INCE SHE HAD BEEN THE LAST DINER THAT NIGHT, it was easy for Basil Treves to waylay Barbara. He did so as she passed the residents’ lounge, having decided to forego postprandial coffee in favour of a prowl along the clifftop, where she hoped to encounter an errant sea breeze.
“Sergeant?” Snake-like, Treves sibilated when he whispered her title. The hotelier was in 007 mode. “I didn't want to intrude on your meal.” A screw driver in Treves’ hand indicated that he'd been in the process of making some sort of adjustment to the large-screen television on which Daniel Day-Lewis was in the process of swearing eternal fidelity to a bosom-heaving woman prior to jumping through a waterfall. “But now that you're finished … If you've a moment …?”
Rather than wait for a response, he took Barbara's elbow between his thumb and index finger and firmly guided her down the passage to reception. He slid behind the desk and removed a computer print out from its bottom drawer. “More information,” he said conspiratorially. “And I thought it best not to share it with you while you were engaged with … well, with others, if you know what I mean. But as you're free at the moment … You are free, aren't you?” He peered past her shoulder as if expecting Daniel Day-Lewis to dash out of the lounge and come to her rescue, flintlock rifle at the ready.
‘Tree's my middle name.” Barbara wondered why the odious man didn't do something about the condition of his skin. It was flaking off into his beard in significant clumps this evening. He looked as if he'd dipped his face into a plate of pastry crumbs.
“Excellent,” he said. He gave a glance round for eavesdroppers, and apparently finding none but still deciding to proceed with caution, he leaned over the counter to speak confidentially and to share the gin on his breath. “Phone records,” he exhaled gustily. “I had a new system put in last year, thank God, so I've a record of everyone's trunk calls. Before, all calls went through the switchboard and we had to keep records by hand and time them, the calls not the records, that is. An utterly byzantine method and hardly accurate. Let me tell you, Sergeant, it led to the most unpleasant rows at check-out time.”
“You've tracked down Mr. Querashi's outgoing calls?” Barbara said encouragingly. She found herself marginally impressed. Eczema or not, the man was actually proving himself to be a bit of a gold mine. “Brilliant, Mr. Treves. What have we got?”
As usual, he preened himself at her use of the plural pronoun. He turned the computer print out round on top of the desk so that it faced her. She could see that he'd circled perhaps two dozen phone calls. They all began with the same double noughts. It was a list of foreign calls, Barbara realised.
“I did take the liberty of carrying our investigation a leetle further, Sergeant. I do hope I wasn't overstepping the mark.” Treves took up a pencil from a holder fashioned out of seashells glued to an erstwhile soup tin. He used it as a pointer as he went on. “These numbers are in Pakistan: three in Karachi and another in Lahore. That's in the Punjab, by the way. And these two are Germany, both of them Hamburg. I didn't phone any of them, mind you. Once I saw the international code, I found that all I needed was the telephone directory. The country and city codes are listed there.” He sounded slightly chagrined by this final admission. Like so many people, he had doubtlessly assumed that policework comprised cloak-and-daggering when it didn't comprise stake-outs, shoot-outs, and lengthy car chases in which lorries and buses crashed into each other as the bad guys manoeuvred wildly through urban traffic.
“These are all his calls?” Barbara asked. “For his entire stay?”
“Every trunk call,” Treves corrected her. “For the local calls he made, of course, there is no record.”
Barbara hunched over the desk and began to examine the print out page by page. She saw that the long distance phone calls had been few and far between in the earliest days of Querashi's stay, and at that time they'd been made to a single number in Karachi. In the last three weeks of his stay, however, the international calls had increased, tripling in the final five days. The vast majority had been made to Karachi. Only four times had he phoned Hamburg.
She reflected on this. Among the telephone messages that callers had left for Haytham Querashi during his absence from the Burnt House, there had been none from any foreign country, because surely the competent WPC Belinda Warner would have made that point to her superior officer when reporting earlier that afternoon on the telephone chits she'd been given to research. So either he always got through to his intended party, or he didn't leave a message for a return call when he didn't get through. Barbara looked at the length of each of the calls and saw confirmation for this latter interpretation of the printout: The longest call he'd made was forty-two minutes, the shortest thirteen seconds, surely not enough time to leave anyone a message.
But the pile-up of calls so close to his death was what Barbara found intriguing, and it was clear to her that she needed to track down whoever was at the other end of the telephone numbers. She glanced at her watch and idly wondered what time it was in Pakistan.
“Mr. Treves,” she said, preparatory to disengaging herself from the man, “you're an absolute marvel.”
He put a hand to his breast, humility incarnate. “I'm only too glad to help you, Sergeant. Ask anything of me—anything at all—and I'll comply to the best of my ability. And with complete discretion, of course. Upon that you may rely. Should it be information, evidence, recollections, eye-witness accounts—”
“As to that …” Barbara decided that there was no time like the present to weasel from the man the truth about his own whereabouts on the night that Querashi died. She considered how best to ease it out of him without his awareness. “Last Friday evening, Mr. Treves …”
He was immediately all attention, eyebrows raised and hands clasped beneath the third button on his shirt. “Yes, yes? Last Friday evening?”
“You saw Mr. Querashi leave, didn't you?”
He did indeed, Treves told her. He was in the bar doing his bit with the brandy and the port. He saw Querashi coming down the stairs, reflected in the mirror. But hadn't he already imparted this information to the sergeant?
Of course he had, she reassured him hastily. What she was leading up to were the others in the bar. If Mr. Treves was pouring brandy and port, it seemed logical to conclude that he was pouring it for other guests in the bar. Was that the case? And if so, did any of the others leave at the same time Querashi did, perhaps following him?
“Ah.” Treves lifted an index finger heavenward as he ascertained her point. He went on to tell her that the only people to leave the bar when Querashi left the Burnt House were poor old Mrs. Porter with her zimmer, clearly not fleet enough of foot to be in hot pursuit of anyone, and the Reeds, an ageing couple from Cambridge who'd come to the Burnt House to celebrate their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. “We do a special for birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries,” he confided. “I dare say they wanted to have at their champagne and chockies.”
As for the rest of the hotel residents, they had hung about the bar and the lounge till half past eleven. He could vouch for each and every one of them, he told her. He was with them all evening.
Fine, Barbara thought. And she was pleased to see that he was none the wiser at having just provided her with an alibi for his own whereabouts. She thanked him, said goodnight, and with the computer print out tucked beneath her arm, she took herself up the stairs.
In her room, she went directly to the phone. It stood on one of the two wobbly bedside tables, next to a dusty lamp that was shaped like a pineapple. With the print out in her lap, Barbara punched for an outside line and then tapped in the first number in Germany. Several clicks and the connection was made. A phone began ringing somewhere across the North Sea.
When the ringing stopped, she drew in a breath to identify herself. But instead of a human being, she found she was listening to an answer machine. A male voice spoke in machine-gun German. She caught the number seven and two nines, but other than that and the word chüs at the end—which she took for a German form of “cheerio bye-bye”—she gleaned nothing whatsoever from the message. The beep sounded, and she left her name, her phone number, and a request for a return call, all with the hope that whoever listened to her message spoke English.
She went on to the second number in Hamburg and found herself on the line with a woman saying something as unintelligible as had the male voice on the answer machine. But at least this was a real human being, and Barbara wasn't about to let her slip through her grasp.
God, how she wished she'd studied foreign language at the comprehensive! All she knew how to say in German was “Bitte zwei Bier” which didn't seem applicable in the situation. She thought, Bloody hell, but gathered her wits enough to say, “Ich spreche … I mean …Sprechen vous … No, that's not right …Ich bin ein calling from England … Hell! Damn!”
This was apparently sufficient stimulus, because the response came in English, and the words were surprising. “Here is Ingrid Eck,” the woman said curtly and with an accent so heavy that Barbara half-expected to hear Das Deutschlandlied playing in the background. “Here is Hamburg Police. Wer ist das, bitte? How may I help you?”
Police? Barbara thought. Hamburg police? German police? What in hell was a Pakistani in England doing phoning the German police?
She said, “Sorry. Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers here. New Scotland Yard.”
“New Scotland Yard?” the woman repeated. “Ja? To who will you wish”—vill and vish, she said—”to speak at this location?”
“I'm not sure,” Barbara said. “We're looking into a murder and the victim—”
“You have a German victim?” Ingrid Eck asked at once. Except she said haff and wictim and went on to clarify with “Has a German national been involved”—inwolwed—”in a homicide, please?”
“No. Our victim is Asian. Pakistani, in fact. A bloke called Haytham Querashi. And he phoned this number two days before he was killed. I'm trying to trace the call. I'd like to speak to whoever he phoned. Can you help me?”
“Oh. Ja. I see.” And then she spoke past the receiver, rapid German of which Barbara caught the words England and mord. Several voices answered, many gutturals like the clearing throats of a half dozen men afflicted with serious postnasal drip. Barbara's hopes lifted at the passion of their conversation, only to be dashed when Ingrid's voice came back over the line.
“Here is Ingrid another time,” she said. “I feel terror that we can be of no help.”
Terror? Barbara thought before she made the correction to I'm afraid. “Let me spell out the name for you,” she said helpfully. “Foreign names are odd when you hear them, aren't they, and if you see it written down, you might recognize it. Or someone else might if you pass it round.”
With stops and starts and at least five pauses to make corrections in the spelling, Ingrid took Haytham Querashi's name. She said in her creative and broken English that she would display it and circulate it round the station, but New Scotland Yard weren't to get their hopes up about receiving a helpful answer. Many hundred people worked at Polizeihochhaus in Hamburg in one division or another, and there was no telling if the right person would see the circulated and displayed name any time soon. People were beginning to take their summer holidays, people were overworked, people's focus was on German rather than English problems. …
So much for European unity, Barbara thought. She asked Ingrid to do her best, left her own number, and rang off. She blotted her hot face on the hem of her T-shirt, thinking how unlikely it was that she'd find an English-speaking recipient at the other end of her next set of phone calls. It had to be well after midnight in Pakistan, and since she didn't know a word of Urdu in which to tell an Asian sleeper why his slumber had been shattered by the ringing of his phone, Barbara decided to rustle up someone who could do the job for her.
She went up the stairs and made her way down the corridor to the section of the hotel in which Querashi's room had been. She paused before the door behind which she'd heard television voices on the previous night. Azhar and Hadiyyah had to be within. It was unthinkable that Basil Treves might have deviated from his odious separate-but-equal philosophy by placing the Asians in part of the hotel where his English guests would have their delicate sensibilities disrupted by a foreign presence.
She knocked quietly and said Azhar's name, then knocked again. The key turned in the lock within, and he was standing before her in a maroon dressing gown with a cigarette in his hand. Behind him, the room was semi-dark. A bedside lamp was shaded by a large blue handkerchief, but enough light was apparently left for him to read by. A bound document of some sort lay next to his pillow.
“Is Hadiyyah asleep? Can you come to my room?” she asked him.
He looked so startled at the request that Barbara felt her face begin to flame at the implication behind her words. She said hurriedly, “I need you to phone some numbers in Pakistan for me,” and went on to explain how she'd come by them.
“Ah.” He glanced at the gold watch on his thin wrist. “Have you any idea what time it is in Pakistan, Barbara?”
“Late.”
“Early,” he corrected her. “Extremely early. Would your purposes not be better served by waiting till a more reasonable hour?”
“Not when we're dealing with a murder,” she said. “Will you make the calls for me, Azhar?”
He looked over his shoulder into the room. Beyond him, Barbara could see the small humped figure of Hadiyyah in the second bed. She was sleeping with a large stuffed Kermit tucked in beside her.
“Very well,” Azhar said, and stepped back into the room. “If you'll give me a moment to change …”
“Forget it. You don't need to get dressed. This'll probably take less than five minutes. Come on.”
She didn't give him a chance to argue. She set off down the corridor in the direction of the stairs. Behind her, she heard the sound of his door closing, followed by the scrape of the key as he locked up. She waited for him at the top of the stairs.
“Querashi was phoning Pakistan at least once a day in the last three weeks. Whoever got those calls is bound to remember if they've heard he's dead.”
“The family has been informed,” Azhar told her. “Aside from them, I can't think whom he might have been phoning.”
“That's what we're about to find out.”
She shoved open the door of her room and ushered him inside. From the floor, she scooped up the underclothes, the drawstring trousers, and the T-shirt that she'd worn earlier that day. She tossed them into the clothes cupboard with an “Excuse the mess,” and led him to the bedside table, where the computer print out lay on the dingy counterpane.
“Have at it,” she said. “Make yourself comfortable.”
He sat and looked at the print out for a moment, cigarette in his mouth and a plume of smoke rising like a vaporous serpent above his head. He tapped his fingers beneath one of the circled numbers and finally glanced in her direction.
“Are you certain you wish me to place these calls?”
“Why wouldn't I be certain?”
“We sit among opposing forces, Barbara. Should the parties at the other end of these numbers speak only Urdu, how will you know I'm relating the truth of the conversation to you?”
He had a point. Prior to fetching him, she hadn't dwelt long upon Azhar's reliability as a conduit of information. She hadn't thought about the question at all. She wondered why. Nonetheless she said, “Our objective's the same, isn't it? We both want to get to the bottom of who killed Querashi. I can't think you'd do something to bury the truth once you knew it was the truth. Frankly, you've never seemed that type.”
He gazed at her, his expression something between thoughtful, enlightened, and perplexed. He finally said, “As you wish,” and picked up the phone.
Barbara dug her cigarettes out of her bag, lit up, and dropped onto the dressing table's lime-cushioned stool. She moved an ashtray within reach of both of them.
Azhar used his long fingers to shove back a wing of black hair that had fallen across his forehead. He placed his cigarette into the ashtray and said, “It's ringing. Have you a pencil?” Then a moment later: “It's a recording, Barbara.” He frowned, listening. He jotted notes on the print out. He left no message, however, when the recording finished. He just rang off. “This number—” And he ticked off one of them. “This is a travel agency in Karachi. World Wide Tours. The message gave their hours of operation, none of which”—he smiled and reached for his cigarette—”happen to be between midnight and seven A.M.”
Barbara looked at the print out. “He phoned them four times last week. What d'you make of that? Honeymoon plans? The great escape from his marriage?”
“Doubtless he was merely arranging for his family's transport, Barbara. They would have wanted to be here to celebrate his marriage to my cousin. Shall I continue?”
She nodded. He went on to the next number. The connection was made, and within moments he was speaking Urdu. Barbara could hear the voice on the other end of the line. The words, at first hesitant, quickly became both urgent and passionate. The conversation went on some minutes, with English interspersed where there was no Urdu translation. Thus, she heard her own name mentioned as well as New Scotland Yard, Balford-le-Nez, Burnt House Hotel, and Essex Constabulary.
When he rang off, she said, “Well? Who was it? What did they—” but he held up his hand to stop her question and went on to make the next call.
This time he spoke at greater length, and he made notes as a man's voice on the other end of the line imparted what appeared to be a small volume of information. Barbara itched to wrest the receiver away from Azhar and make demands of her own. But she schooled herself to patience.
Without comment, Azhar went on to the fourth call, and this time Barbara recognised what seemed to be his standard opening: an apology for having phoned at such an hour, followed by an explanation in which Haytham Querashi's name came up more than once. This final conversation was longest of all, and at its conclusion, Azhar kept his attention gravely on the computer print out until Barbara spoke.
His expression was so sombre that Barbara felt the queasiness of trepidation come over her. She had handed him a potential item of crucial interest in the investigation. He was free to do with it what he would, including lie about its significance or relate it—with suitable incendiary comments—to his cousin.
She said, “Azhar?”
He roused himself. He reached for his cigarette and took a hit. Then he looked her way.
“The first call was to his parents.”
“That's the number that appears earlier on the printout?”
“Yes. They are—” He paused, ostensibly seeking a word or a phrase. “They are understandably crushed by his death. They wished to know about the status of the investigation. And they would like the body. They feel they cannot grieve their oldest son properly without having his body, so they ask if they must pay the police to release it.”
“Pay?”
Azhar continued. “Haytham's mother is under a doctor's care, having collapsed when informed of his murder. His sisters are confused, his brother hasn't spoken a word since Saturday afternoon, and his paternal grandmother is attempting to hold the family together. But her heart is weakened by angina, the strain is great, and a strong attack may kill her. The ringing telephone frightened them all.”
He fastened his eyes on her. She said, “Murder's a nasty business, Azhar. I'm sorry, but there's no making it easier for anyone to bear. And I'd be lying if I told you that the horror ends when we make an arrest. It doesn't. Ever.”
He nodded. Absently, he rubbed the back of his neck. For the first time, she noticed he wore only the pyjama bottoms under his dressing gown. His chest was bare, and his dark skin appeared burnished in the light.
Barbara rose and went to the window. She could hear music coming from somewhere, the hesitant notes of someone practicing the clarinet in one of the houses on the clifftop some distance away.
“The next number is for a mulla,” Azhar said behind her. “This is a religious leader, a holy man.”
“Like an ayatollah?”
“Lesser. He's a local religious leader and he serves the community in which Haytham grew up.”
He sounded so grave that Barbara turned from the window to face him. She saw that he looked grave as well. “What did he want with the mulla? Did it have to do with the marriage?”
“With the Qur'aan,” Azhar said. “He wanted to speak of the same passage that he'd marked in the book: the passage I translated for you during our conference this afternoon.”
“About being brought forth from the oppressors?”
Azhar nodded. “But his interest did not lie with the ‘town from which the people are oppressors,’ as my cousin thought. He wished to understand how to define the word feeble.”
“He wanted to know what feeble means? And he phoned all the way to Pakistan to find out? That doesn't make sense.”
“Haytham knew what feeble means, Barbara. He wanted to know how to apply the definition. The Qur'aan instructs Muslims to fight for the cause of the feeble among men. He wished to discuss the manner in which one recognises when a fellow man is feeble and when he is not.”
“Because he wanted to fight someone?” Barbara returned to the dressing table stool. She sank onto it, reached for the ashtray, and crushed out her cigarette. “Bloody hell,” she said more to herself than to Azhar. “What was he up to?”
“The other call was to a mufti” Azhar continued. “This is a specialist in Islamic law.”
“D'you mean a lawyer?”
“Somewhat analogous to a lawyer. A mufti is one who provides legal interpretations of Islamic law. He's schooled to deliver what is called a fatwa”
“Which is?”
“Something akin to a legal brief.”
“What did he want from this bloke, then?”
Azhar hesitated, and Barbara could see that they'd come to the heart of whatever had caused the solemnity of his earlier expression. Instead of answering at once, he reached for the ashtray and crushed out his cigarette. A second time, he brushed his fallen hair from his forehead. He studied his feet. Like his chest, they were bare. Like his hands, they were thin. High arched and smooth, they might have belonged to a woman.
“Azhar,” Barbara said. “Please don't do a bunk on me now, okay? I need you.”
“My family—”
“Needs you as well. Right. But we all want to get to the bottom of this. Asian killer or English killer, we don't want Querashi's death to go unpunished. Even Muhannad can't want that, no matter what he says about protecting his people.”
Azhar sighed. “From the mufti, Haytham sought an answer about sin. He wished to know if a Muslim—guilty of a serious sin—would remain a Muslim and hence part of the greater community of Muslims.”
“You mean: Would he remain a part of his family?”
“A part of his family and a part of the community as a whole.”
“And what did the mufti tell him?”
“He spoke of usul al-figh: the sources of law.”
“Which are?”
Azhar raised his head to meet her eyes. “The Qur'aan, the Sunna of the Prophet—”
“Sunna?”
“The Prophet's example.”
“What else?”
“Consensus of the community and analogical reasoning—what you call deduction.”
Barbara reached for her cigarettes unseeing. She shook one for herself and offered Azhar the pack. He took the book of matches from the dressing table, striking one for her and then applying it to his own cigarette. He returned to his place on the edge of the bed.
“So when he and the mufti were done with their confab, some conclusion must have been reached, right? They had an answer to his question. Can a Muslim guilty of a serious sin remain a Muslim?”
He answered with a question of his own. “How can one live in defiance of any one of the tenets of Islam and still claim to be a Muslim, Barbara?”
The tenets of Islam. Barbara tossed this phrase round in her head, attaching it to everything she'd learned so far about Querashi and about the people with whom he'd come into contact. Doing this, she saw the inevitable connection between the question and Querashi's own life. And she felt the heady rush of excitement as the Asian's behaviour began to make sense. “Earlier—when we were outside—you said that homosexuality is expressly forbidden by the Qur'aan.”
“I did.”
“But he intended to marry. In fact, he was committed to marry. He was so committed that his family was ready to attend the celebration and he had the wedding night all planned out.”
“It seems reasonable to conclude that,” Azhar said cautiously.
“So can we reckon that after his conversation with the mufti, Haytham Querashi decided to start living by the tenets of Islam, in effect to go straight?” She warmed to her topic. “Can we reckon that he'd been at war with himself about doing this—about going straight—ever since coming to England? He was committed to getting married, after all, and yet still he was drawn to the men he'd sworn to give up. In being drawn to them, he was probably drawn to locations they frequent, more than one location. So he met some bloke in Clacton market square and took up with him. They carried on for a month or so, but he didn't want to live a double life—too much was at risk—so he tried to end it. Only he ended instead.”
“Clacton market square?” Azhar asked. “What has Clacton market square to do with anything, Barbara?”
And Barbara realised what she'd done. So caught up was she in her desire to piece together what facts and speculations they had been able to gather that she'd inadvertently given Azhar a piece of information which only Trevor Ruddock and the investigators had. In doing so, she'd crossed a line.
Shit, she thought. She wanted to rewind the tape, to whisk the words Clacton market square out of the air and back into her mouth. But she couldn't unsay them. All she could hope to do was temporise. Temporising, however, was among the very least of her talents. Oh, to be in the company of Detective Inspector Lynley, Barbara thought. With his gracefully adroit conversational footwork, he'd ease them out of this situation in a flash. Of course, he'd never have got them into this situation in the first place since he wasn't in the habit of thinking aloud unless he was in the presence of his colleagues. But that was another matter entirely.
She decided to ignore the question by saying in as reflective a manner as possible, “Of course, he may have had another person in mind when he was speaking to the mufti,” and having said this, she realised how close to the truth she may have just come.
“Who?” Azhar asked.
“Sahlah. Perhaps he'd discovered something about her that made him reluctant to marry her. Perhaps he was seeking from the mufti a way to get out of the marriage contract. Wouldn't a woman's grave sin—something that if revealed could result in her being cut off from Islam—be reason enough to nullify the marriage contract?”
He looked sceptical, then shook his head. “It would nullify the contract. But what grave sin could my cousin Sahlah possibly have on her soul, Barbara?”
Theo Shaw, Barbara thought. But this time wisely she said nothing.
THE DOORBELL RANG in the midst of their argument. Connie's voice had reached such a shrill pitch that had Rachel not been standing in the sitting room doorway, she wouldn't have heard it. But the two-note chime—the second note strangled as always like a bird shot down in the middle of a chirp—came at the moment when her mother was taking a breath.
Connie ignored the chimes. “You answer me, Rache!” she shouted. “You answer me now and you answer me good. What d'you know about this business? You was lying to that police detective and you're lying to me now and I'm not going to stand for it, Rachel Lynn. I truly am not.”
“That was the door, Mum,” Rachel said.
“Connie. I'm Connie and don't you forget it. And bugger the door. It won't get itself opened till you answer me straight. How're you messed in with that dead bloke from the Nez?”
“I already said,” Rachel told her. “I gave him the receipt so he could see how much Sahlah loved him. She told me she was worried. She said she didn't think he believed her and I thought that if he saw the receipt—”
“Rubbish!” Connie shrieked. “Bloody flaming bollocks! If that rot's the truth, then I'm Mother Goose. Why didn't you tell that police person when she asked you about it, eh? But we know the answer to that one, don't we? You didn't say cause you hadn't cooked up a good explanation till now. Well, if you expect me to believe a half-arsed story about proving some coloured girl's eternal love for her intended bloody sodding bridegroom, then—”
The doorbell rang again. Three times in succession. Connie herself stormed to answer it. She flung the door open. It smashed against the wall.
“What?” she barked. “What bloody what? Who the hell are you? And do you know what time it is, by the way?”
A young voice, male. It was carefully deferential. “Rachel in, Mrs. Winfield?”
“Rachel? What d'you want with my Rache?”
Rachel went to the door, standing behind her mother. Connie attempted to block her with her hip.
“Who is this wanker?” Connie demanded of her. “And what's his business showing up at … Piss on your face! Do you know what time it is, you?”
It was Trevor Ruddock, Rachel saw. He was standing well into the shadows so that neither the light from the house nor the light from the streetlamps touched him. But still, he couldn't do much to hide. And he looked worse than usual because his T-shirt was dirty, with holes round the neckline, and his jeans had gone so long unwashed that they probably could have stood up on their own.
Rachel attempted to step past her mother. Connie caught her arm. “We aren't finished, you and me, Missy-miss.”
“What is it, Trev?” Rachel asked.
“You know this bloke?” Connie demanded incredulously.
“Obviously,” Rachel replied. “Since he asked for me, I probably know him.”
“C'n you talk for a minute?” Trevor asked. He shifted his weight, and his boots—unlaced and unpolished—scraped against the concrete front step. “I know it's late, but I was hoping … Rachel, I need to talk to you, okay? Private.”
“About what?” Connie demanded hotly. “What've you got to say to Rachel Lynn that you can't say in front of her mum? And who are you anyways? Why've I never seen you before if you and Rachel know each other good enough for you to come calling at quarter past eleven?”
Trevor looked from Rachel to her mother. He looked back to Rachel again. His expression said clearly, What d'you want her to know? And Connie read it like a psychic.
She jerked Rachel's arm. “This is what you been messing with? This is what you snuck up round the beach huts for? You been lowering yourself to do the job with a wally no better than yesterday's rubbish?”
Trevor's lips jerked as if he were stopping himself from responding. Rachel did it for him.
“Shut up, Mum.” She twisted out of her mother's grasp and stepped onto the porch.
“You get back in this house,” her mother said.
“And you stop talking like I was a baby,” Rachel retorted. “Trevor's my friend and if he wants to see me, I mean to know why. And Sahlah's my friend and if I want to help her, I'm going to do it. And no policeman—and you neither, Mum—is going to make me do anything else.”
Connie gaped at her. “Rachel Lynn Winfield!”
“Yeah, that's my name,” Rachel said. She heard her mother gasp at the sheer audacity of her reply. She took Trevor's arm and led off the front step, in the direction of the street where he'd left his old motor-scooter. “We can finish our talking once I talk to Trevor,” she called back to her mother.
A slammed door was the answer.
“Sorry,” she said to Trevor, stopping midway down the path. “Mum's in a state. The cops came round to the shop this morning and I scarpered without telling her why.”
“They came to me, too,” he said. “Some sergeant bird. Sort of fat with her face all …” He seemed to recall whose presence he was in and what a remark about a banged-up face might mean to her. “Anyway,” he said, driving a hand into the pocket of his jeans. “The cops came. Someone at Malik's told them I'd got the sack from Querashi.”
“That's rough,” Rachel said. “But they don't think you did anything, right? I mean, what would've been the point? It's not like Mr. Malik didn't know why Haytham sacked you.”
Trevor pulled out his keys. He played them through his fingers. To Rachel's eyes, he looked nervous, but until he went on, she didn't know why.
“Yeah, but why I got the sack's not really the point,” he said. “The fact of getting the sack is. ‘S far as they see it, I could've given him the chop to get revenge. That's what they're thinking. Besides, I'm white. He was coloured. A Paki. And with the rest of that lot making noise about hate crimes …” He lifted his arm and wiped it across his brow. “Fucking hot,” he said. “Whew. You'd think it'd cool off at night.”
Rachel watched him curiously. She'd never seen Trevor Ruddock nervous. He always acted like he knew what he wanted and getting it was only a matter of doing what it took. For sure, he'd been that way with her all right: smooth moving and easy talking. Definitely and positively easy talking. But now … This was a Trevor she'd not seen before, not even at school, where he'd once stood out among the pupils as a hopeless yob with limited brainpower and a future to match. Even then, he'd acted sure of himself. What he couldn't solve mentally, he'd solved with his fists.
“Yeah. It's hot,” she said carefully, waiting to see what would unfold between them. It couldn't be what usually unfolded between them. Not here with her mother steaming behind the lounge curtains and the nearby neighbours in the congested street only too willing to have a peep and a listen through their open windows. “I can't remember when it's ever gone on like this, day after day, can you? I read a bit in the paper about global warming. Maybe this's it, huh?”
But it was evident that Trevor had not come to speak about science, atmospheric or otherwise. He shoved his keys back into his pocket, gnawed on his thumb, and cast a quick glance over his shoulder to the lounge window.
“Listen,” he said. He looked at the skin he'd bitten. He rubbed the thumb against the front of his T-shirt. “Look'ere, Rachel, c'n we talk for a sec?”
“We're talking.”
He jerked his head towards the street. “I mean … c'n we walk?” He headed to the pavement. He stopped at the rusty front gate and indicated—again with his head—that he wished her to follow.
She did so, saying, “Aren't you s'posed to be at work, Trev?”
“Yeah. I'm going. But I got to talk to you first.” He waited for her to join him. But he walked no farther than his motorscooter, and he straddled it, planting his bum on the seat. He gave his attention to the handlebars, and his hands twisted round them as he continued. “Lookit, you and me … I mean … last Friday night. When Querashi got chopped. We was together. You remember that, right?”
“Sure,” she said, although the growing warmth of her chest and neck told her that she was going crimson.
“You remember what time we split, don't you? We went up to the huts round nine. We had that booze—bloody awful, it was—what was it called?”
“Calvados,” she said, and added uselessly, “It's made from apples. It's for after dinner.”
“Well, we sort of had it before dinner, huh?” He grinned.
She didn't like it when he grinned. She didn't like his teeth. She didn't like to be reminded that he never saw a dentist. Nor did she like to be faced with the fact that he didn't bathe daily, that he never used a brush on his fingernails, and most of all that he was always careful that their meetings were private, beginning beneath the pier on the seaside of whatever pile was nearest the water and ending in that beach hut that smelled of mildew, where the rattan mats on the floor made a red lattice on her knees as she knelt before him.
Love me, love me. Her actions had begged. See how good I can make you feel?
But that was before she knew that Sahlah needed her help. That was before she'd seen the expression on Theo Shaw's face that told he intended to abandon Sahlah.
“Anyways,” Trevor said when she didn't chuckle at his lewd remark, “we were still there at half-eleven, remember? I even had to make a dash for it to get to work on time.”
She shook her head, slowly. “No, we weren't, Trev. I got home round ten.”
He grinned, still focused on the handlebars. When he raised his head with a nervous laugh, he still didn't look at her. “Hey, Rache, that's not the way it was. Course, I don't expect you to get the time exactly straight cause we was sort of involved.”
“I was involved,” Rachel corrected him. “I don't remember you doing much of anything after you pulled your prong from your trousers.”
He finally looked at her. For the first time ever in her recollection, his face was scared. “Rachel,” he said miserably. “Come on, Rache. You remember how it was.”
“I remember it being dark,” she said. “I remember you telling me to wait ten minutes while you went up to the hut—third from the end in the top row, it was—to … What was it, Trev? To ‘air it out,’ you said. I was to wait underneath the pier and when ten minutes were up, I was supposed to follow.”
“You wouldn't've wanted to go inside when it was all smelly,” he protested.
“And you wouldn't've wanted to be seen with me.”
“That is not the case,” he said, and for a moment he sounded so stiff with outrage that Rachel truly wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe that it really meant nothing that the single time they'd been in public together had been dinner at a Chinese restaurant conveniently located some fifteen miles from Balford-le-Nez. She wanted to believe that the fact that he'd never kissed her mouth meant he was only shy and working up his courage. And most of all, she wanted to believe that his letting her service him fifteen times without ever once wondering what she was getting out of the activity aside from the humiliation of yearning so openly for anything remotely resembling hope of a normal future only meant that he'd not yet learned from her example how to give. But she couldn't believe. So she was stuck with the truth.
“I got home round ten, Trev. I know cause I felt all hollow inside, so I turned on the telly. And I even know what I watched, Trev. The middle and end of that old movie with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. I bet you know the one: They're kids and it's summer and they fall in love and mess around. And they sort of finally realise that love's more important than being scared and hiding who you really are.”
“Can't you just tell them?” he asked. “Can't you say it was half past eleven? Rache, the cops're going to ask you cause I said I was with you that night. And I was. If you tell them you got home round ten, don't you see what that means?”
“I expect it means you had time to give Haytham Querashi the business,” she answered.
“I didn't do it,” he said. “Rache, I never saw the bloke that night. I swear. I swear. But if you don't back me up in what I said, then they'll know I'm lying. And if they know I'm lying about that, they'll think I'm lying about not having killed him. Can't you help me out? What's another hour?”
“Hour and a half,” she corrected him. “You said half-eleven.”
“Okay. Hour and a half. What's another hour and a half?”
Plenty of time for you to show you had at least one thought in your mind about me, she told him silently. But she said, “I won't lie for you, Trev. I might've once. But I won't do it now.”