Deception on His Mind

  He examined the paper solemnly. He folded it precisely in half, then in quarters. He placed it in the pocket of his trousers. He said, “Yes. If you have seen enough …?” and without waiting for her reply, he made a courtly gesture in the direction of the office.

  Once there, Barbara went through the routine: She thanked him for his help. She reminded him of the gravity of the situation. She emphasised the importance of full cooperation with the police.

  He said, “I understand, Sergeant. Already I'm going through my mind in an attempt to locate a connection between this man and Eastern Imports.”

  Speaking of connections, she thought. And as she adjusted the strap of her bag so that it drew less heavily on her shoulder, she said, “Yes. Well,” and went to the door, where she paused. She thought of what she knew of European history, and she drew her question from that. “Your accent sounds Austrian. Vienna? Salzburg?”

  “Please,” he said, a hand pressed to his chest in the offence that Barbara had hoped to rouse in him. “I am German.”

  “Ah. Sorry. It's difficult to tell. Where're you from?”

  “Hamburg,” he replied.

  Where else? she thought. “And your name? I'll need it for my report to the DCI.”

  “Naturally. It's Reuchlein,” he replied, and he spelled it helpfully. “Klaus Reuchlein.”

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, Barbara could hear Inspector Lynley chuckle.

  REUZHAGE SAYS THAT REUCHLEIN'S PAYING RENT on two flats at Oskarstrafie 15,” Barbara concluded. “But all of the flats in the building are small—bed-sits, only, with individual kitchens and bathrooms—so if a bloke has money enough, Kreuzhage claims, he might use one flat as a bedroom and another as a sitting room. Especially if he entertains and doesn't much want his guests having to sit on his bed. So the fact of two flats shouldn't arouse our suspicions, he warns. Although they may well have aroused Querashi's suspicions, being from Pakistan where most people live—as Kreuzhage put it—more humbly.”

  “And he's certain it's Klaus Reuchlein who's renting the flats? Klaus and not another first name?”

  “It was Klaus, all right.” Barbara drank the last of the carrot juice that Emily had offered her upon their joining forces once again in the DCI's office to compare their investigative notes. She did her best to hide a grimace when her tongue registered the flavour. No wonder people into health foods were so flaming skinny, she thought. Everything they ingested immediately obliterated any desire to ingest more. “According to him, one of his blokes saw the rental agreement and the signature. Unless Klaus Reuchlein's German for John Smith and there's one under every rock, it's the same bloke.”

  Emily nodded. She gazed across her office at the china board where the CID team's activities were listed next to an officer's identification number. They'd begun five days ago with activity Al. Barbara saw that they were up to A320.

  “We're closing in on him,” Emily said. “I know it, Barb. This Reuchlein bit just about noose-ties Mr. Hot Shot's neck. So much for saving his people from us. Someone ought to be saving his people from him.”

  Barbara had stopped by the Burnt House prior to returning to the station. There, she'd picked up the message that Kriminalhauptkom-misar Kreuzhage had phoned, leaving the cryptic message that “information pertaining to the sergeant's interests in Hamburg had been obtained.” She'd phoned him at once, munching on a cheese and pickle sandwich provided by Basil Treves, who'd had to be discouraged as subtly as possible from hanging about at the doorway of her room, the better to eavesdrop on her conversation. Kreuzhage first confirmed her suspicions that the Hamburg address matched the phone number that Querashi had rung from the Burnt House prior to his death, and when he did so she experienced the same sensation that the DCI was experiencing at the moment: a growing certainty that they were getting close to the truth. But when she combined that growing certainty with what she'd seen at Eastern Imports—which was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary except a broken toilet and a pillow on the floor—her mind filled with questions instead of with answers. Her intuition was telling her that everything she'd heard and seen this day was connected in some way, if not to the murder of Querashi, then at least to each other. But her brain refused to tell her how.

  Belinda Warner entered the room, saying, “Got the log checked, Guv. I've made a list of everything dodgy. Want it now or at the team meeting this afternoon?”

  Emily answered by extending her hand. “This may give us the rope to hang him,” she told Barbara.

  The document was pages long, a computer printout of nuisances and crimes—petty and otherwise—that had been reported to the Balford police since the beginning of the year. WPC Warner had highlighted in yellow those activities which fell under the categorical description of being dodgy and hence worthy of the DCI's notice. It was these activities that Emily read aloud.

  Six stolen cars since January—one per month and all of them accounted for, found in locations that spanned everywhere from the tidal track leading to Horsey Island to the golf course in Clacton-on-Sea. Dead rabbits placed on the front doorstep of the headmistress of the primary school. Four acts of arson: two in rubbish bins placed on the street for the dust collectors, one in a pillbox on the edge of the Wade, one in the graveyard of St. John's Church, where a crypt had been broken into and defiled with graffiti. Five beach lockers broken into. Twenty-seven burglaries among which were house-breakings, the prising open of a change machine at a laundrette, the invasion of numerous beach huts on the seafront, and the theft of the till from a Chinese takeaway. A handbag snatching on the pleasure pier. Three Zodiac inflat-ables taken from East Essex Boat Hire at the Balford Marina, one of them found abandoned at low tide on the south side of Skipper's Island and the other two with dead motors in the middle of the Wade.

  Emily shook her head with disgust at this last report. “If Charlie Spencer gave half the attention to securing his Zodiacs that he gives to reading the racing forms from Newmarket, he wouldn't be giving us aggro once a week.”

  But Barbara was thinking of what she'd heard and seen on the previous afternoon, what she'd discovered on the previous night, and how both related to one of the reports Emily had just read out from the log. She wondered why she hadn't realised the truth before. Rachel Winfield had revealed it to her. She just hadn't seen its wider application. “The break-ins in those beach huts, Em. What was nicked from them?”

  Emily looked up. “Come on, Barb. You can't be thinking that the beach hut break-ins are the connection we're looking for.”

  “Perhaps not to Querashi's murder,” Barbara agreed, “but they might fit somewhere. What was taken?”

  Emily flipped through several of the printout's pages. She appeared to read more closely than she had on her first run through the information, but she rejected its import by saying, “Salt cellars. Pepper mills. Christ, it's nothing but rubbish. Who would want a sampler? Or a badminton set? I can understand lifting someone's calor gas stove—you could use it or sell it, couldn't you—but what about this: a framed photograph of Great-gran drooling under a beach umbrella?”

  “That's it, then,” Barbara said urgently. “That's the whole point: selling what's been nicked. That's just the sort of junk people flog at car boot sales, Em. It's the kind of rubbish the Ruddocks were moving from their sitting room to their car yesterday afternoon. And it's just like the junk that I found in Trevor Ruddock's back pack on the pier last night. That's what he was doing between the time he was with Rachel Win-field and when he showed up for work at the pier: nicking goodies from the beach huts to supplement the family's income.”

  “Which, if you're right—”

  “Bet on it.”

  “—clears him off our slate.” Emily bent eagerly over the report. “But what—goddamn what—puts Malik back on it?”

  Her telephone rang and she muttered a curse. She lifted the receiver and continued to study the report. She said, “Barlow here …Ah. Well done, Frank. Take him into interrogation. We'll b
e with you directly.” She replaced the receiver and tossed the report on her desk. “We finally had a match from S04 on those fingerprints on Querashi's Nissan,” she told Barbara. “DC Eyre's just brought our boy in.”

  THEIR BOY WAS locked into the same interrogation room that had previously been occupied by Fahd Kumhar. One look at him told Barbara that they'd managed to track down Querashi's putative lover. He fit the description perfectly. He was a slight and wiry man, with close-cropped blond hair, a gold eyebrow ring, and ears that displayed studs, hoops, and—hanging from one lobe—a plastic-topped safety pin generally used on an infant's nappie. He also had a lip ring, this one silver with a tiny bauble dangling from it. A skimpy T-shirt with its arms ripped off revealed a bicep tattooed with what at first appeared to be a large lily with the words gam me spelled out beneath it. A closer look, however, revealed that the flower's stamen was actually a priapus. Charming, Barbara thought when she saw this. She liked the subtle touch.

  “Mr. Cliff Hegarty,” Emily said as she closed the door. “Good of you to come in for some questions.”

  “Didn't have much choice, far as I c'n see,” Hegarty said. When he spoke, he displayed the whitest and most perfect teeth Barbara had ever seen. “Two blokes showed up and asked me if I minded coming down to the station. I always like the way cops make it sound like you got some alternative when it comes to assisting with their inquiries.”

  Emily wasted no time getting down to business. Hegarty's fingerprints, she told him, had been found on the car of a murdered man called Haytham Querashi. The car itself had been found at the crime scene. Would Mr. Hegarty explain how they got there?

  Hegarty crossed his arms. It was a movement that displayed his tattoo to greater effect. He said, “I can phone a solicitor if I want.” His lip ring caught the overhead lighting as he spoke.

  “You may,” Emily replied. “But as I haven't even read you the caution, your need for a solicitor intrigues me.”

  “I didn't say I need one. I didn't say I want one. I just said I could phone one if I want.”

  “And your point is?”

  His tongue slid from his mouth and darted, lizard-like in its speed, round his lips. “I can tell you what you want to know, and I'm willing to do it. But you got to guarantee that my name gets kept away from the press.”

  “I'm not in the habit of making anyone guarantees of anything.” Emily sat across the table from him. “And considering the fact that your prints were found at the scene of a murder, you're in no position to be making deals.”

  “Then I don't talk.”

  “Mr. Hegarty,” Barbara interposed, “we had the i.d. on your dabs off S04 in London. My guess is that you know the score: A London i.d. means you're sitting on a record of arrest. D'you need it pointed out that it looks a little dicey for a bloke if a felon's prints are associated with a murder and the bloke and the felon are one and the same?”

  “I never hurt anyone,” Hegarty said defensively. “In London or in anyplace else. And I'm not a felon. What I did was between two adults, and just because one of the adults was paying, it wasn't like I ever had to force anyone into it. Besides, I was just a kid then. If you coppers paid more attention to stopping real crime and less attention to rousting blokes trying to make a few honest quid by using their bodies just like a coal miner or a ditch digger uses his, then this country would be a better place to live.”

  Emily didn't argue with the creative comparison between manual labourers and male prostitutes. “Look. A solicitor can't keep your name out of the paper, if that's why you want one. And I can't guarantee that someone from the Standard won't be camped on your doorstep when you go home. But the quicker we get you in and out of here, the less likely that possibility is.”

  He considered this, lizard-tonguing his lips once again. His biceps tightened and the phallus posing as the lily's stamen flexed suggestively. He finally said, “It's like this, okay? There's another bloke. Him and I, we been together awhile. Four years, to be specific. I don't want him to know about …well, about what I'm going to tell you. He already suspects but he doesn't know. And I want to keep it that way.”

  Emily consulted a clipboard that she'd picked up from reception on her way downstairs. She said, “You have a business, I see.”

  “Shit. I can't tell Gerry you been after me about the Distractions. He already doesn't like me making them. He's always after me to be doing something legit—legit according to his definition of legit—and if he finds out that I've had some aggro from the cops—”

  “And I see this business is in the Balford Industrial Estate,” Emily continued unperturbed. “Which is where Malik's Mustards is. Which is where Mr. Querashi was employed. We will, of course, be speaking to every businessman in the industrial estate in the course of our investigation. Does this meet your needs, Mr. Hegarty?”

  Hegarty blew out the breath he'd taken in order to voice further protest. Clearly, he'd received the implicit message. He said, “Yeah. It does. Okay.”

  “Right then.” Emily briskly switched on the cassette recorder. “Begin with how you knew Mr. Querashi. We are correct in assuming you knew him, I take it?”

  “I knew him,” Hegarty said. “Yeah. I knew the bloke all right.”

  They'd met in Clacton market square. Cliff had taken to going there when he was caught up at work. He went for the shopping and for what he called “a bit of larking about, if you know what I mean. It just gets to be such a drag when you're with one bloke day in and day out. Larking about cuts the boredom, see? And that's all it was. Just larking about.”

  He'd seen Querashi checking out some counterfeit Hermés scarves. He hadn't thought much of him—”dark meat not gen'rally being my preference”—until the Asian raised his head and gave him the eye. “I'd seen him round Malik's before,” Hegarty said. “But I never met him and I never gave him much of a thought. But when he looked at me, I knew what was what. It was a ginger look, and no mistaking. So I went to the toilets. He followed directly. And that's how it started.”

  True love, Barbara thought.

  He'd thought it would be a one-off, Hegarty explained, which is what he wanted and what he usually got when he went to the market square. But that's not how Querashi had wanted it. What Querashi had wanted was a permanent—if illicit—liaison, and the fact that Cliff was committed elsewhere served the Pakistani's essential needs. “He told me he was engaged to Malik's daughter, but the deal between them was going to be on paper only. She needed him to be legit. He needed her for the same reason.”

  “To be legit?” Barbara interjected. “Is the Malik girl lesbian?”

  “She's in the club,” Hegarty answered. “Least, that's what Hayth told me about her.”

  Bloody hell, Barbara thought. “Was Mr. Querashi certain that she's pregnant?” she clarified.

  “The bird told him herself, he said. She told him straightaway when they met. He figured it was fine because while he could've shagged her, he knew that shagging a woman was going to be a real chore. So if they could pass the kid off as his, the better. He'd look like he'd done the husband business on his wedding night, and if the kid was a boy, he'd be in clover and not have to bother with the wife any longer.”

  “And all the time he'd have his assignations with you.”

  “That was the plan, yeah. It suited me as well because, like I said, having only one bloke day in and day out…” He lifted his fingers by way of a shrug. “This gave me a bit on the side, so it wasn't always Gerry, Gerry, Gerry.”

  Emily continued taking Hegarty through his paces, but Barbara's mind was on overdrive. If Sahlah Malik was pregnant, and if Querashi wasn't the father, there could be only one person who was. Life begins now took on a whole new meaning. And so did the fact that Theodore Shaw had no alibi for the night of the murder. All he'd needed to do was sail his cabin cruiser from Balford Marina down the main channel so as to round the north point of the Nez and gain access to the area where Haytham Querashi fell to his death. The question w
as: Could he have taken the boat from the marina without being seen?

  “We used the pillbox on the beach,” Hegarty was explaining to Emily. “No place else was safe enough. Hayth had a place in the Avenues—where he was supposed to live once he and the girl got spliced—but we couldn't go there cause Gerry's working nights on it, fixing it up.”

  “And on Gerry's work nights, you met Querashi?”

  “That's how it was.”

  They couldn't meet at the Burnt House for fear that Basil Treves—“that limp-dick Treves” was how Hegarty identified him—would tell someone, specifically Akram Malik, his fellow town councillor. They couldn't meet in Jaywick Sands because the community was small and word could get back to Gerry, who wasn't about to put up with his lover doing the business with other blokes. “AIDS and all,” Hegarty added as if he felt the need to explain Gerry's incomprehensible position to the police.

  So they met in the pillbox on the beach. And that's where Cliff was, waiting for Querashi, on the night he died.

  “I saw it happen,” he said, and his eyes grew cloudy as if he were revisiting what he'd seen that night. “It was dark, but I saw the lights of his car when he got there cause he parked near the edge of the cliff. He came to the steps and looked round, like he'd heard something. I could tell that, because I could see his silhouette.”

  After a pause at the top of the steps, Querashi had begun his descent. His fall began not five steps from the top. He went down hard and toppled—head over heels over head over heels—all the way to the bottom of the cliff.