Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(95)

Too right, Barbara thought. Why was it that she had trouble picturing Trevor Ruddock embroiled in deep philosophical colloquy with a female?

She wondered about the explanation he was giving, about why he found it necessary to give one in the first place. He'd either been with a woman or he hadn't been with a woman. She would either confirm his alibi or she wouldn't. Whether the two of them had been snogging, discussing politics, playing snap, or boffing each other like two hot monkeys made no difference to Barbara. She reached for her bag and brought out her notebook. “What's her name, then?”

“You mean this girl?”

“Right. This girl. I'll need to have a word with her. Who is she?”

He shuffled from one foot to the other. “Just a friend. We talk. It's no big-”

“Give me her name, okay?”

He sighed. “She's called Rachel Winfield. She works at the jewellery shop on the High Street.”

“Ah, Rachel. We've already met.”

He clasped his left hand round his right elbow. He said, “Yeah. Well, I was with her on Friday night. We're friends. She'll confirm.”

Barbara observed his discomfort and mentally toyed with the nature of it. Either he was embarrassed to have it known that he associated with the Winfield girl, or he was lying and hoping to get to her before Barbara checked his story out. “Where were the two of you?” she asked, seeing the need to establish a second source of corroboration. “A caff? A pub? The arcade? Where?”

“Uh … none of those, actually. We just went for a walk.”

“On the Nez maybe?”

“Hey, no way. We were on the beach all right, but nowheres near the Nez. We were off by the pier.”

“Anyone see you?”

“I don't think so.”

“But at night the pier's crowded. How could someone not have seen you?”

“Because … look, we weren't on the pier. I never said we were on it. We were at the beach huts. We were—” He raised his forefinger and gnawed again viciously. “We were in a beach hut. Got it? Okay?”

“In a beach hut?”

“Yeah. Like I said.” He dropped his hand from his mouth. His look was defiant. There was little doubt what he'd been up to with Rachel, and Barbara knew it probably had little to do with discussing what was what with the world.

“Tell me about Mr. Querashi and the market square,” she said. “Clacton's not that far from here. What are we talking about: twenty minutes in the car? It's not exactly a trip to the moon. So what was unusual about Haytham Querashi's being in the market square?”

“It's not him being there,” Trevor corrected Barbara. “It's a free country. He can go where he likes. It's what he was up to there. And with who.”

“All right. I'll go for it. What was he up to?”

Trevor returned to his seat at the table. He pulled an illustrated book from beneath a disorganised array of newspapers. It was open to a colour photograph. Barbara saw that the picture was of the spider that Trevor was in the process of creating. “Jumping spider,” he informed her. “It don't use a web like the others do, which is what makes it different to them. It hunts its prey. It goes out on the prowl, it finds a likely meal, and fumph—” His hand shot out and alighted on her arm. “He eats.” The young man grinned. He had odd eyeteeth, one long and one short. They made him look dangerous, and Barbara could tell that he knew and enjoyed this fact.

She disengaged her arm from his hand. “This is a metaphor, right? Querashi the spider? What was he hunting?”

“What a randy bloke gen'rally hunts when he goes someplace he doesn't think he'll be known. Only, I saw him. And he knew I saw him.”

“He was with someone?”

“Oh, they didn't make it look that way, but I saw them talking and I watched them afterwards. And sure enough, they trotted off to the toilets one at a time—real casual, you know—looking like cats with feathers in their teeth.”

Barbara observed the young man, and he observed her. She said carefully, “Trevor, are you telling me that Haytham Querashi was doing some cottaging in Clacton market square?”

“Looked that way to me,” Trevor said. “He's standing there giving some scarves the finger at a stall across the square from the toilets. Some bloke comes up and does his own bit with the scarves ‘bout five feet from him. They look at each other. They look away. This other bloke walks past and drops a line in his ear. Haytham heads for the gents straightaway. I watch. Two minutes later this bloke slides in there as well. Ten minutes after that, Haytham comes out. Alone. Looking the look. And that's when he sees me.”

“Who was this other bloke? Someone from Balford? Do you know him?”

Trevor shook his head. “He was just some poufter wanting to score. Some poufter with a fancy for a poke of a different colour.”

Barbara jumped on this. “He was white? The homosexual? He was English?”

“Could've been. But he could've been German, Danish, Swedish. Maybe even Norwegian. I don't know. But he wasn't a coloured, that's for sure.”

“And Querashi knew you'd seen him?”

“Yes and no. He saw me but he didn't know I'd watched him pull this other bloke. It was only when he wanted to give me the sack that I told him I seen the whole thing.” Trevor shoved the spider book back where he'd taken it from. “I thought I'd have something to hold over him, see? Like he wouldn't sack me if he knew I might give the word to old Akram that his future son-in-law was buggering white boys in a public convenience. But he denied the whole thing, Querashi did. All he said was that I'd better not hope to keep my job at the factory by spreading the nasties about him. Akram wouldn't believe them, he said, and I'd end up without my job at Malik's and without the new spot at the pier as well. I needed the pier job, so I shut my gob. End of story.”