HADIYYAH COULDN'T HAVE been more delighted with her new giraffe. She held it happily to her thin chest, tucking its head under her chin. The other giraffe, however, she refused to part with. She clutched it in her other hand, saying, “It's not his fault he got smirched with ketchup,” as if the stuffed animal were a personal friend. “We c'n wash him up, I expect. Can't we, Dad? ‘N’ if all the ketchup won't come out, we can just pretend he escaped from a lion when he was little.”
The buoyancy of children, Barbara thought.
They spent another hour enjoying the pleasure pier's attractions: losing themselves in the Hall of Mirrors, intrigued by the hologram exhibition, tossing balls at a basket, trying their luck at archery, deciding what they would have printed upon their souvenir T-shirts. Hadiyyah settled on a sunflower, Azhar chose a steam train—although Barbara found that she couldn't imagine him actually wearing anything less formal than one of his spotless linen shirts—and Barbara herself went for a cartoon egg that was shattered on rocky ground beneath a wall, with the words SCRAMBLE HUMPTY-DUMPTY arching over the picture.
Hadiyyah sighed with pure pleasure as they made their way towards the exit. The attractions were beginning to shut down for the night, and as a result the noise had abated and the crowd had thinned out considerably. What remained were mostly couples now, boys and girls who sought the shadows as eagerly as they had earlier sought the games and amusements. Here and there, an entwined duo leaned against the pier railing. Some watched the lights of Balford fanned out on the shore, some listened to the sea as it slapped against the pilings beneath them, and some ignored everything but each other and the pleasure afforded by another's body pressed to one's own.
“This,” Hadiyyah announced dreamily, “is the very best place in the whole wide world. When I grow up, I'm going to spend every one of my holidays here. And you'll come with me, won't you, Barbara? Because we'll know each other for ever and ever. Dad'U come with us, won't you, Dad? And Mummy as well. And this time when Dad wins Mummy an elephant, I won't cut it open on the kitchen floor.” She gave another sigh. Her eyelids were beginning to droop. “We got to get postcards, Dad,” she added with a little stumble as she failed to lift her foot high enough when she took a step. “We got to send a postcard to Mummy.”
Azhar stopped. He took the two giraffes from the little girl and handed them to Barbara. Then he lifted his daughter and settled her legs round his waist.
“I c'n walk,” she protested sleepily. “I'm not tired. Not one little bit.”
Azhar kissed the side of her head. For a moment he stood motionless with his daughter in his arms, as if awash in an emotion that he wished to feel but not to exhibit.
Watching him, Barbara was overwhelmed for an instant with a longing that she didn't wish to identify, much less to experience. So she fumbled with the plastic bag in which their three T-shirts were folded, placing the two giraffes within it, finding it necessary to rearrange the bag's position on her arm. It was a moment in which her daily armour of derision and irony failed her entirely. There, on the pier in the company of a father and his child, circumstances suggested that she assess the elements comprising her personal life.
But she wasn't a woman who embraced such suggestions, so she looked about for other intellectual, emotional, and psychological employment. She found it without difficulty: Trevor Ruddock was heading in their direction, having just emerged from the brightly lit pavilion.
He was wearing sky-blue overalls, attire so out of character in him that Barbara could only conclude it was a uniform worn by the maintenance and custodial crews who took care of the pier after it closed for the night. But it wasn't the overalls that caused her to take a second and closer look at young Mr. Ruddock. He worked on the pier, after all. He'd been released from the nick some hours earlier. His presence at Shaw Attractions was hardly illogical, considering the hour. But the bulging backpack he was wearing slung over his shoulders was a less than reasonable accessory to his sartorial ensemble.
His eyes adjusting to the difference in lighting from the pavilion to the pier, Trevor didn't see Barbara and her companions. He went to a shed at the east side of the pavilion, where he unlocked its door and disappeared inside.
As Azhar started to move towards the exit again, Barbara put a hand on his arm. “Hang on,” she said.
He followed the direction of her gaze, seemed to see nothing, and looked back at her, perplexed. “Is there …?”
“Just a little something I want to check out,” she said. The shed, after all, was a perfect place to cache contraband. And Trevor Ruddock clearly had something other than his evening meal in his possession. With Balford's nearness to Harwich and Parkeston … it didn't make sense to let an opportunity like this one pass her by.
Trevor emerged—sans backpack, Barbara noted—pushing a large trolley. It was equipped with brooms and brushes, with buckets and dust pans, with a coiled hose pipe and an assortment of unidentifiable bottles, tins, and cannisters. Cleansers and disinfectants, Barbara concluded. The upkeep of Shaw Attractions was serious business. She wondered momentarily if Trevor's backpack had merely been a means of transporting all of his cleaning accoutrements. It was a possibility. She knew there was only one way to find out.
He took off towards the end of the pier, obviously with the intention of working his way towards and into the pavilion from the future site of the restaurant. Barbara seized the opportunity. She grabbed Azhar's elbow and hustled him across the pier to the shed. She tried the door, which Trevor had swung shut behind him. She found she was in luck. He hadn't relocked it.
She ducked inside. “Just keep watch for me,” she requested of her friend.
“Watch?” Azhar shifted the bulk of Hadiyyah's weight from one arm to the other. “For what? Barbara, what are you doing?”
“Just checking out a theory,” she said. “I won't be a tick.”
He said nothing else, and as she couldn't see him, she could only assume he was doing his bit and keeping an eye open for anyone approaching the shed with an intent to enter. For her part, she considered what Helmut Kreuzhage had told her from Hamburg earlier in the evening: Haytham Querashi had suspected someone of an illegal activity involving both Hamburg and the nearby English harbours.
Drug smuggling was the obvious illegal activity of choice, despite what Kriminalhauptkommisar Kreuzhage had said to discourage this line of thought. It brought in big money, especially if the drug was heroin. But an illegal activity that involved smuggling didn't limit itself to narcotics. There was pornography to consider, as well as loose jewels like diamonds, explosives, and small arms, any of which could be carried onto the pleasure pier via backpack and hidden in a shed.
She looked round for the backpack, but it was nowhere in sight. She began a search. The only light inside came from what the partially open doorway allowed, but it was sufficient for her to see by once her eyes became accustomed to the gloom. The shed was outfitted with a set of cupboards, and she went through these swiftly. She found nothing inside but five cans of paint, brushes, rollers, overalls, and tarpaulins, in addition to extra cleaning supplies.
Aside from the cupboards, there were two deep drawers and a chest. The drawers held tools for small repairs: spanners, screw drivers, pliers, a crow bar, nails, screws, and even a small saw. But nothing else.
Barbara went on to the chest. Its lid made a squeak that, she swore, probably could have been heard in Clacton. The backpack lay within, the sort of aluminum-framed rucksack that students use when they hitchhike during their holidays, determined to see the world.
Anticipation rising, feeling and believing that at last she was getting somewhere, Barbara lifted the pack out and laid it on the floor. But her hopes were dashed when she saw the contents. And confusion quickly took hope's place.
The backpack contained a hotchpotch of useless articles, at least articles that were useless to her present purposes. She emptied the pack of salt cellars fashioned like lighthouses, fishermen, anchors, and whales; pepper mills posing as Scotties and pirates; a plastic tea set; two dirty Barbie dolls; three unused and sealed decks of cards; a mug commemorating the short-lived marriage of the Duke and Duchess of York; a small London taxi missing a wheel; two pairs of child-sized sunglasses;
an unopened box of Beehive nougats; two Ping-Pong bats, a net for the game, and a box of balls.
Hell, Barbara thought. This was a total bust.
“Barbara,” she heard Azhar murmur from the other side of the door. “A boy's walking in this direction from the pavilion. He's just come out.”
She stowed everything away again, trying to replace each article in the order in which she'd first found it. Azhar said her name again, more urgently this time.
“Right, right,” she whispered in response. She returned the backpack to the chest and rejoined Azhar outside on the pier.
They faded to the railing, where the shadows were deep, just beyond the sailing ship ride. The newcomer rounded the corner of the shed, went to its doorway without hesitation, cast a surreptitious glance to the right and the left, and let himself inside.
Barbara knew him on sight, having had two occasions already to interact with the boy. It was Charlie Ruddock, Trevor's younger brother.
“Who is this, Barbara?” Azhar asked quietly. “Do you know him?” Her head on his shoulder, Hadiyyah was fast asleep, and she murmured as if in answer to her father.
“He's called Charlie Ruddock,” Barbara said.
“Why do we watch him? And what were you looking for in that shed?”
“I don't exactly know,” she said, and when he looked sceptical, she went on. “It's the truth, Azhar. I don't know. That's the hell of this case. It could be racial like you want it to be—”
“As I want it to be? No, Barbara. I am not—”
“All right. All right. Like some people want it to be. But it's starting to look like it could be something else as well.”
“What?” he asked. But he read her reluctance to part with information as clearly as if she'd communicated it to him. “You won't explain yourself further, will you?”
She was saved from having to answer his question. Charlie Ruddock was exiting the shed. And on his back he wore the pack that Barbara had just examined. Curiouser and curiouser, she thought. Exactly what the hell was going on?
Charlie headed back towards the pavilion. Barbara said, “Come on,” and began to follow.
The lights had been turned off now on the amusements, and the number of fun-goers had been reduced to the shadow-seeking couples and a few families still gathering up their straggling members prior to departure. The din had quieted. The smells had faded. In the attractions, on the rides, and within the numerous take-away food stalls, those whose livelihood was the pier readied it for another day.
With so few pleasure-seekers left and most of them wending their way towards the exit, it was easy enough to tail one young boy who was not only doing likewise, but doing it with a bulging pack on his back. As Barbara and her friends made their way through the pavilion and towards the seafront, she watched Charlie's progress and considered what she'd seen and heard that evening.
Haytham Querashi had been quite insistent that something illegal was taking place between Germany and England. Since he'd phoned Hamburg, it stood to reason that he believed the activity originated in that city. And German ferries leaving from Hamburg arrived in Parkeston harbour, near Harwich. But Barbara was no closer to learning what—if anything—was going on between the two countries and who—if anyone—was involved in the activity than she'd been when the condition of Querashi's abandoned Nissan had first suggested possession of contraband.
The fact that the Nissan had been torn apart brought everything about Querashi into question anyway, didn't it? And didn't the car's condition also emphasise the possibility of smuggling? And if it did, was Querashi involved? Or was he, a man of deep enough religious convictions that he'd phoned all the way to Pakistan merely to discuss a verse of the Qur'aan, attempting to blow the whistle on the illegal activity? And no matter what Querashi had been doing, how the hell did Trevor Ruddock fit into it? Or his brother Charlie?
Barbara knew how Muhannad Malik—and perhaps Azhar—would respond to those final two questions. The Ruddocks, after all, were white.
But she herself had seen this evening evidence of what she already knew about racial interactions. The adolescents who had harassed Hadiyyah and the one young girl who'd attempted to right the wrong were human microcosms of the population at large, and as such they gave testimony to Barbara's belief: Some of her countrymen were xenophobic imbeciles; others most decidedly were not.
But where did that knowledge leave the investigation into Querashi's murder? she wondered. Especially in a situation in which the only suspects without alibis were white?
Ahead, Charlie Ruddock had gained the land side of the pavilion and stopped. Barbara and her friends did likewise, watching him. He was at the south railing of the pier, mounting an ancient, rust-corroded bicycle. Beyond him, the proprietors of the Lobster Hut were cranking down the metal shields over the establishment's ordering windows. A short distance away, Balford Balloons and Rock had already shut its doors for the night. The tiers of deserted beach huts that stretched along the promenade to the south of these two commercial concerns resembled an abandoned village. Both their doors and their windows were firmly barred, and the only noise emitted from their immediate vicinity was the echo of the sea as waves hit the shore.
“This boy is involved in something, isn't he?” Azhar asked. “And it's something to do with Haytham's murder.”
“I don't know, Azhar,” Barbara said truthfully as they watched Charlie mount a dilapidated bike and begin to pedal in the general direction of the distant Nez. “He's involved in something. That much seems obvious. But as to what it is, I swear to God, I just don't know.”
“Is this the sergeant or Barbara speaking?” Azhar asked quietly.
She looked away from the Ruddock boy to the man beside her. “There's no difference between the two of them,” she said.
Azhar nodded and shifted his daughter in his arms. “I see. But perhaps there ought to be.”