Deception on His Mind (36 page)

For a moment she thought she hadn't been able to hook him, but as the bait of her interest floated in front of him, Theo Shaw made the decision to bite. He handed over the gold wrist cuff, unfastening it with his thumbnail and slipping it off.

“It's great,” Barbara said. “May I …?” She gestured towards the window, and when he nodded, she carried it over. She turned it this way and that with her hand. She said, “The man's a genius, isn't he? I like these swirls. And the metal's perfect. He's the Rembrandt of goldsmiths, if you ask me.” She hoped the artistic allusion was right. What she knew about Rembrandt—not to mention what she knew about gold and jewellery—could easily fit into a teaspoon. She went on to remark on the weight of it, she ran her fingers over the shape of it, she examined its cleverly hidden clasp. And when the time was right, she looked at its inside and saw what she had believed she would see. Three words were engraved in a fluid scroll:
LIFE BEGINS NOW.

Ah. Time to apply the thumbscrews. Barbara returned to the desk and set the bracelet next to the fossilised sponge. Theo Shaw didn't put it on at once. His colour was slightly higher than it had been when Barbara had taken the bracelet from him. He'd seen her read the inscription inside and she had little doubt that she and the young man were about to dance the careful
pas de deux
of how-to-find-out-what-the-rozzers-know. She realised that when the music began, she was going to need to outstep him.

“Makes a nice statement, that,” she said, indicating the bracelet with a nod. “I wouldn't mind finding one on my doorstep some morning. Just the sort of thing one hopes to have passed one's way by a nameless admirer.”

Theo reached for the bracelet and snapped it back on. “It was my dad's,” he said.
Voila,
Barbara thought. He should have kept his mug plugged, but in her experience, the guilty parties so rarely did, feeling compelled to demonstrate their spurious innocence for one and all.

“Your dad's dead, then?”

“My mother as well.”

“Then all of this—” Here she indicated the pier itself followed by the blue prints on the bulletin board. “Is all of this commemorating your parents?”

He looked nonplussed. She went on. “When I came here as a kid, this was Balford Pier. Now it's Shaw Attractions. And the leisure centre—Agatha Shaw Recreational Village. Is that your mum's name?”

His expression cleared. “Agatha Shaw's my grandmother, although she's done duty as my mother since I was six. My parents were killed in a car crash.”

“That must have been rough,” Barbara said.

“Yeah. But … well, Gran was great.”

“She's all you've got left?”

“All that's here. The rest of the family scattered years ago. Gran took us in—I've an older brother trying his luck in Hollywood—and raised us as her second set of kids.”

“Nice to have something to remember your dad by,” Barbara noted, another nod at the bracelet. She wasn't about to let him slither away from the topic at hand with Dickensian recollections of being orphaned and passed along to an ageing relative. She gazed at him fixedly. “Sort of modern to be a family heirloom, though. It looks like it was made last week.”

Theo returned her gaze just as fixedly, although he couldn't prevent the rush of colour on his neck, which gave him away. “I'd never thought of that. But I suppose it does.”

“Yes. Well. It's interesting to run across it like this because, oddly enough, we're on the trail of a Kennedy piece that's very much like it.”

Theo frowned. “On the trail …? Why?”

Barbara avoided a direct answer and went back to the window overlooking the pier. Outside, the Ferris wheel had begun to revolve, lifting a score of happy riders into the air. She said, “How do you know Akram Malik, Mr. Shaw?”

“What?” Clearly, he expected something else.

“You mentioned he phoned you about hiring Trevor Ruddock. That suggests you know each other. I was wondering how.”

“From the Gentlemen's Cooperative.” Theo went on to explain what it was. “We try to help each other out. This was an instance when I could do him favour. He'll do me one in return one day.”

“Is that your only connection with the Maliks?”

He looked from her to the window. Outside, a gull had come to sit on an exhaust fan on the roof of the arcade below them. The bird looked expectant. Barbara did likewise. She knew Theo Shaw was walking a delicate line at the moment. Not knowing what she had already been told about him from other sources, he would have to choose carefully between truth and lie. “Actually, I helped Akram set up his factory's computer system,” he settled on saying. “And I went to junior school here in town with Muhannad. To comprehensive as well, but that was in Clacton.”

“Ah.” Barbara mentally waved away the geography of his relationship with the family. Clacton or Balford hardly mattered. What was important was the connection itself. “You've known them for years, then.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What manner of speaking is that?” Barbara lifted her Coke for another swig. It was doing wonders to settle the earlier consumed whitebait into her digestive system.

Theo followed her lead and took a swallow of Coke himself. “I knew Muhannad from school, but we weren't friends, so I never knew the family until I did their computers at the factory. This was a year ago, perhaps a bit more.”

“So I assume that you know Sahlah Malik as well?”

“I've met Sahlah, yes.” He did what, in Barbara's experience, so many people did when trying to look nonchalant about a piece of information that was causing their insides to shimmy: He continued to look her straight in the eye.

“So you'd recognise her. On the street, say. Or perhaps on the pier. Dressed Muslim or otherwise.”

“I suppose. But I don't see what Sahlah Malik has to do with anything. What's this all about?”

“Have you seen her on the pier in the last few days?”

“No. No, I haven't.”

“When did you last see her?”

“I can't recall. From what I could tell when I was doing their computers, Akram keeps her on a rather short tether. She's the only daughter, and it's their way. What makes you think she was on the pier?”

“She told me she was. She told me she threw a bracelet something like this one”—with a flip of her thumb at his Kennedy gold—”off the end of the pier once she was told that Haytham Querashi was dead. She said it'd been a gift for him and she gave it the toss on Saturday afternoon. But here's what's odd: As far as I've been able to tell, not a soul saw her. What d'you make of that?”

As if of their own volition, his fingers reached for his wrist and closed over the bracelet. “I don't know,” he said.

“Hmm.” Barbara nodded gravely. “It's intriguing, though, isn't it? That no one saw her.”

“It's getting on to high summer. There're scores of people on the pier every day. It's not very likely that one of them would stick in the memory.”

“Perhaps,” Barbara said, “but I've been the length of it, and here's what I noticed: No one's out there in Muslim garb.” Barbara rooted casually through her bag to find her cigarettes. She said, “Mind?” And when he waved her onward with a flick of his fingers, she lit up and said, “Sahlah wears the traditional get-up. Take that with the thought that she'd have had no reason to come onto the pier incognito, and we've got her here wearing Muslim garb. Wouldn't you agree? I mean, it's not like she was doing something illegal that required a disguise: She was just tossing an expensive piece of jewellery into the drink.”

“I suppose that makes sense.”

“So if she said she was here and if no one saw her and if she came here wearing her usual togs, then there's only one conclusion to draw. Isn't there?”

“Drawing conclusions is your job, not mine,” Theo Shaw said, and Barbara gave him credit for saying it evenly. “But if you're suggesting that Sahlah Malik's somehow involved in what happened to her fiancé … That's just not on.”

“How'd we get on to this business at the Nez?” Barbara asked. “That's rather a jump.”

He refused to be baited or trapped this time. He said, “You're the police, and I'm not stupid. If you're asking whether I knew the Maliks, you're involved in investigating the death on the Nez. Right?”

“And you knew she was to marry Querashi?”

“I'd been introduced to him at the Gentlemen's Cooperative. Akram called him his future son-in-law. I didn't think he was here to marry Muhannad, so it seemed reasonable to conclude he was here to marry Sahlah.”

Touché,
Barbara saluted him mentally. She'd thought she had him, but he'd dodged adroitly.

“So you knew Querashi yourself?”

“I'd met him. I wouldn't call it knowing him.”

“Yes. Right. But you knew who he was. You'd have recognised him on the street.” When Theo Shaw acknowledged this to be the case, Barbara went on with “Just for clarity's sake, then, where were you on Friday night?”

“I was at home. And since you're going to inquire anyway, if not of me then of someone else, home is at the end of Old Hall Lane, which is itself a ten-minute walk from the Nez.”

“Were you alone?”

His thumb created a small dent in the Coke can. “Why the hell are you asking me this?”

“Because Mr. Querashi's death on the Nez was a murder, Mr. Shaw. But I expect you know that already, don't you?”

His thumb relaxed. The Coke can
pinged.
“You're trying to mix me up in this, aren't you? I'll tell you that Gran was upstairs in bed while I was down in my workroom. You'll note that I therefore had opportunity to dash off to the Nez and do away with Querashi. Of course, I had no reason to kill him, but that detail is of no consequence, apparently.”

“No reason?” Barbara said. She flicked cigarette ash into the waste-paper basket.

“No reason.” Theo Shaw's words were firm, but his gaze skittered to the telephone. It hadn't rung, so Barbara wondered who it was he was going to phone the second she left his office. He wouldn't be stupid enough to make the call while she was skulking in the corridor, though. Whatever else he might have been, Theo Shaw wasn't an idiot.

“Right,” Barbara said. Cigarette dangling between her lips, she scribbled the number of the Burnt House Hotel on the back of one of her cards. She handed it over, telling Theo to phone should he recall anything pertinent to the case—like the truth about his possession of the gold bracelet, she added mentally.

Outside, with the cacophony of the arcade swirling round her, Barbara thought of the implications behind both Theo Shaw's possession of the gold piece and his lies about its origin. While it was possible that two Aloysius Kennedy golds could exist harmoniously in the same town, it was unlikely that they'd be inscribed identically. This being the case, the reasonable conclusion to draw was that Sahlah Malik had been lying about throwing the bracelet from the pier and the bracelet she claimed to have thrown from the pier was resting round Theo Shaw's wrist. And there were only two ways that the bracelet had come into Theo Shaw's possession: Either Sahlah Malik had given it to him directly or she'd given it to Haytham Querashi and Theo Shaw had seen it and taken it from Querashi's body. In either case, Theo Shaw was standing squarely in suspicion's doorway.

Another Englishman, Barbara thought. She wondered what would actually happen to the community's tenuous peace if it turned out that Querashi had met his death at the hands of a Westerner. Because at this moment it seemed to her that they had two solid suspects, Armstrong and Shaw, both of whom were English. And next on her list was Trevor Ruddock, in line to be Englishman Number Three. Unless F. Kumhar came up smelling like three-day-old cod or one of the Maliks began to sweat more than one expected in this heat—except for Sahlah, who appeared to have been born without pores—then an Englishman was likely the perp they were seeking.

However, at the thought of Sahlah, Barbara hesitated, her car keys dangling from her fingers and Trevor Ruddock's address crumpled into her hand. What did that previous conclusion imply? What did it mean if Sahlah had given the bracelet to Shaw and not to Querashi? It meant the obvious, didn't it? Since “Life begins now” wasn't exactly the sort of comment one made to a casual acquaintance, then Theo Shaw wasn't a casual acquaintance. Which meant he and Sahlah knew each other rather more intimately than Theo had suggested. Which in turn meant that not only Theo Shaw had a motive to off Querashi. Sahlah Malik may very well have had a motive to kill her fiancé as well.

An Asian was finally firmly on the list of suspects, Barbara thought. So the case was still anybody's game.

ARBARA GRABBED A BAG OF POPCORN AND A
second bag of rainbow rock from a free-standing stall at the land end of the pier. The stall was called Sweet Sensations, and its emanating odours of doughnuts frying, candy floss spinning, and corn popping were too tempting to disregard. So she made her purchase and with barely a twinge of guilt. After all, she told herself, it stood to good reason that she might be taking her next meal with the calorically abstemious Emily Barlow. If that were the case, she wanted to bulk up on her daily junk-food quotient.