Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(228)

And Barbara thought. She thought about everything they'd heard: from Theo Shaw, from Rachel Winfield, from Sahlah Malik, from Ian Armstrong, from Trevor Ruddock. She thought about everything they knew: that Sahlah was pregnant, that Trevor had been given the sack, that Gerry DeVitt had been hard at work on Querashi's house, that Cliff Hegarty had been the murdered man's lover. She thought of the alibis, of who had them and who hadn't, of what each of them meant and where each of them fit in the greater structure of the case itself. She thought—

“Good Christ.” She surged to her feet, snatching up her shoulder bag in the same movement and barely noticing the spearhead of pain that pierced her chest. She was too intent upon the sudden, horrifying but utterly clear realisation that had come upon her. ‘Oh my God. Of course. Of course/’

Emily turned from the night. “What?”

“He didn't do it. He did the smuggling, but he didn't do this. Em! Don't you see—”

“Don't play games with me,” Emily snapped. “If you're trying to escape a disciplinary hearing by pinning this murder on anyone but Malik—”

“Sod you, Barlow,” Barbara said impatiently. “Do you want the real killer or don't you?”

“You're out of line, Sergeant.”

“Fine. What's new? Add it to the report. But if you want to close this case, come with me.”


THERE WAS NO need to rush, so they didn't use either the siren or the lights. As they drove up Martello Road, from there to the Crescent where Emily's house lay in darkness, from the Crescent into the upper Parade and round back of the railway station, Barbara explained. And Emily resisted. And Emily argued. And Emily tersely presented reasons why Barbara was leaping to a false conclusion.

But in Barbara's mind, everything was there and had been all along: the motive, the means, and the opportunity. They'd merely been incapable of seeing them, blinded by their own preconceptions of what sort of woman would submit herself to an arranged marriage in the first place. She would be docile, they had thought. She would have no mind of her own. She would give her will over to the care of others—father first, husband second, elder brothers, if there were any, third—and she would be unable to take an action even when an action might have been called for.

“That's what we think when we think of a marriage being arranged, don't we?” Barbara asked.

Emily listened, tightlipped. They were on Woodberry Way, gliding past the line of Fiestas and Carltons that stood before the down-at-heel terraced houses of one of the town's older neighbourhoods.

Barbara went on. Because their Western culture was so different to the Eastern, she argued, Westerners saw Eastern women as so many willow branches, blown by any kind of wind that happened upon the tree. But what Westerners never considered was the fact that the willow branch was formed—indeed, had completely evolved over time—for resiliency. Let the wind blow; let the gale howl. The branch moved but still remained fixed to the tree.

“We looked at the obvious,” Barbara said, “because the obvious was all that we had to work with. It was logical, right? We looked for Haytham Querashi's enemies. We looked for people with a bone to pick with him. And we found them. Trevor Ruddock, who'd been given the sack. Theo Shaw, who'd been entangled with Sahlah. Ian Armstrong, who'd got his job back when Querashi died. Muhannad Malik, who had the most to lose if Querashi told anyone what he knew. We considered everything. A homosexual lover. A jealous husband. A blackmailer. You name it, and there we were, running it under the microscope. What we never thought of was what it meant in the larger scheme of everyone's life once Haytham Querashi was out of the way. We saw his murder as having to do solely with him. He got in someone's way. He knew something he shouldn't have known. He gave someone the sack. So he had to die. What we never saw was that his murder might not have had anything to do with him at all. We never thought it could have been the means to an end having nothing to do with anything that we—as Westerners, as bloody Westerners—could possibly hope to understand.”

The DCI shook her head stubbornly. “You're blowing smoke. This is nothing.” She'd driven them through the solidly middle-class neighbourhood that served as a boundary between old Balford and new, between the sagging Edwardian buildings that Agatha Shaw had hoped to restore to their former glory and the upmarket, tree-shaded, elegant homes that had been built in architectural styles that harkened to the past. Here were mock Tudor mansions, Georgian hunting lodges, Victorian summer homes, Palladian fa?ades.

“No,” Barbara responded bluntly. “Just look at us. Look at how we think. We never even asked her for an alibi. We never asked any one of them. And why? Because they're Asian women. Because in our eyes they allow their men to dominate them, to decide their fates, and to determine their futures. They cover their bodies cooperatively. They cook and clean. They bow and scrape. They never complain. They have, we think, no lives of their own. So they have, we think, no minds of their own. But for God's sake, Emily, what if we're wrong?”

Emily turned right into Second Avenue. Barbara directed her to the house. The downstairs lights all appeared to be on. The family would know about Muhannad's flight by now. If they hadn't had the news from a member of the town council, they'd have had it from the media, phoning with questions, eager for a response from the Maliks, their reaction to Muhannad's escape.