Deception on His Mind (53 page)

The DCI again rooted through the files and papers on the top of her desk. She found the file and set the photos of the body to one side. She laid out the pictures of the scene itself. Barbara went to stand behind the DCI's chair, studying the photographs over her shoulder.

“Okay,” Emily said. “Let's go with it. Let's see how it plays with the lover
not
Querashi's killer. On Friday if Querashi's intention was to meet someone, then that person was either already at the Nez waiting for him when Querashi got there or on his way to the rendezvous. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” Barbara continued with the scenario. “So if that person either saw or heard Querashi take the fall or if he found him dead at the bottom of those steps—”

“Then he would have logically assumed it was an accident. He would have chosen two courses of action at that point: leaving the body there for someone else to find or reporting the accident himself.”

“Right. If he wants to keep their liaison secret, he leaves the body. If he doesn't care who knows—”

“He reports it,” Emily finished.

“But the entire picture changes if Querashi's lover actually
saw
something suspicious that night.”

Slowly, Emily's head turned from the photographs until she was meeting Barbara's eyes. She said, “If the lover saw …Christ, Barb. Whoever Querashi was going there to meet must have known it was murder when he fell.”

“So Querashi's lover is out of sight, waiting. He sees the killer string the tripwire, a shadow on the stairs moving about. He doesn't know what he's watching, but when Querashi takes the tumble, he figures it out directly. He even sees the killer remove the wire afterwards.”

“But he can't come forward because he can't let it be known that he's been having a fling,” Emily went on.

“Because he's married,” Barbara said.

“Or involved with someone else.”

“In either case, he can't come forward, but he wants to do something to signal to the police that this is a murder and not an accident.”

“So he moves the body,” Emily finished. “And he tosses the car. Jesus Christ, Barb. D'you know what this means?”

Barbara smiled. “We've got ourselves a flaming witness, Guv.”

“And if the killer knows that,” Emily added grimly, “we also have someone who could be in danger.”

Y
UMN WAS STANDING
at the window, changing the baby's nappie, when she heard the front door close and the sandaled footsteps head down the path towards the street. She looked out to see Sahlah pulling her amber
dupattā
over her thick hair as she hurried to her Miera, parked at the kerb. She was late for work again, but doubtless Akram's wondrous little precious would be forgiven this unfortunate lapse.

She'd spent half an hour in the bathroom with the water running into the tub to cover the sound of her morning retching. But no one really knew that, did they? They thought she was washing herself, an unusual rite for her in the morning—Sahlah was a nighttime bather—but one that was understandable given the mind-numbing heat. Only Yumn knew the truth, Yumn who'd stood outside the door listening carefully, gathering information to store like kernels of corn against the potential famine of Sahlah's failure to please the sister-in-law to whom she owed respect, allegiance, and cooperation.

Such a little whore, Yumn thought as she watched Sahlah climb into the car and crank down both of the windows. Sneak out to meet him in the night, Sahlah, invite him into your room when the house is sleeping, spread your legs for him, join your bodies, rotate your hips, and still the next morning manage to look so pure so innocent so fragile so lovely so precious so …Little
whore.
Like a rotten egg that's perfect on the outside but, once cracked, reveals the corruption within.

The baby whimpered. Yumn looked down to see that instead of removing the soiled nappie from him, she'd inadvertently wrapped it tightly round his leg.

“Beloved,” she said, quickly removing it. “Forgive your thoughtless
ammī-gee,
Bishr.”

He cooed in response, waving arms and legs. She gazed down at him. Naked, he was magnificent.

She used the washing flannel to clean him, drawing it through his legs and carefully wiping his tiny penis. She eased the foreskin back and smoothed the flannel round it. She sang,
“Ammī-gee's
little love, Bishr. Yes. Yes. You are. You're
Ammī-gee's
one true love.”

When he was clean, she didn't reach for a fresh nappie at once. Instead, she admired him. From the shape of him, the strength, and the size, she could tell that he would be just like his father.

His masculinity affirmed her place as a woman. It was her duty to give her husband sons, and she'd done that duty and would continue to do it as long as her body allowed her the privilege. As a consequence, she would not only be cared for in her old age, she would be treasured. And that was more glory than loathsome little Sahlah would ever attain in a thousand lifetimes. She could not hope to be as fertile as Yumn, and she'd already transgressed the tenets of their religion so seriously that she could never redeem herself. She was damaged goods, soiled beyond redemption and ruined beyond the hope of reclamation. She was, indeed, good for nothing more than a life of servitude.

It was such a lovely thought.

“Yes,” Yumn crooned at the baby. “Yes, yes, what a lovely thought indeed.”

She caressed the insignificant appendage between his legs. How incredible it was that such a small scrap of flesh could determine the role this child would play in life. But that is how the Prophet decreed it.

“Men are in charge of us,” Yumn crooned to the baby, “because Allah made one to excel the other. Little Bishr, listen to
Ammī-gee.
Do your duty: shelter, protect, and guide. And seek a woman who knows how to do hers.”

Certainly Sahlah did not. She acted the part of obedient daughter, dutiful younger sister and sister-in-law, subservient and docile as required. But that was only a role she played. The real girl was the one who lay in a bed whose springs creaked rhythmically in the dead of night.

Yumn knew this. And she'd been intent upon holding her tongue about it. True, she'd not
completely
held her tongue. Some types of hypocrisy were not to be born. When Sahlah's morning vomiting had been followed so closely by her agreement to marry the first young man presented to her as a potential husband, Yumn had made the decision to act. She would not be party to so great a deception as the family's flower-like Sahlah had obviously intended to perpetrate upon her fiance.

So she'd gone to Haytham Querashi privately, slipping out of the house on one of the many evenings that Muhannad spent elsewhere. She'd buttonholed the intended bridegroom in his hotel and, sitting knee-to-knee in his garret of a room, she'd done her duty as any religious woman might have done, revealing the one ineradicable impediment to his upcoming marriage to her sister-in-law. The brat Sahlah carried could be got rid of, of course. But her virginity once lost could not be regained.

Haytham, however, had not reacted as Yumn had expected. The announcement,
She's soiled, she's carrying another man's child
had not led where tradition and logic dictated it should lead. In fact, Haytham had been so tranquil at Yumn's revelation that she had experienced a moment of dread in which she'd thought she'd somehow got events confused, with Sahlah's morning retching beginning
after
Haytham's advent instead of before it, making Haytham the father of Sahlah's child.

But she
knew
that this was not the case. She
knew
that Sahlah had been pregnant already when Haytham arrived. Thus his acquiescence to a marriage—taken in conjunction with his utter placidity once informed of Sahlah's sin—could mean only one thing. He'd known about her condition and he'd agreed to marry her anyway. The little bitch was saved, Yumn had realised. She was saved from disgrace and saved from dishonour because Haytham was eager, ready, and willing to take her away from the family home as soon as she wished to leave it.

The situation could not have been one iota more unfair. Having been forced to endure her mother-in-law's extolment of Sahlah's virtues for nearly three years, Yumn had been taking great pleasure in every opportunity she had to torment the girl. She'd heard quite enough about Sahlah's beauty, her artistry with those pitiful baubles she made, her intellectual gifts, her religious piety, her physical perfection, and especially her adherence to duty. Upon that last characteristic of her beloved child, Wardah Malik was fully capable of waxing utterly intolerable. And she had no compunction about invoking the image of Sahlah's earnest docility every time Yumn displeased her. If she overcooked the
sevian,
Wardah was good for twenty minutes on the subject of Sahlah's expertise in the kitchen. If she dared to omit one of the five daily prayers—and she was very likely to forgo the
namdz
of sunrise—she was regaled with a ten-minute discourse about Sahlah's devotion to Islam. If she failed to dust well enough, to scour the bath completely, or to search out every cobweb in the house, her slovenly habits were compared to Sahlah's which were, of course, immaculate. So it had been a source of great enjoyment to Yumn, having a nasty little piece of knowledge to hold over her sister-in-law's head. And it had been a source of even greater enjoyment, knowing how she was going to be able to put that knowledge to use for her own benefit. Yumn had almost had to relinquish all of her dreams about indefinitely holding little Sahlah hostage to her wishes and commands once Haytham declared his intention of marrying her despite her sins. But now Yumn held the girl's future in her palm once again. And in Yumn's palm was where Sahlah Malik so richly deserved to be.

Yumn smiled down at her son. She began to enfold him in the fresh, soft nappie.

“How lovely life is, little god,” she whispered.

And she made a mental list of the duties she would have Sahlah perform when she arrived home that evening.

HE POSSIBILITY OF HAVING A WITNESS TO QUERASHI'S
death invigorated and refocussed the investigation. DCI Barlow began phoning her men on their mobiles, saying, “Everyone who came in contact with Querashi is a potential witness to his murder as of now. I want everyone's alibi and I want it corroborated. Whoever was on the Nez that night, track him down.”

For Barbara's part, she went on her way to phone the fingerprint office in London, using what little influence she had to get S04 to move on the prints that had been lifted from the Nissan. She knew that a match wasn't guaranteed. They would have a match only if the prints on the Nissan had been left by someone once arrested and run through a booking procedure somewhere in the country. But if that was the case, they'd have the best break they could get: an identity, something concrete that was beyond the realm of speculation.

Barbara made the call. Like most support services, the fingerprint people didn't warm to anything suggesting interference from another branch of the legal family, so she used the racial unrest in the town to promote her cause. She finished by saying, “We're sitting on a powder keg out here, and we need your help to diffuse it.”

S04 understood. Everyone wanted their dabs given identities before the sun set on the first day of the investigation. But the sergeant needed to understand that a highly specialised work force such as S04 could only be expected to deal with a limited number of evidential particulars on a given day. “We cannot afford an error,” the department head intoned, “not when guilt or innocence may well ride on a conclusion reached by this organisation.”

Right, right, right, Barbara thought. She told him to do his best and returned to Emily.

“I'm a bird with a lot less clout than I would like to be,” Barbara told her frankly. “They'll do what they can. What's up?”

Emily was in the process of flipping through the contents of a file. She said, “Querashi's picture,” and pulled it out. It was, Barbara saw, the same photograph of the murdered man that had run on the front page of the
Tendring Standard:
Querashi looked simultaneously solemn and harmless. “If Trevor Ruddock's telling the truth about Querashi and his cottaging, there's a chance that someone else saw him in the market square in Clacton. And if someone else saw him, someone may have seen our potential witness with him. I want that witness, Barb. If Ruddock's telling the truth.”