Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(20)
“Broke yesterday,” the girl said. “Sorry.” She fingered the blemish on her chin in an unappetising fashion. “It's just that I was thinking of doing it myself, when I've got the money. So I was wondering: Did it hurt much?”
“What?”
“Your nose. Haven't you had it fixed? Isn't that why you've got all those bandages?” She picked up the table's chrome napkin dispenser and studied her reflection. “I want a bobbed one myself. Mum says to thank God for what I have, but I say why did God invent plastic surgery if we weren't meant to use it? I'm planning to do my cheekbones as well, but the nose comes first.”
“It wasn't surgery,” Barbara said. “I broke it.”
“Lucky you!” the girl exclaimed. “So you got a new one on National Health! Now, I wonder …” Clearly, she was meditating on the prospect of walking rapidly into a door with proboscis at the ready.
“Yeah, well, they don't ask how you want it set,” Barbara said. “Had they bothered to inquire, I would have requested a Michael Jackson. I've always been a slave to perpendicular nostrils.” And she crackled her newspaper meaningfully.
The girl—whose nametag identified her as Suzi—leaned one hand against the table, noted what Barbara was reading, and said confidentially, “They should never've come here, you know. This's what happens when they go where they're not wanted.”
Barbara set down her paper and speared a portion of poached egg on her fork. She said, “Pardon?”
Suzi nodded at the newspaper. “Those coloureds. What're they doing here anyway? Besides raising a ruckus, which they did real proper this afternoon, as a matter of fact.”
“They're trying to improve their lot in life, I expect.”
“Hmph. Why don't they improve it somewheres else? My mum said there'd be trouble eventually if we let them settle round here, and look what's happened: One of them overdoses down on the beach and all the rest start carrying on and shouting it's murder.”
“It's a drug-related death?” Barbara began to scan the paragraphs of the story for the pertinent details.
“What else could it be?” Suzi asked. “Everyone knows they swallow bags of opium and God knows what else back in Pakistan. They smuggle it into this country in their stomachs. Then when they get here, they get locked up in a house till they do a poo and get it all out of their system. After that they're free to go. Didn't you know? I saw that on the telly once.”
Barbara recalled the description of Haytham Querashi that she'd heard on television. The newsreader had identified him as recently arrived from Pakistan, hadn't he? She wondered for the first time if she'd misread all her cues in dashing out to Essex on the strength of a televised demonstration and Taymullah Azhar's mysterious behaviour.
Suzi was continuing. “Only in this case, one of the bags broke in this bloke's insides and he crawled in that pillbox to die. That way, he wouldn't disgrace his people. They're big on that as well, you know.”
Barbara returned to the article and began to read it in earnest. “Has the postmortem been released, then?” Suzi seemed so grounded in the certainty of her facts.
“We all know what happened. Who needs a postmortem? But tell that to the coloureds. When it comes out that he died of an overdose, they'll blame it on us. Just you wait and see.”
She turned on her heel and headed towards the kitchen. Barbara called, “My lemonade?” as the door swung shut behind her.
Alone again, Barbara read the rest of the article unimpeded. The dead man, she saw, had been the production manager at a local business called Malik's Mustards & Assorted Accompaniments. This concern was owned by one Akram Malik who, according to the article, was also a member of the town council. At the time of his death—which the local CID had declared took place on Friday night, nearly forty-eight hours before Barbara's arrival in Balford—Mr. Querashi had been eight days away from marrying the Malik daughter. It was his future brother-in-law and local political activist Muhannad Malik who, upon the discovery of Querashi's body, had spear-headed the local cry for a CID investigation. And although the enquiry had been handed over to CID immediately, no cause of death had as yet been announced. As a result of this, Muhannad Malik promised that other prominent members of the Asian community would be joining him to dog the investigators. “We would be foolish to pretend we are not aware of what ‘getting to the truth’ means when it's applied to an Asian,” Malik was quoted as saying on Saturday afternoon.
Barbara laid the newspaper to one side as Suzi returned with her glass of lemonade in which a single piece of ice bobbed with hopeful intentions. Barbara nodded her thanks and ducked her head back to the paper to forestall any additional commentary. She needed to think.
She had little doubt that Taymullah Azhar was the “prominent member of the Asian community” whom Muhannad Malik had promised to produce. Azhar's departure from London had followed too closely on the heels of this story for the situation to be otherwise. He had come here, and Barbara knew it was only a matter of time until she stumbled upon him.
She could only imagine how he would greet her intention to run interference between him and the local police. For the first time, she realised how presumptuous she was being, concluding that Azhar would need her intercession. He was an intelligent man—good God, he was a university professor—so he had to know what he was getting into. Hadn't he?