Deception on His Mind (42 page)

So she said in a low voice the only thing she could say, “The police were at the factory today,
Ammī”

“Your father phoned me,” Wardah replied.

“They've sent two detective constables. The constables are talking to everyone, and they're recording the interviews. They're in the conference room and one by one they call in someone to question. From the kitchen, from shipping, from storage, from production.”

“And you, Sahlah? Have these constables spoken to you as well?”

“No. Not yet. But they will. Soon.”

Wardah seemed to hear something in her voice, because for a moment she stopped brushing Sahlah's hair. “You fear an interview with the detective constables? Do you know something about Haytham's death? Something you haven't spoken of yet?”

“No.” Sahlah told herself it wasn't a lie. She didn't know anything. She merely suspected. She waited to see if her mother would hear a hesitation in her words that gave her away or an uncharacteristic inflection that revealed the roiling of a soul in which guilt, sorrow, fear, and anxiety all warred. “But I'm frightened,” she said. And this, at least, was a truth she could part with.

Wardah put the hairbrush on the chest of drawers. She returned to her daughter and placed her fingers beneath Sahlah's chin. She tilted her face and gazed into it. Sahlah felt her heart beating rapidly, and she knew the birthmark on her cheek had suffused with colour.

“You have no reason to fear,” Wardah told her. “Your father and your brother will protect you, Sahlah. As will I. No harm can possibly come to you from the harm that came to Haytham. Before that ever could happen, your father would lay down his own life. As would Muhannad. You know this, don't you?”

“Harm has already come to us all,” Sahlah whispered.

“What happened to Haytham touches all of our lives,” Wardah agreed. “But it needn't contaminate us if we choose not to let it. And we make that choice by speaking the truth. Only lies and denials have the power to taint us.”

These words were nothing that Wardah had not said in the past. But now their power to wound astonished her daughter. She couldn't blink the tears away before her mother saw them.

Wardah's face softened and she drew her close, holding Sahlah's head against her breast. “You're quite safe, dearest,” her mother said. “I promise you that.”

But Sahlah knew that the safety of which her mother spoke was as insubstantial as a piece of gauze.

B
ARBARA SUFFERED THROUGH
Emily's ministrations to her face a second time that day. Before allowing her to meet the Pakistanis in her first official appearance as police liaison officer, Emily took her to the locker room and stood her in front of the basin and mirror for another go with the foundation, powder, mascara, and blusher. She even dotted Barbara's mouth with lipstick, saying, “Stuff it, Sergeant,” when Barbara protested. “I want you looking fresh for the fray,” she instructed. “Don't underestimate the power of personal appearance, especially in our line of work. You'd be a fool to think it doesn't count.”

As she repaired what the heat had damaged, she gave her directions for the upcoming meeting. She listed what details Barbara was to share with the Asians, and she reiterated the dangers of the minefield they were walking through.

She concluded by saying, “The last thing I want is for Muhannad Malik to use anything from this meeting to fire up his people, all right? And watch them both while you're at it. Watch them like a hawk. Watch everyone like a hawk. I'll be meeting the rest of the team in the conference room, if you need me.”

Barbara was determined not to need her, as well as to do justice to the DCI's faith in her. And as she faced Muhannad Malik and Taymullah Azhar across the table in what had once been the Victorian house's dining room, she recommitted herself to those ends.

The two men had been kept waiting a quarter of an hour. During that time, someone had provided them with a jug of water, four glasses, and a blue paper plate of Oreos. But they appeared to have touched nothing. When Barbara entered, both men were sitting. Azhar rose. Muhannad did not.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” she told them. “Some last-minute details we had to clear up.”

Muhannad didn't look as if he believed that remark. Obviously, he was experienced enough and clever enough to know when power-jockeying was being attempted by an adversary. For his part, Azhar made a study of Barbara as if trying to gaze beneath her skin for the truth of the matter. When she returned his scrutiny, he lowered his eyes.

“Details we wait to hear,” Muhannad said. Barbara had to credit him with opening the meeting with an attempt to sound polite.

“Yes. Well.” Onto the table she slapped the folders she was carrying. There were three of them, and she'd brought them along more for effect than for any other reason. She topped them with the yellow-bound book she'd taken from Querashi's hotel room. Then she drew out a chair, sat, and gestured Azhar to do likewise. She'd brought along her cigarettes, and she took a moment to light up.

The room was only a degree or two less stifling than Emily Barlow's office had been, but unlike Emily's office, there was no fan circulating the tepid air. Muhannad's forehead glistened. Azhar, as usual, could have stepped from an icy shower a moment prior to Barbara's entrance.

Barbara indicated the yellow-bound book with her cigarette. “I'd like to begin with this. Can you tell me what it is?”

Azhar reached across the table. He turned the book with the back cover face up and read what Barbara would have thought to be the final page. He said, “This is the Holy Qur'aan, Sergeant. Where did you get it?”

“In Querashi's room.”

“As he was a Muslim, that can't come as a surprise.” Muhannad said pointedly.

Barbara extended her hand for the book, and Azhar complied. She opened it to the page she'd noted on the previous night, marked with a satin ribbon. She directed Azhar's attention to the passage on the page, where brackets had been drawn in blue ink. “As you obviously read Arabic,” she said, “would you translate this for me? We've sent a fax of it to a bloke at the University of London for deciphering, but we'll be that much ahead of the game if you're willing to do the honours right now.”

Barbara saw a small flicker of irritation cross Azhar's face. In revealing that he read Arabic, he'd inadvertently given her an advantage over him that she'd otherwise not have had. In telling him that she'd already sent the page to London, she'd made it impossible for him to manufacture a translation that might meet ends other than the truth. Love-one, she thought with no little pleasure. It was important, after all, that Taymullah Azhar understand their acquaintance wasn't going to stand in the way of Sergeant Havers's getting her job done. It was equally important that both men knew they weren't dealing with a fool.

Azhar read the passage. He was silent for a minute, during which time Barbara could hear voices coming from the first floor conference room as the door opened and shut upon Emily's afternoon meeting with her team. She shot a glance at Muhannad but couldn't decide whether he looked bored, eager, hostile, overheated, or tense. His eyes were on his cousin. His fingers held a pencil and tapped its rubber end against the top of the table.

Finally, Azhar said, “A direct translation isn't always possible. English terms aren't always adequate or comparable to those in Arabic.”

“Right,” Barbara said. “The point's duly noted. Just do your best.”

“The passage refers to one's duty to go to the aid of those who are in need of help,” Azhar said. “Roughly, it reads, ‘How should you not fight for the cause of Allah and of the feeble among men and of the women and the children who are crying: Our Lord! Bring us forth from out this town of which the people are oppressors! Oh, give us from thy Presence some protecting friend!’ “

“Ah,” Barbara said wryly. “Roughly, as you say. Is there more?”

“Naturally,” Azhar said with delicate irony. “But only this passage is marked in pencil.”

“I think it's clear enough why Haytham marked it,” Muhannad noted.

“Is it?” Barbara drew in on her cigarette and examined him. He'd pushed his chair back as his cousin was reading. His face wore the look of a person who'd had his suspicions confirmed.

“Sergeant, if you'd ever sat on this side of the table, you'd know that it is,” Muhannad said. “‘Bring us forth from out this town of which the people are oppressors!’ There you have it.”

“I did hear the translation.”

Muhannad bristled. “Did you? Then let me ask you this: What more do you need? A message written in Haytham's blood?” He dropped his pencil on the table. He got to his feet and went to the window. When he next spoke, he gestured to the street and—metaphorically, it seemed—to the town beyond it. “Haytham had been here long enough to experience what he'd never had to experience before: the smart of racism. How d'you think he felt?”

“We haven't the slightest indication that Mr. Querashi—”

“Wear my skin for a day if you want an indication. Haytham was brown. And being brown means being unwelcome in this country. Haytham would have liked to catch the first flight back to Karachi, but he couldn't because he'd made a commitment to my family that he intended to honour. So he read the Qur'aan looking for an answer, and he saw it written that he could fight in the cause of his own protection. And that's what he did. And that's how he died.”

“Not exactly,” Barbara said. “Mr. Querashi's neck was broken. That's how he died. There's no indication that he was doing any fighting at all, I'm afraid.”

Muhannad turned to his cousin and clenched his fist. “I
told
you, Azhar. They were holding back on us all along.”

Azhar's hands were on the table. He pressed the tips of his fingers together. “Why weren't we informed at once?” he asked.

“Because the postmortem hadn't yet been performed,” Barbara answered. “And no information's ever released in advance of the p.m. That's how it's done.”

Muhannad looked incredulous. “You can't sit there and tell us that you didn't know the moment you saw the body—”

“How exactly did the death occur?” Azhar asked with a quieting glance at his cousin. “One's neck can break in a number of ways.”

“We're not clear on that point.” Barbara adhered to the police line that Emily Barlow had already drawn. “But we're able to say with a fair degree of certainty that we're looking at a murder. Premeditated murder.”

Muhannad dropped into his seat. He said, “A broken neck is an act of violence: the result of a brawl, a product of anger and rage and hate. A broken neck isn't something that someone can plan in advance.”

“I wouldn't actually disagree with that under normal circumstances,” Barbara said.

“Then—”

“But in this case, the circumstances indicate that someone knew Querashi would be on the Nez, and this someone got there before him and set events into motion that culminated in his death. That's premeditated murder, Mr. Malik. No matter how you might like to think otherwise of Haytham Querashi's death, it wasn't a random killing arising from a racial brawl or incident.”

“What d'you know of racial incidents? What can you tell us of how they start? Do you know the look on a Western face that tells a man to change directions when he's walking down the street, to lower his eyes when he pushes a handful of coins across the counter to pay for his newspaper, to ignore the stares of other patrons when he walks into a restaurant and finds himself the only brown face in the room?”

“Cousin,” Azhar said. “This takes us nowhere productive.”

“Oh yes it does,” Muhannad insisted. “How can a white-skinned CID investigate the death of a man whose experience they can't even begin to understand? These people's minds are closed, Azhar. We'll only get justice if we open them.”

“Is that the purpose of
jum'a?”
Barbara asked.

“The purpose of
Jum'a
isn't under discussion. Haytham's death is.”

“Was he a member of
Jum'a?”

“You won't rest till you pin this on an Asian. That's where you're heading.”

“Just answer the question.”

“No, he wasn't a member of
Jum'a.
If you suspect that I murdered him over that fact, then arrest me.”

The expression on his face—so taut, so filled with anger and loathing—caused Barbara to reflect briefly on the child Ghassan whom she'd seen on the street, with the bottle-tossed urine dripping down his legs. Was it incidents like that, repeated throughout childhood and adolescence, that effected the sort of animosity she felt rolling off Muhannad Malik? He was right in so many ways, she thought. But he was wrong in so many others.

“Mr. Malik,” she finally said, setting her cigarette on the edge of an ashtray at her elbow, “I'd like to make something clear to you before we go on: Just because a person's born with white skin, it doesn't follow that she spends the rest of her life attempting to prise a silver spoon from her mouth.” She didn't wait for a response. She went on to delineate the course that the investigation was taking at the moment: A safe deposit box key found among the dead man's belongings was in the process of being traced to one of the banks in Balford and in surrounding towns; the Friday night whereabouts of everyone connected with Querashi were being sought and corroborated; paperwork found among Querashi's belongings was being sorted out; and Fahd Kumhar was being tracked down.

“You have his first name, then,” Azhar noted. “May we know how you obtained it?”

“A piece of luck,” Barbara said.

“Because you have the name or because it's Asian?” Muhannad asked.

Jesus. Give it a rest,
Barbara wanted to say. But what she did say was “Give us some credit, Mr. Malik. We don't have time to waste tracking down some bloke just to satisfy our need to cause him aggro. We need to talk to him about his relationship to Mr. Querashi.”

“Is he a suspect?” Azhar asked.

“Everyone who knew Querashi is under scrutiny. If this bloke knew him, consider him a suspect.”

“He knew English people as well,” Azhar said, and he added in so bland a manner that Barbara knew he was already well aware of the answer, “Did anyone English benefit from his death?”