Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(118)

“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.