Deception on His Mind

  Emily swung her shoulder against the old oak door and admitted them into a small room. Fahd Kumhar sat in a corner, as far as possible from the police detective—oddly clad in walking shorts and a Hawaiian shirt—who was attending him. He was cowering in his chair like a rabbit cornered by hounds, and when he saw the identity of the newcomers, his gaze skittered from Emily to Barbara and then beyond them to Azhar and Muhannad. It seemed that his body reacted without any intention on his part of doing so. His feet pushed against the wooden floor and forced the chair even farther into the corner. Fright or flight, Barbara thought.

  She could smell his incipient panic. The acrid stench of male sweat made the air very nearly unbreathable. She could only wonder how the Asians would interpret the man's mental state.

  She didn't have to wonder for long. Azhar crossed the room and squatted in front of his chair. As Emily switched on the tape recorder, he said, “I'm going to introduce myself to him. My cousin as well.” He then spoke in Urdu. Kumhar's flash of a glance from Azhar to Muhannad and back to Azhar indicated that introductions had indeed been made.

  When Kumhar whimpered, Azhar reached out and put his hand on one of the man's arms, which he still held up defensively against his chest. “I've told him I've come from London to help him,” Azhar said. He went on quietly in his native tongue, repeating in English both his questions and Kumhar's answers. “Have they hurt you?” he asked. “Have the police treated you roughly, Mr. Kumhar?”

  Emily interposed at once. “These weren't our parameters, and you know it, Mr. Azhar.”

  Muhannad shot her a contemptuous look. “We can't tell him his rights till we know how many of them have already been violated,” he said. “Look at him, Azhar. He's like melting jelly. Can you see any bruises? Check his wrists and his neck.”

  The DC who'd been in the room upon their arrival stirred at this. He said, “He was quiet enough till you lot got in here.”

  “Consider what constitutes the lot of us, Constable” was Muhannad's riposte. “We didn't exactly walk in here without DCI Barlow, did we?”

  At these remarks, Kumhar made an involuntary mewling. He said something rapidly, but it didn't appear to be directed at any of them.

  “What's that?” Emily demanded.

  Azhar coaxed one of the man's arms from his chest. He unbuttoned the cuffs of his white cotton shirt and examined each wrist in turn, saying, “He said, ‘Protect me. I have no wish to die.’ “

  “Tell him that I will see to it,” Muhannad said. “Tell him—”

  “Hang on,” Barbara broke in angrily. “We had an agreement, Mr. Malik.”

  Simultaneously, DCI Barlow snapped, “And that just bloody cuts it. Out of here. Both of you. Now.”

  “Cousin,” Azhar said in a beleaguered fashion. He spoke to Kumhar, explaining to Emily and Barbara that he was reassuring the man that he had nothing to fear from the police, that the Asian community would see to his safety.

  “That's gracious of you,” Emily said acidly. “But you've already blown your wad. I want you out of here. Constable, if you can give us some assistance …?”

  By the door, the constable rose. He was enormous. Seeing him, Barbara wondered if half Kumhar's fear had to do with being enclosed with a man the size and shape of a mountain gorilla.

  “Inspector,” Azhar said, “I apologise. Both for myself and for my cousin. But you can see that Mr. Kumhar's quite panic-stricken, and I suggest it's to everyone's advantage that we make his rights under the law quite clear to him. Even if he gives you a statement, I fear that in his present condition it's going to be disallowed as a statement made under extreme duress.”

  “I'll take my chances,” Emily said, and let him know by her tone how little she believed in his expression of concern.

  But Azhar had a point. Barbara sought a way out of the impasse that served the police interests of peace in the community at the same time as it allowed everyone to save face. She thought the best approach would be to squash the fly in the ointment by tossing Muhannad out on his ear. But she knew that suggestion would only enflame Malik further.

  She said, “Inspector? If I could have a word …?” When Emily joined her by the door—keeping a sharp eye on the Pakistanis—Barbara murmured, “We won't get any sense out of that bloke in the state he's in anyway. We either send for Professor Siddiqi to settle him down and tell him how things stand for him legally, or we let Azhar—Mr. Azhar—do it, with the proviso that Muhannad keeps his gob plugged. If we go for the first alternative, we end up cooling our heels till the professor gets here, which'U take at least two hours or more. In the meantime, Muhannad shoots his mouth off to his people about Mr. Kumhar's state of mind. If we go for the second alternative, we mollify the Muslim community at the same time as we advance our own cause.”

  Frowning, Emily crossed her arms. “God, how I hate to give in to this bastard,” she said through her teeth.

  “We're serving our own interests,” Barbara said. “It only looks like we're giving in.”

  Barbara knew she was right. But she also knew that the DCFs antipathy for the Pakistani—in conjunction with everything Muhannad Malik did to encourage that antipathy—might prompt her to see otherwise. Emily was in a tenuous position. She couldn't afford to seem weak at the same time as she couldn't afford to risk igniting an already flammable situation.

  The DCI finally drew a breath, and when she spoke, she sounded disgusted with the entire procedure. “If you can guarantee your cousin's silence for the rest of this meeting, Mr. Azhar, you may inform Mr. Kumhar of his rights.”

  Azhar nodded. He said to Muhannad, “Cousin?”

  Muhannad jerked his head in agreement. But he placed himself with a full view of the quivering Asian man, standing with his denim-clad legs apart and his arms crossed, solid, like a guard.

  For his part, Fahd Kumhar clearly had followed none of the heated exchange between the police and his brother Asians. He remained in his rabbit-like position, and he didn't seem to know where to look. So his eyes flicked from person to person with a speed suggesting that—soothing words from Azhar or not—he trusted absolutely no one.

  With Muhannad adhering to his part of the bargain, despite the lack of grace with which he did the adhering, Azhar was able to communicate the essential information to Fahd Kumhar.

  Did he understand that he was being held for questioning in the matter of the death of Haytham Querashi?

  He did, he did. But he had nothing to do with that death, nothing, he didn't even know a Mr. Querashi.

  Did he understand that he had a right to have a solicitor with him when he was questioned by the police?

  He didn't know a solicitor, he had his papers, they were all in order, he'd tried to show them to the police, he had never met a Mr. Querashi.

  Did he wish to arrange for a solicitor now?

  He had a wife in Pakistan, he had two children, they needed him, they needed money to—

  “Ask him why Haytham Querashi wrote him a cheque for four hundred pounds if the two of them had never met,” Emily said.

  Barbara shot her a surprised look. She wouldn't have bet on the DCI's playing any one of her cards in the presence of the Pakistanis. In reaction to Emily's words, she saw Muhannad's eyes narrow as he silently took in this piece of information before turning to assess the man in the chair.

  But Kumhar's answer was much the same. He didn't know a Mr. Querashi. There was some mistake, perhaps another Kumhar. It was a common enough name.

  “Not round here” was Emily's reply. “Finish it up, Mr. Azhar. It's clear that Mr. Kumhar needs some time to dwell upon his situation.”

  But something in all of Kumhar's babble had struck a chord with Barbara. She said, “He keeps talking about his papers. Ask him if he's had any dealings with an agency called World Wide Tours, either here or in Pakistan. They deal in immigration.”

  If Azhar recognised the name from the calls he'd made to Karachi for her, he gave no indication. He merely acted as transla
tor for the fact that Kumhar knew no more about World Wide Tours than he knew about Haytham Querashi.

  Once Azhar had completed the process of informing Kumhar of his legal rights, he stood and moved away from the chair. But even this did not relax the young man. Kumhar had gone back to his original position with fists clenched tightly beneath his chin. His face dribbled sweat. His thin shirt clung to his skeletal frame. Barbara noted that he wore no socks beneath his black trousers, and where his foot met his cheap shoe, the flesh looked raw. Azhar studied him for a long moment before he turned to Barbara and Emily. He said, “You'd do well to have a doctor examine him. At the moment, he's clearly incapable of making a rational decision about legal representation.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said in a tone that was deadly polite. “You've registered the fact that he's unbruised. You can see he's got an attendant here to keep him from harm. And now that you know he's fully aware of his rights—”

  “We won't know that till he asserts them,” Muhannad put in.

  “—Sergeant Havers can bring you up-to-date on the investigation, and then you can leave.” Emily continued speaking steadily as if she hadn't heard Muhannad. She turned to the door, which the constable swung open for her.

  “A moment, Inspector,” Azhar said quietly. “If you have no charge to bring against this man, you can keep him in your custody for only twenty-four hours. I'd like him to know that.”

  “Tell him,” Emily said.

  Azhar did so. Kumhar didn't look relieved by the news. Indeed, he looked no different from the way that he'd looked when they'd walked into the room.

  “Tell him also,” Muhannad said, “that someone from Jum'a will come to the station to pick him up and escort him home at the end of those twenty-four hours. And”—this with a meaningful look at the police—”these officers had better have a good reason for holding him if he's not released at that time.”

  Azhar glanced Emily's way, as if waiting either for her reaction or for her permission to pass this information on. Emily gave a single sharp nod. They heard the word ]um'a among the others as Azhar spoke.

  Outside in the corridor, Emily directed her final comments to Muhannad Malik. She said, “I trust you'll pass along the information about Mr. Kumhar's well-being to all the relevant parties.”

  The implication was obvious: She'd done her part, and she expected him to do his.

  That said, she left them in Barbara's company.

  WHEN EMILY STALKED up to the first floor, blood on the boil at having had the two Pakistanis gain the upper hand in the meeting with Fahd Kumhar, she heard the news that Superintendent Ferguson was waiting for her on the other end of the telephone line. Belinda Warner called out the information just as Emily was about to plunge into the loo.

  “I'm unavailable,” she shot back.

  “This is his fourth call since two o'clock, Inspector,” Belinda informed her with a rise in inflection that communicated a tentative, sisterly sympathy.

  “Is it? Well, someone should remove the redial button from that idiot's phone. I'll talk to him when I talk to him, Constable.”

  “What shall I tell him, then? He knows you're in the building. Reception told him.”

  Reception's loyalty was a wonderful thing, Emily thought. “Tell him we have a suspect and I can either spend time questioning him or waste time yammering with my effing arsehole of a superintendent.”

  That said, she shoved open the door of the loo and went in. At the wash basin, she turned on the water, pulled six paper towels from the holder, and dashed them under the tap. When they were thoroughly doused, she wrung them out and used them vigorously: against her neck and her chest, down her arms, pressed against her forehead and cheeks.

  Christ, she thought, how she loathed that bloody Asian. She'd loathed him since she'd first come across him as a teenager, the pride of his parents with his future laid out, one into which he only needed to step in order to succeed. While the rest of the world had to fight their way through life, Muhannad Malik had life handed to him. But did he realise this fact? Did he give it the barest nod of acknowledgement? Of course not. Because people who had their lives presented to them on a platinum platter never had the sort of perspective that allowed them to recognise how bloody lucky they were.

  There he was, with his Rolex watch and his signet ring, with his snakeskin goddamn boots and the serpentine vein of a hosepipe gold chain just visible beneath his perfect, ironed T-shirt. There he was with his classic car and his Oakley sunglasses and a body that announced precisely how much leisure sodding time he possessed to see to its daily sculpted transcendence. Yet all he could talk about was how rotten he'd had it, how lousy life was, how rife with bias and hatred and prejudice his privileged little existence had been.

  Christ, but she hated him, and she had reason to hate him. For the last ten years he'd been looking for racial bias under every pebble he found in his path, and she was sick to death, not only of him but of having to mince every word, every question, and every natural inclination when she was round him. When the police found themselves in a position of having to mollify the very people they suspected—and she'd suspected Muhannad of nearly every infraction of the law that had occurred on her patch in Balford since the day she'd met him—then they were playing the game at a disadvantage. As she was now.

  She found the situation intolerable, and as she worked the wet paper towels against her steamy skin, she cursed Superintendent Ferguson, Muhannad Malik, the death on the Nez, and the entire Asian community for good measure. She couldn't believe she'd actually given in to Barbara's suggestion and allowed the Pakistanis to see Kumhar. She should have tossed them into the street on their ears. Better yet, she should have arrested Taymullah Azhar the moment she'd seen him loitering outside the station when she'd brought in Kumhar. He'd been quick enough to inform his bloody cousin that the cops had an Asian suspect in lock-up. Emily had no doubt that it was he who'd rushed off to give Muhannad and his cohorts the word. Who was he anyway, this Azhar? What bloody right did he have to come into town and challenge the police like some pricey barrister, which he decidedly was not?

  It was the question of who he was—and the aggravation at being bested by him—that sent Emily back to her office. Until that moment, she'd forgotten the request she'd made of the Intelligence Unit, seeking information about the unknown Pakistani who'd entered their midst on Sunday afternoon. Clacton Intelligence had been in possession of that request for more than forty-eight hours. While that wasn't a great deal of time in intelligence work, it was enough to gather whatever information had been amassed by SOU in London, if Taymullah Azhar had ever attracted the attention of the silent service.

  The plain of her desk had become hilled with files, documents, and reports. It took her a good ten minutes to sort through them all. Nothing had yet come in on Azhar.

  Damn. She wanted something on the man, something to slide into their verbal sparring, even a minor fact or an insignificant secret whose revelation by either herself or Barbara Havers would tell him that he wasn't as secure in the police presence as he apparently felt himself to be. That kind of juicy detail about an adversary worked to wrest the upper hand away from him. And while she knew she still had the upper hand—indeed, information was hers to dole out or withhold as she saw fit—she wanted the Asians to realise that she had it. She picked up the phone and rang Intelligence.

  EMILY WAS ON the phone when Barbara joined her. The fact that she was engaged in a personal call was made evident by the timbre of her voice. She sat at her desk with her forehead cradled by one of her hands while the other held the receiver to her ear and she said, “Believe me, I could do with that twice over, tonight. Three times even,” and then she laughed. It was a throaty laugh, punctuation within the sort of conversation that lovers had. Emily wouldn't, Barbara thought, be talking to her super. “What time?” she was saying. “Hmmm. I could manage that. But won't she wonder? …Gary, no one walks a dog for three hours.” And to whatever remark Ga
ry made in reply, she laughed once more. She shifted position in her chair.

  Barbara side-stepped, ready to duck out of the office before the DCI raised her head. But that was movement enough. Emily looked up and lifted her hand to keep Barbara where she was, one finger indicating that she was bringing the conversation to a close.

  “All right, yes,” she said. “Half past ten. And don't forget the condoms this time.”

  Without embarrassment, she rang off. She said to Barbara, “What did you give them?”

  Barbara examined her, knowing full well that her face was flaming. For her part, Emily was all business. Nothing in her expression even began to suggest that she'd just been arranging an assignation with a married man for later in the evening. Yet surely that was what she'd been doing: lining up for some energetic mattress activity the very same bloke whom she'd given the brush on Sunday night. She might have been setting up a dental appointment.

  Emily appeared to read Barbara with an excruciating precision. She said, “Fags, booze, ulcers, migraines, psychosomatic illness, or promiscuity. Choose your poison, Barb. I chose mine.”