Deception on His Mind (70 page)

Inspector Kreuzhage had said it himself from Hamburg: There was no evidence of anything. So on what exactly was Emily basing her intuitive conclusions?

Barbara recalled her friend's easy success during the three courses they'd taken together in Maidstone, how she'd received the accolades of their instructors and the admiration of the other detectives. There had been no question in Barbara's mind then that Emily Barlow was a cut above the average cop. She wasn't merely good at what she did; she was superb. Her elevation to DCI at the age of thirty-seven underscored this fact. So, Barbara wondered, why was she entertaining even a single question about the DCI's capability now?

Her long partnership with DI Lynley had forced Barbara more than once to examine not only the facts in a case but also her motives in shining the spotlight of suspicion on one of those facts in favour of another. She engaged in much the same activity now as she spun between the summer wheat fields on the road to Harwich. Only this time she didn't scrutinise which facts she was spotlighting in the investigation and why she was spotlighting them. Instead, she studied the underpinning of her own discomfort.

She didn't much like the result of her study because she concluded that she herself might well be the problem in the investigation into Querashi's death. Did finding guilt among the Pakistanis cut a little too close to the home of Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers? Perhaps she wouldn't have felt the smallest degree of uneasiness with seeing Muhannad Malik as everything from a street thug to a pimp had Taymullah Azhar and his appealing daughter not been hovering on the periphery of the investigation.

This final consideration gave her a jolt she could have done without. She found that she didn't want to speculate upon whose investigative mind was actually clear and whose was clouded. And she definitely didn't want to reflect upon her feelings for Azhar and Hadiyyah.

She pulled into Harwich determined to gather information objectively. She followed the High Street as it wound towards the sea, and she found World Wide Tours tucked between a take-away sandwich shop and an Oddbins that was advertising a cut-rate price on
amontillado.

World Wide Tours comprised one large room with three desks at which two women and a man were working. It was sumptuously decorated, but oddly in the fashion of a by-gone era. The walls were papered in a
faux
William Morris print and hung with gilt-framed drawings of turn-of-the-century families on suitable holidays. The desks, chairs, and shelves were heavy mahogany. Five large palms stood in pots, and seven enormous ferns hung from the ceiling, where a fan circulated the air and rustled their fronds. Overall, there was an artificial Victorian fussiness to the whole set-up that made Barbara want to blast the office with a fire hose.

One of the two women asked if Barbara required assistance. The other spoke into the telephone while their male colleague scanned a computer screen, murmuring, “Lufthansa, come on.”

Barbara presented her warrant card. She saw by the presence of a name placard that she was speaking to someone called Edwina.

“Police?” Edwina said, pressing three fingers to the hollow of her throat as if she expected to be accused of something more untoward than accepting employment in a tastelessly reproduced office directly out of Charles Dickens. She glanced at her fellow workers. The man—his name placard identified him as Rudi—poked at the key board of his computer and swivelled his chair in their direction. He acted the part of Edwina's echo, and when he spoke the dread word again, the third employee brought her telephone conversation to an end. This person was called Jen, Barbara saw, and she gripped both sides of her chair seat as if thinking it might suddenly become airborne. The arrival of an officer of the law, Barbara thought not for the first time, always brought people's subconscious guilt to the surface.

“Right,” Barbara said. “New Scotland Yard.”

“Scotland Yard?” This came from Rudi. “You're here from London? I hope there's no trouble?”

There well might be, Barbara realised. The little sod spoke with a German accent.

She could almost hear Inspector Lynley's posh public-school voice intoning his number-one credo of policework: There is no such thing as coincidence in murder. Barbara examined the young bloke head to toe. Tubby as a wine cask, cropped red hair receding from his forehead, he didn't look like a party to a recent murder. But then no one usually did.

She fished her photographs from her shoulder bag and showed them Querashi's first, saying, “This bloke look familiar to you lot?”

The other two gathered round Edwina's desk, shoulders hunched over the picture which Barbara placed dead centre. They examined it in silence, while above their heads the fern fronds sussurated and the ceiling fan spun. It was nearly a minute before anyone answered, and then it was Rudi, speaking to his colleagues and not to Barbara.

“This is the chap who inquired about air tickets, isn't it?”

“I don't know,” Edwina said doubtfully. Her fingers pulled at the skin just beneath the hollow of her throat.

Jen said, “Yes. I remember him. I served him, Eddie. You were out of the office.” She met Barbara's eyes squarely. “He came in—when was it, Rudi?—perhaps three weeks ago? I don't quite recall.”

“But you remember him,” Barbara said.

“Well, yes. I mean, there aren't actually many …”

“We see very few Asians in Harwich,” Rudi said.

“And you yourself are from …?” Barbara asked encouragingly, although she was fairly certain of the answer.

“Hamburg,” he said.

Well, well, well, she thought.

He said, “Originally Hamburg, that is. I have been in this country for seven years.”
Haff,
he said.

She said, “Right. Yes. Well. This bloke's called Haytham Querashi. I'm investigating his murder. He was killed last week in Balford-le-Nez. What sort of air tickets was he asking about?”

To their credit, they all seemed equally surprised or dismayed when the word
murder
was intoned. They lowered their heads as one to re-examine the photograph of Querashi as if it were a relic of a saint. Jen was the one to answer. He'd been inquiring about airline tickets for his family, she explained to Barbara. He wished to bring them to England from Pakistan. A whole party of people, it was: brothers and sisters, parents, the lot. He wanted them to join him in England permanently.

“You've a branch office in Pakistan,” Barbara noted. “In Karachi, right?”

“In Hong Kong, Istanbul, New Delhi, Vancouver, New York, and Kingston as well,” Edwina said proudly. “Our speciality is foreign travel and immigration. We've experts working in every office.”

Which is probably why Querashi had chosen World Wide Tours rather than an agency in Balford, Jen added, testimonial incarnate. He'd been asking about immigration for his family. Unlike most travel agencies solely eager to part customers from their cash, WWT had an international reputation—”a proud international reputation” was how she put it—for its network of contacts with lawyers round the world who specialised in immigration. “UK, EU, and US,” she said. “We're travel agents for people on the move and we're here to help make that movement easier.”

Yadda, yadda, yadda, Barbara thought. The girl sounded like an advert. So much for any previous thoughts about Querashi's trying to skip town one step ahead of his wedding day. It sounded as if he'd been fully intending to uphold his end of the marriage agreement. Indeed, it sounded as if he'd been laying plans for the future of his family as well.

Barbara pulled the Polaroid of Fahd Kumhar from her shoulder bag next. This met with a different result. None of them knew this particular Asian. None of them had ever seen him. Barbara watched them closely, looking for an indication that one or all of them were lying. But no one quivered so much as an eyelash.

Bust, she thought. She thanked them for their help and stepped from the office into the High Street. It was eleven o'clock and she was already sweat-drenched. She was also thirsty, so she ducked into the Whip and Whistle across the street. There, she managed to talk the publican into parting with five ice cubes over which he poured lemonade. She carried this to a table by the window—along with a packet of salt and vinegar crisps—and she flung herself onto a stool, lit a cigarette, and prepared to enjoy her elevenses.

She'd consumed half of the crisps, three-quarters of the lemonade, and all of the cigarette when she saw Rudi step out of World Wide Tours across the street. He glanced right and left and right again, in a manner that Barbara decided could have been overly cautious—indicating the normal trepidation of a European unused to English traffic—or borderline stealthy. She cast her vote with the latter and when Rudi took off up the street, she gulped down the rest of her lemonade and left the remaining crisps on the table.

Outside, she saw him unlocking a Renault on the street corner. Her own Mini was parked two cars away, so as the German fired up his vehicle and guided it into the traffic, she dashed to her own. In a moment, she was in pursuit.

Anything, of course, could have taken him from the travel office: a dental appointment, a sexual assignation, a visit to the chiropodist, an early lunch. But following so closely on the heels of her visit, Rudi's departure was too intriguing to let go uninvestigated.

She followed him at a distance. He took the A120 out of town. He drove with no interest in the speed limit, and he led her directly to Parkeston, just over two miles from the travel office. He didn't make the turn towards the harbour, however. Rather, he drove into an industrial estate just before the harbour road.

Barbara couldn't risk following him there. But she pulled into the layby that opened into the industrial estate, and she watched the Renault roll to a stop at a prefabricated metal warehouse at the farthest end. Barbara would have given her signed edition of
The Lusty Savage
for a pair of binoculars at that moment. She was too far from the building to read its sign.

Unlike the other warehouses in the estate, this one was closed up and looked unoccupied. But when Rudi rapped on the door, someone within admitted him.

Barbara watched from the Mini. She didn't know what she expected to see, and she was rewarded with seeing nothing. She sweated silently in the roasting car for a quarter of an hour that seemed like a century before Rudi emerged: no bags of heroin in his possession, no pockets bulging with counterfeit money, no video cassettes of children in compromising positions, no guns or explosives or even companions. He left the warehouse as he'd entered the warehouse, empty-handed and alone.

Barbara knew he'd see her if she remained on the edge of the industrial estate, so she pulled back onto the A120 with the intention of turning round and having a bit of recce among the warehouses once Rudi was gone. But as she looked for a suitable place to make a three-point turn, she saw a large stone building sitting back from the road on a horseshoe drive.
THE CASTLE HOTEL,
its roadside sign announced in mediaeval lettering. She recalled the brochure that she'd found in Haytham Querashi's room. She turned into the hotel's car park, making the decision to kill another bird with the stones she'd been fortuitously given.

P
ROFESSOR SIDDIQI WASN'T
at all what Emily Barlow had expected him to be. She'd anticipated someone dark and middle-aged, with black hair sweeping back from an intelligent forehead, kohl-coloured eyes, and tobacco skin. But the man who presented himself to her in the company of DC Hesketh, who'd fetched him from London, was very nearly blond, his eyes were decidedly grey, and his skin was fair enough for him to be mistaken for a northern European instead of an Asian. Looking to be in his early thirties, he was a compact man, not even her own height. He was toughly built, like an amateur wrestler.

He smiled as she quickly adjusted her expression from surprise to indifference. He offered his hand in greeting and said, “We don't all come out of the same mould, Inspector Barlow.”

She didn't like to be read that easily, especially by someone she didn't know. She ignored the remark, saying brusquely instead, “Good of you to come. Would you like a drink or shall we get started with Mr. Kumhar straightaway?”

He asked for grapefruit juice, and as Belinda Warner took herself off to fetch it, Emily explained the situation into which the London professor had been brought. “I'll be tape-recording the entire interview,” she said in conclusion. “My questions in English, your translations, Mr. Kumhar's answers, your translations.”

Siddiqi was astute enough to make the proper inference. “You can rely upon my integrity,” he said. “But as we've never met before now, I wouldn't expect you to depend upon it without a system of checks and balances.”

The major ground rules laid and the minor ones implied, Emily took him to meet his fellow Asian.

Kumhar hadn't benefited from his night in custody. If anything, he was more anxiety-ridden than on the previous afternoon. Worse, he was sodden with sweat and foul with the odour of faeces, as if he'd messed himself.

Siddiqi took one look at him and turned back to Emily. “Where's this man been kept? And what the hell have you been doing to him?”

Another ardent viewer of pro-I.R.A. films, Emily decided wearily. What Guildford and Birmingham had done to set back the cause of policework was inestimable. She said, “He's been kept in a cell which you're more than welcome to inspect, Professor. And we've been doing nothing to him, unless serving him dinner and breakfast goes as torture these days. It's hot in the cells. But no more so than the rest of the building or the whole bloody town. He'll tell you as much if you care to ask him.”

“I'll do just that,” Siddiqi said. And he fired off a series of questions to Kumhar that he didn't bother to translate.

For the first time since being brought into the station, Kumhar lost the look of a terrified rabbit. He unclasped his hands and reached towards Siddiqi as if a life belt had been thrown him.

It was a gesture of supplication, and the professor apparently saw it as such. He used both of his hands to reach for the man, and having done so, he drew him to the table in the centre of the room. He spoke again, translating this time for Emily. “I've introduced myself. I've told him that I'm to translate your questions and his answers. I've told him that you mean him no harm. I hope that's the truth, Inspector.”