Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(104)

The room was only a degree or two less stifling than Emily Barlow's office had been, but unlike Emily's office, there was no fan circulating the tepid air. Muhannad's forehead glistened. Azhar, as usual, could have stepped from an icy shower a moment prior to Barbara's entrance.

Barbara indicated the yellow-bound book with her cigarette. “I'd like to begin with this. Can you tell me what it is?”

Azhar reached across the table. He turned the book with the back cover face up and read what Barbara would have thought to be the final page. He said, “This is the Holy Qur'aan, Sergeant. Where did you get it?”

“In Querashi's room.”

“As he was a Muslim, that can't come as a surprise.” Muhannad said pointedly.

Barbara extended her hand for the book, and Azhar complied. She opened it to the page she'd noted on the previous night, marked with a satin ribbon. She directed Azhar's attention to the passage on the page, where brackets had been drawn in blue ink. “As you obviously read Arabic,” she said, “would you translate this for me? We've sent a fax of it to a bloke at the University of London for deciphering, but we'll be that much ahead of the game if you're willing to do the honours right now.”

Barbara saw a small flicker of irritation cross Azhar's face. In revealing that he read Arabic, he'd inadvertently given her an advantage over him that she'd otherwise not have had. In telling him that she'd already sent the page to London, she'd made it impossible for him to manufacture a translation that might meet ends other than the truth. Love-one, she thought with no little pleasure. It was important, after all, that Taymullah Azhar understand their acquaintance wasn't going to stand in the way of Sergeant Havers's getting her job done. It was equally important that both men knew they weren't dealing with a fool.

Azhar read the passage. He was silent for a minute, during which time Barbara could hear voices coming from the first floor conference room as the door opened and shut upon Emily's afternoon meeting with her team. She shot a glance at Muhannad but couldn't decide whether he looked bored, eager, hostile, overheated, or tense. His eyes were on his cousin. His fingers held a pencil and tapped its rubber end against the top of the table.

Finally, Azhar said, “A direct translation isn't always possible. English terms aren't always adequate or comparable to those in Arabic.”

“Right,” Barbara said. “The point's duly noted. Just do your best.”

“The passage refers to one's duty to go to the aid of those who are in need of help,” Azhar said. “Roughly, it reads, ‘How should you not fight for the cause of Allah and of the feeble among men and of the women and the children who are crying: Our Lord! Bring us forth from out this town of which the people are oppressors! Oh, give us from thy Presence some protecting friend!’ “

“Ah,” Barbara said wryly. “Roughly, as you say. Is there more?”

“Naturally,” Azhar said with delicate irony. “But only this passage is marked in pencil.”

“I think it's clear enough why Haytham marked it,” Muhannad noted.

“Is it?” Barbara drew in on her cigarette and examined him. He'd pushed his chair back as his cousin was reading. His face wore the look of a person who'd had his suspicions confirmed.

“Sergeant, if you'd ever sat on this side of the table, you'd know that it is,” Muhannad said. “‘Bring us forth from out this town of which the people are oppressors!’ There you have it.”

“I did hear the translation.”

Muhannad bristled. “Did you? Then let me ask you this: What more do you need? A message written in Haytham's blood?” He dropped his pencil on the table. He got to his feet and went to the window. When he next spoke, he gestured to the street and—metaphorically, it seemed—to the town beyond it. “Haytham had been here long enough to experience what he'd never had to experience before: the smart of racism. How d'you think he felt?”

“We haven't the slightest indication that Mr. Querashi—”

“Wear my skin for a day if you want an indication. Haytham was brown. And being brown means being unwelcome in this country. Haytham would have liked to catch the first flight back to Karachi, but he couldn't because he'd made a commitment to my family that he intended to honour. So he read the Qur'aan looking for an answer, and he saw it written that he could fight in the cause of his own protection. And that's what he did. And that's how he died.”

“Not exactly,” Barbara said. “Mr. Querashi's neck was broken. That's how he died. There's no indication that he was doing any fighting at all, I'm afraid.”

Muhannad turned to his cousin and clenched his fist. “I told you, Azhar. They were holding back on us all along.”

Azhar's hands were on the table. He pressed the tips of his fingers together. “Why weren't we informed at once?” he asked.

“Because the postmortem hadn't yet been performed,” Barbara answered. “And no information's ever released in advance of the p.m. That's how it's done.”

Muhannad looked incredulous. “You can't sit there and tell us that you didn't know the moment you saw the body—”

“How exactly did the death occur?” Azhar asked with a quieting glance at his cousin. “One's neck can break in a number of ways.”