Deception on His Mind (50 page)

“And you stop talking like I was a baby,” Rachel retorted. “Trevor's my friend and if he wants to see me, I mean to know why. And Sahlah's my friend and if I want to help her, I'm going to do it. And no policeman—and you neither, Mum—is going to make me do anything else.”

Connie gaped at her. “Rachel Lynn Winfield!”

“Yeah, that's my name,” Rachel said. She heard her mother gasp at the sheer audacity of her reply. She took Trevor's arm and led off the front step, in the direction of the street where he'd left his old motor-scooter. “We can finish our talking once I talk to Trevor,” she called back to her mother.

A slammed door was the answer.

“Sorry,” she said to Trevor, stopping midway down the path. “Mum's in a state. The cops came round to the shop this morning and I scarpered without telling her why.”

“They came to me, too,” he said. “Some sergeant bird. Sort of fat with her face all …” He seemed to recall whose presence he was in and what a remark about a banged-up face might mean to her. “Anyway,” he said, driving a hand into the pocket of his jeans. “The cops came. Someone at Malik's told them I'd got the sack from Querashi.”

“That's rough,” Rachel said. “But they don't think you did anything, right? I mean, what would've been the point? It's not like Mr. Malik didn't know why Haytham sacked you.”

Trevor pulled out his keys. He played them through his fingers. To Rachel's eyes, he looked nervous, but until he went on, she didn't know why.

“Yeah, but why I got the sack's not really the point,” he said. “The
fact
of getting the sack is. ‘S far as they see it, I could've given him the chop to get revenge. That's what they're thinking. Besides, I'm white. He was coloured. A Paki. And with the rest of that lot making noise about hate crimes …” He lifted his arm and wiped it across his brow. “Fucking hot,” he said. “Whew. You'd think it'd cool off at night.”

Rachel watched him curiously. She'd never seen Trevor Ruddock nervous. He always acted like he knew what he wanted and getting it was only a matter of doing what it took. For sure, he'd been that way with her all right: smooth moving and easy talking. Definitely and positively easy talking. But now … This was a Trevor she'd not seen before, not even at school, where he'd once stood out among the pupils as a hopeless yob with limited brainpower and a future to match. Even then, he'd acted sure of himself. What he couldn't solve mentally, he'd solved with his fists.

“Yeah. It's hot,” she said carefully, waiting to see what would unfold between them. It couldn't be what usually unfolded between them. Not here with her mother steaming behind the lounge curtains and the nearby neighbours in the congested street only too willing to have a peep and a listen through their open windows. “I can't remember when it's ever gone on like this, day after day, can you? I read a bit in the paper about global warming. Maybe this's it, huh?”

But it was evident that Trevor had not come to speak about science, atmospheric or otherwise. He shoved his keys back into his pocket, gnawed on his thumb, and cast a quick glance over his shoulder to the lounge window.

“Listen,” he said. He looked at the skin he'd bitten. He rubbed the thumb against the front of his T-shirt. “Look'ere, Rachel, c'n we talk for a sec?”

“We're talking.”

He jerked his head towards the street. “I mean … c'n we walk?” He headed to the pavement. He stopped at the rusty front gate and indicated—again with his head—that he wished her to follow.

She did so, saying, “Aren't you s'posed to be at work, Trev?”

“Yeah. I'm going. But I got to talk to you first.” He waited for her to join him. But he walked no farther than his motorscooter, and he straddled it, planting his bum on the seat. He gave his attention to the handlebars, and his hands twisted round them as he continued. “Lookit, you and me … I mean … last Friday night. When Querashi got chopped. We was together. You remember that, right?”

“Sure,” she said, although the growing warmth of her chest and neck told her that she was going crimson.

“You remember what time we split, don't you? We went up to the huts round nine. We had that booze—bloody awful, it was—what was it called?”

“Calvados,” she said, and added uselessly, “It's made from apples. It's for after dinner.”

“Well, we sort of had it before dinner, huh?” He grinned.

She didn't like it when he grinned. She didn't like his teeth. She didn't like to be reminded that he never saw a dentist. Nor did she like to be faced with the fact that he didn't bathe daily, that he never used a brush on his fingernails, and most of all that he was always careful that their meetings were private, beginning beneath the pier on the seaside of whatever pile was nearest the water and ending in that beach hut that smelled of mildew, where the rattan mats on the floor made a red lattice on her knees as she knelt before him.

Love me, love me. Her actions had begged. See how good I can make you feel?

But that was before she knew that Sahlah needed her help. That was before she'd seen the expression on Theo Shaw's face that told he intended to abandon Sahlah.

“Anyways,” Trevor said when she didn't chuckle at his lewd remark, “we were still there at half-eleven, remember? I even had to make a dash for it to get to work on time.”

She shook her head, slowly. “No, we weren't, Trev. I got home round ten.”

He grinned, still focused on the handlebars. When he raised his head with a nervous laugh, he still didn't look at her. “Hey, Rache, that's not the way it was. Course, I don't expect you to get the time exactly straight cause we was sort of involved.”

“I was involved,” Rachel corrected him. “I don't remember you doing much of anything after you pulled your prong from your trousers.”

He finally looked at her. For the first time ever in her recollection, his face was scared. “Rachel,” he said miserably. “Come on, Rache. You remember how it was.”

“I remember it being dark,” she said. “I remember you telling me to wait ten minutes while you went up to the hut—third from the end in the top row, it was—to … What was it, Trev? To ‘air it out,’ you said. I was to wait underneath the pier and when ten minutes were up, I was supposed to follow.”

“You wouldn't've wanted to go inside when it was all smelly,” he protested.

“And you wouldn't've wanted to be seen with me.”

“That is
not
the case,” he said, and for a moment he sounded so stiff with outrage that Rachel truly wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe that it really meant nothing that the single time they'd been in public together had been dinner at a Chinese restaurant conveniently located some fifteen miles from Balford-le-Nez. She wanted to believe that the fact that he'd never kissed her mouth meant he was only shy and working up his courage. And most of all, she wanted to believe that his letting her service him fifteen times without ever once wondering what she was getting out of the activity aside from the humiliation of yearning so openly for anything remotely resembling hope of a normal future only meant that he'd not yet learned from her example how to give. But she couldn't believe. So she was stuck with the truth.

“I got home round ten, Trev. I know cause I felt all hollow inside, so I turned on the telly. And I even know what I watched, Trev. The middle and end of that old movie with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. I bet you know the one: They're kids and it's summer and they fall in love and mess around. And they sort of finally realise that love's more important than being scared and hiding who you really are.”

“Can't you just tell them?” he asked. “Can't you say it was half past eleven? Rache, the cops're going to ask you cause I said I was with you that night. And I was. If you tell them you got home round ten, don't you see what that means?”

“I expect it means you had time to give Haytham Querashi the business,” she answered.

“I
didn't
do it,” he said. “Rache, I never saw the bloke that night. I swear. I
swear.
But if you don't back me up in what I said, then they'll know I'm lying. And if they know I'm lying about that, they'll think I'm lying about not having killed him. Can't you help me out? What's another hour?”

“Hour and a half,” she corrected him. “You said half-eleven.”

“Okay. Hour and a half. What's another hour and a half?”

Plenty of time for you to show you had at least one thought in your mind about me, she told him silently. But she said, “I won't lie for you, Trev. I might've once. But I won't do it now.”

“Why?” The word was a plea. He reached for her arm and ran his fingers up her bare skin. “Rachel, I thought we had something special, you and me. Didn't you feel it? When we ‘as together, it was like … Hey, it was like magic, didn't you think?” His fingers reached the sleeve of her blouse and insinuated themselves inside, up her shoulder, along the strap of her bra.

She wanted touch so bad that she felt the damp answer to his question. It was between her legs, on the backs of her knees, and in the hollow of her throat, where her heart was lodged.

“Rache …?” The fingers grazed the front of her bra.

This was how it was supposed to be, she thought. A man touching a woman and the woman wanting, needing, melting—

“Please, Rache. You're the only one who c'n help me.”

But this was also the first and only time he'd touched her with tenderness and not as a hurried and impatient stimulation that would ultimately lead to his own pleasure.

That bird needs a bag on her head!

You look like a dog's arse, Rachel Winfield!

Blokes'll have to roger her wearing a blindfold.

She stiffened under his touch, remembering the voices and how she'd battled them throughout her childhood. She knocked Trevor Ruddock's hand away.

“Rache!” He even managed to look wounded.

Yes. Well. She knew how that felt.

“I got home round ten on Friday night,” she said. “And if the cops ask, that's what I mean to tell them.”

N HER BEDROOM CEILING, SAHLAH STUDIED THE
silhouette of tree leaves illuminated by the moon. They didn't move. Despite the proximity of her family's house to the sea, there was no breeze. It would be another night of smothering heat when the thought of having bedclothes touch skin was akin to the idea of trying to sleep enshrouded in cling film.

Except that she knew she wouldn't sleep. She'd bade her family goodnight at half past ten, after suffering through an evening of tense conversation between her father and her brother. Akram had been first struck dumb by the news that Haytham's neck had been broken. Muhannad had seized what advantage their father's consternation gave him, announcing everything else that he'd learned in his meeting with the police—which was little enough, to Sahlah's ears—and outlining what he and Taymullah Azhar had planned as their next move. Akram had inserted, “This is not a game, Muhannad,” and the dispute between them had grown from there.

Their words, spoken tersely by Akram and hotly by Muhannad, not only pitted father and son against each other but also threatened the peace of their household and the fabric of their family. Yumn sided with Muhannad, of course. Wardah reverted to a lifetime of acquiescing to males and said nothing at all, with her eyes cast down upon her embroidery. Sahlah tried to find a means of
rapprochement
between the two men. In the end, all of them sat in a silence so electric that the air itself seemed filled with sparks. Never one to deal with quiet in any of its forms, Yumn had jumped to her feet and seized the moment to slide a video into the machine. When the grainy picture appeared on the screen—an Asian boy following along behind a herd of goats, stick in his hand, as a sitar played and the credits rolled in Urdu—Sahlah said her goodnights. Only her mother responded.

Now it was half past one. She'd been in bed since eleven. The house had been still since midnight, when she'd heard her brother moving round the bathroom, preparatory to finally retiring. The floors and walls had stopped their nighttime creaking. And she waited fruitlessly for sleep.

But in order to sleep, she knew she would have to wipe her mind of thoughts and concentrate on relaxing. While she might have managed the second activity, she knew she wouldn't be able to manage the first.