Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(145)

“Be concerned about offending these bloody Westerners if that's what you have to do,” Muhannad had snapped. “Just don't ask me to do the same. I won't allow the police to question even one of our people without representation, and if that makes your position on the town council difficult, then that's just the way it's going to be. You can trust what parades as the good will and noble intentions of this filthy community as much as you like, Father. You're free to do so because as we both know, the world has plenty of room for fools.”

Sahlah had shuddered, waiting for her father to strike him. Instead, although a vein throbbed in his temple when he replied, Akram's words were calm.

“In front of your wife, whose duty is to obey and respect you, I will not do as I ought, Muni. But there will come a day when you are forced to realise that promoting enmity gains one nothing.”

“Haytham is dead!” was Muhannad's response, and he made it slamming his fist into his palm. “Wasn't that the first blow struck in the cause of enmity? And who struck that blow?”

Sahlah had left before Akram replied, but not before she'd seen her mother's hands fumble at the mess she was making of her embroidery, and not before she'd seen Yumn's avid face absorbing the altercation as if the hot words between father and son were feeding her blood. Sahlah knew why. Any antagonism between Akram and Muhannad had the potential to push the son away from the father and closer to his wife. And that's what Yumn had wanted from the first: Muhannad entirely and solely to herself. In the traditional way of things, she could never have him solely. He had duties to his parents that precluded this. But tradition had flown out of the window with Haytham's death.

Now, in the courtyard of the mustard factory, Sahlah saw that her brother had come to stand in the shadows—behind the factory's three Muslim women—while the other workers faced the mihrab that Akram had fashioned into the wall, so that they might direct their prayers eastward towards Mecca. But Muhannad didn't engage in any of the bows or prostrations, and when shahada was recited, his lips didn't move in the profession of faith: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet.”

These words weren't in English, but everyone knew their meaning. As they knew the meaning of the Fatihah that followed.

“Allahu Akbar,” Sahlah heard her father murmur. And her heart was sore with the need to believe. But if God was most great, why had He brought their family to this: one member pitted against another, each engagement between them an attempt to illustrate which person had power and which was forced by age, by birth, or by temperament to submit?

The prayers continued. Inside the factory, the few Westerners whom her father employed took time from their own work like their Asian counterparts. Akram had long ago told them that they might use the periods each day during which the Muslims prayed as a group to pray formally on their own or to meditate. Instead, Sahlah knew, they hurried out to smoke in the lane, as happy to take advantage of her father's generosity as they were willing to remain in ignorance about the tenets of his religion and his way of life.

But Akram Malik didn't see that. Nor did he notice the way their lips curved slightly behind his back, offering smug smiles of superiority in the face of his foreign ways. Nor did he observe the glances they exchanged—eyes moving subtly skyward and shoulders shrugging—each time he shepherded his Muslim employees to the courtyard in which they said their prayers.

As they were doing now, and with a devotion that Sahlah herself couldn't pretend to feel. She stood as they stood, she moved as they moved, her lips formed the appropriate words. But in her case, it was all performance.

A movement out of the ordinary caught her attention. She turned. The outcast cousin—Taymullah Azhar—had come into the courtyard. He was speaking in a whisper to Muhannad. In response to whatever Azhar was telling him, Muhannad's face went rigid. In a moment, he gave a single sharp nod and indicated the door with a canting motion of his head. The two men left together.

Akram rose from his final prostration at the front of their small congregation of believers. He concluded their prayers with a recitation of the taslim, asking for peace, mercy, and the blessings of God. As Sahlah watched him and listened to his words, she wondered when any of those three requests would be granted to her and to her family.

As was always the case, the Malik employees returned to work quietly. Sahlah waited for her father just inside the door.

She watched him, momentarily unobserved. He was getting older, and she'd hardly noticed until this moment. His hair was combed and spread carefully across the top of his head but thinner than she'd ever remembered. His jaw was no longer firm, and his body—which she'd always seen as iron-like in strength—was soft in appearance, as if some sort of resistance had gone out of him. The skin beneath his eyes was dark, charcoal-smudged beneath his lower lashes. And his gait that had been swift and firm of purpose seemed hesitant now.

She wanted to tell him that nothing mattered so much as the future he'd so long held dear, a future in which he planted roots and a family in a small Essex town and built a life there for children and grandchildren and for other Asians like himself who left behind their country in pursuit of a dream. But she'd been party to obliterating that future. Any reference that she made to it now would be born of a need to maintain a pretence which, at the moment, she hadn't the heart to attempt.