Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(91)

With a blare of its horn, the van shot forward. The roar of its engine echoed against the buildings. Startled, the children jumped back. One dropped his ice cream and in a reflex, bent to retrieve it. The other, a hand on his companion's collar, quickly jerked him out of harm's way. “Fuckin’ Pakis!” someone shouted from the van, and a bottle flew out. It hadn't been sealed, so its contents arced into the air as it sailed. The boys dodged but didn't quite make it. Yellow liquid splashed into their faces and across their clothes before the bottle broke at their feet.

“Bloody hell,” Barbara muttered. She dashed across the street.

“My ice cream!” the smaller boy cried. “Ghassan, my ice cream!”

Ghassan's face was a study in disgust, but he was directing it towards the fleeing vehicle. The van was tearing up the shore road, which curved out of sight beneath the shade of a cypress tree. Barbara tried—but failed—to make out its number plates.

“You all right?” she asked the boys. The smaller child had begun to cry.

The blistering street and pavement quickly heated the liquid that had been tossed. The sharp odour of urine seeped upward. The boys had it on their clothes and their skin, nasty yellow stains against their white shorts and yellow droplets speckling their brown legs and their cheeks.

“I lost my ice cream,” the smaller boy wailed.

“Shut up, Muhsin,” Ghassan scowled. “They want you to cry. So shut up!” He shook him roughly, one hand on his shoulder. “Here, take mine. I don't want it.”

“But—”

“Take it!” He shoved the Cornetto at the other boy.

“You all right?” Barbara repeated. “That was a rotten thing to do.”

Ghassan finally looked her way. She could have tasted the scorn in his expression, had it had a flavour. “English cunt.” He said the words so distinctly that she couldn't have mistaken them for anything else. “Get away from us. Come on, Muhsin.”

Barbara felt her mouth drop open, and she snapped it shut as the boys walked off. They went in the direction they'd intended from the first, towards the pier. No one, it seemed, was going to stop them from doing what they had planned to do.

Barbara would have admired them had she not seen how the entire episode—as brief as it had been—served to underscore all of the racial tensions in Balford, tensions that only a few nights previously might have led to murder. She watched the boys descend the path to the pier before she returned to her car.

She didn't have far to drive to Trevor Ruddock's house. She didn't, in fact, have to drive there at all. A quick purchase of a town map at Balford Books and Crannies revealed that Alfred Terrace was less than a five-minute walk from the High Street and the bookstore itself. It was also a five-minute walk from Racon Jewellery, a detail that Barbara took note of with interest.

Alfred Terrace comprised a single line of seven saltbox-sized dwellings that ran along one side of a little square. Each house was decorated with derelict window boxes, and each possessed a front door so narrow that inhabitants of the terrace doubtless had to consider their daily food intake and how it might affect their ability to gain access to their sitting rooms. The houses were uniformly dirty white, their faded doors the only distinguishing feature about them. These were each painted differently, in colours that ran from yellow to puce. The paint had faded over time, however, for the terrace faced west and it took the very worst of the day's sun and heat.

Which is what it was doing at the moment. The air was still and the temperature seemed ten degrees higher than it had been on the pier. Egg frying on the pavement was called for. Barbara could feel her skin cooking where it was bare.

The Ruddock family lived along the terrace at Number 6. Their choice of door colour had at one time been red, but the sun had reduced it to the shade of raw salmon. Barbara rapped on this sharply and gave a quick peek to the single front window. She could see nothing through its net curtains, although she could hear rap music playing somewhere in the house and the loud chatter of a television accompanying it. When no one answered her first knock on the door, she gave it a more meaningful assault.

This got results. Footsteps clattered against an uncarpeted floor, and the door swung open.

Barbara found herself looking at a child playing dress-up. She couldn't tell if the creature was male or female, but whatever the case, Dad's clothes had apparently been appropriated for the game. The shoes were clown-size and, no matter the day's heat, an old tweed jacket hung down to the knees.

“Yeah?” the child asked.

“Wha’ is it, Brucie?” a woman's voice shouted from the back of the house. “You at the door? Someone here? Don't you go outside in your dad's gear. You hear me, Brucie?”

Brucie observed Barbara. The corners of his eyes, she noted, could have done with a thorough cleaning.

She gave the child her happiest hello, to which he responded by wiping his nose on his father's jacket sleeve. Underneath it he wore only underpants with the elastic stretched beyond redemption. The pants hung perilously on his bony frame. “I'm looking for Trevor Ruddock,” she explained. “Does he live here? Are you his brother?”

The child turned in his clown shoes and shouted into the house. “Mum! It's some fat bird asking for Trev!” Barbara's hands itched to become acquainted with the circumference of his neck.