MILY FELL. BARBARA DROPPED THE GUN. BUT where she expected to see blood and intestines all over the DCFs tank top, she saw only water from the spray that continued to soar up on either side of the boat. The shot had gone wide.
Fogarty leapt forward. He jerked the DCI upright in her seat. He yelled, “She's right! Guv! She's right!”
And Barbara went for the boat's controls.
She didn't know how much time had passed. It seemed like several eternities. She brought the boat about with such speed that they nearly capsized. While Fogarty disarmed Emily, she wildly scanned the water for the girl.
Shit, she thought. Oh God. Please.
And then she saw her, some forty yards off their starboard side. Not thrashing, but floating. A floating body. She shouted, “Mike! There!” And she gunned the motor.
Fogarty was over the side the instant they were close enough to the child. Barbara killed the engine. She flung the life jackets and seat cushions into the water, where they bobbed like marshmallows. And then she prayed.
It didn't matter that her skin was dark, that her mother had abandoned her, that her father had allowed her to live eight years believing they were alone in the world. What mattered was that she was Hadiyyah: joyous and innocent and in love with life.
Fogarty reached her. Hadiyyah was floating face down. He flipped her over, caught her under the chin, and began swimming back to the boat.
Barbara's vision blurred. She whirled on Emily. “What were you thinking?” she shrieked. “What the goddamn hell were you thinking? She's eight years old, eight fucking years old!”
Emily turned from the sea back to Barbara. She raised a hand as if to fend off the words. Her fingers curled into a fist. But above that fist, her eyes narrowed slowly.
“She's not a Paki brat,” Barbara persisted. “She's not a nameless face. She's a human being.”
Fogarty had the child at the side of the boat.
“Christ,” Barbara whispered as she dragged the fragile body inside.
As Fogarty clambered into the boat, Barbara stretched the little girl out on the floor. Scarcely breathing herself, without thinking about its use or futility, she began CPR. She moved rapidly between the kiss of life and the cardiac massage and she kept her eyes on Hadiyyah's face. But her own ribs ached from the pounding she'd taken. And every breath she took seared her chest. She grunted. She coughed. She pounded the heel of her hand beneath Hadiyyah's breast.
“Get out of the way.” It was Emily's curt voice. Next to her, right into her ear.
“No!” Barbara closed her mouth around Hadiyyah's.
“Stop it, Sergeant. Get out of my way. I'll see to it.”
Barbara ignored her. And Fogarty, panting heavily from his exertions, reached for her arm. He said, “Let the Guv, Sarge. She can do it. It's okay.”
So Barbara allowed Emily to work on the child. And Emily worked in much the same way that Emily Barlow had always worked: efficiently, seeing that there was a job to be done, allowing nothing to get in the way of her doing it.
Hadiyyah's chest gave a monumental heave. She began to cough. Emily rolled her onto her side, and her body convulsed once before it began to expel saltwater, bile, and vomit all over the bottom of Charlie Spencer's prized Hawk 31.
Hadiyyah blinked. Then she looked stunned. Then she seemed to take in the three adults who were hovering over her. Face perplexed, her glance went first to Emily, then to Fogarty, then found Barbara. She smiled beatifically.
“My stomach went whoop-dee-do,” she said.
THE MOON HAD risen by the time they finally made it back to Balford Marina. But the marina was awash with light. It was aswarm with spectators as well. As the Sea Wizard rounded the point at which the Twizzle met the Balford Channel, Barbara could see the crowd. They were milling about the Hawk 31's berth, headed by a bald man whose pate glittered in more lights than were natural or necessary on the pontoon.
Emily was on the helm. She squinted over the Sea Wizard's bow. She said, “Brilliant,” in a disgusted tone.
In the boat's back seat, Barbara held Hadiyyah in the curve of her arm, the child swathed in a mildewed blanket. She said, “What's going on?”
“Ferguson.” Emily said. “He's phoned the bloody press.”
The media were represented by photographers wielding strobes, reporters carrying notebooks and cassette recorders, and a newsvan getting ammunition for ITV's ten o'clock broadcast. Together with Superintendent Ferguson, they surged forward and scattered down the pontoons on either side of the Sea Wizard as Emily cut the engines and let the boat's momentum carry them into the berth.
Voices were shouting. Strobes were popping. A video cameraman jostled his way through the crowd. Ferguson was yelling, “Where is he, goddamn it?” Charlie Spencer was crying, “My seats! What the hell've you done with my boat seats?” Ten journalists were shouting, “Can I have a word over here, please?” And everyone in sight was searching the boat for the obvious—and unfortunately missing—celebrity, promised to be brought to them in chains, head bowed and repentant, just in time to avert a political disaster. Except they didn't have him. All they had was a shivering little girl who clung to Barbara until a slender dark man with intense black eyes pushed past three constables and two teen-aged gawkers.
Hadiyyah saw him. She cried, “Dad!”
Azhar reached for her, grabbed her from Barbara's arms. He clutched her to him as if she carried the only hope of his salvation, as indeed she probably did. “Thank you,” he said fervently. “Barbara. Thank you.”
WPC BELINDA WARNER kept the coffee coming through the next few hours. There was much to see to.
Superintendent Ferguson had to be dealt with first, and Emily saw to him behind closed doors. To Barbara's ears, their meeting appeared to be a cross between a round of bear baiting and a vicious colloquy on the position of women in the police force. It seemed to consist of raised voices hurling nasty accusations, aggrieved remonstrations, and angry imprecations. Much of it centred round the superintendent's demanding to know what he was supposed to report to his own superiors about “this monumental cock-up of yours, Barlow,” and Emily's responding that she didn't give a fuck what he reported to anyone just as long as he did his bloody reporting away from her office and let her get back to the business of nabbing Malik. Their meeting ended with Ferguson storming off with vows that she'd do well to prepare herself for disciplinary action and Emily shouting that he'd do well to prepare a defence for harassment, which is what she intended to charge him with if he goddamn well didn't let her get on with her job.
Waiting uneasily with the rest of the team in the conference room next door to Emily's office, Barbara knew how much of the DCFs career now lay in the palm of her hand. As did Barbara's own professional fate rest in Emily Barlow's.
Neither of them had spoken a word about those moments on the Sea Wizard that had led up to Barbara's seizing control of the boat. Likewise, PC Fogarty had himself remained mum on the subject. He'd gathered the weapons when they'd returned to the marina. He'd stowed them—along with himself—in the ARV. He'd gone on his way, back to patrol or wherever he'd been when he'd first got the word to report to the marina. He'd nodded at them, said, “Sergeant, Guv, nice work” in farewell and left Barbara with the distinct impression that what was said on the subject of the sea chase would not be up to him.
And Barbara wasn't sure what to do because she couldn't bear to think of what she'd learned—about herself and about Emily Barlow—in just a few brief days in Balford-le-Nez.
“We had a score of Asians … howling like werewolves.”
“One of those take-away marriages all boxed up pretty by Mummy and Dad.”
“They're Asians. They wouldn't want to lose face.”
The reality had been before her all along, but her blind admiration for the DCI had encouraged Barbara to overlook it. Now she knew that professional ethics required her to expose what she'd seen—without wanting to see—in Emily from the first.
But an allegation from Barbara would most certainly be met by the DCFs levelling a more damning set of charges against her. They began with insubordination; they ended with attempted murder. A word from Emily to London and Barbara was finished in CID. One did not aim and discharge a loaded weapon at one's superior officer and hope that moment's breach of sanity would somehow be overlooked.
When Emily rejoined the team, however, her face gave no indication of her intentions. She entered the room with a down-to-business air about her, and the manner in which she gave directions to her team told Barbara that her mind was on the job, not on retribution.
Interpol needed to be involved. Balford CID would make contact with them through the Met. The request they were making was basic enough. No investigation was being required of Germany's Bundeskriminalamt. All that was needed was a simple arrest: as simple as anything could ever be, once more than one country became involved.
But Interpol would require reports to send on to Germany. And Emily directed several members of the team to start gathering those reports. Others were set to work on the extradition proceedings. Still others were to assemble material for the press officer's use in the morning. And others were assigned to assembling data—activity reports, transcripts of interrogations, forensic material—to be handed over to the prosecutors once the police had Muhannad Malik in hand. At this point, pushing yet another trolley of coffee into the room, Belinda Warner informed Emily that Mr. Azhar was asking to see her and the sergeant.
Azhar had disappeared with his daughter almost as soon as he'd swept her into his arms. He'd shouldered his way through the milling crowd on the pontoon, making no response to the questions shouted at him, stoically facing the strobes as his picture was recorded for tomorrow's papers. He'd carried Hadiyyah to his car and he'd driven off, leaving the police to sweep up the pieces of what his cousin Muhannad had wrought.
Emily said, “Take him to my office,” and she finally gave a glance to Barbara. “Sergeant Havers and I will meet him there.”
Sergeant Havers and I. Barbara's gaze flew to Emily's. She tried to read for substance beneath the DCFs words. But Emily's look was level, betraying nothing, and she turned on her heel and left the conference room. Barbara followed, waiting for a sign.
“How is she?” Barbara asked when Azhar joined them in the DCFs office.
“She's well,” he said. “Mr. Treves was good enough to have soup prepared. She's eaten and bathed, and I've put her to bed. She's been seen by a doctor. Mrs. Porter sits with her until I return.” He smiled. “She has the giraffe in bed with her, Barbara. The ruined one. ‘Poor thing,’ she said. ‘It's not his fault he got mooshed up, is it? He doesn't know he's a mess.’ “
“Who really does?” Barbara replied.
Azhar gazed at her a long moment and then nodded slowly before he turned to Emily. “Inspector, I have no idea what Barbara has told you about our acquaintance. But I'm afraid you might have misunderstood her involvement with my family. We're neighbours in London. Indeed, she's been so kind as to befriend my daughter in her mother's …” He hesitated, shifted his eyes away, brought them back to Emily. “In her mother's absence. And that's the extent to which we know each other. She had no idea that I came to your town to assist my family in a police matter. Equally, she had no idea that my experience isn't limited to my work at the university, as I've never told her that. So when you requested that she assist you during her holiday, she was completely innocent of any knowledge that might have—”
“I what?” Emily said. “I did what?”
“You phoned her? You asked for her help?”
Barbara closed her eyes briefly. It was one hell of a tangled web. She said, “Azhar, that's not what happened. I lied to you both about how I happened to be in Balford. I came because of you.”
He looked so perplexed that Barbara wanted to sink through the floor rather than have to explain anything further. But she muddled on.
“I didn't want you in over your head. I thought if I was here, I could keep you out of trouble. Both you and Hadiyyah. Obviously, I failed. At least in Hadiyyah's case. I completely blew it.”
“No,” Emily said. “You got us out on the North Sea, Sergeant. Which is where we needed to be to learn the truth.”
Surprised, Barbara shot her a grateful look, embraced entirely by relief at last. No accounting had to be made. What had passed between them on the sea could be forgotten. Emily's words told Barbara that the DCI had learned richly from the experience, that no report to her superior officer was going to have to be made.
There was a moment of silence among them. Into it came the sounds of the CID team pulling information together, working through the evening and into the night. But there was a sense of lightheartedness to their work, the sound of men and women who knew a trying job was winding down.
Emily turned to Azhar. “Until we have Malik in interrogation, we can only sketch out the details of what happened. You can help us with that, Mr. Azhar. As I see it, Querashi twigged to the smuggling ring by accident when he came across Muhannad in Parkeston on the night that he himself was there at the Castle Hotel. He wanted in on the action. He threatened to talk if he wasn't included in a way that earned him big money. Muhannad stalled. Querashi grabbed Kumhar and got him to go along by telling him the plan was to put an end to the entire smuggling business. He installed Kumhar in Clacton as leverage for his scheme to make the Maliks pay up. But things didn't work out the way he'd hoped. He got the chop instead.”
Azhar shook his head. “That cannot be.”
Emily bristled.
Back to normal indeed, Barbara thought.
“After what Kumhar said about Muhannad, you can't think Malik's not involved in this murder. The man just dumped your own daughter into the sea.”
“I'm not disagreeing about my cousin's involvement. It's Mr. Querashi's that you've misunderstood.”
Emily frowned. “How exactly?”
“By not taking our religion into account.” Azhar indicated one of the chairs in Emily's office, saying, “May I? I find that I'm rather more exhausted than I expected to be.”
Emily nodded. All of them sat. Barbara wished—yet another time—for a cigarette, and she expected that Azhar had much the same longing because his fingers went to the breast pocket of his shirt as if with the thought of finding a packet of fags therein. They would have to make do with a roll of fruit pastilles scavenged from the depths of Barbara's shoulder bag. She offered him one. He took it with a grateful nod.
“There was a passage marked in Mr. Querashi's copy of the Qur'aan,” Azhar explained. “It was about fighting for the feeble among—”
“The passage we got Siddiqi to translate,” Emily cut in.
Azhar went on quietly. As Sergeant Havers would confirm, Mr. Querashi had made several phone calls to Pakistan from the Burnt House Hotel in the days leading up to his death. One was to a mulla, a Muslim holy man from whom he sought a definition of the word feeble.
“What's feeble got to do with anything?” Emily asked.
Feeble, as in helpless, Azhar told her. As in without force or effectiveness. A word that could be used to describe a friendless soul newly arrived in this country and finding himself trapped in an enslavement that appeared to have no end.
Emily nodded cautiously. But her doubtful expression telegraphed that she still would have to be convinced of the weight of Azhar's comments.
The other phone call was to a mufti, Azhar continued, a legal scholar. From this man he'd sought the answer to a single question: Could a Muslim, guilty of a grave sin, remain a Muslim?
“Sergeant Havers has told me all this already, Mr. Azhar,” Emily pointed out.
“Then you know that one cannot remain a Muslim and live in defiance of Islam's tenets. And that's what Muhannad was doing. And that's what Haytham wished to stop.”
“But wasn't Querashi doing it as well?” Barbara asked. “What about his homosexuality? You said that it's forbidden. Couldn't he have been phoning the mufti to talk about his own soul and not Muhannad's?”
“He could have been doing that,” Azhar acknowledged, “but taken with everything else that he did, it doesn't seem likely.”
“If Hegarty's to be believed,” Emily told Barbara, “Querashi intended to keep up his double life after his marriage, Islam or not. So he couldn't have cared much about his soul.”
“Sexuality's powerful,” Azhar admitted. “Sometimes more powerful than personal or religious duty. We're willing to risk everything for the sake of it. Our souls. Our lives. All that we have and all that we are.”
Barbara met his glance. Angela Weston, she thought. What must it have felt like: that desperate resolve to fly in the face of all one knew, believed, and had previously upheld in order to possess the unattainable?
Azhar continued. “My uncle—a devout man—would have known nothing about this scheme of Muhannad's, and I suggest to you that a complete search of his factory as well as a scrutiny of the papers of his Asian employees will prove this fact.”
“You're not suggesting that Muhannad's in this business alone,” Emily said. “You heard Kumhar earlier. There were three men. A German and two Asians he said. And there may have been more.”
“But not my uncle. Muhannad would have had partners in Germany, true. Other partners here, no doubt. I don't question Mr. Kumhar's word on that. This scheme could have been in place for years.”
“He could have cooked it up in university, Em,” Barbara pointed out.
“With Rakin Khan,” Emily acknowledged. “Mr. Alibi. They were at university together.”
“My money says that a recce of Klaus Reuchlein's past will show a history among all three of them,” Barbara added.
Azhar shrugged his shoulders in acceptance of this theory. “Whatever the genesis of the scheme, Haytham Querashi uncovered it.”
“With Hegarty, as he himself told us,” Barbara noted. “That night when they were at the Castle Hotel.”
“Haytham's duty as a Muslim required he put a stop to it,” Azhar explained. “He pointed out to Muhannad that his immortal soul was at risk. And at risk for the worst possible reason: his lust for money.”
“But what about Querashi's own immortal soul, if it came to that?” Barbara persisted.
Azhar looked at her directly. “I should guess he would already have dealt with that problem, by justifying his behaviour in some way. It's easy for us to excuse our physical lust. We call it love, we call it seeking a soul mate, we call it something bigger than and beyond ourselves. We lie that we might have what we want to have. And we call our behaviour answering the demands of the heart, preordained by a God who stimulates hungers within us that are meant to be satisfied.” He raised his hands, palm upward, a gesture of acceptance. “No one is immune to this sort of self-deception. But Haytham would have seen Muhannad's sin as the greater one. His own sin affected only himself. People can do good in one area of their lives even when they're committing a wrong in another area. Murderers love their mothers; rapists treasure their dogs; terrorists blow up department stores and then go home to rock their children to sleep. Haytham Querashi could have worked for the betterment of the people enslaved by Muhannad and still lived a sinner in one small area of his life that he set aside and excused. Indeed, Muhannad himself did that, organising Jum'a on the one hand and the gangmaster scheme on the other.”
“Jum'a just kept him looking good,” Emily argued. “He had to demand an investigation into Querashi's death because of ]um'a. If he hadn't, everyone would have wondered why.”
“But if Querashi wanted to bring an end to Muhannad's scheme,” Barbara said, “then why didn't he just expose it, turn him in, and get the police involved? He could have done all that anonymously. It would have served the same purpose.”
“But it would also have served to destroy Muhannad. He would have gone to prison. He would have been cut off from his family. And I expect that Haytham didn't seek that. He sought a compromise instead, with Fahd Kumhar as the guarantee that he got it. If Muhannad had closed down the operation, nothing more would be said about it. If he didn't, Fahd Kumhar would come forward and expose the smuggling ring from Karachi to Hamburg to Parkeston Harbour. I expect that was the plan. And it cost him his life.”
Motive, means, and opportunity. They had it all. What they didn't have was the killer himself.
Azhar rose. He would, he said, return to the Burnt House. Hadiyyah had been sleeping peacefully when he left her, but he did not wish her to awaken without finding her father at her side.
He nodded to them both. He went to the office door. Then he turned back, hesitantly. “I've forgotten altogether why I came here,” he said apologetically. “Inspector”—this to Emily—”there's one thing more.”
Emily looked wary. Barbara saw a muscle move in her jaw. “Yes?” she said.
“I wanted to say thank you. You could have kept going. You could have captured Muhannad. Thank you for stopping and saving my daughter instead.”
Emily nodded stiffly. She moved her eyes away from him to the filing cabinets along one wall. He left her office.