Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(132)
So she'd gone to Haytham Querashi privately, slipping out of the house on one of the many evenings that Muhannad spent elsewhere. She'd buttonholed the intended bridegroom in his hotel and, sitting knee-to-knee in his garret of a room, she'd done her duty as any religious woman might have done, revealing the one ineradicable impediment to his upcoming marriage to her sister-in-law. The brat Sahlah carried could be got rid of, of course. But her virginity once lost could not be regained.
Haytham, however, had not reacted as Yumn had expected. The announcement, She's soiled, she's carrying another man's child had not led where tradition and logic dictated it should lead. In fact, Haytham had been so tranquil at Yumn's revelation that she had experienced a moment of dread in which she'd thought she'd somehow got events confused, with Sahlah's morning retching beginning after Haytham's advent instead of before it, making Haytham the father of Sahlah's child.
But she knew that this was not the case. She knew that Sahlah had been pregnant already when Haytham arrived. Thus his acquiescence to a marriage—taken in conjunction with his utter placidity once informed of Sahlah's sin—could mean only one thing. He'd known about her condition and he'd agreed to marry her anyway. The little bitch was saved, Yumn had realised. She was saved from disgrace and saved from dishonour because Haytham was eager, ready, and willing to take her away from the family home as soon as she wished to leave it.
The situation could not have been one iota more unfair. Having been forced to endure her mother-in-law's extolment of Sahlah's virtues for nearly three years, Yumn had been taking great pleasure in every opportunity she had to torment the girl. She'd heard quite enough about Sahlah's beauty, her artistry with those pitiful baubles she made, her intellectual gifts, her religious piety, her physical perfection, and especially her adherence to duty. Upon that last characteristic of her beloved child, Wardah Malik was fully capable of waxing utterly intolerable. And she had no compunction about invoking the image of Sahlah's earnest docility every time Yumn displeased her. If she overcooked the sevian, Wardah was good for twenty minutes on the subject of Sahlah's expertise in the kitchen. If she dared to omit one of the five daily prayers—and she was very likely to forgo the namdz of sunrise—she was regaled with a ten-minute discourse about Sahlah's devotion to Islam. If she failed to dust well enough, to scour the bath completely, or to search out every cobweb in the house, her slovenly habits were compared to Sahlah's which were, of course, immaculate. So it had been a source of great enjoyment to Yumn, having a nasty little piece of knowledge to hold over her sister-in-law's head. And it had been a source of even greater enjoyment, knowing how she was going to be able to put that knowledge to use for her own benefit. Yumn had almost had to relinquish all of her dreams about indefinitely holding little Sahlah hostage to her wishes and commands once Haytham declared his intention of marrying her despite her sins. But now Yumn held the girl's future in her palm once again. And in Yumn's palm was where Sahlah Malik so richly deserved to be.
Yumn smiled down at her son. She began to enfold him in the fresh, soft nappie.
“How lovely life is, little god,” she whispered.
And she made a mental list of the duties she would have Sahlah perform when she arrived home that evening.
HE POSSIBILITY OF HAVING A WITNESS TO QUERASHI'S death invigorated and refocussed the investigation. DCI Barlow began phoning her men on their mobiles, saying, “Everyone who came in contact with Querashi is a potential witness to his murder as of now. I want everyone's alibi and I want it corroborated. Whoever was on the Nez that night, track him down.”
For Barbara's part, she went on her way to phone the fingerprint office in London, using what little influence she had to get S04 to move on the prints that had been lifted from the Nissan. She knew that a match wasn't guaranteed. They would have a match only if the prints on the Nissan had been left by someone once arrested and run through a booking procedure somewhere in the country. But if that was the case, they'd have the best break they could get: an identity, something concrete that was beyond the realm of speculation.
Barbara made the call. Like most support services, the fingerprint people didn't warm to anything suggesting interference from another branch of the legal family, so she used the racial unrest in the town to promote her cause. She finished by saying, “We're sitting on a powder keg out here, and we need your help to diffuse it.”
S04 understood. Everyone wanted their dabs given identities before the sun set on the first day of the investigation. But the sergeant needed to understand that a highly specialised work force such as S04 could only be expected to deal with a limited number of evidential particulars on a given day. “We cannot afford an error,” the department head intoned, “not when guilt or innocence may well ride on a conclusion reached by this organisation.”
Right, right, right, Barbara thought. She told him to do his best and returned to Emily.
“I'm a bird with a lot less clout than I would like to be,” Barbara told her frankly. “They'll do what they can. What's up?”
Emily was in the process of flipping through the contents of a file. She said, “Querashi's picture,” and pulled it out. It was, Barbara saw, the same photograph of the murdered man that had run on the front page of the Tendring Standard: Querashi looked simultaneously solemn and harmless. “If Trevor Ruddock's telling the truth about Querashi and his cottaging, there's a chance that someone else saw him in the market square in Clacton. And if someone else saw him, someone may have seen our potential witness with him. I want that witness, Barb. If Ruddock's telling the truth.”