Deception on His Mind (46 page)

She could see that she'd taken him by surprise. When she'd told him she wanted to ask him about Islam, he'd no doubt concluded that whatever questions she had would be further questions about arranged marriages, more of the same as she'd asked that morning. This was an entirely new direction, and he was clever enough to know how the question related to the investigation.

“Haytham Querashi?” he asked.

She shrugged. “We have a statement that makes it possible, but only that. And the person who gave it has a good enough reason to want us heading off on a goose chase, so it may be nothing. But I need to know what sort of deal homosexuality is to Muslims, and I'd rather not have to send to London to find out.”

“One of the suspects made this statement,” Azhar said thoughtfully. “Is this an English suspect?”

Barbara sighed, expelling a lungful of smoke. “Azhar, can we give this symphony more than one note? What difference does it make if he's English or Asian? Do you lot want this murder solved no matter what? Or only if an Englishman did it? And the suspect
is
English, by the way. And he was turned over to us by someone else English. If the truth be told, we've got at least three possibilities, and all of them are English. Now, will you give it a rest and answer my flaming question?”

He smiled and crushed out his cigarette. “Had you displayed this level of passion in our meeting today, Barbara, most of my cousin's trepidations would have been resolved. Why didn't you?”

“Because, frankly, I care sod bloody all about your cousin's trepidations. Even if I'd told him we had thirty English suspects, he'd hardly have believed me unless I'd given him their names. Am I right?”

“Admitted.” Azhar sipped his drink. Another time he managed to replace the glass on the same ring of condensation from which he'd taken it.

“So?” she said.

He waited a moment before answering. In the silence, Barbara heard Basil Treves ho-ho-hoing it at someone's joke. Azhar grimaced at the obviously false nature of the laughter. “Homosexuality is expressly forbidden,” he said.

“So what happens if a bloke is homosexual?”

“It would be something that he would keep to himself.”

“Because?”

Azhar toyed with the queen he'd captured from his daughter, his dark fingers rolling the piece to the base of his thumb and back again. “In openly practising homosexuality, he would be indicating that he no longer believed in Muslim ways. This is sacrilege. And for that—as well as for the homosexuality itself—he would be cut off from his family, from other Muslims as well.”

“So it follows,” Barbara said thoughtfully, “that he'd want to keep this business quiet. Maybe he'd even want to get married and have a reasonable front, to deflect suspicion.”

“These are serious charges, Barbara. You must guard against denigrating the memory of a man like Haytham. In insulting him, you insult the family to which he was bound by contracted marriage.”

“I haven't ‘charged’ anyone with anything,” Barbara said. “But if someone opens up a field of enquiry, the police are bound to walk across it. That's our job. So what about the insult to the family if he
was
homosexual? He'd have been contracting himself to a marriage under false pretenses, wouldn't he? And if a man does that to a family like the Maliks, what's the penalty?”

“Marriage is a contract between two families, not just between two individuals.”

“Jesus Christ, Azhar. You can't be telling me that Querashi's family would simply send over a different brother for Sahlah Malik to marry, like she was some fresh hot roll just waiting for a suitable sausage.”

Azhar smiled, it seemed, in spite of himself. “Your defense of your sex is admirable, Sergeant.”

“Great. Thanks. So—”

He interrupted. “But what I meant is this: Haytham's dissembling would have caused an irreparable breach between the two families. This breach—and the cause of it—would be known to the greater community as well.”

“So in addition to being cut off from his family, he would have done a job on their chances of emigrating, right? Because I expect that no one else would be hot to strike a marriage bargain with them, not after they'd palmed off spurious goods as the real thing. In a manner of speaking.”

“Correct,” Azhar said.

Finally, Barbara felt, they were making progress. “So, he had a bucketful of reasons to keep the lid on if he was queer.”

“If
he was,” Azhar acknowledged.

She stubbed out her cigarette, placing this new bit of knowledge into various positions in the puzzle of Querashi's murder, attempting to see where it best fit. When she had a potential picture in her mind, she went on slowly. “And if someone knew what he was hiding, knew it for certain because he'd seen Querashi in a situation where there was absolutely no mistaking what was going on … and if that person got in contact with him and told him what he knew … and if that same person made certain demands …”

He said, “Are you speaking of the person who suggested Haytham's homosexuality in the first place?”

Barbara noted his tone: simultaneously anxious and vindicated. She realised that her speculations were leading them both where he and his cousin ardently wished them to go. She burst his bubble. “It's a rare Englishman who would know all the ramifications of a Muslim's homosexuality, Azhar. Especially all the ramifications of this particular Muslim's homosexuality.”

“Then you're saying an Asian knew.”

“I'm not
saying
anything.”

But by the way his eyes moved to and stayed on his glass, she saw that he was thinking. And his thoughts led him to the only Asian, aside from members of his own family, whom the police had mentioned in connection with Haytham Querashi. “Kumhar,” he said. “You think this man Fahd Kumhar played a part in Haytham's death.”

“You didn't hear that from me,” Barbara said.

“And you wouldn't have pulled that idea from nowhere,” he continued. “Someone has told you of a relationship between Haytham and this man, yes?”

“Azhar—”

“Or something.
Something
has told you. And if you speak of demands being made under these circumstances, demands that Fahd Kumhar made of Haytham Querashi, you must be speaking of blackmail as well.”

“You're really getting ahead of yourself,” Barbara said. “All I'm saying is that if one person saw Querashi doing a job where he wasn't employed, another person might have done the same. End of story.”

“And you think that other person is Fahd Kumhar,” Azhar concluded again.

“Look.” Barbara was feeling exasperated, partly because he'd read her so well and partly because his reading of her could lead to his muddying up the case by involving his cousin where his cousin wasn't wanted. “What bloody difference does it make if it's Fahd Kumhar or the Queen of—”

“Here, here, here!” The sing-song cry came from Hadiyyah, who stood at the door. She waved her watercolours in one hand. In the other, she held a white-lidded jam jar. “I only brought two cause the one of the sea's awfully bad, Barbara. And look, see what I caught as well? He was in the roses outside the dining room and after lunch I got a jar from the kitchen and he flew right in.”

She presented her jam jar for Barbara's inspection. In the fading light, Barbara saw a rather unhappy bee flinging itself hopelessly against the glass.

“I put some food in for him. Look. D'you see it? And I poked some holes through the top. D'you think he'll like London? I expect he will cause there's lot of flowers, so he can eat them up and then make honey.”

Barbara set the jar by the chess board on the table and gave it a close inspection. The food Hadiyyah had provided consisted of a wilting pile of rose petals and a few sad leaves with their edges curled inward. A Nobel-calibre entomologist in the making, she clearly wasn't. But she was positively inspired when it came to the art of providing distraction.

“Well,” Barbara said, “here's the problem with that, kiddo. Bees have families, and they all live together in hives. They don't like strangers, so if you take this bee back to London with you, he won't have any family to live with. I expect that's why he's in such a state at the moment. It's getting dark, and while it's been a nice visit, he'd like to go home.”

Hadiyyah came to stand between Barbara's legs. She crouched so that her chin was level with the table and her nose pressed up to the side of the jar. “You think?” she asked. “Should I let him go? Is he missing his family?”

“Sure,” Barbara said, picking up the child's watercolours for an inspection. “Besides, bees don't belong inside jars. It's not a good idea, and it isn't safe.”

“Why?” Hadiyyah asked.

Barbara looked past the paintings to the artist's father. “Because when you ask a creature to live in a way that's against his nature, someone always ends up getting hurt.”

T
HEO WASN'T LISTENING,
Agatha Shaw concluded. He wasn't listening any more than he'd listened during drinks, during dinner, during coffee, or during the nine o'clock news. His body had been present and he'd even managed to respond in such a way that a less perspicacious woman might have taken for holding up his end of the conversation. But the truth of the matter was that his mind was no more on the redevelopment of Balford-le-Nez than hers was on the current price of bread in Moscow.

“Theodore!” she snapped, and wielded her stick at his legs. He was passing her sofa yet another time, treading from his chair to the open window as if he'd decided to wear a path straight through the Persian carpet before the end of the evening. His grandmother couldn't decide which activity drove her more to distraction: his charade of conversing with her or his newly found interest in the state of the garden. Not that he could see much of the garden in the fast dying light. But there was little doubt that if she demanded to know what was so enthralling outside the window, he would claim to be mourning the death of the lawn.

Her stick failed to stop him, missed him entirely. But when she said, “Theodore Michael Shaw, traipse across this drawing room another time and I'll give you six of the best that you'll never forget. And I'll use this cane to do it. D'you hear me?”

That did the trick. Theo stopped, turned, and looked at her wryly. “Think you're up for that, Gran?” The question was fondly asked, yet he seemed to feel the fondness in spite of himself. He walked no farther to the window, but his gaze went to it nonetheless.

“What the devil is it?” she demanded. “You haven't heard a word I've said all evening. I want this to stop and I want it to stop right now. Tonight.”

“What?” he asked, and to give him credit, he looked sufficiently nonplussed nearly to convince her.

But she was nobody's fool. She hadn't brought up four difficult children—six, if one counted Theo and his pig-headed brother—for nothing. She knew when something was going on, and she knew even better when that something was a something which someone was trying to hide from her.

“Don't be obtuse,” she replied tartly. “You were late … again. You didn't eat more than ten bites at dinner. You ignored the cheese, let your coffee get cold, and for the past twenty minutes when you haven't been wearing a trail through my carpet, you've been watching the clock like a prisoner waiting for visiting hours.”

“I had a late lunch, Gran,” Theo said reasonably. “And this heat's pure hell. How could anyone tuck into salmon pie in this kind of weather?”

“I managed,” she said. “And hot food is appropriate when the weather's beastly. It cools the blood.”

“That sounds like an old wives’ tale to me.”

“Piffle,” she said. “And food isn't the point. You're the point. Your behaviour's the point. You haven't been yourself since—” She paused for thought. How long had it been since Theo hadn't been the Theo she'd known and loved—loved against her wishes, her wisdom, and her inclination—for the last twenty years? A month? Two? He'd started at first with long silences, he'd gone on to longer observations of her when he probably thought she wasn't looking, and he'd mixed these up with nocturnal disappearances, hushed telephone calls, and a disturbing weight loss. “What in the name of Medusa is going on?” she settled on demanding.

He flashed her a smile, but she didn't miss the fact that this rident expression did nothing to alter the bleakness in his eyes. “Gran, believe me. Nothing's going on.” He answered in that soothing tone that doctors always use when attempting to garner the cooperation of a recalcitrant patient.

“Are you up to something?” she asked directly. “Because if you are, I'd like to point out that you've little to gain from obfuscation.”

“I'm not up to anything. I've been thinking about business: how the pier's shaping up and how much money we're going to lose if Gerry DeVitt doesn't have that restaurant opened before the August bank holiday.” He returned to his chair, as if this action would prove his words. He clasped his hands loosely between his knees and gave her what went for his full attention these days.

She continued as if he hadn't spoken. “Obfuscation destroys. And if you wish to argue about that, perhaps three names will emphasise my point: Stephen, Lawrence, Ulricke. All practitioners of the fine art of deception.”

She saw his eyes tighten in a wince that pleased her. She meant to hit him below the belt, and she was glad to know that he'd felt the blow. His brother, his father, and his pea-brained mother, those three were. All of them dissemblers, all of them consequently disinherited, all of them sent into the world to fend for themselves. Two of them were already dead, and the third … who knew what insalubrious end Stephen Shaw would meet in that snake pit that went for a society in Hollywood?

Since Stephen's departure at nineteen years of age, she'd been telling herself that Theo was different. He was sane, reasonable, and enlightened in a way that his immediate family had never been. Upon him she'd learned to place her hopes and to him would go her fortune. If she didn't live to see the complete renaissance of Balford-le-Nez, it didn't matter, because Theo would carry forward her dream. Through him and his efforts, she would live on.

Or so she had thought. But the past few weeks—or was it a month? or two?—had seen the waning of his interest in her affairs. The past few days had shown her that his mind was deeply engaged elsewhere. And the past few hours had indisputably illustrated that she had to act soon to bring him back on track if she wasn't to lose him altogether.