Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(225)

“I what?” Emily said. “I did what?”

“You phoned her? You asked for her help?”

Barbara closed her eyes briefly. It was one hell of a tangled web. She said, “Azhar, that's not what happened. I lied to you both about how I happened to be in Balford. I came because of you.”

He looked so perplexed that Barbara wanted to sink through the floor rather than have to explain anything further. But she muddled on.

“I didn't want you in over your head. I thought if I was here, I could keep you out of trouble. Both you and Hadiyyah. Obviously, I failed. At least in Hadiyyah's case. I completely blew it.”

“No,” Emily said. “You got us out on the North Sea, Sergeant. Which is where we needed to be to learn the truth.”

Surprised, Barbara shot her a grateful look, embraced entirely by relief at last. No accounting had to be made. What had passed between them on the sea could be forgotten. Emily's words told Barbara that the DCI had learned richly from the experience, that no report to her superior officer was going to have to be made.

There was a moment of silence among them. Into it came the sounds of the CID team pulling information together, working through the evening and into the night. But there was a sense of lightheartedness to their work, the sound of men and women who knew a trying job was winding down.

Emily turned to Azhar. “Until we have Malik in interrogation, we can only sketch out the details of what happened. You can help us with that, Mr. Azhar. As I see it, Querashi twigged to the smuggling ring by accident when he came across Muhannad in Parkeston on the night that he himself was there at the Castle Hotel. He wanted in on the action. He threatened to talk if he wasn't included in a way that earned him big money. Muhannad stalled. Querashi grabbed Kumhar and got him to go along by telling him the plan was to put an end to the entire smuggling business. He installed Kumhar in Clacton as leverage for his scheme to make the Maliks pay up. But things didn't work out the way he'd hoped. He got the chop instead.”

Azhar shook his head. “That cannot be.”

Emily bristled.

Back to normal indeed, Barbara thought.

“After what Kumhar said about Muhannad, you can't think Malik's not involved in this murder. The man just dumped your own daughter into the sea.”

“I'm not disagreeing about my cousin's involvement. It's Mr. Querashi's that you've misunderstood.”

Emily frowned. “How exactly?”

“By not taking our religion into account.” Azhar indicated one of the chairs in Emily's office, saying, “May I? I find that I'm rather more exhausted than I expected to be.”

Emily nodded. All of them sat. Barbara wished—yet another time—for a cigarette, and she expected that Azhar had much the same longing because his fingers went to the breast pocket of his shirt as if with the thought of finding a packet of fags therein. They would have to make do with a roll of fruit pastilles scavenged from the depths of Barbara's shoulder bag. She offered him one. He took it with a grateful nod.

“There was a passage marked in Mr. Querashi's copy of the Qur'aan,” Azhar explained. “It was about fighting for the feeble among—”

“The passage we got Siddiqi to translate,” Emily cut in.

Azhar went on quietly. As Sergeant Havers would confirm, Mr. Querashi had made several phone calls to Pakistan from the Burnt House Hotel in the days leading up to his death. One was to a mulla, a Muslim holy man from whom he sought a definition of the word feeble.

“What's feeble got to do with anything?” Emily asked.

Feeble, as in helpless, Azhar told her. As in without force or effectiveness. A word that could be used to describe a friendless soul newly arrived in this country and finding himself trapped in an enslavement that appeared to have no end.

Emily nodded cautiously. But her doubtful expression telegraphed that she still would have to be convinced of the weight of Azhar's comments.

The other phone call was to a mufti, Azhar continued, a legal scholar. From this man he'd sought the answer to a single question: Could a Muslim, guilty of a grave sin, remain a Muslim?

“Sergeant Havers has told me all this already, Mr. Azhar,” Emily pointed out.

“Then you know that one cannot remain a Muslim and live in defiance of Islam's tenets. And that's what Muhannad was doing. And that's what Haytham wished to stop.”

“But wasn't Querashi doing it as well?” Barbara asked. “What about his homosexuality? You said that it's forbidden. Couldn't he have been phoning the mufti to talk about his own soul and not Muhannad's?”

“He could have been doing that,” Azhar acknowledged, “but taken with everything else that he did, it doesn't seem likely.”

“If Hegarty's to be believed,” Emily told Barbara, “Querashi intended to keep up his double life after his marriage, Islam or not. So he couldn't have cared much about his soul.”

“Sexuality's powerful,” Azhar admitted. “Sometimes more powerful than personal or religious duty. We're willing to risk everything for the sake of it. Our souls. Our lives. All that we have and all that we are.”

Barbara met his glance. Angela Weston, she thought. What must it have felt like: that desperate resolve to fly in the face of all one knew, believed, and had previously upheld in order to possess the unattainable?