“Bullshit.” Emily crossed her arms. “Muhannad Malik had plenty of time before I got to Colchester to phone Rakin Khan and tell him to corroborate his story.”
“For that matter,” Barbara said, “Ian Armstrong's had plenty of time to ask his in-laws to do the same. Have you spoken to them?”
Emily made no response.
Barbara went on. “He's got a solid motive, Ian Armstrong. What's Muhannad got that's holding your interest?”
“He protests too much,” Emily said.
“P'rhaps he's got something to protest about,” Barbara pointed out. “Look, I agree he comes off like a lag in the making. And this Rakin Khan may be just as bad. But you're leaving out some details that you can't tie to Muhannad. Think of just three of them: You said Querashi's car was tossed. His body was moved. His car keys were thrown into the brush. If Muhannad killed Querashi for the honour of his family, then why toss the car and why move the body? Why put neon lights round what otherwise might have been taken for an accident?”
“Because he didn't want it to be taken for an accident,” Emily said. “Because he wanted just what he's got: an incident that he can rally his people round. He meets two ends at once this way: He evens the score with Querashi for blackening the family name and he cements his position in the Asian community.”
“Okay. Perhaps,” Barbara said. “But on the other hand, why should we believe Trevor Ruddock about this homosexuality thing in the first place? He's got a motive as well. Okay, he didn't get his job back like Armstrong did, but he didn't seem the type to say no to a decent spot of revenge if he had the chance to get it.”
“You said he has an alibi as well.”
“Bloody hell! They all have flaming alibis, Em! Someone's got to be lying somewhere.”
“Which, Sergeant Havers, is exactly my point.” Emily's voice was quite even. But there was a steely quality to it that reminded Barbara once again of two facts: that not only was Emily her superior officer by reasons of talent, intelligence, intuition, and skill, but also that she herself had been admitted to work on this case on DCI Barlow's generous sufferance.
Back off, she told herself. This is not your patch, Barb. She was suddenly aware of how bloody hot the incident room was. It was worse than an oven. The harsh light of late afternoon poured in like an armed invasion. When, she wondered, had the country ever had a summer this beastly and miserable at the seaside?
“I checked on Trevor's alibi,” she said. “I stopped by Racon Jewellery on my way back here. According to her mum, Rachel did a runner right after I left them. Her mum couldn't say where Rachel was on the murder night because she herself was dancing in some ballroom competition in Chelmsford. She did say something interesting, though.”
“What's that?” Emily asked.
“She said, ‘My Rachel only goes with white boys, and mind you, remember that, Sergeant.’ What d'you think that means?”
“That she's worried about something.”
“We know that Querashi was probably meeting someone that night. We have only Trevor Ruddock's word that Querashi was cottaging in the first place. And even if Querashi was cottaging, that doesn't mean he doesn't swing both ways.”
“You're putting Querashi with Rachel Winfield now?” Emily asked.
“She gave him that jewellery receipt, Em. She had to have a reason.” Barbara considered one other element of the puzzle that they'd not yet tried to place. “But that doesn't really take care of the question of the bracelet: what Theo Shaw's doing with it. I've assumed that Sahlah gave it to him. But he always could have taken it from Querashi's body. If he did that, though, it means that Sahlah's lie about having tossed the bracelet from the pier was prompted by the fact that she knows that whoever has the bracelet is involved in all this. Why else lie?”
Behind her, Emily said with some passion, “Jesus. This is just like going down the goddamn rabbit hole.”
The tone of Emily's comment prompted Barbara to study the DCI more closely. Emily was leaning her bum against the edge of the table. For the first time, Barbara noticed the smudged skin under her eyes.
“Em?” she said.
“If it's one of them, Barb, this town's going to blow.”
Barbara knew what she was implying: If the killer was English and the town caved in to more racial unrest because of that fact, heads would roll. And the first would be Emily Barlow's.
In the silence that hung between them, Barbara heard voices in the entry downstairs. Terse words were spoken by a man and answered by a woman sounding calm and professional. Barbara recognised the man, at least. Muhannad Malik was in reception, arrived for his afternoon meeting with the police.
Azhar would be with him. So the moment had arrived when Barbara knew she ought to tell Emily Barlow the truth.
She opened her mouth to do so but found that she couldn't. If she fully explained—at least as fully as she was able, considering how little she had bothered to examine her motives before setting forth to Balford—Emily would have to dismiss her from the case. She could hardly view Barbara as an objective party in the investigation when at the side of at least one of the suspects moved a man who lived a bare fifty yards from her own shack-like dwelling in London. And Barbara wanted to stay on the case for more than one reason now. While it was true that she'd initially come to Balford-le-Nez for the sake of her Pakistani neighbours, she realised that she wished to remain for the sake of her colleague.
Barbara was well aware of the myriad prices women had to pay to succeed in policework. Men in the profession didn't have to persuade a single soul that their competence was unaffected by their sex. Women lived with having to do that daily. So if she could help Emily maintain her position and prove herself as a DCI, she was determined to do it.
“I'm on your side, Em,” she said quietly.
“Are you.” Once again Emily said the two words; she didn't ask them. Which reminded Barbara of another fact: The higher one climbed in authority and power, the fewer true friends one actually had. But a moment later, Emily roused herself from whatever black thoughts of the future were troubling her. She said, “So where was Theo Shaw on Friday night?”
“He says he was at home. His grandmother was there, but she won't be able to confirm anything, as she'd gone to bed.”
“That part of his story is probably true,” Emily said. “Agatha Shaw—that's the grandmother—had a stroke some time ago. She'd need her rest.”
“Which gives Theo plenty of opportunity to have taken himself over to the Nez on foot,” Barbara pointed out.
“Which would explain why no one in the vicinity claims to have heard another car.” Emily frowned thoughtfully. She directed her attention to a second china board. On it she had scrawled surnames of suspects and first initials, followed by their alleged whereabouts for the time in question. She said, “The Malik girl seems docile enough, but if she was secretly involved with Theo, she may have had a reason to send her fiancé tumbling down the Nez stairs. It would sure as hell end her obligation to Querashi. Permanently.”
“But you said her dad claimed that he wouldn't have forced her to marry the man.”
“He says that now. But he could be covering up for her. Perhaps she and Theo are in this together.”
“Romeo and Juliet killing off Count Paris instead of themselves? Okay. I see that it works. But aside from the car-tossing, which we'll forget about for the moment, here's something else we're not considering: Let's say Querashi got tricked into going to the Nez to meet Theo Shaw for a confab about Theo's relationship to Sahlah. Then how do we explain the condoms in his pocket?”
“Shit. The condoms,” Emily said. “Okay, so he may not have been going to meet Theo Shaw at all. But even if he didn't know about Theo, one thing is certain: Theo knew about him.
Barbara had to admit that the scales of culpability were beginning to tip in the direction of one of the Englishmen. She wondered what the hell she was going to report to the Pakistanis when they had their meeting. She could only imagine w
hat Muhannad Malik would do with any information that supported his belief in the crime's racist nature.
“Okay,” she said, “but we can't forget that we've caught out Sahlah Malik in a lie. And since Haytham Querashi had the receipt, I think we can conclude that someone must have wanted him to know that Sahlah had another relationship.”
“Rachel Winfield,” Emily said. “She's still the enigma in all this for me.
“A woman went to see Querashi at the hotel. A woman wearing a chador.”
“And if that woman was Rachel Winfield, and if Rachel Winfield wanted Querashi for herself—”
“Guv?” Emily and Barbara turned to the door, where Belinda Warner had come to stand, with a stack of chits in her hand. These were neatly clipped together in several different piles. Barbara recognised them as the copies of the telephone messages from the Burnt House Hotel that she'd handed over to Emily that morning.
“What is it?” Emily said.
“I've sorted through this lot, arranged them in categories, and tracked everyone down. Or at least nearly everyone.” She entered and placed each small stack down as she identified it. “Calls from the Maliks: Sahlah, Akram, and Muhannad. Calls from a contractor: a bloke called Gerry DeVitt from Jaywick Sands. He was doing some work on the house that Akram'd bought for the newlyweds.”
“DeVitt?” Barbara asked. “Em, he works on the pier. I spoke to him this afternoon.”
Emily made an entry into her notebook, which she scooped from a table in the incident room. “What else?” she asked Belinda.
“Calls from a decorator in Colchester, also working on the house. And this last, miscellaneous calls: from friends, I expect, by their names: Mr. Zaidi, Mr. Faruqi, Mr. Kumhar, Mr. Kat—”
“Kumhar?” Emily and Barbara said simultaneously.
Belinda looked up. “Kumhar,” she confirmed. “He phoned the most. There're eleven messages from him.” She licked her index finger and flicked through the final stack of chits. She pulled from them the one she wanted. “Here it is. Fahd Kumhar,” she said.
“Bloody hell. There you are,” Barbara put in reverently.
“It's a Clacton number,” Belinda went on. “I phoned it, but I only got a news agent on Carnarvon Road.”
“Carnarvon Road?” Emily said quickly. “Are you absolutely sure it was Carnarvon Road?”
“I've got the address right here.”
“Now there's a development from the gods, Barb.”
“Why?” Barbara asked. There was a map of the area on one of the notice boards, and she went to this and looked it over, seeking the location of Carnarvon Road. She found it, rising perpendicularly from the sea and Clacton's Marine Parade. It passed the railway station and ultimately led to the A133, which was the road to London. “Is there something important about Carnarvon Road?”
“There's something too coincidental for coincidence,” Emily said. “Carnarvon Road runs along the east side of the market square. Clacton market square, that is, of recent cottaging fame.”
“Now, that's a tasty detail,” Barbara said. She turned from the map and saw the DCI watching her. Emily's eyes were bright.
“I think we may be looking at a whole new cricket match, Sergeant Havers,” she announced. And her voice was renewed with the vigour that Barbara had always encountered in Barlow the Beast. “Whoever Kumhar is, let's track this bloke down.”
AHLAH USED GREAT CARE TO SET OUT THE TOOLS of her craft. She lifted the transparent plastic trays from their green metal workbox and lined them up neatly. She took the narrow-nosed pliers, the drill, and the wire cutter from their protective sheaths and she laid them on either side of the row of cords, cables, and lengths of gold chain that she used to assemble the intricate necklaces and earrings which Rachel and her mother had kindly undertaken to sell among the jewellery in their shop. “This's every bit as good as anything we got at Racon,” Rachel had declared loyally. “Mum'll want to show it, Sahlah. You'll see. Anyway, what c'n it hurt to try? If it sells, you got some money for yourself. If it doesn't, you got some new jewellery, right?”
There was a degree of truth to Rachel's words. But beyond the money—three-quarters of which she turned over to her parents once she'd earned enough to pay off Theo's bracelet—it had been the idea of doing something on her own and something that was purely an expression of herself that had motivated Sahlah to design and create for eyes and purses outside of her family's.
Had this been the first step? she wondered as she reached for the tray of African beads and trickled them slowly into her palm like winter raindrops, cool and smooth. Was it when she decided to engage in this solitary creative act that she'd first awakened to the possibilities offered by a world beyond the realm of her family? And had this act of creating something as simple as jewellery in the isolation of her bedroom produced the first fissure in her contentment?
No, she realised. Nothing was ever as simple as that. There was no primary cause-and-effect that she could point a finger at, explaining not only the restlessness of her spirit but also the soreness of an insular heart. What there was instead was the entire duality of a life lived with her feet attempting to march in two conflicting worlds.
“You're my English girl,” her father had said to her nearly every day as she scooped up her schoolbooks in the morning. And she'd heard the pride in his voice. She was born in England; she went to the junior school right there in town with English children; she spoke the language by virtue of both birth and exposure and not from having had to learn it as an adult. Therefore, in her father's mind she was English, and as verifiably English as any child with porcelain cheeks that flushed like peach skin after play. She was, in fact, as English as Akram secretly longed to be.
Muhannad was right in this, Sahlah realised. Although their father attempted to wear two different suits of cultural clothing, his true love was with the three-piece suits and brollies of his adopted country despite his duty's entanglement with the shalwār-gamīs of his heritage. And from the moment of his children's births, he'd expected them to share and understand this perplexing dichotomy. At home they were to be dutiful: Sahlah subdued and obedient, honing skills in homemaking to please a future husband; Muhannad respectful and industrious, preparing himself to shoulder the burdens of the family business and eventually producing sons who would shoulder that burden in their turn. Beyond the home, though, the two Malik children were to be quintessentially English. Counselled by their father to mix with their schoolmates, they were supposed to establish friendships in order to garner respect and affection for the family name and consequently for the family business. And to this latter end, Akram monitored their schooldays, looking for signs of social progress where he could not possibly hope to find them.
Sahlah had tried to humour him. Unable to face being the cause of her father's disappointment, she'd made valentines and birthday cards addressed to herself, and she'd brought them home, signed in the names of fellow pupils. She'd written herself chatty, gossipy notes ostensibly passed her way during science and maths. She'd found discarded pictures of classmates and autographed them to herself, with love. And when her father got wind of birthday parties, off she went in mock attendance to a celebration in which she was never included, jubilating instead in a tree at the bottom of the orchard, where she was hidden from the house and from the prospect of her father's disillusion.
But Muhannad made no similar attempt to fulfill their father's fantasies. He had no conflicts about being dark-skinned in a white-faced world, and he didn't seek to mitigate any consternation he encountered, consternation aroused at the sight of a foreigner living among a populace who were largely unused to dark faces. Born in England like herself, he no more considered himself an Englishman than he considered cows capable of flight. Indeed, the last thing on earth Muhannad would have wanted to be was an Englishman. He scorned what went for the English culture. He had only contempt for the ceremonies and traditions that formed the foundation of English life. He ridiculed the stiff upper l
ips that propriety required of men who dubbed themselves gentlemen. And the masks that Westerners wore to hide their biases and prejudices he eschewed entirely. He displayed his own biases, prejudices, and animosities like the family escutcheon. And the demons that haunted him were not and had never been the demons of race, no matter how he tried to convince himself and others that this was the case.
But she wouldn't think of Muhannad now, Sahlah decided. And she took up her long-nosed pliers as if making a pretence of work would somehow assist her in driving from her mind any consideration of her brother. She pulled paper towards her to sketch a necklace design, hoping that putting pencil to paper and carved beads in position would obliterate from memory that glitter in her brother's eye when he was determined to have his way, that streak of cruelty which he always managed to keep diligently hidden from both of their parents, and most of all that anger of his and how it whipped through his arms and burst from the tips of his fingers when she least expected.
Somewhere in the house below her, Sahlah heard Yumn calling to one of her boys. “Baby, precious baby,” she was cooing. “Lovely boy. Come to your Ammī-gee, little man.”
Sahlah's throat closed, her head grew light, and the African beads melded one into the other on the table before her. She released her grip on the long-nosed pliers, crossed her arms on the tabletop, and sank her head into their cradle. How could she think of her brother's sins, Sahlah wondered, when her own were as grievous and just as capable of rending the family irreparably?
“I've seen you with him,” Muhannad had hissed in her ear. “You slut. I've seen you with him. Do you hear me? I've seen. And you're going to pay. Because all whores pay. Especially white men's filthy slags.”
But she hadn't intended anything harmful. Least of all had she intended love.
She'd been allowed to work with Theo Shaw because her father knew him from the Gentlemen's Cooperative and because accepting Theo Shaw's offer of his computer expertise was yet another way that Akram Malik could demonstrate solidarity with the English community. The mustard factory had recently moved to its new location in the industrial estate on Old Hall Lane, and this expansion had necessitated an updating of business procedures.