Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(14)

Sahlah let out a soft, ironic laugh. She turned to the window and looked at the afternoon sunshine that beat relentlessly down on the garden, drying the soil, desiccating the lawn, robbing the flowers of life. “The bad's already happened,” she said. “Where were you to stop it?”

The question chilled Rachel as no breath of cool wind could have done. They suggested that Sahlah had come to know the lengths to which Rachel had been willing to go in order to preserve their friendship. Her courage faltered. But she couldn't leave the house without knowing the truth. She didn't want to be faced with it, because if the truth was what she thought it might be, she would also be faced with the knowledge that she herself had been the cause of their friendship's demise. But there was no way round it that Rachel could see. She had barged her way in where she wasn't wanted. Now she would have to learn the cost.

“Sahlah,” she said, “did Haytham—” She hesitated. How to ask it without admitting the ugly extent to which she'd been willing to betray her friend?

“What?” Sahlah asked. “Did Haytham what?”

“Did he mention me at all to you? Ever?”

Sahlah looked so bewildered at the question that Rachel had her answer. It was accompanied by a swelling of relief so sweet that she tasted its sugar on the back of her tongue. Haytham Querashi had died saying nothing, she realised. For the moment, at least, Rachel Winfield was safe.

? ? ?


FROM THE WINDOW, Sahlah watched her friend pedal off on her bicycle. She was riding toward the Greensward. She meant to return home by way of the seafront. Her route would take her directly past the Clifftop Snuggeries, where she'd harboured her dreams despite everything Sahlah had said and done to illustrate that they'd taken different paths.

At heart, Rachel was no different to the little girl she'd been at the junior school where she and Sahlah had first stumbled across each other. She'd had plastic surgery to build relatively reasonable features out of the disastrous face she'd been born with, but beneath those features she was still the same child: always hopeful, eager, and filled with plans no matter how impractical.

Sahlah had done her best to explain that Rachel's master plan—the plan that they should purchase a flat and live together into old age like the two social misfits they were—could not be realised. Her father would not allow her to set up house in such a fashion, with another woman and away from the family. And even if in a fit of madness he decided to allow his only daughter to adopt such an aberrant lifestyle, Sahlah herself could not do it. She might have done, once. But now it was too late.

Each ticking moment made it later still. Haytham's death was in so many ways her own. If he had lived, nothing would have mattered. Now he was dead, everything did.

She clasped her hands beneath her chin and closed her eyes, wishing for a breath of sea air to cool her body and still her feverish mind. Once in a novel—kept carefully hidden from her father, who wouldn't have approved—she had read the term “her mind raced wildly” about a desperate heroine and had not understood how a mind could possibly accomplish such an unusual feat. But now she knew. For her mind had been racing like a herd of gazelles ever since she knew that Haytham was dead. She'd considered every permutation of what to do, where to go, whom to see, how to act, and what to say from that moment forward. She'd come up with no answers. As a result, she'd become completely immobilised. Now she was the incarnation of waiting. But what she waited for she could not have said. Rescue, perhaps. Or a renewal of the ability to pray, something she'd once done five times a day with perfect devotion. It was lost to her now.

“Has the troll gone, then?”

Sahlah turned from the window to see Yumn lounging in the doorway, one shoulder against the jamb. “Are you speaking about Rachel?” Sahlah asked her.

Her sister-in-law advanced into the room, arms raised languidly as she plaited her hair. The braid that resulted was insubstantial, barely the thickness of a woman's little finger. Yumn's scalp showed through it unappealingly in places. “‘Are you speaking about Rachel?’ “Yumn mimicked. “Why do you always talk like a woman with a poker up her bum?” She laughed. She'd removed the dupattā she always wore, and without the scarf and with her hair pulled back and away from her face, her wandering eye looked more pronounced than usual. When she laughed, the eye seemed to skitter from side to side like the yolk of an uncooked egg. “Rub my back,” she ordered. “I want to be relaxed for your brother tonight.”

She went to the bed where her older child would soon start sleeping, and she kicked off her sandals and sank onto the azure counterpane. She swung her legs up and lay on her side. She said, “Sahlah, did you hear what I said? Rub my back.”

“Don't call Rachel a troll. She can't help what she looks like any more than—” Sahlah stopped herself short of the final two words. Any more than you can would be carried straight back to Muhannad, with a suitable amount of hysteria accompanying it. And Sahlah's brother would see that she paid for the insult to the mother of his sons.

Yumn observed her, smiling slyly. She so wanted Sahlah to complete the sentence. She'd enjoy nothing more than to hear the crack of Muhannad's palm on his younger sister's cheek. But Sahlah wouldn't give her the pleasure. Instead, she joined her at the bed and watched as Yumn removed her upper garments.