Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(111)

Relief came over her like the cool water she'd been longing for since she'd left the shop. True, she'd done wrong by giving Haytham Querashi that receipt for the bracelet, but it had all come out right in the end: Theo and Sahlah would be together.

She began to plan her next encounter with Sahlah. She thought of the words she'd use to relate what had just passed between herself and Theo. She'd even got as far as imagining the look on her best friend's face as she heard the news that Theo would be coming for her, when Theo himself turned round from the rubbish bin and Rachel had a better look at his expression. Her bones felt liquid at the sight of him and what the sight meant.

His pinched features radiated the misery of a man who saw himself irrevocably trapped. And as he walked heavily back to the car, Rachel understood that come what may, he'd never intended to marry her friend. He was exactly like so many of the men Connie Winfield had dragged home over the years, men who spent the night in her bed, the morning at her breakfast table, and the afternoon or evening in their cars, fleeing the previously amorous scene like hooligans on the run from a petty crime.

“Oh no.” Rachel's lips formed the words, but she emitted no sound. She saw it all: how he'd used her friend like a typical man as a casual and easy mark for sex, seducing her with a kind of attention and admiration that she couldn't hope to get from an Asian man, biding his time until she was ready for a physical approach. And that approach would have been subtle, no move made until he was certain that Sahlah was completely in love with him. She had to be ready. More, she had to be willing. If she was both, then the responsibility for anything untoward that happened as a result of the pleasure Theo Shaw took from Sahlah Malik would be Sahlah's alone.

And Sahlah herself had known this all along.

Rachel felt the animosity rising like a stream of bubbles escaping from her chest to her throat. What had happened to her friend was so bloody unjust. Sahlah was good, and she deserved someone equally good. That person obviously wasn't Theo Shaw.

Theo slid inside the car once more. Rachel opened her door.

“Well, Theo,” she said, making no attempt to hide the contempt in her voice, “is there any message you want me to pass along to Sahlah?”

His answer came as no surprise, but she'd wanted to hear it, just to make certain he was as low as she'd decided he was.

“No,” he said.


BARBARA STEPPED BACK from the mirror in her loo with a view, and admired her handiwork. She'd stopped at Boots on her way back to the Burnt House and twenty minutes in the single aisle that went for a make-up department had been enough for her to purchase a bagful of cosmetics. She'd been aided by a youthful shop assistant whose face was a living, breathing testimony to her enthusiasm for painting her features. “Super!” she'd cried when Barbara had asked for some guidance on the appropriate brands and colours. “You're spring, aren't you?” she'd added obscurely as she'd begun piling a variety of mysterious bottles, cases, jars, and brushes into a basket.

The shop assistant had offered to “do” Barbara right there in Boots, giving her the benefit of talents that appeared questionable at best. Evaluating the girl's yellow eye shadow and magenta cheeks, Barbara had demurred. She needed the practice anyway, she explained. There was no time like the present to get her toes damp by dipping them into the waters of cosmetic improvement.

Well, she thought as she observed her face now. She wouldn't exactly be finding herself on the cover of Vogue in the foreseeable future. Nor would she be selected as a sterling example of a woman's triumph over a broken nose, a bruised face, and an unfortunate set of features that could most mercifully be described as snubby. But for the moment she would do. Especially in dim lighting or among people whose vision had recently begun to fail them.

She took a moment to shove her supplies into the medicine cabinet. Then she scooped up her shoulder bag and left the room.

She was hungry, but dinner was going to have to wait indefinitely. Through the windows of the hotel bar upon her arrival, she'd seen Taymullah Azhar and his daughter on the lawn, and she wanted to talk to them—or at least to one of them—before they got away.

She descended the stairs and crossed the passage to cut through the bar. Since he was well occupied with seeing to the needs of his resident diners, Basil Treves would not be able to waylay her. He'd waved at her meaningfully upon seeing her enter the hotel earlier. He'd gone so far as to mouth, “We must talk,” and to waggle his eyebrows in a fashion that related he had something of a momentous nature to impart. But he'd been in the process of ferrying dishes to the dining room, and when he'd mouthed “Later” and tilted his shoulders to indicate he was asking a question, she'd made much of giving him a vigorous thumbs-up to keep lubricated the machinery of his fragile ego. The man was unsavoury, beyond a doubt. But he had his uses. After all, he'd been responsible for unknowingly handing them Fahd Kumhar. God alone knew what other jewels he would manage to mine, given half a chance and equal encouragement. But at the moment she wanted to talk to Azhar, so she was just as happy to see that Treves was unavailable.

She ducked into the bar and crossed to the french doors, which were wide open to the dusk. There she hesitated for a moment.

Azhar and his daughter were sitting just outside on the flagstone terrace, the child hunched over a spotty wrought iron table on which a chess board was set up, the father leaning back in his chair with a cigarette dangling from his fingers. A smile played round the corners of his mouth as he watched Hadiyyah. Obviously unaware that he was being observed, he allowed his features to take on a softness that Barbara had never seen in them before.