With No One As Witness (29 page)

Griff had turned on the brighter overhead lights. She chose to ignore that. She went to the kitchen where the fridge held a chilled bottle of white Burgundy. She took out two glasses and fetched the corkscrew.

Seeing this, Griff said, “Ulrike, I’ve just got off the river. I’m knackered and there’s just no way—”

She turned round. “That wouldn’t have stopped you a month ago. Anytime, anywhere. Man the torpedoes and damn the consequences. You can’t have forgotten.”

“I haven’t.”

“Good.” She poured the wine and carried a glass over to him. “I like to think of you as eternally ready.” She hooked her arm round his neck and drew him to her. An instant of resistance and then his mouth was on hers. Tongues, more tongues, a lengthy caress, and after a moment his hand sliding from her waist to the side of her breast. Fingers reaching for her nipple. Squeezing. Coaxing her to groan. Heat shooting into her genitals. Yes. Very nice stuff, Griff. She released him abruptly and moved away.

He had the grace to look flustered. He went to a chair—not the sofa—and sat. He said, “You said this was urgent. Emergency. Twenty-five-line whip. Crisis. Chaos. That’s why I came. This is exactly the opposite direction from home, by the way, which means I’ll not even get home now till God knows what time.”

“How unfortunate,” she said. “With duty calling you and all that. And I’m fully aware of your address, Griffin. As you well know.”

“I don’t want a row. Have you brought me here for a row?”

“Why would you think that? Where were you all day?”

He raised his head to the ceiling, one of those martyred male looks of the sort one saw in paintings of dying early Christian saints. He said, “Ulrike, you know my situation. You’ve always known it. You can’t have…What would you have me do? Now or then? Walk out on Arabella when she was five months pregnant? While she was in labour? Now she’s got an infant to contend with? I never gave you the slightest indication—”

“You’re right.” She produced a brittle smile. She could actually feel how frangible it was, and she loathed herself for reacting to him. She saluted him with her wineglass in a mock toast. “You never did. Bully for you. Everything always in the open and on the up-and-up. Don’t ask anyone to wear a blindfold. That’s a very good way to sidestep responsibility.”

He put his wineglass on the table, its contents untouched. He said, “All right. I surrender. White flag. Whatever you want. Why am I here?”

“What did she want?”

“Look, I was late today because I went to the silk-screening shop. I told you that. Not that it’s actually any of your business what Arabella and I—”

Ulrike laughed, although it was somewhat forced, a bad actress on an overlit stage. “I have a fine idea of what Arabella wanted and what you probably gave her…all seven and a half inches of it. But I’m not talking about you and the darling wife. I’m talking about the policewoman. Constable Whatsername with the broken teeth and bad hair.”

“Are you trying to back me into a corner?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about your whole approach. I protest, I call a halt to the way you’re behaving just now, I say enough, I tell you to fuck off, and you’ve got what you want.”

“Which is?”

“My head on a bloody charger, no dancing and no seven veils required.”

“Is that what you think? Is that why you actually think I’ve asked you to come here?” She drained her glass of wine and felt the effect of it almost immediately.

“Are you saying you wouldn’t sack me, given half the chance?”

“In an instant,” she replied. “But that’s not why we’re talking.”

“Then why…?”

“What did she talk to you about?”

“Exactly what you thought she’d talk to me about.”

“And?”

“And?”

“And what did you tell her?”

“What d’you think I told her? Kimmo was Kimmo. Sean was Sean. One was a free-spirit transvestite with the personality of a vaudeville queen, a kid no one in his right mind would want to harm. The other looked like someone who wanted to chew screws for breakfast. I let you know when Kimmo missed a day of assessment. Sean was out of my orbit and on to something else, so I wouldn’t have known if he stopped turning up.”

“That’s all you told her?” She studied him as she asked the question, wondering about what kind of trust could possibly exist between two people who’d betrayed a third.

His eyes had narrowed. He said only, “We agreed.” And as she openly evaluated him, he added, “Or don’t you trust me?”

She didn’t, of course. How could she trust someone who lived by betrayal? But there was a way to test him, and not only that, but a way to fix him in position so that he had to maintain the pretence of cooperation with her, if it was a pretence in the first place.

She went to her canvas holdall. From it, she took the file she’d removed from her office. She handed this over to him.

She watched as his gaze dropped to it, as his eyes took in the label at the top. He looked up at her once he’d read it. “I did what you asked. What am I supposed to do with this, then?”

“What you have to,” she said. “I think you know what I mean.”

WHEN DETECTIVE CONSTABLE BARBARA HAVERS PULLED into the underground carpark at New Scotland Yard the next morning, she was already on her fourth cigarette, not counting the one she’d lit up and sucked down as she made her way from bed to shower. She’d been smoking steadily since leaving her digs, and the always maddening trip from North London had done nothing to improve either her nerves or her mood.

She was used to rows. She’d had run-ins with everyone she’d ever worked with, and she’d even gone so far as to shoot at a superior officer, in the truly advanced row that had cost her her rank and very nearly her job. But nothing that had gone before in her patchy career—not to mention in her life—had affected her as she’d been affected in five minutes of conversation with her neighbour.

She hadn’t intended to take on Taymullah Azhar. Her objective had been to extend a simple invitation to his daughter. Careful research—well, what went for careful research on her part, which was to buy a copy of What’s On, like a tourist come to see the Queen—had informed her that a place called the Jeffrye Museum offered glimpses into social history via models of sitting rooms through the centuries. Wouldn’t it be brilliant for Hadiyyah to accompany Barbara there in order to feed her eager little mind with something other than considerations of the belly rings currently being worn by female pop singers? It would be a journey from North to East London. It would, in short, be edu-bloody-cational. How could Azhar, a sophisticated educator himself, object to that?

Quite easily, as it turned out. When Barbara knocked him up on her way out to her car, he opened the door and he listened politely, as was his habit, with the fragrance of a well-balanced and nutritional breakfast floating out from the flat behind him like an accusation against Barbara’s own morning ritual of Pop-Tart and Players.

“Sort of a double whammy, you could call it,” Barbara finished the invitation, and even as she said it, she wondered where the hell double whammy had come from. “I mean, the museum’s built in a row of old almshouses, so there’s historical and social architecture involved as well. The sort of thing kids pass without knowing what they’re passing, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I thought it might be…” What, she asked herself? A good idea? An opportunity for Hadiyyah? An escape from further punishment?

That last was it, of course. Barbara had passed Hadiyyah’s solemn little gated face in the window one time too many. Enough was bleeding enough, she’d thought. Azhar had made his point. He didn’t need to beat the poor kid over the head with it.

“This is very kind of you, Barbara,” Azhar had said with his usual grave courtesy. “However, in the circumstance in which Hadiyyah and I find ourselves…”

She’d appeared behind him then, having apparently heard their voices. She cried, “Barbara! Hello, hello,” and she peered round her father’s slender body. She said, “Dad, can Barbara not come in? We’re having our breakfast, Barbara. Dad’s made French toast and scrambled eggs. That’s what I’m having. With syrup. He’s having yogurt.” She wrinkled her nose, but not evidently at her father’s choice of food because she went on to say, “Barbara, have you been smoking already? Dad, can Barbara not come in?”

“Can’t, kiddo,” Barbara said hastily so Azhar wouldn’t have to issue an invitation he might not want to issue. “I’m on my way to work. Keeping London safe for women, children, and small furry animals. You know the drill.”

Hadiyyah bounced from foot to foot. “I got a good mark in my maths exam,” she confided. “Dad said he was proud when he saw it.”

Barbara looked at Azhar. His dark face was sombre. “School is very important,” he said to his daughter, although he looked at Barbara as he spoke. “Hadiyyah, please go back to your breakfast.”

“But can’t Barbara come—”

“Hadiyyah.” The voice was sharp. “Have I not just spoken to you? And has Barbara herself not told you that she must go to work? Do you listen to others or merely desire and hear nothing that precludes desire’s fulfillment?”

This seemed a little harsh, even by Azhar’s standards. Hadiyyah’s face, which had been glowing, altered in an instant. Her eyes widened, but not with surprise. Barbara could see she did it to contain her tears. She backed away with a gulp and scooted in the direction of the kitchen.

Azhar and Barbara were left together eyeball to eyeball, he looking like a disinterested witness to a car crash, she feeling the warning sign of heat seeping into her gut. That was the moment when she should have said, “Well. Right. That’s that, then. P’rhaps I’ll see you both later. Ta-ta,” and gone on her way, knowing she was wading out of her depth and mindlessly swimming into someone else’s business. But instead she’d held her neighbour’s gaze and allowed herself to feel the heat and its progression from her stomach to her chest, where it formed a burning knot. When it got there, she spoke.

“That was a bit out of order, don’t you think? She’s just a kid. When’re you planning to give her a break?”

“Hadiyyah knows what she is meant to do,” Azhar replied. “She also knows there are consequences when she goes her own way in defiance.”

“Okay. All right. Got it. Written in stone. Tattooed on my forehead. Whatever you want. But how about punishments fitting the crime? And while we’re at it, how about not humiliating her in front of me?”

“She is not—”

“She is,” Barbara hissed. “You didn’t see her face. And let me tell you this for a lark, all right? Life’s hard enough, especially for little girls. What they don’t need is parents making it harder.”

“She needs to—”

“You want her brought down a peg or two? Want her sorted? Want her to know she’s not numero uno in anyone’s life and she never will be? Just let her out in society, Azhar, and she’ll get the message. She bloody well doesn’t need to hear it from her father.”

Barbara could see she’d gone too far with that. Azhar’s face—always composed—shuttered completely. “You have no children,” he replied. “If one day you find yourself fortunate enough to be a mother, Barbara, you will think otherwise about how and when your child should be disciplined.”

It was the word fortunate and all it implied that allowed Barbara to see her neighbour in an entirely new light. Dirty fighter, she thought. But two could play at that game.

“No wonder she walked out, Azhar. How long did it actually take her to get a reading on you? Too long, I’d guess. But that’s not much of a surprise, is it? After all, she was an English girl, and none of us English girls play the game with all fifty-two cards in the deck, do we?”

That said, she turned and left him, enjoying the coward’s brief triumph at having had the last word. But it was the simple fact that she’d had that word that kept Barbara in raging and internal conversation, with an Azhar who wasn’t present, all the way into Central London. So when she pulled into a parking bay beneath New Scotland Yard, she was still in a state and hardly in the proper frame of mind for a day’s productive employment. She was also light-headed from nicotine.

She stopped in the ladies’ loo to splash some water on her face. She looked in the mirror and hated herself for stooping to examine her image for evidence of what she realized Taymullah Azhar had been seeing for all these months they’d been neighbours: Unfortunate female Homo sapiens, a perfect specimen of everything gone wrong. No chance for a normal life, Barbara. Whatever the hell that was.

“Sod him,” she whispered. Who was he, anyway? Who the bloody hell did he think he was?

She ran her fingers through her chopped-up hair, and she straightened the collar of her blouse, realising she should have ironed it…had she owned an iron. She looked three quarters of the journey towards a fright, but that couldn’t be helped and it didn’t matter. There was a job to do.

In the incident room, she found that the morning briefing was already going on. Superintendent Lynley glanced her way in the middle of listening to something being said by Winston Nkata, and he did not look particularly chuffed as his gaze traveled beyond her to the clock on the wall.

Winston was saying, “…works of wrath or vengeance, ’cording to what the lady at Crystal Moon told me. She looked it up in a book. She handed over a register of shop visitors wanting to be on their newsletter list, and she’s got credit card purchases and postal codes of customers as well.”

“Let’s match the postal codes with the body sites,” Lynley said to him. “Do the same with the register and the credit card purchases. We may get some joy there. What about Camden Lock Market?” Lynley looked towards Barbara. “What did you get from that stall, Constable? Did you stop there this morning?” Which was his way of saying, I trust that’s your reason for walking in here late.

Barbara thought, Holy hell. The run-in with Azhar had wiped every other consideration from her mind. She fumbled round her head for an excuse, but the course of wisdom brought her back from the brink at the last moment. She opted for the truth. “I dropped the ball on that,” she admitted. “Sorry, sir. When I was finished with Colossus yesterday, I…Never mind. I’ll get on to it directly.”