Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(181)
She sighed, wondering if the hollow feeling in her stomach was merely a desire for sustenance, vengeance taken for having left a third of her bag of crisps back in the Harwich pub. She rustled round in her shoulder bag and pulled out her notebook. She scrawled the number of the Burnt House Hotel on a spare sheet of paper and passed it over to the German, telling him to phone if he recalled anything pertinent, particularly how a bill of lading from Eastern Imports managed to end up among a dead man's belongings.
He examined the paper solemnly. He folded it precisely in half, then in quarters. He placed it in the pocket of his trousers. He said, “Yes. If you have seen enough …?” and without waiting for her reply, he made a courtly gesture in the direction of the office.
Once there, Barbara went through the routine: She thanked him for his help. She reminded him of the gravity of the situation. She emphasised the importance of full cooperation with the police.
He said, “I understand, Sergeant. Already I'm going through my mind in an attempt to locate a connection between this man and Eastern Imports.”
Speaking of connections, she thought. And as she adjusted the strap of her bag so that it drew less heavily on her shoulder, she said, “Yes. Well,” and went to the door, where she paused. She thought of what she knew of European history, and she drew her question from that. “Your accent sounds Austrian. Vienna? Salzburg?”
“Please,” he said, a hand pressed to his chest in the offence that Barbara had hoped to rouse in him. “I am German.”
“Ah. Sorry. It's difficult to tell. Where're you from?”
“Hamburg,” he replied.
Where else? she thought. “And your name? I'll need it for my report to the DCI.”
“Naturally. It's Reuchlein,” he replied, and he spelled it helpfully. “Klaus Reuchlein.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Barbara could hear Inspector Lynley chuckle.
REUZHAGE SAYS THAT REUCHLEIN'S PAYING RENT on two flats at Oskarstrafie 15,” Barbara concluded. “But all of the flats in the building are small—bed-sits, only, with individual kitchens and bathrooms—so if a bloke has money enough, Kreuzhage claims, he might use one flat as a bedroom and another as a sitting room. Especially if he entertains and doesn't much want his guests having to sit on his bed. So the fact of two flats shouldn't arouse our suspicions, he warns. Although they may well have aroused Querashi's suspicions, being from Pakistan where most people live—as Kreuzhage put it—more humbly.”
“And he's certain it's Klaus Reuchlein who's renting the flats? Klaus and not another first name?”
“It was Klaus, all right.” Barbara drank the last of the carrot juice that Emily had offered her upon their joining forces once again in the DCI's office to compare their investigative notes. She did her best to hide a grimace when her tongue registered the flavour. No wonder people into health foods were so flaming skinny, she thought. Everything they ingested immediately obliterated any desire to ingest more. “According to him, one of his blokes saw the rental agreement and the signature. Unless Klaus Reuchlein's German for John Smith and there's one under every rock, it's the same bloke.”
Emily nodded. She gazed across her office at the china board where the CID team's activities were listed next to an officer's identification number. They'd begun five days ago with activity Al. Barbara saw that they were up to A320.
“We're closing in on him,” Emily said. “I know it, Barb. This Reuchlein bit just about noose-ties Mr. Hot Shot's neck. So much for saving his people from us. Someone ought to be saving his people from him.”
Barbara had stopped by the Burnt House prior to returning to the station. There, she'd picked up the message that Kriminalhauptkom-misar Kreuzhage had phoned, leaving the cryptic message that “information pertaining to the sergeant's interests in Hamburg had been obtained.” She'd phoned him at once, munching on a cheese and pickle sandwich provided by Basil Treves, who'd had to be discouraged as subtly as possible from hanging about at the doorway of her room, the better to eavesdrop on her conversation. Kreuzhage first confirmed her suspicions that the Hamburg address matched the phone number that Querashi had rung from the Burnt House prior to his death, and when he did so she experienced the same sensation that the DCI was experiencing at the moment: a growing certainty that they were getting close to the truth. But when she combined that growing certainty with what she'd seen at Eastern Imports—which was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary except a broken toilet and a pillow on the floor—her mind filled with questions instead of with answers. Her intuition was telling her that everything she'd heard and seen this day was connected in some way, if not to the murder of Querashi, then at least to each other. But her brain refused to tell her how.
Belinda Warner entered the room, saying, “Got the log checked, Guv. I've made a list of everything dodgy. Want it now or at the team meeting this afternoon?”
Emily answered by extending her hand. “This may give us the rope to hang him,” she told Barbara.
The document was pages long, a computer printout of nuisances and crimes—petty and otherwise—that had been reported to the Balford police since the beginning of the year. WPC Warner had highlighted in yellow those activities which fell under the categorical description of being dodgy and hence worthy of the DCI's notice. It was these activities that Emily read aloud.