dad? Why don't you come? It'd be such fun!”
“I don't really think—”
“Oh it would, it would. We could make castles in the sand and swim in the water. We could play catch. We could run on the beach. If we take a kite, we could even—”
“Hadiyyah. Have you managed to say what you've come to say?”
Hadiyyah stilled herself at once and turned to the voice at the door. Her father stood there, watching her gravely.
“You said you would require only one minute,” he observed. “And there is a point at which a brief visit to a friend becomes an intrusion upon her hospitality.”
“She's not bothering me,” Barbara said.
Taymullah Azhar appeared to observe her—rather than just notice her presence—for the first time. His slender shoulders adjusted, the only indication of his surprise. “What's happened to you, Barbara?” he asked quietly. “Have you been in an accident?”
“Barbara broke her nose,” Hadiyyah informed him, going to her father's side. His arm went round her, his hand curved at her shoulder. “And three of her ribs. She's got bandages all up and all down, Dad. I told her she should come with us to the sea. It'd be good for her. Don't you think?”
Azhar's face shuttered immediately at this suggestion. Barbara said quickly, “A nice invitation, Hadiyyah. But my sea-going days are completely kaput.” And to the girl's father, “A sudden trip?”
“He got a phone call,” Hadiyyah began.
Azhar interposed. “Hadiyyah, have you said goodbye to your friend?”
“I told her how I didn't know we were going till you came in and said that—”
Barbara saw Azhar's hand tighten on his daughter's shoulder. “You've left your suitcase open on your bed,” he told her. “Go and put it in the car at once.”
Hadiyyah lowered her head obediently. She said, “Bye, Barbara,” and scooted through the door. Her father nodded at Barbara and began to follow.
“Azhar,” Barbara said. And when he stopped and turned back to her, “Want a fag before you go?” She held the packet out towards him and met his eyes square on. “One for the road?”
She watched him weigh the pros and cons of remaining another three minutes. She wouldn't have attempted to detain him had he not seemed so anxious to keep his daughter quiet about their journey. Suddenly Barbara's curiosity was piqued, and she sought a way to satisfy it. When he didn't answer, she decided that a prod was in order. She said, “Heard anything from Canada?” as a form of coercion. But she hated herself the moment she'd said it. Hadiyyah's mother had been on holiday in Ontario for the eight weeks that Barbara had been acquainted with the child and her father. And daily Hadiyyah had scoured the post for cards and letters—and a birthday present—that never came. “Sorry,” Barbara said. “That was rotten of me.”
Azhar's face was what it always was: the most unreadable of any man's in Barbara's acquaintance. And he had no compunction about letting a silence hang between them. Barbara bore it as long as she could before she said, “Azhar, I apologised. I was out of line. I'm always out of line. I do out of line better than anything else. Here. Have a fag. The sea will still be there if you leave five minutes later than you planned.”
Azhar relented, but slowly. His guard was up as he took the proffered packet and shook out a cigarette. While he lit it, Barbara used her bare foot to shove the other chair back from the table. He didn't sit.
“Trouble?” she asked him.
“Why should you think that?”
“A phone call, a sudden change of plans. In my business, that only means one thing: Whatever the news is, it isn't good.”
“In your business,” Azhar pointed out.
“And in yours?”
He lifted his cigarette to his mouth and spoke behind it. “A small family matter.”
“Family?” He'd never spoken of family. Not that he'd ever spoken of anything personal. He was as guarded a creature as Barbara had ever encountered outside of the criminal element. “I didn't know you had family in this country, Azhar.”
“I have significant family in this country,” he said.
“But on Hadiyyah's birthday, no one—”
“Hadiyyah and I do not see my family.”
“Ah. I get it.” Except she didn't. He was rushing off to the sea on a small family matter concerning a significant family that he never saw? “Well. How long d'you expect to be gone? Anything I can do for you here? Water the plants? Collect the post?”
He appeared to consider this far longer than the insouciance of the offer required. Finally he said, “No. I think not. There's merely been a minor upheaval among my relations. A cousin phoned to give voice to his concerns, and I go to them to offer my support and my expertise in these matters. It is a question of a few days away. The …” He smiled. He had—when he used it—a most attractive smile, perfect white teeth gleaming against his pecan skin. “The plants and the post can wait, I dare say.”
“Which direction are you heading in?”
“East.”
“Essex?” And when he nodded, she went on with “Lucky you, then, to be out of this heat. I've half a mind to follow and spend the next seven days with my bum firmly planted in the old North Sea.”
He didn't react other than to say, “I'm afraid that Hadiyyah and I will ourselves see little of the water on this trip.”
“That's not what she thinks. She'll be disappointed.”
“She must learn to live with disappointment, Barbara.”
“Really? She seems a bit young to be racking up a score in the life's-bitter-lessons game, wouldn't you say?”
Azhar ventured closer to the table and put his cigarette out in the ashtray. He was wearing a short-sleeved cotton shirt, and as he leaned past her, Barbara caught the crisp clean scent of his clothing and she saw the fine black hairs on his arm. Like his daughter, he was delicately boned. But he was darker in colouring. “Unfortunately, we cannot dictate the age at which we learn how much life is going to deny us.”
“Is that what life did to you, then?”
“Thank you for the cigarette,” he said.
He was gone before she could get another dig in. And when he was gone, Barbara wondered why the hell she felt the need to dig at him at all. She told herself it was for Hadiyyah's sake: Someone had to act in the child's best interests. But the truth was that Azhar's impermeable self-containment acted as a spur upon her, pricking at the sides of her need to know. Damn it all, who was the man? What was his solemnity all about? And how did he manage to hold the world at bay?
She sighed. The answers certainly wouldn't come from slouching sluglike at the dining table with a burning fag hanging from her lip. Forget it, she thought. It was too bloody hot to think about anything, let alone to come up with believable rationales for the behaviour of her fellow humans. Sod her fellow humans, she decided. In this heat, sod the whole flaming world. She reached for the small pile of envelopes on the tabl
e.
Looking for Love? leered up at her. The question was superimposed upon a heart. Barbara slid her index finger under the flap and pulled out a single-page questionnaire. Tired of trial-and-error dating? it asked across the top. Willing to take a chance that finding the Right Person is better handled by computer than by luck? And then followed the questions, asking about age, about interests, about occupation, salary, and level of education. Barbara considered filling it out for her own amusement, but after she evaluated her interests and realised that she had virtually none worth mentioning—Who really wanted to be computer-matched with a woman who read The Lusty Savage to lull herself to sleep?—she balled up the questionnaire and lobbed it towards the rubbish bin in her matchbox kitchen. She gave her attention to the rest of the post: BT bill asking to be paid, an advert for private health insurance, and an offer of a deluxe week for two on a cruise ship described as a floating paradise of pampering and sensuality.
She could do with the cruise ship, she realised. She could do with a week of deluxe pampering, with or without the accompanying sensuality. But a glance at the brochure's photographs revealed slim and tanned young things perched on bar stools and lounging poolside, their fingernails painted and lips pouting glossily, attended by men with hirsute chests. Barbara pictured herself floating daintily among them. She snickered at the thought. She hadn't been in a bathing suit in years, having come to believe that some things are better left to draperies, shrouds, and the imagination.
The brochure went the way of the questionnaire before it. Barbara stubbed out her cigarette with a sigh and looked about the bungalow for further employment. There wasn't any. She trundled over to the day bed, searched out the television's remote, and decided to give herself over to an afternoon of channel surfing.
She pressed the first button. Here was the Princess Royal, looking slightly less equine than usual as she inspected a Caribbean hospital for disadvantaged children. Boring. Here was a documentary on Nelson Mandela. Another snore. She picked up the pace and surfed through an Orson Welles film, a Prince Valiant cartoon, two chat shows, and a golf tournament.
And then her attention was rivetted to the sight of a phalanx of police constables facing down a mass of dark-skinned protestors. She thought she was about to settle in for a good wallow with either Tennison or Morse when a red band appeared at the bottom of the screen with the word LIVE superimposed on it. A breaking news story, she realised. She watched it curiously.
She told herself it was no different than an archibishop's attention being drawn to a story about Canterbury Cathedral. She was, after all, a cop. Still, she felt a twinge of guilt—she was supposed to be on holiday, wasn't she?—as she avidly watched the story unfold.
Which is when she saw ESSEX printed on the screen. Which is when she twigged that the dark-skinned faces below the protest signs were Asian. Which is when she upped the volume on the television.
“—body was found yesterday morning, apparently in a pillbox on the beach,” the young reporter was saying. She appeared to be one or two leagues out of her depth, because as she spoke, she smoothed her carefully coiffed blonde hair into place and cast apprehensive glances at the swarm of people behind her, as if afraid they might seek to recoif her without her permission. She put a hand to her ear to block out the noise.
“Now! Now!” the protestors were shouting. Their signs—crudely lettered—called for JUSTICE AT ONCE! and ACTION! and THE REAL TRUTH!
“What began as a very special town council meeting ostensibly called to discuss redevelopment issues,” Blondie recited into her microphone, “disintegrated into what you see behind me now. I've managed to make contact with the protest leader, and—” Blondie was jostled to one side by a burly constable. The picture veered crazily as the camera operator apparently lost his footing.
Angry voices shouted. A bottle soared in the air. A chunk of concrete followed. The phalanx of police constables raised their protective Plexiglas shields.
“Holy shit,” Barbara murmured. What the hell was happening?
The blonde reporter and the cameraman regained their footing. Blondie pulled a man into the camera's range. He was a muscular Asian somewhere in his twenties, long hair escaping from a ponytail, one sleeve ripped away from his shirt. He shouted over his shoulder, “Get away from him, damn you!” before turning to the reporter.
She said, “I'm standing here with Muhannad Malik, who—”
“We've no bloody intention of putting up with evasions, distortions, and outright lies,” the man broke in, speaking into the microphone. “The time has come for our people to demand equal treatment under the law. If the police won't see this death for what it is—a hate crime and an out-and-out murder—then we intend to seek justice in our own way. We have the power, and we have the means.” He swung away from the microphone and used a loud hailer to shout to the people in the crowd. “We have the power! We have the means!”
They roared. They surged forward. The camera swung wildly and flickered. The reporter said, “Peter, we need to get to safer ground,” and the picture switched to the station's news studio.
Barbara recognised the grave-faced newsreader at the pinewood desk. Peter Somebody. She'd always loathed him. She loathed all men with sculptured hair.
“To recap on the situation in Essex,” he said. And he did just that, as Barbara lit another cigarette.
The body of a man, Peter explained, had been discovered in a pillbox on the beach in Balford-le-Nez by an early morning walker. So far, the victim had been identified as one Haytham Querashi, recently arrived from Karachi, Pakistan, to wed the daughter of a wealthy local businessman. The town's small but growing Pakistani community were calling the death a racially motivated crime—hence, nothing short of a murder—but the police had yet to declare what sort of investigation they were pursuing.
Pakistani, Barbara thought. Pakistani. Again she heard Azhar say, “… a minor upheaval among my relations.” Yes. Right. Among his Pakistani relations. Holy shit.
She looked back at the television, where Peter was continuing to drone on, but she didn't hear him. What she heard was the tumble of her own thoughts.
They told her that having a substantial Pakistani community outside of a metropolitan area was such an anomaly in England that for there to be two such communities along the coast in Essex would be wildly coincidental. With Azhar's own words telling her that he was on his way to Essex, with his departure preceding this newsflash of what was clearly a riot-in-the-making, with Azhar heading off to deal with “a minor upheaval” within his family … There was a limit to Barbara's toleration for coincidence. Taymullah Azhar was on his way to Balford-le-Nez.
He planned, he'd said, to offer his “expertise in these matters.” But what expertise? Brick throwing? Riot planning? Or did he expect to get involved in an investigation by the local police? Did he hope for access to the forensic lab? Or, more ominous, did he intend to become involved in the sort of community activism she'd just witnessed on the television, the sort that invariably led to big violence, arrest, and a stretch in the nick?
“Damn,” Barbara muttered. What in God's name was the man thinking? And what in bloody hell was he doing, taking a very special eight-year-old girl along for the ride?
Barbara gazed out the door, in the direction Hadiyyah and her father had taken. She thought of Hadiyyah's bright smile and the plaits that twitched like living things when she skipped. Finally, she mashed out her cigarette among the others.
She went to the clothes cupboard and pulled her haversack off the shelf.
ACHEL WINFIELD DECIDED TO CLOSE THE SHOP TEN minutes early, and she didn't feel one twinge of guilt. Her mother had left at half past three—it was the day of her weekly “do” at the Sea and Sun Unisex Hairstylists—and although she'd left firm instructions about what constituted doing one's duty at the till, for the past thirty minutes not a single customer or even a browser had come inside.
Rachel had more important things to attend to than w
atching the second hand of the wall clock slowly circumnavigate the dial. So after carefully checking to make sure that the display cases were locked, she bolted the front door. She flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED and went to the stockroom, where she took from its hiding place behind the rubbish bins a perkily wrapped box that she'd done her best to keep from her mother's eyes. Tucking it under her arm, she ducked into the alley, where she kept her bike. The box she placed lovingly in the basket. Then she guided the bike round the corner to the front of the shop and took a moment to double check the door.
There'd be hell to pay if she was caught leaving early. There'd be permanent damnation if she not only left early but also left without locking up properly. The bolt was old and sometimes it stuck. Wisdom called for a quick, reassuring, and foiled attempt to get inside. Good, Rachel thought when the door didn't budge. She was in the clear.
Although it was late in the day, the heat still hadn't abated. The regular North Sea wind—which made the town of Balford-le-Nez so nasty in the depths of winter—wasn't gusting at all this afternoon. Nor had it gusted for the last two weeks. It wasn't even sighing enough to stir the bunting that hung dispiritedly across the High Street.
Beneath those crisscrossing red and blue triangles of manufactured gaiety, Rachel pedalled determinedly southward, heading for the upmarket part of the town. She wasn't going home. Had she been doing so, she would have been riding in the opposite direction, along the seafront and beyond the industrial estate to the three truncated streets of terraced houses where she and her mother lived in frequently strained good will. Rather, she was heading to the home of her oldest, best, and only true friend, upon whose life recent tragedy had fallen.
Must remember to be sympathetic, Rachel told herself sternly as she pedalled. Must remember not to mention Clifftop Snuggeries before I tell her how bad I feel. Although I don't feel bad like I ought to feel, do I? I feel like a door's been opened wide and I want to rush through it while I got the chance.