Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(232)

The hotel door opened before Barbara could put her hand on the knob. She started. All the lights were out on the ground floor. In the shadows, she had failed to see that someone had been awaiting her arrival, seated in the old porter's chair that stood just inside the entry.

Oh God. Not Treves, she thought wearily. The idea of another round of cloaks-and-daggers with the hotelier was too much for her. But then she saw the gleam of an incandescently laundered white shirt, and a moment later she heard his voice.

“Mr. Treves wouldn't hear of leaving the door unlocked for you,” Azhar said. “I told him I'd wait and lock up myself. He didn't like that idea, but I expect that he could see no way round it other than by giving direct offence, rather than his more usual, oblique brand of insult. I do think he intends to count the silver in the morning, however.” Despite the words, there was a smile in his voice.

Barbara chuckled. “And he'll do the counting in your presence, no doubt.”

“No doubt,” Azhar said. He closed the door behind her and turned the key in the lock. “Come,” he said.

He led the way into the darkened lounge, where he lit a single lamp next to the fireplace and took himself behind the bar. He poured two fingers of Black Bush into a tumbler and slid this across the mahogany to Barbara. He poured a bitter lemon for himself. That done, he came round the bar and joined her at one of the tables, placing his cigarettes at her disposal.

She told him all of it, from start to finish. She left out nothing. Not Cliff Hegarty, not Trevor Ruddock, not Rachel Winfield, not Sahlah Malik. She told him the part Theo Shaw had played and where Ian Armstrong fit into the picture. She told him what their earliest suspicions had been, where those suspicions had led them, and how they'd ended up in the Maliks’ sitting room, arresting someone they'd never once suspected could be guilty of the crime.

“Yumn?” Azhar said in some confusion. “Barbara, how can this be?”

Barbara told him how. Yumn had been to see the murdered man, and she'd done this without the knowledge of the Malik family. She'd gone in a chā—either her bow to propriety or her need for disguise—and she'd managed the trip without anyone from the Malik household being aware that she'd done so. A good look at the structure of their house, particularly at the position of the driveway and the garage in relation to the sitting room and the bedrooms upstairs, demonstrated the ease with which she could have taken one of the cars without the rest of the family ever knowing. And if she'd done this when the boys were in bed, when Sahlah was occupied with her jewellery making, when Akram and Wardah were at their prayers or in the sitting room, no one would ever have been the wiser. How, after all, could Yumn have failed at what the police had concluded was simplicity itself: watching Haytham Querashi long enough to realise that he went regularly to the Nez, taking a Zodiac round to the east side of the promontory on the night in question, stringing a single wire across a crumbling stairwell, sending him to his death?

“We knew all along and we said all along that a woman could have done it,” Barbara said. “We just failed to see that Yumn had a motive and the opportunity to carry the plan out.”

“But what need did she have to kill Haytham Querashi?” Azhar asked.

And Barbara explained that as well. But when she'd recited Chapter and verse on Yumn's need to be rid of Querashi in order to keep Sahlah in her position of subordination in the household, Azhar looked doubtful. He lit a cigarette, inhaled, and examined the tip of it before he spoke.

“Does your case against Yumn rely upon this?” he asked cautiously.

“And upon the family's testimony. She wasn't in the house, Azhar. And she claimed to be upstairs with Muhannad when Muhannad was miles away in Colchester, a fact that's been confirmed, by the way.”

“But to a good defence counsel the family's testimony will be minor points. They could be attributed to confusion about the dates in question, to animosity towards a difficult daughter-in-law, to a family's desire to protect whom the defence might call the real killer: a man conveniently on the run in Europe. Even if Muhannad's brought back to this country for trial on smuggling charges, a prison term for smuggling would be shorter than a term for premeditated murder. Or so the defence can argue, seeking to prove that the Maliks have reason to wish guilt upon someone other than Muhannad.”

“But they've disowned him anyway.”

“Indeed,” Azhar agreed. “But what Western jury is going to understand the impact that being cast out of one's family has for an Asian?”

He looked at her frankly. There was no mistaking the invitation in his words. Now was the time that they could talk about his own story: how it had begun and how it had ended. She could learn about the wife in Hounslow, the two children he'd left behind with her. She could discover how he'd met Hadiyyah's mother and she could learn about the forces that had worked within him, making a lifetime of disjunction from his family worth the experience of loving a woman who had been deemed forbidden to him.

She remembered once reading the seven-word excuse that a film director had used to explain the betrayal of his longtime love in favour of a girl thirty years his junior. “The heart wants what the heart wants,” he had said. But Barbara had long since wondered if what the heart wanted had, in reality, anything to do with the heart at all.

Yet had Azhar not followed his heart—if that, indeed, had been the body part involved—Khalidah Hadiyyah would not have existed. And that would have doubled the tragedy of falling in love and walking away from love's possibility. So perhaps Azhar had acted for the best when he'd chosen passion over duty. But who could really say?