Deception on His Mind

  Akram said nothing. His face was grave.

  “Sahlah. Bahin, you know we were here. I asked for you. I asked Muni to fetch you. He would have done so. He would have gone to your room and instructed you to—”

  “No, Yumn. That isn't how it was.” Sahlah spoke so carefully that it seemed as if she set each word on a thin sheet of ice and wished to be diligent about not fracturing it. She seemed to be realising what each of her words meant as she said them. “Muni wasn't here. He wasn't in the house. And …” She hesitated. Her face was stricken as, perhaps, she understood the import of what she was about to say, and she fully comprehended how her words would devastate the lives of two innocent little boys. “And neither were you, Yumn. You weren't here either.”

  “I was!” Yumn cried. “How dare you say that I wasn't here! What are you thinking, you stupid girl?”

  “Anas had one of his nightmares,” Sahlah said. “I went in to him. He was screaming and Bishr had started to cry as well. I thought, Where is Yumn? Why doesn't she come to them? How can she sleep so well that she doesn't hear this terrible noise in the very next room? I even thought at the time that you were just too lazy to get out of bed. But you're never too lazy when it comes to the boys. You never have been.”

  “Insolent!” Yumn jumped to her feet. “I insist that you say I was in this house. I'm your brother's wife! I command your obedience. I order you to tell them.”

  And there it was, Barbara realised. The motive itself. Buried deeply within a culture she knew so little about that she had failed to see it. But she saw it now. And she saw how it had worked its desperate energy within the mind of a woman who had nothing else to recommend herself to her in-laws but a sizable dowry and the ability to reproduce. She said, “But Sahlah wouldn't have had to obey any longer if she married Querashi, would she? Only you would be left having to do that, Yumn. Obeying your husband, obeying your mother-in-law, obeying everyone, including your own sons eventually.”

  Yumn refused to submit. She said, “Sus,” to Wardah. “Abby,” to Akram. And “Your grandsons’ mother,” to them both.

  Akram's face closed down, shuttering itself effectively and completely. Barbara felt a chill run down her spine as she saw in that instant that Yumn had simply ceased to exist in the mind of her father-in-law.

  Wardah took up her embroidery. Sahlah leaned forward. She opened the photograph album. She cut Yumn's likeness from the first of the pictures. No one spoke as her image, loosened from the family group, fluttered to the carpet at Sahlah's feet.

  “I am …” Yumn grasped for words. “The mother …” She faltered. She looked to each of them. But no one met her gaze. “The sons of Muhannad,” she said in desperation. “All of you will listen. You will do as I say.”

  Emily moved. She crossed the room and took Yumn's arm. “You'll need to get dressed,” she told the woman.

  Yumn cast a look over her shoulder as Emily drew her towards the door. She said, “Whore,” to Sahlah. “In your room. In your bed. I heard you, Sahlah. I know what you are.”

  Barbara looked cautiously from Sahlah to her parents, breath held and waiting for their reaction. But she could see on their faces that they discounted Yumn's accusation. She was, after all, a woman who had deceived them once and would be willing to deceive them yet again.

  T WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT WHEN BARBARA FINALLY returned to the Burnt House Hotel. She was wrung out. But not so much so that she failed to note the blessed stirring of a breeze from the sea. It struck her cheeks as she climbed out of the Mini, wincing as the pain in her chest told her of the rough usage she'd made of her unhealed ribcage during the day. For a moment, she stood in the car park and carefully breathed in the salt air, hoping that its long-touted medicinal properties might hurry her healing along.

  In the corona of silver light from one of the streetlamps, she could see the first wisps of fog—so long anticipated—finally coming to the shore. Hallelujah, she thought at the sight of the fragile feathers of vapour. Never had the potential return of a damp and dreary English summer seemed so bloody good to her.

  She scooped up her shoulder bag and trudged to the door of the hotel. She felt weighed down by the case, despite—or perhaps because of—having been the means of bringing it to a conclusion. She didn't have to look far to find a reason for feeling so burdened, however. She'd seen the reason first hand, and she'd heard it spoken as well.

  What she'd seen had been in the faces of the elder Maliks as they sought a way to come to terms with the enormity of their beloved son's crimes against his own people. He had represented the future to his parents—their own future and the future of their family stretching out towards infinity, each generation more successful than the last. His had been the promise of security in their old age. He had been the foundation upon which they'd built the larger part of their lives. With his flight—more, with the reason for his flight—all of that had been destroyed. What they might have anticipated for him and expected from him as their only son was gone forever. What was left in place of their hopes was ignominy, a family disaster turned into a permanent nightmare and very real disgrace by their daughter-in-law's culpability in the murder of Haytham Querashi.

  What Barbara had heard was Sahlah's quiet reply to the question she'd asked the girl out of her parents’ hearing. What will you do now? she'd wanted to know. What will you do …about everything that's happened? Everything, Sahlah. It hadn't been her business, of course, but with the thought of so many lives being ruined by one man's greed and one woman's need to cement her position of superiority, Barbara had felt anxious for any indication of reassurance telling her that something good would arise from the devastation fallen upon these people. I'll remain with my family, Sahlah had told her in reply with a voice so steady and sure that there was no doubt that nothing could move her from her resolve. My parents have no one else, and the children will need me now, she'd said. Barbara had thought, And what do you need, Sahlah? But she hadn't asked a question that she'd come to realise was utterly foreign to a woman of this culture.

  She sighed. She realised that every time she felt she'd got a leg up on understanding her fellow man, something happened to whip the rug out from under her. And these past few days had been one long session of energetic rug whipping, as far as she could see. She'd begun in awe of a CID diva; she'd concluded in a stunned recognition that her chosen exemplar had feet of clay. And at the end of the day, Emily Barlow was really no different from the woman they'd just arrested for murder, each of them seeking nothing more than the means—however fruitless and destructive—to order her world.

  The hotel door opened before Barbara could put her hand on the knob. She started. All the lights were out on the ground floor. In the shadows, she had failed to see that someone had been awaiting her arrival, seated in the old porter's chair that stood just inside the entry.

  Oh God. Not Treves, she thought wearily. The idea of another round of cloaks-and-daggers with the hotelier was too much for her. But then she saw the gleam of an incandescently laundered white shirt, and a moment later she heard his voice.

  “Mr. Treves wouldn't hear of leaving the door unlocked for you,” Azhar said. “I told him I'd wait and lock up myself. He didn't like that idea, but I expect that he could see no way round it other than by giving direct offence, rather than his more usual, oblique brand of insult. I do think he intends to count the silver in the morning, however.” Despite the words, there was a smile in his voice.

  Barbara chuckled. “And he'll do the counting in your presence, no doubt.”

  “No doubt,” Azhar said. He closed the door behind her and turned the key in the lock. “Come,” he said.

  He led the way into the darkened lounge, where he lit a single lamp next to the fireplace and took himself behind the bar. He poured two fingers of Black Bush into a tumbler and slid this across the mahogany to Barbara. He poured a bitter lemon for himself. That done, he came round the bar and joined her at one of the tables, placing his cigarettes at he
r disposal.

  She told him all of it, from start to finish. She left out nothing. Not Cliff Hegarty, not Trevor Ruddock, not Rachel Winfield, not Sahlah Malik. She told him the part Theo Shaw had played and where Ian Armstrong fit into the picture. She told him what their earliest suspicions had been, where those suspicions had led them, and how they'd ended up in the Maliks’ sitting room, arresting someone they'd never once suspected could be guilty of the crime.

  “Yumn?” Azhar said in some confusion. “Barbara, how can this be?”

  Barbara told him how. Yumn had been to see the murdered man, and she'd done this without the knowledge of the Malik family. She'd gone in a chā—either her bow to propriety or her need for disguise—and she'd managed the trip without anyone from the Malik household being aware that she'd done so. A good look at the structure of their house, particularly at the position of the driveway and the garage in relation to the sitting room and the bedrooms upstairs, demonstrated the ease with which she could have taken one of the cars without the rest of the family ever knowing. And if she'd done this when the boys were in bed, when Sahlah was occupied with her jewellery making, when Akram and Wardah were at their prayers or in the sitting room, no one would ever have been the wiser. How, after all, could Yumn have failed at what the police had concluded was simplicity itself: watching Haytham Querashi long enough to realise that he went regularly to the Nez, taking a Zodiac round to the east side of the promontory on the night in question, stringing a single wire across a crumbling stairwell, sending him to his death?

  “We knew all along and we said all along that a woman could have done it,” Barbara said. “We just failed to see that Yumn had a motive and the opportunity to carry the plan out.”

  “But what need did she have to kill Haytham Querashi?” Azhar asked.

  And Barbara explained that as well. But when she'd recited Chapter and verse on Yumn's need to be rid of Querashi in order to keep Sahlah in her position of subordination in the household, Azhar looked doubtful. He lit a cigarette, inhaled, and examined the tip of it before he spoke.

  “Does your case against Yumn rely upon this?” he asked cautiously.

  “And upon the family's testimony. She wasn't in the house, Azhar. And she claimed to be upstairs with Muhannad when Muhannad was miles away in Colchester, a fact that's been confirmed, by the way.”

  “But to a good defence counsel the family's testimony will be minor points. They could be attributed to confusion about the dates in question, to animosity towards a difficult daughter-in-law, to a family's desire to protect whom the defence might call the real killer: a man conveniently on the run in Europe. Even if Muhannad's brought back to this country for trial on smuggling charges, a prison term for smuggling would be shorter than a term for premeditated murder. Or so the defence can argue, seeking to prove that the Maliks have reason to wish guilt upon someone other than Muhannad.”

  “But they've disowned him anyway.”

  “Indeed,” Azhar agreed. “But what Western jury is going to understand the impact that being cast out of one's family has for an Asian?”

  He looked at her frankly. There was no mistaking the invitation in his words. Now was the time that they could talk about his own story: how it had begun and how it had ended. She could learn about the wife in Hounslow, the two children he'd left behind with her. She could discover how he'd met Hadiyyah's mother and she could learn about the forces that had worked within him, making a lifetime of disjunction from his family worth the experience of loving a woman who had been deemed forbidden to him.

  She remembered once reading the seven-word excuse that a film director had used to explain the betrayal of his longtime love in favour of a girl thirty years his junior. “The heart wants what the heart wants,” he had said. But Barbara had long since wondered if what the heart wanted had, in reality, anything to do with the heart at all.

  Yet had Azhar not followed his heart—if that, indeed, had been the body part involved—Khalidah Hadiyyah would not have existed. And that would have doubled the tragedy of falling in love and walking away from love's possibility. So perhaps Azhar had acted for the best when he'd chosen passion over duty. But who could really say?

  “She's not coming back from Canada, is she?” Barbara settled on asking. “If, in fact, she's even gone to Canada at all.”

  “She's not coming back,” Azhar admitted.

  “Why haven't you told Hadiyyah? Why're you letting her cling to hope?”

  “Because I've been clinging to hope as well. Because when one falls in love, anything seems possible between two people, no matter the differences in their temperaments or in their cultures. Because—most of all—hope is always the last of our feelings to wither and die.”

  “You miss her.” Barbara stated the fact, so readily apparent beneath his tranquil reserve.

  “Every moment of the day,” he replied. “But this will pass eventually. All things do.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray. Barbara tossed down the rest of her Irish whiskey. She could have done with another one, but she took that feeling as an uneasy warning sign. Getting soused wouldn't clarify anything, and feeling the need to get soused in the first place was a fairly good sign that something inside her needed clarification. But later, she thought. Tomorrow. Next week. Next month. In a year. Tonight she was just too bloody exhausted to mine her psyche for the valuable ore of understanding why she felt what it was that she felt.

  She rose. She stretched. She winced at the pain. “Yeah. Well,” she said in conclusion. “I expect that if we wait long enough, troubles sort themselves out, don't they?”

  “Or we die without understanding them,” he said. But he softened the words with his appealing smile. It was wry but warm, making an offer of friendship.

  Barbara wondered fleetingly if she wanted to accept the offer. She wondered if she really wanted to face the unknown and take the risk of engaging her heart—there it was again, that flaming, unreliable organ—where it might well be broken. But then she realised that, insidious arbiter of behaviour that it was, her heart was already entirely engaged and had been so from the moment she'd encountered the man's elfin daughter. What, after all, was so terrifying about adding one more person to the crew of the largely untidy ship upon which she appeared to be sailing in her life?

  They left the lounge together and started up the stairs in the darkness. They didn't speak again until they'd reached the door of Barbara's room. Then it was Azhar who broke the silence.

  “Will you join us for breakfast in the morning, Barbara Havers? Hadiyyah will want that especially.” And when she didn't answer at once, considering—with some guiltless delight—what another morning of dining with the Asians would do to throw a spanner into Basil Treves’ separate but equal philosophy of innkeeping, he went on. “And for me, too, it would be a pleasure.”

  Barbara smiled. “I'd like that,” she said.

  And she meant those words, despite the complications they brought to her present, despite the uncertainty they gave to her future.

  TTEMPTING, AS AN AMERICAN, TO WRITE ABOUT the Pakistani experience in Great Britain was an enormous undertaking that I couldn't have begun—let alone completed—without the assistance of the following individuals.

  First and foremost, I owe a significant debt of gratitude to Kay Ghafoor, whose honesty and enthusiasm for this project laid the groundwork upon which I built the structure of the novel.

  As always, I'm indebted to my police sources in England. I thank Chief Inspector Pip Lane of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary for providing me with information on everything from Armed Response Vehicles to Interpol. I also thank him for liaising between me and the Essex police force. I thank Intelligence Officer Ray Chrystal of the Clacton Intelligence Unit for the background information he provided, Detective Inspector Roger Cattermole for giving me access to his incident room, Gary Elliot of New Scotland Yard for an insider's tour.

  I'm additionally indebted to William Tullberg o
f Wiltshire Trackle-ments and to Carol Irving of Crabtree and Evelyn, who assisted in my initial search for a suitable family-operated factory, to Sam Llewelyn and Bruce Lack for nautical details, and to Sue Fletcher—my editor at Hodder Stoughton—for throwing her support, her assistance, and the resourceful and redoubtable Bettina Jamani behind this endeavor.

  In Germany, I thank Veronika Kreuzhage and Christine Kruttschnitt for assisting with police procedure and Hamburg information.

  In the United States, I thank Dr. Tom Ruben and Dr. H. M. Upton for once again supplying me with medical information. I thank my assistant Cindy Murphy for keeping the ship afloat in Huntington Beach. And I thank my writing students for challenging me in my approach to this work: Patricia Fogarty, Barbara Fryer, Tom Fields, April Jackson, Chris Eyre, Tim Polmanteer, Elaine Medosch, Carolyn Honigman, Reggie Park, Patty Smiley, and Patrick Kersey.

  And for personal reasons, I thank some wonderful people for their friendship and support: Lana Schlemmer, Karen Bohan, Gordon Globus, Gay Hartell-Lloyd, Carolyn and Bill Honigman, Bonnie SirKegian, Joan and Colin Randall, Georgia Ann Treadaway, Gunilla Sondell, Marilyn Schulz, Marilyn Mitchell, Sheila Hillinger, Virginia Westover-Weiner, Chris Eyre, Dorothy Bodenberg, and Alan Bardsley.

  I owe many debts to Kate Miciak, my excellent longtime editor at Bantam, and none so many as were incurred with the creation of this novel. And last, but certainly far from least, I thank my warrior agents at William Morris—Robert Gottlieb, Stephanie Cabot, and Marcy Posner—for all that they're doing to support my work in progress and to promote the finished product both in the United States and around the world.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR