Deception on His Mind (73 page)

She jerked her thumb at the oil stains. “You ought to clean that up. Safety hazard. Someone could slip and break a leg, especially if he's running round without shoes on.”

“Yes, of course. Unquestionably,” he replied.

She had no reason to linger, aside from a feeling that she hadn't yet learned all there was to learn. She wished like hell that she knew what she was looking for, but if there was a sign of something dodgy going on in the warehouse, she failed to see it. All she had to go on was a hollow sensation in her gut, a drumlike feeling that she wanted to identify as incompletion. It was instinct and nothing else. Yet how could she act upon it when at the same time she continually questioned Emily Barlow for doing the same? Instinct was all well and good but, somewhere along the line, it needed to be supported by evidence.

But Rudi had left World Wide Tours within minutes of her own departure, she told herself. He'd driven directly here. He'd been admitted into this same building. And if those facts didn't mean something, what the hell did?

She sighed, wondering if the hollow feeling in her stomach was merely a desire for sustenance, vengeance taken for having left a third of her bag of crisps back in the Harwich pub. She rustled round in her shoulder bag and pulled out her notebook. She scrawled the number of the Burnt House Hotel on a spare sheet of paper and passed it over to the German, telling him to phone if he recalled anything pertinent, particularly how a bill of lading from Eastern Imports managed to end up among a dead man's belongings.

He examined the paper solemnly. He folded it precisely in half, then in quarters. He placed it in the pocket of his trousers. He said, “Yes. If you have seen enough …?” and without waiting for her reply, he made a courtly gesture in the direction of the office.

Once there, Barbara went through the routine: She thanked him for his help. She reminded him of the gravity of the situation. She emphasised the importance of full cooperation with the police.

He said, “I understand, Sergeant. Already I'm going through my mind in an attempt to locate a connection between this man and Eastern Imports.”

Speaking of connections, she thought. And as she adjusted the strap of her bag so that it drew less heavily on her shoulder, she said, “Yes. Well,” and went to the door, where she paused. She thought of what she knew of European history, and she drew her question from that. “Your accent sounds Austrian. Vienna? Salzburg?”

“Please,” he said, a hand pressed to his chest in the offence that Barbara had hoped to rouse in him. “I am German.”

“Ah. Sorry. It's difficult to tell. Where're you from?”

“Hamburg,” he replied.

Where else? she thought. “And your name? I'll need it for my report to the DCI.”

“Naturally. It's Reuchlein,” he replied, and he spelled it helpfully. “Klaus Reuchlein.”

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Barbara could hear Inspector Lynley chuckle.

REUZHAGE SAYS THAT REUCHLEIN'S PAYING RENT
on two flats at
Oskarstrafie 15,”
Barbara concluded. “But all of the flats in the building are small—bed-sits, only, with individual kitchens and bathrooms—so if a bloke has money enough, Kreuzhage claims, he might use one flat as a bedroom and another as a sitting room. Especially if he entertains and doesn't much want his guests having to sit on his bed. So the
fact
of two flats shouldn't arouse our suspicions, he warns. Although they may well have aroused Querashi's suspicions, being from Pakistan where most people live—as Kreuzhage put it—more humbly.”

“And he's certain it's Klaus Reuchlein who's renting the flats?
Klaus
and not another first name?”

“It was Klaus, all right.” Barbara drank the last of the carrot juice that Emily had offered her upon their joining forces once again in the DCI's office to compare their investigative notes. She did her best to hide a grimace when her tongue registered the flavour. No wonder people into health foods were so flaming skinny, she thought. Everything they ingested immediately obliterated any desire to ingest more. “According to him, one of his blokes saw the rental agreement and the signature. Unless Klaus Reuchlein's German for John Smith and there's one under every rock, it's the same bloke.”

Emily nodded. She gazed across her office at the china board where the CID team's activities were listed next to an officer's identification number. They'd begun five days ago with activity Al. Barbara saw that they were up to A320.

“We're closing in on him,” Emily said. “I know it, Barb. This Reuchlein bit just about noose-ties Mr. Hot Shot's neck. So much for saving his people from us. Someone ought to be saving his people from him.”

Barbara had stopped by the Burnt House prior to returning to the station. There, she'd picked up the message that
Kriminalhauptkom-misar
Kreuzhage had phoned, leaving the cryptic message that “information pertaining to the sergeant's interests in Hamburg had been obtained.” She'd phoned him at once, munching on a cheese and pickle sandwich provided by Basil Treves, who'd had to be discouraged as subtly as possible from hanging about at the doorway of her room, the better to eavesdrop on her conversation. Kreuzhage first confirmed her suspicions that the Hamburg address matched the phone number that Querashi had rung from the Burnt House prior to his death, and when he did so she experienced the same sensation that the DCI was experiencing at the moment: a growing certainty that they were getting close to the truth. But when she combined that growing certainty with what she'd seen at Eastern Imports—which was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary except a broken toilet and a pillow on the floor—her mind filled with questions instead of with answers. Her intuition was telling her that everything she'd heard and seen this day was connected in some way, if not to the murder of Querashi, then at least to each other. But her brain refused to tell her how.

Belinda Warner entered the room, saying, “Got the log checked, Guv. I've made a list of everything dodgy. Want it now or at the team meeting this afternoon?”

Emily answered by extending her hand. “This may give us the rope to hang him,” she told Barbara.

The document was pages long, a computer printout of nuisances and crimes—petty and otherwise—that had been reported to the Balford police since the beginning of the year. WPC Warner had highlighted in yellow those activities which fell under the categorical description of being dodgy and hence worthy of the DCI's notice. It was these activities that Emily read aloud.

Six stolen cars since January—one per month and all of them accounted for, found in locations that spanned everywhere from the tidal track leading to Horsey Island to the golf course in Clacton-on-Sea. Dead rabbits placed on the front doorstep of the headmistress of the primary school. Four acts of arson: two in rubbish bins placed on the street for the dust collectors, one in a pillbox on the edge of the Wade, one in the graveyard of St. John's Church, where a crypt had been broken into and defiled with graffiti. Five beach lockers broken into. Twenty-seven burglaries among which were house-breakings, the prising open of a change machine at a laundrette, the invasion of numerous beach huts on the seafront, and the theft of the till from a Chinese takeaway. A handbag snatching on the pleasure pier. Three Zodiac inflat-ables taken from East Essex Boat Hire at the Balford Marina, one of them found abandoned at low tide on the south side of Skipper's Island and the other two with dead motors in the middle of the Wade.

Emily shook her head with disgust at this last report. “If Charlie Spencer gave half the attention to securing his Zodiacs that he gives to reading the racing forms from Newmarket, he wouldn't be giving us aggro once a week.”

But Barbara was thinking of what she'd heard and seen on the previous afternoon, what she'd discovered on the previous night, and how both related to one of the reports Emily had just read out from the log. She wondered why she hadn't realised the truth before. Rachel Winfield had revealed it to her. She just hadn't seen its wider application. “The break-ins in those beach huts, Em. What was nicked from them?”

Emily looked up. “Come on, Barb. You can't be thinking that the beach hut break-ins are the connection we're looking for.”

“Perhaps not to Querashi's murder,” Barbara agreed, “but they might fit somewhere. What was taken?”

Emily flipped through several of the printout's pages. She appeared to read more closely than she had on her first run through the information, but she rejected its import by saying, “Salt cellars. Pepper mills. Christ, it's nothing but rubbish. Who would want a sampler? Or a badminton set? I can understand lifting someone's calor gas stove—you could use it or sell it, couldn't you—but what about this: a framed photograph of Great-gran drooling under a beach umbrella?”

“That's it, then,” Barbara said urgently. “That's the whole point: selling what's been nicked. That's just the sort of junk people flog at car boot sales, Em. It's the kind of rubbish the Ruddocks were moving from their sitting room to their car yesterday afternoon.
And
it's just like the junk that I found in Trevor Ruddock's back pack on the pier last night. That's what he was doing between the time he was with Rachel Win-field and when he showed up for work at the pier: nicking goodies from the beach huts to supplement the family's income.”

“Which, if you're right—”

“Bet on it.”

“—clears him off our slate.” Emily bent eagerly over the report. “But what—goddamn
what
—puts Malik back on it?”

Her telephone rang and she muttered a curse. She lifted the receiver and continued to study the report. She said, “Barlow here …Ah. Well done, Frank. Take him into interrogation. We'll be with you directly.” She replaced the receiver and tossed the report on her desk. “We finally had a match from S04 on those fingerprints on Querashi's Nissan,” she told Barbara. “DC Eyre's just brought our boy in.”

T
HEIR BOY WAS
locked into the same interrogation room that had previously been occupied by Fahd Kumhar. One look at him told Barbara that they'd managed to track down Querashi's putative lover. He fit the description perfectly. He was a slight and wiry man, with close-cropped blond hair, a gold eyebrow ring, and ears that displayed studs, hoops, and—hanging from one lobe—a plastic-topped safety pin generally used on an infant's nappie. He also had a lip ring, this one silver with a tiny bauble dangling from it. A skimpy T-shirt with its arms ripped off revealed a bicep tattooed with what at first appeared to be a large lily with the words
gam me
spelled out beneath it. A closer look, however, revealed that the flower's stamen was actually a priapus. Charming, Barbara thought when she saw this. She liked the subtle touch.

“Mr. Cliff Hegarty,” Emily said as she closed the door. “Good of you to come in for some questions.”

“Didn't have much choice, far as I c'n see,” Hegarty said. When he spoke, he displayed the whitest and most perfect teeth Barbara had ever seen. “Two blokes showed up and asked me if I
minded
coming down to the station. I always like the way cops make it sound like you got some alternative when it comes to assisting with their inquiries.”

Emily wasted no time getting down to business. Hegarty's fingerprints, she told him, had been found on the car of a murdered man called Haytham Querashi. The car itself had been found at the crime scene. Would Mr. Hegarty explain how they got there?

Hegarty crossed his arms. It was a movement that displayed his tattoo to greater effect. He said, “I can phone a solicitor if I want.” His lip ring caught the overhead lighting as he spoke.

“You may,” Emily replied. “But as I haven't even read you the caution, your need for a solicitor intrigues me.”

“I didn't say I need one. I didn't say I want one. I just said I could phone one if I want.”

“And your point is?”

His tongue slid from his mouth and darted, lizard-like in its speed, round his lips. “I can tell you what you want to know, and I'm willing to do it. But you got to guarantee that my name gets kept away from the press.”

“I'm not in the habit of making anyone guarantees of anything.” Emily sat across the table from him. “And considering the fact that your prints were found at the scene of a murder, you're in no position to be making deals.”