Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(22)

“If you'd give me more manpower, we wouldn't have to worry about the streets or anything else.”

“You've got all you're getting. Unless you want Presley.”

Another DCI? Not on your life, she thought. “I don't need Presley. I need a visible police presence on the street. I need more constables.”

“What you need is to knock a few heads together. If you can't do that—”

“My job's not crowd control,” Emily countered. “We're trying to investigate a murder over here, and the family of the dead man—”

“May I remind you that the Maliks are not Querashi's family, despite the fact that these people seem to live inside each other's pyjamas?”

Emily blotted the sweat from her forehead. She'd always suspected that Donald Ferguson was in reality an ass in pig's clothing, and virtually every remark he made served to corroborate that suspicion. He wanted to replace her. He couldn't wait to replace her. The slightest excuse and her career was history. Emily dug for patience in her reply. “They're the family he was marrying into, Don.”

“And you told them the truth. They caused a bloody riot this afternoon and in response you told them the flaming truth. Do you have any idea what that does to your authority, Inspector?”

“There's no point in keeping the truth from them since they're the first group of people I'm intending to interview. Enlighten me, please. How did you expect me to conduct an investigation into a murder without telling anyone it's a murder we're dealing with?”

“Don't take that tone with me, Inspector Barlow. What's Malik done so far? Besides instigate a riot. And why the hell isn't he under arrest?”

Emily didn't point out the obvious to Ferguson: The crowd had dispersed once the television filming had ceased, and no one had been able to nab a brick thrower. She said, “He's done exactly what he said he'd do. Muhannad Malik's never made an idle threat, and I don't imagine we can expect him to start doing so just to accommodate us.”

“Thank you for the character sketch. Now answer my question.”

“He's brought in someone from London as he said he would. An expert in what he's calling ‘the politics of immigration.’ “

“Save us,” Ferguson muttered. “And what did you tell him?”

“Do you want my exact words or their content?”

“Stuff the innuendo, Inspector. If there's something you want to say, I suggest you say it outright and have done.”

There was plenty to say, but now was not the time. “Don, it's late. I'm bloody tired. It feels about thirty degrees in here, and I'd like to get home sometime before dawn.”

“That can be arranged,” Ferguson said.

Jesus. What a miserable little tyrant. How he loved to pull rank. How he needed to do it. Had the superintendent been in her office, Emily could imagine him unzipping his trousers to demonstrate which one of them was really the man. “I told Malik that we've called in a Home Office pathologist who'll perform the postmortem tomorrow morning,” she replied. “I told him Mr. Querashi's death appears to be what he himself thought it was from the first: a murder. I told him the Standard's got the story, and they'll run it tomorrow. Okay?”

“I like the sound of appears,” Ferguson said. “It gives us elbow room to keep the lid on things. See that you start doing just that.” He rang off in his usual fashion, by dropping the receiver into its cradle at his end. Emily held the phone away from her ear, gave it two fingers, and did the same at her end.

In the airless room that was her office, she grabbed a tissue and pressed it fully against her face. It came away greasily blotted. She would have given her big toe for a fan. She would have given her entire foot for air conditioning. As it was, she had only a lousy tin of warm tomato juice, which was better than nothing to ameliorate the effects of the day's blistering heat. She reached for this and used a pencil to prise open its pop-top. She took a swig and began to massage the back of her neck. I need a workout, she thought, and once again she acknowledged that one of the disadvantages of her line of employment—in addition to having to deal with pigs like Ferguson—was having to forego physical activity more often than was her natural inclination. If she'd had her way, she'd have been outdoors rowing hours ago, instead of doing what duty called upon her to do: return the day's phone calls.

She tossed the last of her returned telephone messages into the rubbish bin and followed them with the tomato juice tin. She was cramming a stack of file folders into her canvas hold-all, when one of the WPCs assigned to the Querashi investigation came to the doorway, trailing several pages of an uncut fax.

“Here's the background on Muhannad Malik you were asking for,” Belinda Warner announced. “Clacton's Intelligence Unit's just sent it over. You want it now or in the morning?”

Emily held out her hand. “Anything more than we already know?”

Belinda shrugged. “’F you ask me, he's nobody's blue-eyed boy. But there's nothing here to confirm it.”

This was what Emily had expected. She nodded her thanks and the WPC disappeared down the hall. A moment later her footsteps clattered on the stairway of the ill-ventilated building that served as the police station in Balford-le-Nez.