Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(169)
Barbara thought about this—about everything that keeping his own counsel could imply—especially in relation to the afternoon's interview with Fahd Kumhar. She said, “Azhar, that meeting today, the one at the nick …”
He dropped his cigarette to the pier and ground it out. Over their shoulders, the ship ride was ending yet again. Hadiyyah called out for one last go. Her father nodded, gave a ticket to the operator, and watched his daughter sail the sea again. He said, “The meeting?”
“With Fahd Kumhar. If Muhannad is someone who keeps his counsel like you're saying, is there any chance he already knew that bloke? Before he walked into the room, I mean.”
At once, Azhar looked cautious, guarded, and most importantly, unwilling to speak. Barbara wished that his cousin could have been with them that very second, so clearly did Azhar's expression show where his true loyalties lay.
She said, “The reason I'm asking is that Kumhar's reaction was so extreme. You'd think the sight of you and Muhannad would have been a relief, but it didn't seem to be at all. He knotted himself up in a proper twist, didn't he?”
“Ah,” Azhar said. “This is a class issue, Barbara. Mr. Kumhar's reaction—consternation, subservience, anxiety—is born of our culture. When he heard my cousin's name pronounced, he recognised a member of a higher social and economic group than his own. His name—Kumhar—is what we call Kami, the artisan caste of labourers, carpenters, potters, and the like. My cousin's name—Malik—indicates membership in the landowning group of our society.”
“D'you mean he was gibbering like that because of someone's last name?” Barbara found that the explanation strained credulity. “Bloody hell, Azhar. This is England, not Pakistan.”
“So I expect you understand my point. Mr. Kumhar's reaction is hardly any different to an Englishman's discomfort when in the presence of another Englishman whose pronunciation of the language or choice of vocabulary reveals his class.”
Damn the man. He was so insufferably and consistently astute.
“Excuse me?”
The voice came from behind them. Barbara and Azhar swung round to see a mini-skirted girl with waist-length blonde hair standing uneasily next to an overfull rubbish bin. She was carrying a giraffe identical to the one that Azhar had earlier scooped up for his daughter, and she shifted her weight from one sandaled foot to the other, her gaze moving uneasily from Azhar to Barbara to the sailing ship ride and back to Azhar.
“I've been looking for you everywhere,” she said. “I was with them. I mean I was there. Inside. When the little girl …” She lowered her head and examined the giraffe before thrusting it in their direction. “Would you give her this, please? I wouldn't want her to think …They act up, that lot. That's how it is. That's just how they are.”
She pressed the stuffed animal into Azhar's hand, smiled fleetingly, and hurried back to her companions. Azhar watched her go. He spoke some words quietly.
“What was that?” Barbara asked him.
“‘Let not their conduct grieve thee,’ “he said with a smile and a nod at the girl's retreating back. “‘They injure Allah not at all.’”
HADIYYAH COULDN'T HAVE been more delighted with her new giraffe. She held it happily to her thin chest, tucking its head under her chin. The other giraffe, however, she refused to part with. She clutched it in her other hand, saying, “It's not his fault he got smirched with ketchup,” as if the stuffed animal were a personal friend. “We c'n wash him up, I expect. Can't we, Dad? ‘N’ if all the ketchup won't come out, we can just pretend he escaped from a lion when he was little.”
The buoyancy of children, Barbara thought.
They spent another hour enjoying the pleasure pier's attractions: losing themselves in the Hall of Mirrors, intrigued by the hologram exhibition, tossing balls at a basket, trying their luck at archery, deciding what they would have printed upon their souvenir T-shirts. Hadiyyah settled on a sunflower, Azhar chose a steam train—although Barbara found that she couldn't imagine him actually wearing anything less formal than one of his spotless linen shirts—and Barbara herself went for a cartoon egg that was shattered on rocky ground beneath a wall, with the words SCRAMBLE HUMPTY-DUMPTY arching over the picture.
Hadiyyah sighed with pure pleasure as they made their way towards the exit. The attractions were beginning to shut down for the night, and as a result the noise had abated and the crowd had thinned out considerably. What remained were mostly couples now, boys and girls who sought the shadows as eagerly as they had earlier sought the games and amusements. Here and there, an entwined duo leaned against the pier railing. Some watched the lights of Balford fanned out on the shore, some listened to the sea as it slapped against the pilings beneath them, and some ignored everything but each other and the pleasure afforded by another's body pressed to one's own.
“This,” Hadiyyah announced dreamily, “is the very best place in the whole wide world. When I grow up, I'm going to spend every one of my holidays here. And you'll come with me, won't you, Barbara? Because we'll know each other for ever and ever. Dad'U come with us, won't you, Dad? And Mummy as well. And this time when Dad wins Mummy an elephant, I won't cut it open on the kitchen floor.” She gave another sigh. Her eyelids were beginning to droop. “We got to get postcards, Dad,” she added with a little stumble as she failed to lift her foot high enough when she took a step. “We got to send a postcard to Mummy.”