Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(128)

Emily waved the apology off. Barbara was, she told her, not on the time sheet. This was supposed to be her holiday. Her assistance with the Pakistanis was a bonus to Balford's CID. No one expected her to skin her nose on the grindstone doing anything else.

The DCI stepped down from her chair and continued with the drawing pins and the stapler base, lower down on the pillowcase. She'd been to the news agent's on Carnarvon Road in Clacton, she informed Barbara. She'd spent quarter of an hour there on the previous night, having a chat with the owner. He himself ran the shop, and when she'd quizzed him about the Pakistani customer who used the phone to make calls to one Haytham Querashi, he'd responded at once with “That'd be Mr. Kumhar, that one. He i'n't in some sort of trouble, is he?”

Fahd Kumhar was a regular, he'd told her. Never caused a bit of trouble or worry, always paid cash. He came in at least three times a week for packets of Benson and Hedges. Sometimes he bought a newspaper as well. And lemon pastilles. He was tremendous fond of lemon pastilles.

“He's never asked Kumhar where he lives,” Emily said. “But the bloke's evidently there often enough for us to make contact with him without much trouble. I've a man in the laundrette across the street, watching the place. When Kumhar shows his face, our boy'll trail him and give us the word.”

“How far is the news agent's from Clacton market square?”

Emily smiled grimly. “Less than fifty yards.”

Barbara nodded. That location placed one more person in the proximity of the gentlemen's toilets, which gave them the first possibility of corroborating Trevor Ruddock's story. She told Emily about her phone calls to Pakistan on the previous night. She didn't add that Azhar had placed them, and when Emily didn't ask her for clarification that would have led to that detail, she concluded that the information itself was more important than the manner in which she'd come by it.

Like Barbara, Emily homed in on the discussions that Querashi had had with the mufti. She said, “So if homosexuality is considered a grave sin by the Muslims—”

“It is,” Barbara said. “I've unearthed that much.”

“Then there's a decent chance that our boy Trevor is telling the truth. And that Kumhar—skulking about in the vicinity—knew about Querashi as well.”

“Perhaps,” Barbara said. “But Querashi could have been phoning the mufti about someone else's sin, couldn't he? Sahlah's, for example. If she'd sinned by having it off with Theo Shaw—and fornication's as big a sin as any of them, I reckon—then she'd be cast out. And that, I'll reckon, would get Querashi off the hook of having to marry her. Maybe that's what he was looking for: a way out.”

“That would certainly set the Maliks off.” Emily nodded her thanks to Belinda Warner as the WPC carried a fax into the room and handed it over. “Anything from London on those prints we lifted from the Nissan?” Emily asked her.

“I've put a call into S04,” Belinda said. “I was asked did I realise that the print officers get the dabs of twenty-six hundred people every day and is there any special reason why our prints ought to have top priority?”

“I'll phone them,” Barbara told Emily. “I can't promise anything, but I'll try to shake the tree.”

“That's from London, that fax,” Belinda went on. “Professor Siddiqi's done the translation on the page from that book from Querashi's room. And Phil rang in from the marina. The Shaws have a boat there, a big cabin cruiser.”

“What about the Asians?” Emily asked.

“Only the Shaws.”

Emily dismissed the young woman and stared thoughtfully at the fax before she read it.

“Sahlah gave Theo Shaw that bracelet,” Barbara said to her. “‘Life begins now.’ And his alibi's about as firm as jelly.”

But the DCI was still studying the fax from London. She read aloud. “‘How should ye 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! Oh, give us from thy Presence some protector!’ Well.” She flipped the fax onto her desk. “That makes things as clear as mud.”

“It sounds like we can trust Azhar,” Barbara said. “That's practically a word-for-word duplicate of his translation from yesterday. As to what it might mean, Muhannad argued it's a sign that someone was causing Querashi aggro. He homed in on the ‘bring us forth from out this town,’ part.”

“He's claiming Querashi was being continually persecuted?” Emily clarified. “We've not a scrap of evidence of that.”

“Then Querashi might have wanted to be delivered from his marriage,” Barbara offered. She warmed to this idea, supporting—as it did—her earlier hypothesis. “After all, he can't have been chuffed if he discovered that his fiancée had messed about with Shaw. It's logical that he'd try to call things off. And maybe he'd phoned Pakistan to talk to the mufti about that, using veiled terms to do it.”

“I'd say it's more likely that he'd realised he couldn't pretend to be straight for the next forty odd years and was trying to get out of the marriage because of that, regardless of what he discussed with this mufti character. Then someone here got word of his reluctance about marrying Sahlah and—” She made a gun from her thumb and index finger, pointed it at Barbara, and released the trigger. “You fill in the blanks, Barb.”