Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(121)

“Pay?”

Azhar continued. “Haytham's mother is under a doctor's care, having collapsed when informed of his murder. His sisters are confused, his brother hasn't spoken a word since Saturday afternoon, and his paternal grandmother is attempting to hold the family together. But her heart is weakened by angina, the strain is great, and a strong attack may kill her. The ringing telephone frightened them all.”

He fastened his eyes on her. She said, “Murder's a nasty business, Azhar. I'm sorry, but there's no making it easier for anyone to bear. And I'd be lying if I told you that the horror ends when we make an arrest. It doesn't. Ever.”

He nodded. Absently, he rubbed the back of his neck. For the first time, she noticed he wore only the pyjama bottoms under his dressing gown. His chest was bare, and his dark skin appeared burnished in the light.

Barbara rose and went to the window. She could hear music coming from somewhere, the hesitant notes of someone practicing the clarinet in one of the houses on the clifftop some distance away.

“The next number is for a mulla,” Azhar said behind her. “This is a religious leader, a holy man.”

“Like an ayatollah?”

“Lesser. He's a local religious leader and he serves the community in which Haytham grew up.”

He sounded so grave that Barbara turned from the window to face him. She saw that he looked grave as well. “What did he want with the mulla? Did it have to do with the marriage?”

“With the Qur'aan,” Azhar said. “He wanted to speak of the same passage that he'd marked in the book: the passage I translated for you during our conference this afternoon.”

“About being brought forth from the oppressors?”

Azhar nodded. “But his interest did not lie with the ‘town from which the people are oppressors,’ as my cousin thought. He wished to understand how to define the word feeble.”

“He wanted to know what feeble means? And he phoned all the way to Pakistan to find out? That doesn't make sense.”

“Haytham knew what feeble means, Barbara. He wanted to know how to apply the definition. The Qur'aan instructs Muslims to fight for the cause of the feeble among men. He wished to discuss the manner in which one recognises when a fellow man is feeble and when he is not.”

“Because he wanted to fight someone?” Barbara returned to the dressing table stool. She sank onto it, reached for the ashtray, and crushed out her cigarette. “Bloody hell,” she said more to herself than to Azhar. “What was he up to?”

“The other call was to a mufti” Azhar continued. “This is a specialist in Islamic law.”

“D'you mean a lawyer?”

“Somewhat analogous to a lawyer. A mufti is one who provides legal interpretations of Islamic law. He's schooled to deliver what is called a fatwa”

“Which is?”

“Something akin to a legal brief.”

“What did he want from this bloke, then?”

Azhar hesitated, and Barbara could see that they'd come to the heart of whatever had caused the solemnity of his earlier expression. Instead of answering at once, he reached for the ashtray and crushed out his cigarette. A second time, he brushed his fallen hair from his forehead. He studied his feet. Like his chest, they were bare. Like his hands, they were thin. High arched and smooth, they might have belonged to a woman.

“Azhar,” Barbara said. “Please don't do a bunk on me now, okay? I need you.”

“My family—”

“Needs you as well. Right. But we all want to get to the bottom of this. Asian killer or English killer, we don't want Querashi's death to go unpunished. Even Muhannad can't want that, no matter what he says about protecting his people.”

Azhar sighed. “From the mufti, Haytham sought an answer about sin. He wished to know if a Muslim—guilty of a serious sin—would remain a Muslim and hence part of the greater community of Muslims.”

“You mean: Would he remain a part of his family?”

“A part of his family and a part of the community as a whole.”

“And what did the mufti tell him?”

“He spoke of usul al-figh: the sources of law.”

“Which are?”

Azhar raised his head to meet her eyes. “The Qur'aan, the Sunna of the Prophet—”

“Sunna?”

“The Prophet's example.”

“What else?”

“Consensus of the community and analogical reasoning—what you call deduction.”

Barbara reached for her cigarettes unseeing. She shook one for herself and offered Azhar the pack. He took the book of matches from the dressing table, striking one for her and then applying it to his own cigarette. He returned to his place on the edge of the bed.

“So when he and the mufti were done with their confab, some conclusion must have been reached, right? They had an answer to his question. Can a Muslim guilty of a serious sin remain a Muslim?”

He answered with a question of his own. “How can one live in defiance of any one of the tenets of Islam and still claim to be a Muslim, Barbara?”

The tenets of Islam. Barbara tossed this phrase round in her head, attaching it to everything she'd learned so far about Querashi and about the people with whom he'd come into contact. Doing this, she saw the inevitable connection between the question and Querashi's own life. And she felt the heady rush of excitement as the Asian's behaviour began to make sense. “Earlier—when we were outside—you said that homosexuality is expressly forbidden by the Qur'aan.”