Deception on His Mind (45 page)

He released her wrist. He turned his head and stared before them, into the rock wall that retained the hillside above which rose the town where Sahlah waited for Theo Shaw to decide her fate.

“You got to go to her,” Rachel said. “You got to talk to her. You got to make her see that it's not the end of the world if you and she go off somewheres and get married. Sure, her mum and dad won't like it at first. But this isn't the middle ages. In modern times, people marry for love, they don't marry for duty or for anything else. I mean, they
do,
but the real marriages and the lasting marriages are the ones that grow out of love.”

He nodded, but she couldn't tell if he actually heard. He'd placed his hands on the BMW's steering wheel, and they'd circled the wheel so tightly that his knuckles looked like they'd pop through his lightly freckled skin. A muscle worked like a spasm in his jaw.

“You got to do something,” Rachel told him. “You're the only one who can.”

Theo made no reply. Instead, he moved his arm to curve it round his stomach, and before Rachel had a chance to tell him that he had only to claim Sahlah's hand in order to save the life of their child, he was out of the car. He stumbled over to the rubbish bin. There he vomited violently and for so long that Rachel thought he was close to losing his entire insides.

When the retching passed, he drew a fist across his mouth. His gold bracelet caught the bright hot afternoon light. He didn't return to the car, however. Rather, he stood at the rubbish bin, chest heaving like a runner and head bent low.

Heaving wasn't an unreasonable reaction, Rachel decided. In fact, it was rather an admirable response to a piece of horrific news. Theo no more wanted Sahlah to submit herself to the surgeon's scalpel—or whatever it was they used to prise unwanted foetuses out of their mothers’ bodies—than Rachel did.

Relief came over her like the cool water she'd been longing for since she'd left the shop. True, she'd done wrong by giving Haytham Querashi that receipt for the bracelet, but it had all come out right in the end: Theo and Sahlah would be together.

She began to plan her next encounter with Sahlah. She thought of the words she'd use to relate what had just passed between herself and Theo. She'd even got as far as imagining the look on her best friend's face as she heard the news that Theo would be coming for her, when Theo himself turned round from the rubbish bin and Rachel had a better look at his expression. Her bones felt liquid at the sight of him and what the sight meant.

His pinched features radiated the misery of a man who saw himself irrevocably trapped. And as he walked heavily back to the car, Rachel understood that come what may, he'd never intended to marry her friend. He was exactly like so many of the men Connie Winfield had dragged home over the years, men who spent the night in her bed, the morning at her breakfast table, and the afternoon or evening in their cars, fleeing the previously amorous scene like hooligans on the run from a petty crime.

“Oh no.” Rachel's lips formed the words, but she emitted no sound. She saw it all: how he'd used her friend like a typical man as a casual and easy mark for sex, seducing her with a kind of attention and admiration that she couldn't hope to get from an Asian man, biding his time until she was ready for a physical approach. And that approach would have been subtle, no move made until he was certain that Sahlah was completely in love with him. She had to be ready. More, she had to be willing. If she was both, then the responsibility for anything untoward that happened as a result of the pleasure Theo Shaw took from Sahlah Malik would be Sahlah's alone.

And Sahlah herself had known this all along.

Rachel felt the animosity rising like a stream of bubbles escaping from her chest to her throat. What had happened to her friend was so bloody unjust. Sahlah was good, and she deserved someone equally good. That person obviously wasn't Theo Shaw.

Theo slid inside the car once more. Rachel opened her door.

“Well, Theo,” she said, making no attempt to hide the contempt in her voice, “is there any message you want me to pass along to Sahlah?”

His answer came as no surprise, but she'd wanted to hear it, just to make certain he was as low as she'd decided he was.

“No,” he said.

B
ARBARA STEPPED BACK
from the mirror in her loo with a view, and admired her handiwork. She'd stopped at Boots on her way back to the Burnt House and twenty minutes in the single aisle that went for a make-up department had been enough for her to purchase a bagful of cosmetics. She'd been aided by a youthful shop assistant whose face was a living, breathing testimony to her enthusiasm for painting her features. “Super!” she'd cried when Barbara had asked for some guidance on the appropriate brands and colours. “You're spring, aren't you?” she'd added obscurely as she'd begun piling a variety of mysterious bottles, cases, jars, and brushes into a basket.

The shop assistant had offered to “do” Barbara right there in Boots, giving her the benefit of talents that appeared questionable at best. Evaluating the girl's yellow eye shadow and magenta cheeks, Barbara had demurred. She needed the practice anyway, she explained. There was no time like the present to get her toes damp by dipping them into the waters of cosmetic improvement.

Well, she thought as she observed her face now. She wouldn't exactly be finding herself on the cover of
Vogue
in the foreseeable future. Nor would she be selected as a sterling example of a woman's triumph over a broken nose, a bruised face, and an unfortunate set of features that could most mercifully be described as snubby. But for the moment she would do. Especially in dim lighting or among people whose vision had recently begun to fail them.

She took a moment to shove her supplies into the medicine cabinet. Then she scooped up her shoulder bag and left the room.

She was hungry, but dinner was going to have to wait indefinitely. Through the windows of the hotel bar upon her arrival, she'd seen Taymullah Azhar and his daughter on the lawn, and she wanted to talk to them—or at least to one of them—before they got away.

She descended the stairs and crossed the passage to cut through the bar. Since he was well occupied with seeing to the needs of his resident diners, Basil Treves would not be able to waylay her. He'd waved at her meaningfully upon seeing her enter the hotel earlier. He'd gone so far as to mouth, “We must talk,” and to waggle his eyebrows in a fashion that related he had something of a momentous nature to impart. But he'd been in the process of ferrying dishes to the dining room, and when he'd mouthed “Later” and tilted his shoulders to indicate he was asking a question, she'd made much of giving him a vigorous thumbs-up to keep lubricated the machinery of his fragile ego. The man was unsavoury, beyond a doubt. But he had his uses. After all, he'd been responsible for unknowingly handing them Fahd Kumhar. God alone knew what other jewels he would manage to mine, given half a chance and equal encouragement. But at the moment she wanted to talk to Azhar, so she was just as happy to see that Treves was unavailable.

She ducked into the bar and crossed to the french doors, which were wide open to the dusk. There she hesitated for a moment.

Azhar and his daughter were sitting just outside on the flagstone terrace, the child hunched over a spotty wrought iron table on which a chess board was set up, the father leaning back in his chair with a cigarette dangling from his fingers. A smile played round the corners of his mouth as he watched Hadiyyah. Obviously unaware that he was being observed, he allowed his features to take on a softness that Barbara had never seen in them before.

“How much time do you want,
khushi?”
he asked. “I believe that I have you trapped, and you're only prolonging your king's death throes.”

“I'm
thinking,
Dad.” Hadiyyah squirmed to a new position on her seat, rising on her knees with her elbows on the table and her bottom in the air. She made a closer scrutiny of the battlefield. Her fingers drifted first towards a knight, then towards the single remaining castle. Her queen had already been taken, Barbara noted, and she was attempting to mount an attack against far superior forces. She began to slide the castle forward.

Her father said, “Ah,” in anticipation.

She withdrew her fingers. “Changed my mind,” she announced hastily. “Changed my mind, changed my mind.”

“Hadiyyah.” Her father drew her name out in affectionate impatience. “When you make a decision, you must adhere to it.”

“Sounds just like life,” Barbara said. She stepped out of the bar to join them.

“Barbara!” Hadiyyah's little body rose on her chair till she was kneeling upright. “You're here! I kept watching and watching for you at dinner. I had to eat with Mrs. Porter ‘cause Dad wasn't here, and I wished and wished that she was you. What've you done to your face?” Her own face screwed up, then lit as she realised. “You've painted it! You've covered your bruises. You look quite nice. Doesn't Barbara look quite nice, Dad?”

Azhar had risen, and he nodded politely. When Hadiyyah chanted, “Sit, sit, please sit,” he fetched a third chair so that Barbara could join them. He offered his cigarettes and lit hers wordlessly when she took one.

“Mummy uses make-up as well,” Hadiyyah confided chattily as Barbara settled in. “She's going to teach me how to do it properly when I'm old enough. She makes her eyes the prettiest of prettiest that you've ever seen. They're big as anything when she's done. ‘Course, they're big anyway, Mummy's eyes. She's got the loveliest eyes, hasn't she, Dad?”

“She has,” Azhar said, his own eyes on his daughter.

Barbara wondered what he saw when he gazed upon her: her mother? himself? a living declaration of their love for each other? She couldn't know and she doubted he'd say. So she gave her attention to the chess board.

“Dire straits,” she said as she studied the meagre collection of pieces with which Hadiyyah was attempting to wage war on her father. “Looks like white-flag time to me, kiddo.”

“Oh pooh,” Hadiyyah said happily. “We don't want to finish now anyway. We'd rather talk to you.” She adjusted her position so that she was sitting, and she swung her sandal-shorn feet against the legs of the chair. “I did a puzzle today with Mrs. Porter. A jigsaw of Snow White. She was asleep and the prince was kissing her and the dwarfs were crying cause they thought she was dead. ‘Course she didn't
look
dead, and if they only thought about why her cheeks were so rosy, they could've worked it out for themselves that she was only sleeping. But they didn't and they didn't know that all she needed was a kiss to wake up. But since they
didn't
know, she met a real prince and they lived happily ever after.”

“A conclusion to which we all fervently aspire,” Barbara said.

“And we painted as well. Mrs. Porter used to do watercolours and she's teaching me how. I did one of the sea and one of the pier and one of—”

“Hadiyyah,” her father said quietly.

Hadiyyah ducked her head and was silent.

“You know, I've got a real thing for watercolours,” Barbara told the little girl. “I'd love to see them if you're up for that. Where've you got them stowed?”

Hadiyyah brightened. “In our room. Shall I fetch them? I c'n fetch them easier than anything, Barbara.”

Barbara nodded and Azhar handed over the room key. Hadiyyah squirmed off her chair and dashed into the hotel, ribboned plaits flying. In a moment, they could hear her sandals clattering against the wooden stairs.

“Out for dinner this evening?” Barbara asked Azhar when they were alone.

“There were things to see to after our conference,” he replied. He dislodged ash from his cigarette and took a drink from a glass on the table. It held ice, a lime, and something fizzy. Mineral water, she guessed. She couldn't see Azhar blithely swilling down gin and tonic, despite the heat. He replaced the glass exactly on the same ring of damp from which he'd taken it. Then he looked at her and with such intent scrutiny that she was certain she'd smeared her mascara. “You acquitted yourself well,” he finally said. “We gained something from the meeting, but not, I imagine, all that you know.”

And that's why he'd not returned to the hotel directly in time for dinner with his daughter, Barbara decided. He and his cousin had no doubt put their heads together for a discussion on their next move. She wondered what that move would be: a meeting of the Asian community, another march in the streets, a request for intervention from their MP, an event designed to heighten media interest in the killing and the investigation once again. She didn't know and couldn't have said. But she had little doubt that he and Muhannad Malik had decided upon an action they'd take in the next few days.

“I need to pick your brains about Islam,” she told him.

“Tit for tat,” he replied, “in exchange for …?”

“Azhar, that can't be how we play the game. I can only tell you what DCI Barlow authorises me to tell you.”

“That's convenient for you.”

“No. That's how I stay involved in this case.” Barbara took a drag of her cigarette and considered how best to garner his cooperation. She said, “And as I see the situation, it's to everyone's advantage that I stay involved. I don't live here. I have no axe to grind and no vested interest in proving or disproving anyone's guilt. If you blokes think that there's prejudice behind the investigation, then frankly, I'm your best bet of weeding it out.”

“And is there?” he asked.

“Bloody hell, I don't know. I've been here twenty-four hours, Azhar. I'd like to think I'm good, but I doubt I'm that good. So can we get on with it, you and I?”

He took a turn to think things over, and he seemed to be trying to read her face for the truth of what she'd said. “You know how his neck was broken, though,” he finally said.

“Yeah. We know. But when you think about it, how else would we really be able to determine it was clear-cut murder?”

“And was it?”

“Know it.” She flicked ash onto the flagstones and drew in on her cigarette. She said, “Homosexuality, Azhar. How does it sit with Islam?”