Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(139)

“That's still my conclusion.”

“But you knew Querashi, didn't you? He had telephone messages from you at the Burnt House Hotel. That does something to suggest that you mixed with him.”

DeVitt changed positions to lean against the pier railing, his elbows taking most of his weight. He was facing her, not the North Sea, but he was looking at the town. Perhaps in meditation, perhaps with the hope of avoiding her eyes. “I didn't mix with him. I was doing some work for him in a house in First Avenue. It's where he was going to live after his marriage.”

“So you did know him.”

“I'd spoken to him a dozen times, maybe more. But that's the extent of it. If you want to call that knowing him, I knew him.”

“Where did you first meet him?”

“There. At the house.”

“The First Avenue house? You're certain of that?”

He shot her a glance. “Yeah. That's right.”

“How did he know to contact you to work on it?”

“He didn't contact me,” DeVitt said. “Akram Malik did. He said he had a rush renovation about two months ago and asked me if I'd take it on. I gave it a look and thought I could manage it. I could always do with the money. I met Querashi there—at the house—after I'd already begun the work.”

“But you're working here at the pier full-time, aren't you? So when do you work in First Avenue? At the weekend?”

“Nights as well.”

“Nights?” Barbara's voice rose instinctively.

He gave her a glance, this one more guarded than the last. “That's what I said.”

She took stock of DeVitt. A long time had passed since she'd first concluded that one of the most foolish mistakes an investigator could make was drawing an inference based on appearance. With his powerful build and the kind of work he did, DeVitt had the look of a man who ended his blow torch days with a pint of bitter and a shag with the wife or the girlfriend. True, he was wearing an earring—the same gold hoop that he'd had on yesterday—but Barbara knew that earrings, toe rings, navel rings, or nipple rings meant sod bloody all in the current decade.

“We think that Mr. Querashi was homosexual,” Barbara told him. “We think he may have been intending to meet his lover on the Nez on the night he was killed. He was due to marry in the next few days, so we have an idea that he may have gone to the Nez to end that relationship once and for all. If he tried to live a double life while married to Sahlah Malik, someone was bound to find out eventually, and he had a lot to lose.”

DeVitt raised his hand to his mouth. The movement was studied, slow and steady, as if he wished to demonstrate that his nerves were unjangled in the face of this new information. He spit the Polo into his hand, then flicked it from his palm into the sea. “I don't know anything about how the bloke got his rocks off,” DeVitt said. “Men, women, or animals. We didn't discuss it.”

“He left the hotel at the same time several nights each week. And we're fairly certain he was meeting someone. He had three condoms in his pocket when his body was found, so I think we can safely conclude they were meeting for more than a casual after-dinner brandy at one of the pubs. Tell me this, Mr. DeVitt. How often did Querashi come to First Avenue to check on the work you were doing there?”

She saw the reaction this time: a sharp movement of muscle in his jaw. He didn't reply.

“Did you work there alone, or did some of these blokes help you out?” Here, she indicated the restaurant by jutting her chin at it. Inside, someone had turned on a portable radio. Above the noise of the construction, a voice began chanting about having life to live and love to give as the accompanying music crescendoed. “Mr. DeVitt?” Barbara prompted.

“Alone,” he said.

“Ah,” she replied.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Did Querashi stop by often to check your work?”

“Once or twice. But so did Akram. And the wife, Mrs. Malik.” He looked her way. His face was damp, but that easily could have been due to the heat. The sun was climbing and it throbbed down upon both of them, sucking the moisture through their pores. Her own face would have been damp as well, Barbara knew, had she not thoroughly brushed it with powder in step two of her facial beautification project. “I never knew when any of them would drop in,” he added. “I did the work, and if they decided to stop by and check it, that was fine by me.” He scrubbed his face on the sleeve of his T-shirt, adding, “So if that's all you want from me, I'd like to get on with it.”

Barbara nodded him back to work, but as he approached the restaurant door, she spoke once more. “Jaywick Sands, Mr. DeVitt. Is that where you live? That's where your calls to Querashi came from.”

“I live there, yeah.”

“I've not been there in years, but as I recall, it's not far from Clacton. Just a few minutes by car, in fact. That's the case, isn't it?”

His eyes narrowed to a squint. But again the sun could have been his reason. “What exactly are you on about, Sergeant?”

Barbara smiled. “Just trying to keep my geography straight. There're a thousand details in a case like this. You never know which one is going to lead you to a killer.”