THE BRACELET WAS unmistakably an Aloysius Kennedy piece: thick, heavy, undefined swirls similar to the bracelet Barbara had seen in Ra-con Jewellery. She was willing to admit that Theo Shaw's possession of such a unique item might be pure coincidence, but she hadn't been involved in Criminal Investigations for eleven years for nothing: She knew how unlikely coincidences were when it came to murder.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Theo Shaw's tone was so friendly that Barbara wondered if, against all reason, he thought her visit was a social call. “Coffee? Tea? A Coke? I was about to grab a drink myself. Bloody hot weather, isn't it?”
Barbara said that a Coke would be fine, and when he left his office in search of one, she took the opportunity to have a look round. She wasn't sure what she was looking for, although she wouldn't have said no to the sight of a nice coil of incriminating wire—suitable for tripping someone in the darkness—lying squarely in the middle of his desk.
But there wasn't much to take note of. A set of book shelves held one row of green plastic binders and a second row of account books with successive years stamped on the spine of each in flaking gold numerals. A metal in-and-out tray on the top of a filing cabinet contained a batch of invoices that appeared to be for foodstuffs, for electrical work, for plumbing, and for business supplies. A bulletin board on one of the walls had posted upon it four architectural blue prints: two for a structure identified as the Pier End Hotel and two for a leisure centre called Agatha Shaw Recreational Village. Barbara took note of this latter name. Mother of Theo? she wondered. Aunt? Sister? Wife?
Idly she picked up a large paperweight that was holding down a pile of correspondence, all of which appeared devoted to a plan to redevelop the town. When she heard Theo's approaching footsteps in the corridor, she removed her attention from the letters to the paperweight, which appeared to be a large blob of pocked stone.
“Rapbidonema” Theo Shaw said. He carried two Coke cans with a paper cup fitted over one of them. He handed this one over to Barbara.
“Raphi-who?” she said.
“Raphidonema. Porifera calcarea pharetronida lelapiidae raphidonema to be more exact.” He smiled. He had a most appealing smile, Barbara thought, and she hardened automatically at the sight of it. She knew well enough what degree of complicity an appealing smile was able to hide. “I'm showing off,” he said ingenuously. “It's a fossil sponge. Lower Cretaceous period. I found it.”
Barbara turned the rock in her hands. “Really? It looks like … hell, I don't know … sandstone? How'd you know what it was?”
“Experience. I've been playing palaeontologist for years.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Along the coast, just north of town.”
“At the Nez?” Barbara asked.
Theo's eyes narrowed, but so fractionally that Barbara would have missed the movement had she not been watching for some indication that he knew, at heart, what she was doing in his office. “Right,” he said. “The red crag traps them and the London clay releases them. All you have to do is wait for the sea to erode the cliffs.”
“That's your primary spot for fossil-hunting, then? Out on the Nez?”
“Not on the Nez,” he corrected her. “On the beach below it, at the base of the cliffs. But yes, that's the best spot for fossils along this stretch of coastline.”
She nodded and placed the fossilised sponge back on top of the papers it had been weighing down. She popped open her Coke and drank straight from the can. The paper cup she crumpled slowly into her hand. A tiny elevation of Theo Shaw's eyebrows told her that he didn't misunderstand the gesture.
First things first, she thought. The Nez and the bracelet made Theo himself a subject that she wished to pursue, but there were other fish to fry before she got to him. She said, “What can you tell me about a bloke called Trevor Ruddock?”
“Trevor Ruddock?”
Did he sound relieved? Barbara wondered. “He works somewhere on the pier. D'you know him?”
“I do. He's been here for three weeks.”
“He came to you via Malik's Mustards, I understand.”
“He did.”
“Where he was given the sack for pilfering goods.”
“I know,” Theo said. “Akram wrote me about it. Phoned as well. He asked me to give the chap a chance because he believed there were extenuating circumstances behind the pilfering. The family's poor. Six kids. And Trevor's dad has been out of work with a bad back for the last eighteen months. Akram said he couldn't in conscience keep Ruddock on, but he wanted to give him a second chance somewhere else. So I took him on. It's not much of a job, and it doesn't pay nearly what he was making with Akram, but it's something to tide him over.”
“What's he do?”
“Pier clean-up right now. After hours.”
“So he's not here at the moment?”
“He starts work at half past eleven at night. There'd be no point to coming to the pier before that, unless he was doing it for his own amusement.”
Mentally, Barbara added another tick to Trevor Ruddock's name in the list of suspects. The motive was there and now the opportunity. He could easily have done away with Haytham Querashi on the Nez and still clocked in at the pier on time.
But that begged the question of what Theo Shaw was doing with the Aloysius Kennedy bracelet. If indeed it was the Kennedy bracelet. And there was only one way to find out.
Enter Thespian Havers, Barbara thought. She said, “I'll need a current address for him if you've got it.”
“Not a problem at all.” Theo went to his desk and sat in the wheeled oak chair behind it. He turned the spool of an old Rolodex and flipped through its cards until he came to the one he wanted. He wrote the address on a Post-it and handed this over. Which gave Thespian Havers the opportunity she wanted.
“Whoa,” she said. “Is that an Aloysius Kennedy you've got on? It's gorgeous.”
“What?” Theo said.
Score a point, Barbara thought. He hadn't bought the bracelet himself, because if he had done, there was little doubt that one of the Winfields would have waxed eloquent on its origins. “That bracelet,” Barbara said. “It looks like one I've been drooling over in London. A bloke called Aloysius Kennedy designs them. Can I have a look?” She added with what she hoped was her best display of girlish artlessness, “This is probably as close as I'm ever going to get to owning one, if you know what I mean.”
For a moment she thought she hadn't been able to hook him, but as the bait of her interest floated in front of him, Theo Shaw made the decision to bite. He handed over the gold wrist cuff, unfastening it with his thumbnail and slipping it off.
“It's great,” Barbara said. “May I …?” She gestured towards the window, and when he nodded, she carried it over. She turned it this way and that with her hand. She said, “The man's a genius, isn't he? I like these swirls. And the metal's perfect. He's the Rembrandt of goldsmiths, if you ask me.” She hoped the artistic allusion was right. What she knew about Rembrandt—not to mention what she knew about gold and jewellery—could easily fit into a teaspoon. She went on to remark on the weight of it, she ran her fingers over the shape of it, she examined its cleverly hidden clasp. And when the time was right, she looked at its inside and saw what she had believed she would see. Three words were engraved in a fluid scroll: LIFE BEGINS NOW.
Ah. Time to apply the thumbscrews. Barbara returned to the desk and set the bracelet next to the fossilised sponge. Theo Shaw didn't put it on at once. His colour was slightly higher than it had been when Barbara had taken the bracelet from him. He'd seen her read the inscription inside and she had little doubt that she and the young man were about to dance the careful pas de deux of how-to-find-out-what-the-rozzers-know. She realised that when the music began, she was going to need to outstep him.
“Makes a nice statement, that,” she said, indicating the bracelet with a nod. “I wouldn't mind finding one on my doorstep some morning. Just the sort of thing one hopes to have passed one's way by a nameless admirer.”
Theo reached for the bracelet and snapped it back on. “It was my dad's,” he said. Voila, Barbara thought. He should have kept his mug plugged, but in her experience, the guilty parties so rarely did, feeling compelled to demonstrate their spurious innocence for one and all.
“Your dad's dead, then?”
“My mother as well.”
“Then all of this—” Here she indicated the pier itself followed by the blue prints on the bulletin board. “Is all of this commemorating your parents?”
He looked nonplussed. She went on. “When I came here as a kid, this was Balford Pier. Now it's Shaw Attractions. And the leisure centre—Agatha Shaw Recreational Village. Is that your mum's name?”
His expression cleared. “Agatha Shaw's my grandmother, although she's done duty as my mother since I was six. My parents were killed in a car crash.”
“That must have been rough,” Barbara said.
“Yeah. But … well, Gran was great.”
“She's all you've got left?”
“All that's here. The rest of the family scattered years ago. Gran took us in—I've an older brother trying his luck in Hollywood—and raised us as her second set of kids.”
“Nice to have something to remember your dad by,” Barbara noted, another nod at the bracelet. She wasn't about to let him slither away from the topic at hand with Dickensian recollections of being orphaned and passed along to an ageing relative. She gazed at him fixedly. “Sort of modern to be a family heirloom, though. It looks like it was made last week.”
Theo returned her gaze just as fixedly, although he couldn't prevent the rush of colour on his neck, which gave him away. “I'd never thought of that. But I suppose it does.”
“Yes. Well. It's interesting to run across it like this because, oddly enough, we're on the trail of a Kennedy piece that's very much like it.”
Theo frowned. “On the trail …? Why?”
Barbara avoided a direct answer and went back to the window overlooking the pier. Outside, the Ferris wheel had begun to revolve, lifting a score of happy riders into the air. She said, “How do you know Akram Malik, Mr. Shaw?”
“What?” Clearly, he expected something else.
“You mentioned he phoned you about hiring Trevor Ruddock. That suggests you know each other. I was wondering how.”
“From the Gentlemen's Cooperative.” Theo went on to explain what it was. “We try to help each other out. This was an instance when I could do him favour. He'll do me one in return one day.”
“Is that your only connection with the Maliks?”
He looked from her to the window. Outside, a gull had come to sit on an exhaust fan on the roof of the arcade below them. The bird looked expectant. Barbara did likewise. She knew Theo Shaw was walking a delicate line at the moment. Not knowing what she had already been told about him from other sources, he would have to choose carefully between truth and lie. “Actually, I helped Akram set up his factory's computer system,” he settled on saying. “And I went to junior school here in town with Muhannad. To comprehensive as well, but that was in Clacton.”
“Ah.” Barbara mentally waved away the geography of his relationship with the family. Clacton or Balford hardly mattered. What was important was the connection itself. “You've known them for years, then.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“What manner of speaking is that?” Barbara lifted her Coke for another swig. It was doing wonders to settle the earlier consumed whitebait into her digestive system.
Theo followed her lead and took a swallow of Coke himself. “I knew Muhannad from school, but we weren't friends, so I never knew the family until I did their computers at the factory. This was a year ago, perhaps a bit more.”
“So I assume that you know Sahlah Malik as well?”
“I've met Sahlah, yes.” He did what, in Barbara's experience, so many people did when trying to look nonchalant about a piece of information that was causing their insides to shimmy: He continued to look her straight in the eye.
“So you'd recognise her. On the street, say. Or perhaps on the pier. Dressed Muslim or otherwise.”
“I suppose. But I don't see what Sahlah Malik has to do with anything. What's this all about?”
“Have you seen her on the pier in the last few days?”
“No. No, I haven't.”
“When did you last see her?”
“I can't recall. From what I could tell when I was doing their computers, Akram keeps her on a rather short tether. She's the only daughter, and it's their way. What makes you think she was on the pier?”
“She told me she was. She told me she threw a bracelet something like this one”—with a flip of her thumb at his Kennedy gold—”off the end of the pier once she was told that Haytham Querashi was dead. She said it'd been a gift for him and she gave it the toss on Saturday afternoon. But here's what's odd: As far as I've been able to tell, not a soul saw her. What d'you make of that?”
As if of their own volition, his fingers reached for his wrist and closed over the bracelet. “I don't know,” he said.
“Hmm.” Barbara nodded gravely. “It's intriguing, though, isn't it? That no one saw her.”
“It's getting on to high summer. There're scores of people on the pier every day. It's not very likely that one of them would stick in the memory.”
“Perhaps,” Barbara said, “but I've been the length of it, and here's what I noticed: No one's out there in Muslim garb.” Barbara rooted casually through her bag to find her cigarettes. She said, “Mind?” And when he waved her onward with a flick of his fingers, she lit up and said, “Sahlah wears the traditional get-up. Take that with the thought that she'd have had no reason to come onto the pier incognito, and we've got her here wearing Muslim garb. Wouldn't you agree? I mean, it's not like she was doing something illegal that required a disguise: She was just tossing an expensive piece of jewellery into the drink.”
“I suppose that makes sense.”
“So if she said she was here and if no one saw her and if she came here wearing her usual togs, then there's only one conclusion to draw. Isn't there?”
“Drawing conclusions is your job, not mine,” Theo Shaw said, and Barbara gave him credit for saying it evenly. “But if you're suggesting that Sahlah Malik's somehow involved in what happened to her fiancé … That's just not on.”
“How'd we get on to this business at the Nez?” Barbara asked. “That's rather a jump.”
He refused to be baited or trapped this time. He said, “You're the police, and I'm not stupid. If you're asking whether I knew the Maliks, you're involved in investigating the death on the Nez. Right?”
“And you knew she was to marry Querashi?”
“I'd been introduced to him at the Gentlemen's Cooperative. Akram called him his future son-in-law. I didn't think he was here to marry Muhannad, so it seemed reasonable to conclude he was here to marry Sahlah.”
Touché, Barbara saluted him mentally. She'd thought she had him, but he'd dodged adroitly.
“So you knew Querashi yourself?”
“I'd met him. I wouldn't call it knowing him.”
“Yes. Right. But you knew who he was. You'd have recognised him on the street.” When Theo Shaw acknowledged this to be the case, Barbara went on with “Just for clarity's sake, then, where were you on Friday night?”
“I was at home. And since you're going to inquire anyway, if not of me then of someone else, home is at the end of Old Hall Lane, which is itself a ten-minute walk from the Nez.”
“Were you alone?”