Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(188)

“And how d'you know that Gerry isn't already in the picture?” Barbara asked. Theo Shaw aside, here was yet another English suspect. She avoided Emily Barlow's eyes.

“What d'you …?” Hegarty suddenly saw where the question was heading. He said quickly, “No. It wasn't Ger on the clifftop. No way. He doesn't know about me and Hayth. He suspects, but he doesn't know. And if he did, he wouldn't've offed Hayth. He would've just sent me packing.”

Emily pushed past this diversion. “Was the figure you saw on the clifftop a man or a woman?”

He couldn't tell, he said. It was dark, and the distance from the pillbox to the clifftop was too great. So as to age, as to sex, as to race or identity … He just didn't know.

“The figure didn't come down to the beach to check on Querashi?”

No, Hegarty said. Whoever it was, the person had hurried north along the top of the cliff, in the direction of Pennyhole Bay.

Which was, Barbara thought with triumph, more support for the theory of a killer arriving by cabin cruiser. “Did you hear a boat's engine that night?”

He didn't hear anything but his own heart slamming against his eardrums, Hegarty said. He waited five minutes beside the pillbox, trying to collect himself and trying to think. He was in such a sweat that he wouldn't've noticed a nuclear explosion ten yards away.

Once he gathered his wits—three minutes, maybe five—he did what had to be done, which took—maybe—quarter of an hour. Then he scarpered. “Only boat engine I heard was my own,” he said.

“What?” Emily asked.

“The boat,” he said. “That's how I got there. Gerry's got a motor-boat that we use at the weekends. I always took that when I was meeting Hayth. I came up the coast from Jaywick Sands. It's more direct, that way, more exciting as well. And I like it to build. The excitement. You know.”

So here was the boat that had been heard in the water off the Nez that night. With a sinking heart, Barbara wondered if they were back at square one. She said, “While you were waiting for Querashi, did you hear anything then? Another boat's motor? Large and running low?” He hadn't, he said. But the figure up on the top of the cliff would have been there before him anyway. The trap was set when Haytham got there, because Hegarty hadn't seen anyone near the steps until after he fell.

Emily said, “We have an i.d. on you at the Castle Hotel with Mr. Querashi, at an affair called …?” She glanced at Barbara.

“Leather and Lace,” Barbara told her.

“Right. That i.d. doesn't square with your story, Mr. Hegarty. Why did the two of you end up at a public dance in the Castle Hotel? That makes no sense if you were so intent upon keeping your relationship a secret from your lover.”

“Ger doesn't do the scene,” Hegarty said. “He never did. How far's that hotel from here anyway? Forty minutes’ drive if you hit it good. More if you're going from Jaywick or Clacton. I didn't think anyone I know'd see me there and spill it to Gerry. And it was a work night in the Avenues for Ger, so I knew he'd never know I was gone. We were safe at the Castle, me and Hayth.” But having said that much, his eyebrows drew together and he frowned.

“Yes?” Emily asked him quickly.

“I thought for a moment …But it's nothing cause he didn't see us, so he never knew. And no way was Haytham going to tell him, of all people.”

“What are you talking about, Mr. Hegarty?”

“Muhannad.”

“Muhannad Malik?”

“Yeah. Right. We saw him at the Castle as well.”

Jesus, Barbara thought. How much more convoluted could the case become? She said, “Muhannad Malik's homosexual as well?”

Hegarty guffawed, fingering the nappie pin dangling from his ear-lobe. “Not at the hotel like in at the hotel. We saw him afterwards, when we were leaving. He drove right in front of us, crossed over the road, and took a right towards Harwich. It was one in the morning and Haytham couldn't make out what Muhannad was doing in that part of the world in the middle of the night. So we followed him.”

Barbara saw Emily's hand tighten round the pencil she'd been holding. Her voice, however, betrayed nothing. “Where did he go?”

He went, Hegarty said, to an industrial estate on the edge of Parkes-ton. He parked at one of the warehouses, disappeared inside for thirty minutes or so, and then left again.

“And you're sure it was Muhannad Malik?” Emily pressed.

There was no mistaking that fact, Hegarty told them. The bloke had been driving his turquoise Thunderbird, and it had to be the only car of its kind in Essex. “Only that's right, isn't it?” Hegarty suddenly added. “He wasn't driving that car when he left. He was driving a lorry. He pulled out of the warehouse in the lorry, in fact. And that's the last we saw of him.”

“You didn't follow him farther?”

“Hayth didn't want to risk it. It was one thing for us to see Muhannad. It was another if Muhannad spotted us.”

“And when was this exactly?”

“Last month.”

“Mr. Querashi never mentioned it again?”

He shook his head.

Barbara could tell from the very intensity of her focus that the DCI was charged up to follow this bit of information. But treading along the Muhannad Trail ignored a signpost that Hegarty had already painted. For the moment, Barbara shoved to the back of her mind the three words that had set her thoughts roiling. In the club couldn't negate the presence of another suspect.