Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(50)

“No, with us! With us!” Hadiyyah crowed. She tugged Barbara to their table, saying, “It's okay, Dad, isn't it? She must sit with us.”

Azhar observed Barbara evenly with his unreadable brown eyes. The only indication of feeling that he gave was the deliberate hesitation he employed before getting to his feet in greeting.

“We'd be very pleased, Barbara,” he said formally.

Bollocks, Barbara thought. But she said, “If you've room …?”

“Can make room. Can do,” Basil Treves said. And as he moved cutlery and crockery from her table to Azhar's, he hummed with the fierce determination employed by a man making the best of a bad situation.

“I'm so happy, happy, happy!” Hadiyyah sang. “You've come for your holiday, haven't you? We can go to the beach. We can look for shells. We can go fishing. We can play on the pier.” She climbed back onto her chair and retrieved her spoon from the middle of her cereal, where it lay like a silver exclamation mark, commenting on the morning's proceedings. Hadiyyah scooped it up, oblivious of the milk that dripped from it onto the front of her striped T-shirt. “Yesterday Mrs. Porter looked after me while Dad did some business,” she confided to Barbara. “We read a book about fossils on the lawn. I mean,” she giggled, “we read on the lawn. Today we were s'posed to take a walk along the Cliff Parade, but it's way too far to walk all the way to the pier. Too far for Mrs. Porter, that is. But I c'n walk that far, can't I? And now that you're here, Dad will let me go to the arcade. Won't you, Dad? Won't you let me go if Barbara comes with me?” She squirmed in her chair so that she faced Barbara. “We c'n ride the roller coaster and the Ferris wheel, Barbara. We c'n shoot in the shooting gallery. We can play the crane grab. Are you good at the crane grab? Dad is brilliant. He grabbed me a koala bear once, and once he grabbed Mummy a pink—”

“Hadiyyah.” Her father's voice was firm. It silenced her with its usual proficiency.

Barbara studied her menu with religious devotion. She decided on her breakfast and gave her order to Treves who hovered nearby.

“Barbara is here to rest, Hadiyyah,” Azhar told his daughter as Treves took himself in the direction of the kitchen. “You are not to force yourself into her holiday. She's been in an accident and will not be well enough to run about the town.”

Hadiyyah made no reply, but she cast a hopeful look in Barbara's direction. Her eager face had Ferris wheel, arcade, and roller coaster written all over it. She was swinging her legs and fairly bouncing in her seat, and Barbara wondered how her father managed to deny her anything.

“These creaking bones might be able to make a trip to the pier,” Barbara said. “But we'll have to see how things develop.”

The marginal promise was apparently enough for the child. She said, “Yea! Yea! Yea!” and before her father could discipline her once more, she tucked into the remains of her cornflakes.

Azhar, Barbara saw, had been eating boiled eggs. He'd finished one egg and had begun the second when she joined them. She said, “Don't let me hold you up,” and gave a nod towards his plate. Again he used hesitation to communicate his reluctance, but whether it was a reluctance to eat or a reluctance to be in her company, she couldn't have said, although she suspected the latter.

He removed the top of the egg with his spoon and deftly separated the top's shimmering white from its shell. He held the spoon in his smooth brown fingers, but ate nothing from it until he'd spoken. “How coincidental it is,” he remarked without irony, “that you should come for your holiday to the same town that Hadiyyah and I have come to, Barbara. And even more coincidental it is that we should all find ourselves in the same hotel.”

“This way we can be together,” Hadiyyah announced happily. “Barbara and I. And when you go off, Dad, Barbara can look after me instead of Mrs. Porter. Mrs. Porter's all right,” she informed Barbara in a lower voice. “I like her well enough. But she isn't able to walk very well on account that she's got some sort of palsy.”

“Hadiyyah,” her father said quietly. “Your breakfast.”

Hadiyyah ducked her head, but not before she shot Barbara a radiant smile. Her feet kicked energetically against the legs of her chair.

Barbara knew that it was pointless to lie. The first time he came to a meeting between the police and the Asian community representatives, Azhar would discover the truth about what she was doing in Balford. Indeed, she realised that she was grateful she had a truth to tell him which was not the original truth that had brought her to Essex in the first place.

“Actually,” she said, “I'm here on business. Well, quasi-business, I expect you'd call it.” She went on breezily to tell him that she'd come to town to help out an old friend in the local CID: the detective chief inspector heading up a murder investigation. She waited to gauge his response to this. It was quintessential Azhar: He barely flickered an eyelash. “A man called Haytham Querashi was found murdered three days ago not far from here,” she went on, and added innocently, “He was staying in this hotel, as a matter of fact. Have you heard about his death, Azhar?”

“And you're working on this case?” Azhar asked. “How can this be? Your work is in London.”

Barbara walked a fine line with the truth. She'd received a phone call from her old mate Emily Barlow, she explained. Old Em had somehow got word—”Police gossip and all, you know how it is”—that Barbara was free at the moment. She'd rung up and invited Barbara to Essex. And that was that.