Deception on His Mind (26 page)

Thinking of the receipt, she glanced at the till. Next to this with its cover curled open lay a booklet of receipts heretofor unused. Barbara registered their colour. They were white. And the receipt from Querashi's room was yellow.

She saw upon this latter paper what she might have noted before had she not been concentrating on the name
Sablah Malik,
the phrase ‘Life begins now,’ and the cost of the item. Printed in minuscule letters at the bottom of the page were two more words:
Business Copy.

“This is the shop's receipt, isn't it?” she asked Rachel Winfield and her mother. “The customer gets the original white one from the book by the till. The shop keeps the yellow as a record of the sale.”

Connie Winfield interjected hastily, “Oh, we're never as clever as that, are we, Rache? We just tear the receipt off and shove one of the two copies over. I don't expect we mind much which one they get, so long as we keep one for ourselves. Isn't that so, love-boodle?”

But Rachel, it seemed, had realised her mother's mistake. She blinked hard when Barbara reached for the receipt book. Those documenting previous sales were folded back along with the booklet's cover. Barbara leafed through them. Every copy left in was yellow.

She saw they were numbered and she riffled through the pages to find the original of the copy she had in her possession. It was receipt number 2395: 2394 and 2396 were in book in yellow, and 2395 wasn't there in either colour.

Barbara closed the book, saying, “Is this always in the shop? What do you do with it when you lock up for the night?”

“It goes under the cash drawer in the till,” Connie said. “Fits snug as a bug. Why? Have you found something wrong with it? God knows me and Rache are a bit loose when it comes to our bookkeeping, but we've never done something
illegal.”
She laughed. “You can't cook the books when the chef's yourself, if you know what I mean. There's no one to cheat. ‘Course, I suppose we could cheat the artists if we had a mind to, but that'd catch up with us in the end because we give them an accounting twice a year and they have the right to go over our books themselves. So if we have any sense at all—and I like to think that we do, mind you—we can—”

“This receipt was among a dead man's belongings,” Barbara cut in.

Connie gulped and raised a closed fist to her sternum. And she kept her eyes so fixed to Barbara that it seemed only too clear whose face she was determined not to glance at. Even when she spoke, she didn't look at her daughter. “Fancy that, Rache. How d'you suppose it happened? Are you talking about that bloke from the Nez, Sergeant? I mean, you're the police and that bloke's the only dead man round here that the police are interested in. So it must be him. He must be the dead man. Yes?”

“The same,” Barbara said.

“Fancy that,” Connie breathed. “I couldn't say for money how he came to have one of our receipts. What about you, love-boodle? D'you know anything about this, Rache?”

One of Rachel's hands closed over a fold in her skirt. It was one of those Asian skirts, Barbara noted for the first time, the translucent sort that were sold in open air markets all over the country. The skirt didn't exactly tie the girl to the Asian community. But it also didn't extricate her from a situation in which her reluctance to speak was indicating that she was—however tangentially—involved.

“Don't know a thing,” Rachel said faintly. “P'rhaps that bloke picked it up off the street or something. It has Sahlah Malik's name on it. He would have recognised that. P'rhaps he meant to give it back to her and he never had the chance.”

“How would he have known Sahlah Malik?” Barbara asked.

Rachel's hand jerked on the skirt. “Didn't you say that him and Sahlah—”

“The story was in the local rag, Sergeant,” Connie put in. “Rache and I c'n both read, and the paper said this bloke was here to marry Akram Malik's daughter.”

“And you know nothing more than what you read in the paper?” Barbara asked.

“Not a thing more,” Connie said. “You, Rache?”

“Nothing,” Rachel said.

Barbara doubted that. Connie was too determinedly loquacious. Rachel was too taciturn. There was a fishing expedition to embark upon here, but she would have to return when she had better bait. She took out one of her cards. Scrawling the name of the Burnt House on it, she told the two women to phone her if anything jogged their memories. She gave the Kennedy bracelet a final scrutiny and tucked the receipt for AK-162 among her own belongings.

She ducked out of the shop but glanced back quickly. Both women were watching her. Whatever they knew, they would talk about eventually. People did that when the conditions were right. Perhaps, Barbara thought, the sight of that missing golden bracelet would light a fire beneath the Winfields and defrost their tongues. She needed to find it.

R
ACHEL LOCKED HERSELF
in the loo. The moment the sergeant moved out of their range of vision, she bolted into the back room. She dashed down the passage created between the wall and a freestanding row of shelves. The loo was next to the shop's back door, and she made for this and bolted the door behind her.

She pressed her hands together to stop their shaking, and when she was unsuccessful at doing this, she used both of them to turn on the tap in the small, triangular basin. She was burning hot and icy cold at the same time, which didn't seem possible. She knew there was a procedure to follow when physical sensations like these came over one, but she couldn't have said for love or money what the procedures were. She settled on splashing her face with water, and she was splashing away when Connie banged on the door.

“You get out here, Rachel Lynn,” she ordered. “We got some talking to do, you and me.”

Rachel gasped, “Can't. I'm being sick.”

“Being sick, my little toe,” Connie snapped. “You going to open this door for me, or am I going to axe it in to get you?”

“I had to go the whole time she was here,” Rachel said, and she lifted her skirt to sit on the toilet for the complete effect.

“I thought you said you were being sick.” Connie's voice had the sound of triumph associated with mothers who catch their daughters in a lie. “Isn't that what you just said? So what is it, Rachel Lynn? You sick? You going? What?”

“Not
that
kind of sick,” Rachel said. “The other. You know. So c'n I have a bit of privacy, please?”

There was a silence. Rachel could imagine her mother tapping her small and shapely foot against the floor. It was what she usually did when she was planning a course of action.

“Give me a minute, Mum,” Rachel pleaded. “My stomach's all clenched up on itself. Listen. Is that the shop door ringing?”

“Don't play with me, girl. I'll be watching the clock. And I know how long it takes to do what in the loo. You got that, Rache?”

Rachel heard her mother's sharp footsteps fading as she headed to the front of the building. She knew that she'd bought herself a few minutes only, and she struggled to gather her fragmented thoughts together in order to form them into a plan. You're a fighter, Rache, she told herself in much the same mental voice she'd used in childhood when preparing every morning for another round of bullying from her merciless schoolmates. So think.
Think.
It doesn't matter two pins if everyone in the world goes and lets you down, Rache, because you've still got yourself and yourself is what counts.

But she hadn't believed that two months before when Sahlah Malik had revealed her decision to submit herself to her parents’ wishes for an arranged marriage to an unknown man from Pakistan. Instead of remembering that she still had herself, she'd been horrified at the thought of losing Sahlah. After which, she'd felt both lost and abandoned. And at the end, she'd believed herself cruelly betrayed. The ground upon which she'd long had faith that her future was built had fractured suddenly and irreparably beneath her, and in that instant she'd forgotten life's most important lesson completely. For the ten years following her birth, she'd lived with the certain belief that success, failure, and happiness were available to her through the effort of a single individual on earth: Rachel Lynn Winfield. Thus, the taunts of her schoolmates had stung her but they'd never scarred her, and she'd grown adept at forging her own way. But meeting Sahlah had changed all that, and she'd allowed herself to see their friendship as central to what the future held.

Oh, it had been stupid—
stupid
—to think in such a fashion, and she knew that now. But in those first terrible moments when Sahlah had revealed her intentions in that calm and gentle way of hers—the way that had made her, too, the victim of bullies who wouldn't
dare
to raise a nasty hand against Sahlah Malik or to voice a slur about the hue of her skin whenever Rachel Winfield was in the vicinity—all that Rachel could think was, What about me? What about us? What about our plans? We were saving up to put money on a flat, we were going to have pine furniture in it with big deep cushions, we were going to set up a workshop for you on one side of your bedroom so you could make your jewellery without your nephews getting into your trays, we were going to collect shells on the beach, we were going to have two cats, you were going to teach me to cook, and I was going to teach you … what? What on earth could I have taught you, Sahlah? What on earth had I ever to offer you?

But she hadn't said that. Instead, she'd said, “Married? You? Married, Sahlah? Who? Not … but I thought you always said that you couldn't—”

“A man from Karachi. A man my parents have chosen for me,” Sahlah had said.

“You mean …? You can't mean a stranger, Sahlah. You can't mean someone you don't even
know.”

“It's the way my parents married. It's the way most of my people marry.”

“Your people, your
people,”
Rachel had scoffed. She'd been trying to laugh the idea off, to make Sahlah see how ludicrous it was. “You're English,” she said. “You were born in England. You're no more Asian than I am. What d'you know about him, anyway? Is he fat? Is he ugly? Does he have false teeth? Does he have hairs sprouting from his nose and his ears? And how old is he? Is he some bloke of sixty with varicose veins?”

“His name is Haytham Querashi. He's twenty-five years old. He's been to university—”

“As if that makes him a good candidate for husband,” Rachel said bitterly. “I suppose he's got lots of money as well. Your dad would go in big for that. Like he did with Yumn. Who cares what sort of monkey crawls into your bed just so long as Akram gets what he wants from the deal? And that's it, isn't it? Isn't your dad getting something as well? Tell the truth, Sahlah.”

“Haytham will work for the business, if that's what you're asking,” Sahlah said.

“Hah! See what they're doing? He's got something they want—Muhannad and your dad—and the only way they can get it is to hand you over to some oily bloke you don't even know. I can't believe you're doing it.”

“I have no choice.”

“What d'you mean? If you said you didn't want to marry this bloke, you can't tell me your dad would make you do it. He dotes on you. So all you have to do is tell him that you and me, we've got plans. And none of them have to do with marrying some twit from Pakistan you've never even met.”

“I want to marry him,” Sahlah said.

Rachel had gaped at her. “You want …” The immensity of the betrayal cleft her. She hadn't ever thought five simple words could cause such pain, and she had no armour to protect herself from it. “You
want
to marry him? But you don't know him and you don't love him and how can you begin to live such a lie?”

“We'll learn to love,” Sahlah replied. “That's what happened for my parents.”

“And is that what happened for Muhannad? What a joke! Yumn's not his beloved. She's his doormat. You've said so yourself. Do you want that to happen to you? Well, do you?”

“My brother and I are different people.” Sahlah had averted her head when she said this, and a length of her
dupattā
shielded her from view. She was withdrawing, an action that made Rachel want to cling to her even harder.

“Who cares about that? It's how different your brother and this Haybram—”

“Haytham.”

“Whatever he's called. It's how different your brother and he are to each other. And you don't know if they're different at all. And you won't know that, will you, till the first time he smacks you a good one, Sahlah. Just like Muhannad. I've seen Yumn's face after she's had a good one from your wonderful brother. What's to prevent Haykem—”

“Haytham, Rachel.”

“Whatever.
What's to prevent him from doing you the same way?”

“I can't answer that. I don't know the answer yet. When I meet him, I'll see.”

“Just like that?” Rachel asked.

They'd been in the pear orchard beneath the trees, canopied in mid-spring by fragrant blossoms. They'd been sitting on the same teetering bench that they'd sat upon so many times as children when they'd swung their legs and made plans for a future that would now never come. It wasn't fair to be denied what was rightfully hers, Rachel thought, to have snatched from her the one person she had learned to depend upon. Not only was it not fair, though, it also wasn't right. Sahlah had lied to her. She had played along with a game that she'd never intended to complete.

Rachel's sense of loss and betrayal shifted slightly, like ground growing used to a new position once an earthquake has done its work. A budding of anger began to grow within her. And with anger came its companion: revenge.

“My father's told me that I can decide against Haytham when we meet,” Sahlah said. “He won't force me into a marriage if he sees I'm unhappy about it.”

Rachel read her friend's meaning behind the words, however Sahlah sought to make them appear. “But you won't be unhappy about it, will you? No matter what, you're going to marry him. I can see that in you. I know you, Sahlah.”

The bench upon which they sat was old. It rested unevenly on the ground beneath the tree. Sahlah picked at a splinter on the edge of the seat, raising it slowly with the smooth crescent edge of her thumbnail.