“Absolutely,” he said. “Carry on without fear, Detective Sergeant Havers.”
She smiled. What a goofball, she thought. She added the keys to the evidence bag. Then she turned to the leather case.
It contents were neatly arranged: a pair of gold cuff links, a gold money clip with something engraved in Arabic on it, a small gold ring—perhaps intended for a woman—with a ruby in the centre, one gold coin, four gold bangles, a cheque book, and a yellow piece of paper that was folded in half. Barbara paused to consider Querashi's predilection for gold and what, if anything, such a predilection meant and how, if possible, such a predilection might fit into the overall scheme of what had happened to the man. Avarice? she wondered. Blackmail? Kleptomania? Foresight? Obsession? What?
The cheque book, she saw, was for a local branch of Barclays. It was the sort of book with a receipt stub running along the left side of the cheques. Only one had been written and documented on a receipt, ￡400 to an F. Kumhar. Barbara examined the date and did her maths: three weeks prior to Querashi's death.
Barbara slid the cheque book into the evidence bag and took up the folded bit of yellow paper. This turned out to be a receipt from a local shop. It was called Racon Original and Artistic Jewellery and beneath this name were the italicised words “Balford's Finest.” Barbara thought at first that the receipt went with the small ruby ring. Perhaps a memento purchased by Querashi for his future bride? But upon inspection, she saw that the receipt wasn't made out to Querashi. Instead, it was made out to Sahlah Malik.
The receipt did not make clear what had been purchased. Whatever it was, it had been identified only by two letters and a number: AK-162. And next to these was a phrase written in inverted commas: “Life begins now.” At the bottom of the receipt was the price that Sahlah Malik had paid: ￡220.
Intriguing, Barbara thought. She wondered how Querashi had come to have the receipt in his possession. Obviously, it was the receipt for something purchased by the man's fiancée, and “Life begins now” was probably what she intended to have engraved on it. Wedding ring? That was the most logical surmise. But did Pakistani husbands wear them? Barbara had never seen one on Taymullah Azhar, but that didn't mean much because not every man in her own culture wore one, so who was to say what the Asian custom was? But even if the receipt was for a wedding ring, having it in his possession indicated that Querashi planned to return whatever it was that Sahlah had purchased. And the act of returning a gift engraved with the hopeful and trusting words “Life begins now” suggested a real fissure in the wedding plans.
Barbara glanced at the bedside table, whose drawer was still open. From across the room she could see the half-empty box of condoms, and she recalled that among the contents of the murdered man's pockets had been three other condoms. In tandem with the receipt from the jewellery shop, the rubbers served to underscore a single conclusion.
Not only had there been a fissure in the wedding plans, but there had likely been a third party involved, one who'd possibly encouraged Querashi to abandon his arranged marriage in favour of another relationship. And this had been done recently, since he still had in his possession the evidence that he was planning a honeymoon.
Barbara added the receipt to the other items she'd lifted from the bedside table. She locked the leather case and put it in the evidence bag as well. She wondered what sort of response would be given to the fiancé in an arranged marriage if he asked to call the arrangement to a halt. Would tempers flare? Would revenge be plotted? She didn't know. But she had an excellent idea of how to find out.
“Sergeant Havers?” From the corridor, it was not so much a whisper but a hiss: 007 was getting restless.
Barbara strode to the door and swung it open. She stepped into the corridor and took Treves’ arm. “We may be on to something,” she told him tersely.
“Really?” He was all agog and aquiver.
“Absolutely. D'you keep records of telephone calls? Yes? Good. I want those records,” she directed him. “Every call he made. Every call he received.”
“Tonight?” Treves licked his lips enthusiastically. Doubtless, Barbara saw, if he were given his way, they'd be up to their elbows in hotel paperwork till dawn.
“Tomorrow's fine,” she told him. “Get some sleep now. Be fresh for the fray.”
His whisper was excitement itself. “Thank God I kept everyone out of that room.”
“Continue to do that, Mr. Treves,” she said. “Keep the door locked. Stand watch if you have to. Hire a guard. Set up a video camera. Wire the place for sound. Whatever it takes. But on no account let a single soul cross over that threshold. I'm depending on you. Can I do that?”
“Sergeant,” Treves said, his hand at his heart, “you can depend upon me to the absolute death.”
“Brilliant,” Barbara said. And she couldn't help wondering if those very same words had been recently said to Haytham Querashi.
HE MORNING SUN AWAKENED HER. IT WAS ACCOM-panied by the sound of gulls and the faint scent of brine in the air. As on the day before, this last was utterly still. Barbara could tell that by squinting out of the open window from her semi-foetal position on one of the room's two beds. Beyond the glass, a bay laurel tree stood, and not a dusty leaf on it so much as quivered. By midday, mercury was going to be bubbling in thermometers all over town.
Barbara ground her knuckles into the small of her back, which ached from its night's exposure to a mattress troughed by several generations of bodies. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stumbled blearily into the loo with a view.
This bathroom continued the hotel's established theme of genteel decay: The tiles on the walls and the grout round the tub grew mildew in furry verdigris tufts, and the doors to the cupboards below the sink were held closed by means of an elastic band stretched between their knobs. One gained access to the view through a small window above the toilet, four grimy panes of glass behind a limp curtain on which appliquéd dolphins leapt out of a frothing sea that had long since gone the depressing colour of a winter sky.
Barbara assessed the environment with an “ugh,” and she gazed at her face in the age-spotted mirror above the sink, where perhaps two dozen gold cupid transfers shot amorous arrows at each other from clusters at the glass's four corners. She assessed her appearance with a second and more fervent “ugh.” The combination of bruises going yellow at the edges from her eyes to her chin and the sleep creases across her left cheek created an unappealling vision to have to gaze upon directly before breakfast. The sight could definitely put one off one's bangers, Barbara decided, and turned from it to take in the view that the loo-with provided her.
The window was open to its fullest extent, affording a generous five inches of fresh morning air. She breathed this in and scrubbed her fingers through her thatch of hair as she looked across the slope of lawn to the sea.
On a bluff approximately one mile north of the town's centre, the Burnt House Hotel was positioned propitiously for travellers who came to Balford only seeking a view. To its south, Princes Beach carved a crescent of sand punctuated by three stone breakwaters. To its east, the lawn ended in a cliff beyond which endlessly stretched the sea, motionless this morning and edged by a roll of grey fog that hovered on the distant horizon, making a beguiling promise of cooler weather. To its north, the cranes of distant Harwich Harbour lifted their dinosaur necks far above the ferries that passed beneath them on their way to Europe. Barbara could see all of this from her window, small though it was, and all of this and more would be on display for anyone sitting in one of the drooping canvas chairs that were scattered across the hotel's lawn.
A landscape painter or a sketch artist might find that the Burnt House served his interests, Barbara decided, but for a traveller coming to Balford-le-Nez to sample more than just a pleasant vista, the hotel's location was a study in utter commercial folly. The distance between the hotel and the town proper—with its seafront esplanade, pleasure pier, and High Street—underscored this fact. These locations constituted the commercial heart of Balford-le-Nez, where tourists spent their money. While they were a convenient walking distance from the other hotels, the guest houses, and the summer cottages in the fading seatown, they were not a convenient walking distance from the Burnt House Hotel. Parents with children in tow, young people eager for whatever questionable nightlife the town now afforded, travellers seeking everything from sand to souvenirs, would not find it here on the bluff north of Balford proper. They could walk into the town, of course. But there was no direct access along the seafront. Instead, pedestrians heading townward from the Burnt House would have to trudge inland first along Nez Park Road and then back out again to the Esplanade.
Basil Treves, Barbara concluded, was lucky to have anyone staying here at any time of year. Which meant he was lucky to have had Haytham Querashi staying as a long-term resident. Which in turn brought into question the part Treves may or may not have played in Querashi's marriage plans. It was an interesting speculation.
Barbara gazed in the direction of the pleasure pier. Construction was going on at its end, where the Jack ‘Awkins Cafeteria once had stood. And even at this distance she could see that the pier itself gleamed with clean new paint: white, green, blue, and orange, while bright motley flags flew from the poles that lined its sides. None of that had existed when she'd last been in Balford.
Barbara turned away. At the mirror once more, she examined her face and wondered if removing the bandages had been as inspired an idea as she'd originally thought. She'd brought no make-up with her. Her supply of cosmetics being limited to one tube of Blistex and a pot of rouge once belonging to her mother, tossing them into her haversack had hardly seemed worth the effort. She liked to consider herself a bird whose moral fibre wouldn't allow the rank dishonesty of doing anything more than pinching the cheeks for a bit of colour in the face. But the truth was, given a choice between painting her flesh and sleeping for another fifteen minutes in the morning, she'd spent a lifetime selecting sleep. In her line of work, it seemed more practical. Thus, her preparation for the current day took less than ten minutes, and four of these she spent digging through her haversack, cursing, and looking for a pair of socks.
She gargled, ran a brush through her hair, shoved into her shoulder bag the goodies she'd removed from Querashi's room on the previous night, and headed out the door. In the corridor, breakfast odours clung to the air like importunate children to their mother's skirt. Somewhere, eggs and bacon had been fried, bangers had been roasted, toast had been burned, tomatoes and mushrooms had been grilled. Barbara needed no map to find the dining room. She just followed the ever-intensifying smells down one flight of stairs and along a cramped ground floor corridor towards the sound of cutlery being wielded against plates and voices murmuring about the day's plans. Which is when she heard it.
One voice stood out as she approached. A child was saying brightly, “Did you know about the lobster boat ride? C'n we go, Dad? And the Ferris wheel? C'n we ride it today? I watched it and watched it from the lawn with Mrs. Porter last night, and she said that when she was my age, the Ferris wheel—”
A low murmur interrupted the hopeful chatter. As it usually did, Barbara realised grimly. What the hell was the matter with the man? He squelched every impulse the little girl had. Barbara advanced to the door, feeling unaccountably irritated and battle-ready where she knew she had no business feeling anything other than blandly disinterested.
Hadiyyah and her father sat in a dark corner of the old, heavily panelled dining room. They'd been placed well away from the other hotel residents: three elderly white couples whose tables lined up along the open french doors. These latter people attended to their breakfasts as if no one else were present, save for one old woman with a zimmer frame resting next to her chair. She appeared to be the aforementioned Mrs. Porter because she was nodding at Hadiyyah as if in encouragement from her end of the room.
Barbara wasn't completely surprised at the coincidence of being at the same hotel as Hadiyyah and Taymullah Azhar. She'd expected to find them staying with the Malik family, but as that apparently had not been possible, then the Burnt House Hotel was a logical choice. Haytham Querashi had stayed here, after all, and Azhar was in Balford because of Querashi.
“Ah. Sergeant Havers.” Barbara swung round to see Basil Treves behind her, two plates of breakfast in his hand. He beamed at her. “If you'll allow me to show you to your table …?”
As he attempted to shimmy past her to do the honours, Hadiyyah gave a happy shout. “Barbara! You came!” And she dropped her spoon into her cereal, splashing milk across the pink tablecloth. She popped out of her chair and did her usual hop-and-skip across the room, singing, “You came! You came! You came to the seaside!” with her yellow ribboned plaits dancing round her shoulders. She was dressed like sunshine: yellow shorts and striped T-shirt, yellow banded socks and sandals. She gripped Barbara's hand. “Have you come to build a sand castle with me? Have you come to pick cockles? I want to play the penny slide and ride the dodge'm cars as well. Do you?”
Basil Treves was watching this interaction with some consternation. He said with more meaning, “If I may show you to your table, Sergeant Havers,” and nodded pointedly at a table next to an open window and decidedly among the English residents.
“I'd rather be over there,” Barbara told him, jerking her thumb in the direction of the Pakistanis’ dark corner. “Too much fresh air in the morning puts me right off my kippers. D'you mind?”
Without waiting for him to reply, she sauntered over to Azhar. Hadiyyah skipped ahead. She cried out, “She's here! Look, Dad! She's here! She's here!” and didn't appear to notice that her father was greeting Barbara's arrival with that special joy one generally reserves for embracing lepers.
Basil Treves, in the meantime, had deposited the two breakfast plates in front of Mrs. Porter and her companion. He hurried over to usher Barbara into a seat at the table next to Azhar's. He was saying, “Yes, oh yes. Of course. And will it be orange juice, Sergeant Havers? What about grapefruit?” He whipped the napkin out of its teepee folds with a flourish that suggested having the sergeant sit among the darkies had always been part of his master plan.
“No, with us! With us!” Hadiyyah crowed. She tugged Barbara to their table, saying, “It's okay, Dad, isn't it? She must sit with us.”
Azhar observed Barbara evenly with his unreadable brown eyes. The only indication of feeling that he gave was the deliberate hesitation he employed before getting to his feet in greeting.
“We'd be very pleased, Barbara,” he said formally.
Bollocks, Barbara thought. But she said, “If you've room …?”
“Can make room. Can do,” Basil Treves said. And as he moved cutlery and crockery from her table to Azhar's, he hummed with the fierce determination employed by a man making the best of a bad situation.
“I'm so happy, happy, happy!” Hadiyyah sang. “You've come for your holiday, haven't you? We can go to the beach. We can look for shells. We can go fishing. We can play on the pier.” She climbed back onto her chair and retrieved her spoon from the middle of her cereal, where it lay like a silver exclamation mark, commenting on the morning's proceedings. Hadiyyah scooped it up, oblivious of the milk that dripped from it onto the front of her striped T-shirt. “Yesterday Mrs. Porter looked after me while Dad did some business,” she confided to Barbara. “We read a book about fossils on the lawn. I mean,” she giggled, “we read on the lawn. Today we were s'posed to take a walk along the Cliff Parade, but it's way too far to walk all the way to the pier. Too far for Mrs. Porter, that is. But I c'n walk that far, can't I? And now that you're here, Dad will let me go to the arcade. Won't you, Dad? Won't you let me go if Barbara comes with me?” She squirmed in her chair so that she faced Barbara. “We c'n ride the roller coaster and the Ferris wheel, Barbara. We c'n shoot in the shooting gallery. We can play the crane grab. Are you good at the crane grab? Dad is brilliant. He grabbed me a koala bear once, and once he grabbed Mummy a pink—”
“Hadiyyah.” Her father's voice was firm. It silenced her with its usual proficiency.
Barbara studied her menu with religious devotion. She decided on her breakfast and gave her order to Treves who hovered nearby.
“Barbara is here to rest, Hadiyyah,” Azhar told his daughter as Treves took himself in the direction of the kitchen. “You are not to force yourself into her holiday. She's been in an accident and will not be well enough to run about the town.”
Hadiyyah made no reply, but she cast a hopeful look in Barbara's direction. Her eager face had Ferris wheel, arcade, and roller coaster written all over it. She was swinging her legs and fairly bouncing in her seat, and Barbara wondered how her father managed to deny her anything.
“These creaking bones might be able to make a trip to the pier,” Barbara said. “But we'll have to see how things develop.”
The marginal promise was apparently enough for the child. She said, “Yea! Yea! Yea!” and before her father could discipline her once more, she tucked into the remains of her cornflakes.
Azhar, Barbara saw, had been eating boiled eggs. He'd finished one egg and had begun the second when she joined them. She said, “Don't let me hold you up,” and gave a nod towards his plate. Again he used hesitation to communicate his reluctance, but whether it was a reluctance to eat or a reluctance to be in her company, she couldn't have said, although she suspected the latter.
He removed the top of the egg with his spoon and deftly separated the top's shimmering white from its shell. He held the spoon in his smooth brown fingers, but ate nothing from it until he'd spoken. “How coincidental it is,” he remarked without irony, “that you should come for your holiday to the same town that Hadiyyah and I have come to, Barbara. And even more coincidental it is that we should all find ourselves in the same hotel.”
“This way we can be together,” Hadiyyah announced happily. “Barbara and I. And when you go off, Dad, Barbara can look after me instead of Mrs. Porter. Mrs. Porter's all right,” she informed Barbara in a lower voice. “I like her well enough. But she isn't able to walk very well on account that she's got some sort of palsy.”
“Hadiyyah,” her father said quietly. “Your breakfast.”
Hadiyyah ducked her head, but not before she shot Barbara a radiant smile. Her feet kicked energetically against the legs of her chair.
Barbara knew that it was pointless to lie. The first time he came to a meeting between the police and the Asian community representatives, Azhar would discover the truth about what she was doing in Balford. Indeed, she realised that she was grateful she had a truth to tell him which was not the original truth that had brought her to Essex in the first place.
“Actually,” she said, “I'm here on business. Well, quasi-business, I expect you'd call it.” She went on breezily to tell him that she'd come to town to help out an old friend in the local CID: the detective chief inspector heading up a murder investigation. She waited to gauge his response to this. It was quintessential Azhar: He barely flickered an eyelash. “A man called Haytham Querashi was found murdered three days ago not far from here,” she went on, and added innocently, “He was staying in this hotel, as a matter of fact. Have you heard about his death, Azhar?”
“And you're working on this case?” Azhar asked. “How can this be? Your work is in London.”
Barbara walked a fine line with the truth. She'd received a phone call from her old mate Emily Barlow, she explained. Old Em had somehow got word—”Police gossip and all, you know how it is”—that Barbara was free at the moment. She'd rung up and invited Barbara to Essex. And that was that.
Barbara kneaded the dough of her friendship with Emily until it rose appropriately, sounding as if they were something between soul mates and twins once joined at the hip. When she was certain he got the I'd-do-anything-for-Em impression, she went on to say, “Em's asked me to serve on a committee that's been set up to keep the Asian community informed on the progress of the case.” And again she waited for his reaction.
“Why you?” Azhar set his spoon beside his egg cup. Barbara noted that half the egg was uneaten. “Have the local police inadequate manpower?”
“All of CID will be working the investigation itself,” Barbara told him, “which is, I expect, what the Asian community wants. Wouldn't you think so?”
Azhar removed the napkin from his lap. He folded it neatly and placed it next to his plate. “Then it seems we're here on similar missions, you and I.” Azhar looked at his daughter. “Hadiyyah, are you finished with your cereal? Yes? Good. Mrs. Porter looks as if she wishes to make plans with you for today.”
Hadiyyah looked stricken. “But I thought that Barbara and I—”
“Barbara has just told us that she's here on business, Hadiyyah. Go to Mrs. Porter. Help her out to the lawn.”
“But—”