Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(184)

“And all the time he'd have his assignations with you.”

“That was the plan, yeah. It suited me as well because, like I said, having only one bloke day in and day out…” He lifted his fingers by way of a shrug. “This gave me a bit on the side, so it wasn't always Gerry, Gerry, Gerry.”

Emily continued taking Hegarty through his paces, but Barbara's mind was on overdrive. If Sahlah Malik was pregnant, and if Querashi wasn't the father, there could be only one person who was. Life begins now took on a whole new meaning. And so did the fact that Theodore Shaw had no alibi for the night of the murder. All he'd needed to do was sail his cabin cruiser from Balford Marina down the main channel so as to round the north point of the Nez and gain access to the area where Haytham Querashi fell to his death. The question was: Could he have taken the boat from the marina without being seen?

“We used the pillbox on the beach,” Hegarty was explaining to Emily. “No place else was safe enough. Hayth had a place in the Avenues—where he was supposed to live once he and the girl got spliced—but we couldn't go there cause Gerry's working nights on it, fixing it up.”

“And on Gerry's work nights, you met Querashi?”

“That's how it was.”

They couldn't meet at the Burnt House for fear that Basil Treves—“that limp-dick Treves” was how Hegarty identified him—would tell someone, specifically Akram Malik, his fellow town councillor. They couldn't meet in Jaywick Sands because the community was small and word could get back to Gerry, who wasn't about to put up with his lover doing the business with other blokes. “AIDS and all,” Hegarty added as if he felt the need to explain Gerry's incomprehensible position to the police.

So they met in the pillbox on the beach. And that's where Cliff was, waiting for Querashi, on the night he died.

“I saw it happen,” he said, and his eyes grew cloudy as if he were revisiting what he'd seen that night. “It was dark, but I saw the lights of his car when he got there cause he parked near the edge of the cliff. He came to the steps and looked round, like he'd heard something. I could tell that, because I could see his silhouette.”

After a pause at the top of the steps, Querashi had begun his descent. His fall began not five steps from the top. He went down hard and toppled—head over heels over head over heels—all the way to the bottom of the cliff.

“I just froze.” Hegarty had begun to perspire. The bauble on his lip ring danced. “I didn't know what to do. I couldn't believe he'd fallen. … I kept waiting for him to get up …dust himself off. Maybe laugh about it or something, like he was embarrassed. Anyway, that's when I saw the other one.”

“Someone else was there?” Emily said quickly.

“Tucked behind some gorse just at the cliff top.”

Hegarty described the movement he'd seen: a figure slipping out of the shrubbery, descending a few steps, removing something from round an iron banister at either side of the concrete steps, then slipping away.

“That's when I figured someone'd done him in,” Hegarty concluded.


RACHEL SIGNED HER name with a flourish on every line that Mr. Dobson ticked off for her. It was so scorching in his office that her thighs were sticking to her chair and droplets of sweat plopped from her eyebrows onto the documents like tears. But she was far from crying. On this day of all days, crying was the last thing on her mind.

She had used her lunch hour to pedal over to the Cliff top Snuggeries. She had pedalled furiously without regard for heat, traffic, or pedestrians, working herself into a lather in order to get to the Snuggeries and Mr. Dobson before someone else purchased that one remaining flat. Her spirits were so elevated that she didn't bother to duck her head from the stares of the curious as she usually did when out among strangers. What was their gawping when at last her future was being settled?

She had honestly believed her final words to Sahlah on the previous day. Theo Shaw, she had said, would come round. He wouldn't leave Sahlah to fend for herself. It wasn't in Theo Shaw's nature to desert someone he loved, especially not during a time of need.

But what she hadn't counted on was Agatha.

Rachel had heard the news about Mrs. Shaw's stroke within ten minutes of opening the shop that morning. The old woman's condition was the talk of the High Street. Rachel and Connie had no more than uncovered the necklaces and bracelets in the main display case, when Mr. Unsworth from Balford Books and Crannies popped round with an oversized get-well card for them to sign.

“What's this, then?” Connie wanted to know. The card was shaped like an enormous rabbit. It looked more suitable for wishing a child Happy Easter than for sending fond regards to a woman teetering on the edge of death.

Those three words were all Mr. Unsworth needed to hold forth on the subject of “apoplectic seizures,” which is what he called Mrs. Shaw's stroke. That was typical of Mr. Unsworth. He read the dictionary between customers, and he always liked to puff himself up by using words that no one except him understood. But when Connie—not only unintimidated by his vocabulary but also unimpressed with anything that didn't directly relate to swing dancing or selling a bauble to a customer—said, “Alfie, what'n hell're you squawking about? We got work to do,” Mr. Unsworth dropped Mr. Chips in favour of a more direct manner of communicating: