Deception on His Mind

  So the day had started out bad and had only got worse: waking up to find that Gerry'd done a bunk and looking out the shop window to see the coppers putting the cosh on everyone in sight.

  Now, at the jigsaw, Cliff tried to give his mind to the work. There were orders to fill and puzzles to be cut, dodgy pictures to assess for their potential as future puzzles and decisions to be made about ordering in an array of novelty condoms from Amsterdam. He had at least sixteen videos to preview and reviews to write for Crossdressers’ Quarterly. But he found that he could think of nothing but the questions the cops had wanted him to answer and whether he'd managed to be so convincing that they wouldn't show up in Jaywick Sands to ask Gerry DeVitt's assistance in their enquiry.

  • • •

  THEO SHAW'S APPEARANCE didn't suggest a man who'd slept the sleep of the guileless, Barbara thought. Shaw was carrying luggage under his eyes and these were nearly bloodshot enough to give him the look of an albino rabbit. When Dominique the Tongue-stud had announced Barbara's arrival at the pier offices for a second visit, Theo had started to say brusquely, “No way. Tell her—” but had choked off whatever else he'd intended to communicate when he saw Barbara standing directly behind the girl.

  Dominique said, “She's asking to see the time cards, Mr. Shaw, last week's time cards. Sh'll I fetch them or what? I didn't want to do nothing till I talked to you first.”

  “I'll handle this,” Theo Shaw said, and made no other comment until Dominique went swinging back towards reception in her orange platform shoes. Then he looked at Barbara, who'd entered his office without an invitation, installing herself in one of two rattan chairs that sat facing his desk. “Time cards?”

  “In the singular,” Barbara said. “Trevor Ruddock's from last week, to be specific. Have you got it?”

  He had. The card was with the accounting department, where the payroll was done. If the sergeant didn't mind waiting a minute …

  Barbara didn't mind. Another opportunity to recce Theo Shaw's office was just fine by her. But he seemed to read her intention, because instead of heading off to fetch the requested time card himself, he picked up the phone, punched in three numbers, and asked that the card be brought to them.

  “I hope Trevor's not in trouble,” he said.

  The devil you do, Barbara thought. She said, “Just confirming a few details.” She gestured towards the window. “The pier looks more crowded today. Business must be picking up.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good for the cause, that.”

  “What cause?”

  “Redevelopment. Are the Asians part of it? Redevelopment, I mean.”

  “That's an odd question. Why do you ask?”

  “I was in a place called Falak Dedar Park. It looks new. There's a fountain in the centre: a girl in Arab garb pouring water. And the name sounds Asian. So I was wondering if the Asians are involved in your redevelopment plans. Or do they have their own?”

  “Anyone's free to become involved,” Theo said. “The town needs investors. We don't intend to hold anyone back if they want to be part of the project.”

  “And if someone wants to go his own way? Have his own project? With a different idea to yours about redevelopment? What happens then?”

  “It makes more sense for Balford to accept an overall plan,” Theo replied. “Otherwise, what you end up with is an architectural hotchpotch, like the south bank of the Thames. I've lived here most of my life and, frankly, I'd rather like to avoid that happening.”

  Barbara nodded. His reasoning made sense. But it also suggested yet another area in which the Asian community might be in conflict with the longtime residents of Balford-le-Nez. She left her chair and approached the redevelopment plans, which she'd noticed on the previous day. She wanted to see how the plans affected such areas as the industrial estate where Akram Malik had obviously invested so much money in his mustard factory. But she was distracted by a town map that hung on the wall next to the blueprints and the artist's renderings of Balford-to-be.

  This map indicated in which sections of the town the most money would be invested. But that wasn't what interested Barbara. Instead, she took note of the location of the Balford Marina. It was west of the Nez at the base of the peninsula. With advantageous tidal conditions, someone sailing from the marina up the Balford Channel into Pen-nyhole Bay would have easy access to the east side of the Nez, where Haytham Querashi had met his death.

  She said, “You have a boat, haven't you, Mr. Shaw? Berthed at the marina?”

  His expression was guarded. “It's the family's, not mine.”

  “Cabin cruiser, isn't it? Do any night sailing?”

  “I have done.” He saw where she was heading. “But not on Friday night.”

  They would see about that, Barbara thought.

  Trevor's time card was delivered by an antique gentleman who looked as if he'd worked on the pier since the day it was built. He doddered into the room, dressed in a linen suit, starched shirt, and tie despite the heat, and he handed the card over with a respectful, “Mr. Shaw, sir. Glorious day, isn't it? Like a gift from the Almighty.”

  Theo thanked him, asked after his dog, his wife, and his grandchildren—in that order—and sent him on his way. He gave Barbara the time card.

  She saw on it what she expected to see. Trevor Ruddock had been telling half-truth and half-lie during her interview with him: His time card indicated that he'd appeared for work at eleven thirty-six. But if Rachel could be depended upon to be speaking the truth, then he hadn't been with her after ten that evening, and he had an hour and a half still to account for. Motive and opportunity were now his. Barbara wondered if the means lay among the clutter of his spider-making workta-ble.

  She told Theo Shaw that she would need the time card. He made no protest, although he added, “Trevor's a good sort, Sergeant. He looks like a lout, but that's the extent of it. He might engage in petty theft, but he'd never take it on to murder.”

  “People can surprise you,” Barbara said. “Just when you think you know what you're dealing with, they can do something that makes you wonder if you ever really knew them at all.”

  She'd struck something with that: the right note, the wrong chord, a jangled nerve. She could see it in his eyes. She waited for him to make a comment that might betray himself in some way, but he didn't do it. He merely made the appropriate noises about being glad to be helpful in her investigation. Then he saw her on her way.

  On the pier once more, Barbara slipped the time card into her shoulder bag. She managed to avoid Rosalie the Romany Palm Reader a second time, and she wended her way through the clumps of small children waiting with their parents to charge onto the kiddie rides. As was the case yesterday, the noise in this covered section of the pier reverberated from the walls and the ceiling. Clanging bells, shrilling whistles, a tooting calliope, and shouting voices all contributed to a din that made Barbara feel as if she were shooting round inside a gigantic pinball machine. She extricated herself from the cacophony by making her way to the uncovered section of the pier.

  To her left the Ferris wheel was spinning. To her right, barkers were trying to seduce passersby into taking a chance at tossing coins, upending milk bottles, and firing air guns. Beyond, a roller coaster car was hurtling downward with a load of screaming passengers. And a miniature steam train was chugging towards the end of the pier.

  Barbara followed the train. The unfinished restaurant loomed over the sea, and the workers on its roof reminded her that there was a point she wished to clarify with the head of the project, Gerry DeVitt.

  As on the previous day, DeVitt was welding. But this time he happened to look up as Barbara stepped past a mound of copper tubing and dodged a stack of timber. He doused the flame on his blow torch and pushed his protective mask to the top of his kerchief-bound head.

  “What d'you need this time round?” He didn't sound either rude or impatient, but there was still an edge to his words. She wasn't welcome. Nor, Barbara thought, w
ere her questions. “Make it fast, all right? We've a load of work to get through today and not a lot of time to spend yammering with visitors.”

  “Can I have a word with you, Mr. DeVitt?”

  “Looks to me like you're having it.”

  “Right. Outside, though. Away from the noise.” In order to be heard, she had to raise her voice. The hammering, pounding, and sawing hadn't ceased with her entrance on this occasion.

  DeVitt made a mysterious adjustment to the tanks that were connected to his equipment. Then he led the way to the front of the restaurant, which overlooked the end of the pier. Sidling past a serried arrangement of prefabricated windows that leaned against the doorway, he stepped outside. At the pier railing, he dug in the pocket of his cut-off jeans and brought out a roll of Polos. He popped one in his mouth, turned to Barbara, and said, “So?”

  “So why didn't you mention yesterday that you knew Haytham Querashi?” she said.

  He squinted in the bright light. He didn't pretend to misunderstand her. He said, “The way I recall it, you didn't ask. You wanted to know if we'd seen an Arab bird on the pier. We hadn't. End of story.”

  “You said you didn't mix with the Asians, though,” Barbara said. “You said something about Asians having their ways and English having theirs. ‘Put them together and you've got trouble’ was your conclusion.”

  “That's still my conclusion.”

  “But you knew Querashi, didn't you? He had telephone messages from you at the Burnt House Hotel. That does something to suggest that you mixed with him.”

  DeVitt changed positions to lean against the pier railing, his elbows taking most of his weight. He was facing her, not the North Sea, but he was looking at the town. Perhaps in meditation, perhaps with the hope of avoiding her eyes. “I didn't mix with him. I was doing some work for him in a house in First Avenue. It's where he was going to live after his marriage.”

  “So you did know him.”

  “I'd spoken to him a dozen times, maybe more. But that's the extent of it. If you want to call that knowing him, I knew him.”

  “Where did you first meet him?”

  “There. At the house.”

  “The First Avenue house? You're certain of that?”

  He shot her a glance. “Yeah. That's right.”

  “How did he know to contact you to work on it?”

  “He didn't contact me,” DeVitt said. “Akram Malik did. He said he had a rush renovation about two months ago and asked me if I'd take it on. I gave it a look and thought I could manage it. I could always do with the money. I met Querashi there—at the house—after I'd already begun the work.”

  “But you're working here at the pier full-time, aren't you? So when do you work in First Avenue? At the weekend?”

  “Nights as well.”

  “Nights?” Barbara's voice rose instinctively.

  He gave her a glance, this one more guarded than the last. “That's what I said.”

  She took stock of DeVitt. A long time had passed since she'd first concluded that one of the most foolish mistakes an investigator could make was drawing an inference based on appearance. With his powerful build and the kind of work he did, DeVitt had the look of a man who ended his blow torch days with a pint of bitter and a shag with the wife or the girlfriend. True, he was wearing an earring—the same gold hoop that he'd had on yesterday—but Barbara knew that earrings, toe rings, navel rings, or nipple rings meant sod bloody all in the current decade.

  “We think that Mr. Querashi was homosexual,” Barbara told him. “We think he may have been intending to meet his lover on the Nez on the night he was killed. He was due to marry in the next few days, so we have an idea that he may have gone to the Nez to end that relationship once and for all. If he tried to live a double life while married to Sahlah Malik, someone was bound to find out eventually, and he had a lot to lose.”

  DeVitt raised his hand to his mouth. The movement was studied, slow and steady, as if he wished to demonstrate that his nerves were unjangled in the face of this new information. He spit the Polo into his hand, then flicked it from his palm into the sea. “I don't know anything about how the bloke got his rocks off,” DeVitt said. “Men, women, or animals. We didn't discuss it.”

  “He left the hotel at the same time several nights each week. And we're fairly certain he was meeting someone. He had three condoms in his pocket when his body was found, so I think we can safely conclude they were meeting for more than a casual after-dinner brandy at one of the pubs. Tell me this, Mr. DeVitt. How often did Querashi come to First Avenue to check on the work you were doing there?”

  She saw the reaction this time: a sharp movement of muscle in his jaw. He didn't reply.

  “Did you work there alone, or did some of these blokes help you out?” Here, she indicated the restaurant by jutting her chin at it. Inside, someone had turned on a portable radio. Above the noise of the construction, a voice began chanting about having life to live and love to give as the accompanying music crescendoed. “Mr. DeVitt?” Barbara prompted.

  “Alone,” he said.

  “Ah,” she replied.

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “Did Querashi stop by often to check your work?”

  “Once or twice. But so did Akram. And the wife, Mrs. Malik.” He looked her way. His face was damp, but that easily could have been due to the heat. The sun was climbing and it throbbed down upon both of them, sucking the moisture through their pores. Her own face would have been damp as well, Barbara knew, had she not thoroughly brushed it with powder in step two of her facial beautification project. “I never knew when any of them would drop in,” he added. “I did the work, and if they decided to stop by and check it, that was fine by me.” He scrubbed his face on the sleeve of his T-shirt, adding, “So if that's all you want from me, I'd like to get on with it.”

  Barbara nodded him back to work, but as he approached the restaurant door, she spoke once more. “Jaywick Sands, Mr. DeVitt. Is that where you live? That's where your calls to Querashi came from.”

  “I live there, yeah.”

  “I've not been there in years, but as I recall, it's not far from Clacton. Just a few minutes by car, in fact. That's the case, isn't it?”

  His eyes narrowed to a squint. But again the sun could have been his reason. “What exactly are you on about, Sergeant?”

  Barbara smiled. “Just trying to keep my geography straight. There're a thousand details in a case like this. You never know which one is going to lead you to a killer.”

  MILY'S MOBILE RANG THE MOMENT SHE HIT MARINE Parade East, which edged the waterfront on the approach to the pleasure pier in Clacton-on-Sea. She'd just braked for a group of pensioners who were crossing the street from the Cedars Nursing Home—three of them using zimmer frames and two with walking sticks—when the trill of the phone cut into her thoughts of what a witness to the crime could mean to their case.

  The caller was DC Billy Honigman, who'd spent the day in an unmarked Escort some thirty yards from Jackson and Son, the news agent's shop in Carnarvon Road.

  His message was terse enough: “Got him, Guv.”

  Kumhar, she thought. Where? she wanted to know.

  He'd tailed the Pakistani to a house in Chapman Road, Honigman told her, not much more than round the corner from Jackson and Son. It looked like a boarding house. A sign in the window advertised rooms to let.

  “I'm on my way,” Emily informed him. “Sit tight. Don't approach.”

  She rang off. When the pensioners were clear of her car, she surged forward and in less than a mile made the turn up Carnarvon Road. Chapman Road shot left off the High Street. It was lined with terraced Victorian houses, all identically constructed of umber brick with bay windows whose frames provided the only means of distinguishing among them. These were edged in a variety of colours, and when Emily joined DC Honigman, he indicated a house whose chosen window-frame colour was yellow. It sat twenty yards from where Honigman had parked his Escort.
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  “Lives over there,” he said. “He made a purchase at the news agent's—newspaper, cigarettes, and a chocolate bar—and walked back here directly. Nervous, though. Walked fast and kept his eyes straight ahead, but when he got to the house, he walked on by it. He went halfway to the end of the street and had a good look round before heading back.”

  “Did he see you, Billy?”

  “Might've. But what's to see? Bloke looking for a parking space for a day at the sea.”

  He had a point. With his usual attention to detail, Honigman had strapped a collapsible plastic chaise longue to the roof of the car. In a bow to both continuity and incognito, he was wearing khaki shorts and an open-necked shirt of a decidedly tropical print. He didn't look the part of a policeman.

  “Let's see what we have, then,” Emily said with a nod at the house.

  The door was answered by a woman with a poodle in her arms. She and the dog looked amazingly similar: white-haired, long-snouted, and recently coiffed. She said, “Sorry. The sign's still up, but all the rooms's let. I need to pull it down, I know. But my lumbago stops me taking it out the window.”

  It was the vacancy notice that hung between the diaphanous white curtains and the glass of the ground floor bay window. Emily told the woman that they weren't there in search of accommodation. She produced her warrant card.

  The woman gave a sheeplike bleat. Offering her name as “Gladys Kersey, that's Missus, by the way, although Mr. Kersey's gone to Jesus,” she went on to assure them that everything was in perfect order in her establishment, always had been, always was, and certainly always would be. She clutched the poodle beneath her arm as she spoke, and the dog gave a yip not unlike the owner's bleat.

  “Fahd Kumhar,” Emily said. “If we might have a word with him, Mrs. Kersey?”

  “Mr. Kumhar? He's not in some sort of trouble, is he? He seems a nice enough young man. Very clean, he is, bleaches those shirts of his by hand and what that's doing to his skin, by the way, isn't a very pretty sight. His English isn't much to speak of, but he watches the morning news in the lounge and I can tell he's trying hard to learn. He's not in trouble, is he?”