Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(8)
Azhar relented, but slowly. His guard was up as he took the proffered packet and shook out a cigarette. While he lit it, Barbara used her bare foot to shove the other chair back from the table. He didn't sit.
“Trouble?” she asked him.
“Why should you think that?”
“A phone call, a sudden change of plans. In my business, that only means one thing: Whatever the news is, it isn't good.”
“In your business,” Azhar pointed out.
“And in yours?”
He lifted his cigarette to his mouth and spoke behind it. “A small family matter.”
“Family?” He'd never spoken of family. Not that he'd ever spoken of anything personal. He was as guarded a creature as Barbara had ever encountered outside of the criminal element. “I didn't know you had family in this country, Azhar.”
“I have significant family in this country,” he said.
“But on Hadiyyah's birthday, no one—”
“Hadiyyah and I do not see my family.”
“Ah. I get it.” Except she didn't. He was rushing off to the sea on a small family matter concerning a significant family that he never saw? “Well. How long d'you expect to be gone? Anything I can do for you here? Water the plants? Collect the post?”
He appeared to consider this far longer than the insouciance of the offer required. Finally he said, “No. I think not. There's merely been a minor upheaval among my relations. A cousin phoned to give voice to his concerns, and I go to them to offer my support and my expertise in these matters. It is a question of a few days away. The …” He smiled. He had—when he used it—a most attractive smile, perfect white teeth gleaming against his pecan skin. “The plants and the post can wait, I dare say.”
“Which direction are you heading in?”
“East.”
“Essex?” And when he nodded, she went on with “Lucky you, then, to be out of this heat. I've half a mind to follow and spend the next seven days with my bum firmly planted in the old North Sea.”
He didn't react other than to say, “I'm afraid that Hadiyyah and I will ourselves see little of the water on this trip.”
“That's not what she thinks. She'll be disappointed.”
“She must learn to live with disappointment, Barbara.”
“Really? She seems a bit young to be racking up a score in the life's-bitter-lessons game, wouldn't you say?”
Azhar ventured closer to the table and put his cigarette out in the ashtray. He was wearing a short-sleeved cotton shirt, and as he leaned past her, Barbara caught the crisp clean scent of his clothing and she saw the fine black hairs on his arm. Like his daughter, he was delicately boned. But he was darker in colouring. “Unfortunately, we cannot dictate the age at which we learn how much life is going to deny us.”
“Is that what life did to you, then?”
“Thank you for the cigarette,” he said.
He was gone before she could get another dig in. And when he was gone, Barbara wondered why the hell she felt the need to dig at him at all. She told herself it was for Hadiyyah's sake: Someone had to act in the child's best interests. But the truth was that Azhar's impermeable self-containment acted as a spur upon her, pricking at the sides of her need to know. Damn it all, who was the man? What was his solemnity all about? And how did he manage to hold the world at bay?
She sighed. The answers certainly wouldn't come from slouching sluglike at the dining table with a burning fag hanging from her lip. Forget it, she thought. It was too bloody hot to think about anything, let alone to come up with believable rationales for the behaviour of her fellow humans. Sod her fellow humans, she decided. In this heat, sod the whole flaming world. She reached for the small pile of envelopes on the table.
Looking for Love? leered up at her. The question was superimposed upon a heart. Barbara slid her index finger under the flap and pulled out a single-page questionnaire. Tired of trial-and-error dating? it asked across the top. Willing to take a chance that finding the Right Person is better handled by computer than by luck? And then followed the questions, asking about age, about interests, about occupation, salary, and level of education. Barbara considered filling it out for her own amusement, but after she evaluated her interests and realised that she had virtually none worth mentioning—Who really wanted to be computer-matched with a woman who read The Lusty Savage to lull herself to sleep?—she balled up the questionnaire and lobbed it towards the rubbish bin in her matchbox kitchen. She gave her attention to the rest of the post: BT bill asking to be paid, an advert for private health insurance, and an offer of a deluxe week for two on a cruise ship described as a floating paradise of pampering and sensuality.
She could do with the cruise ship, she realised. She could do with a week of deluxe pampering, with or without the accompanying sensuality. But a glance at the brochure's photographs revealed slim and tanned young things perched on bar stools and lounging poolside, their fingernails painted and lips pouting glossily, attended by men with hirsute chests. Barbara pictured herself floating daintily among them. She snickered at the thought. She hadn't been in a bathing suit in years, having come to believe that some things are better left to draperies, shrouds, and the imagination.
The brochure went the way of the questionnaire before it. Barbara stubbed out her cigarette with a sigh and looked about the bungalow for further employment. There wasn't any. She trundled over to the day bed, searched out the television's remote, and decided to give herself over to an afternoon of channel surfing.