Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(99)
“DeVitt?” Barbara asked. “Em, he works on the pier. I spoke to him this afternoon.”
Emily made an entry into her notebook, which she scooped from a table in the incident room. “What else?” she asked Belinda.
“Calls from a decorator in Colchester, also working on the house. And this last, miscellaneous calls: from friends, I expect, by their names: Mr. Zaidi, Mr. Faruqi, Mr. Kumhar, Mr. Kat—”
“Kumhar?” Emily and Barbara said simultaneously.
Belinda looked up. “Kumhar,” she confirmed. “He phoned the most. There're eleven messages from him.” She licked her index finger and flicked through the final stack of chits. She pulled from them the one she wanted. “Here it is. Fahd Kumhar,” she said.
“Bloody hell. There you are,” Barbara put in reverently.
“It's a Clacton number,” Belinda went on. “I phoned it, but I only got a news agent on Carnarvon Road.”
“Carnarvon Road?” Emily said quickly. “Are you absolutely sure it was Carnarvon Road?”
“I've got the address right here.”
“Now there's a development from the gods, Barb.”
“Why?” Barbara asked. There was a map of the area on one of the notice boards, and she went to this and looked it over, seeking the location of Carnarvon Road. She found it, rising perpendicularly from the sea and Clacton's Marine Parade. It passed the railway station and ultimately led to the A133, which was the road to London. “Is there something important about Carnarvon Road?”
“There's something too coincidental for coincidence,” Emily said. “Carnarvon Road runs along the east side of the market square. Clacton market square, that is, of recent cottaging fame.”
“Now, that's a tasty detail,” Barbara said. She turned from the map and saw the DCI watching her. Emily's eyes were bright.
“I think we may be looking at a whole new cricket match, Sergeant Havers,” she announced. And her voice was renewed with the vigour that Barbara had always encountered in Barlow the Beast. “Whoever Kumhar is, let's track this bloke down.”
AHLAH USED GREAT CARE TO SET OUT THE TOOLS of her craft. She lifted the transparent plastic trays from their green metal workbox and lined them up neatly. She took the narrow-nosed pliers, the drill, and the wire cutter from their protective sheaths and she laid them on either side of the row of cords, cables, and lengths of gold chain that she used to assemble the intricate necklaces and earrings which Rachel and her mother had kindly undertaken to sell among the jewellery in their shop. “This's every bit as good as anything we got at Racon,” Rachel had declared loyally. “Mum'll want to show it, Sahlah. You'll see. Anyway, what c'n it hurt to try? If it sells, you got some money for yourself. If it doesn't, you got some new jewellery, right?”
There was a degree of truth to Rachel's words. But beyond the money—three-quarters of which she turned over to her parents once she'd earned enough to pay off Theo's bracelet—it had been the idea of doing something on her own and something that was purely an expression of herself that had motivated Sahlah to design and create for eyes and purses outside of her family's.
Had this been the first step? she wondered as she reached for the tray of African beads and trickled them slowly into her palm like winter raindrops, cool and smooth. Was it when she decided to engage in this solitary creative act that she'd first awakened to the possibilities offered by a world beyond the realm of her family? And had this act of creating something as simple as jewellery in the isolation of her bedroom produced the first fissure in her contentment?
No, she realised. Nothing was ever as simple as that. There was no primary cause-and-effect that she could point a finger at, explaining not only the restlessness of her spirit but also the soreness of an insular heart. What there was instead was the entire duality of a life lived with her feet attempting to march in two conflicting worlds.
“You're my English girl,” her father had said to her nearly every day as she scooped up her schoolbooks in the morning. And she'd heard the pride in his voice. She was born in England; she went to the junior school right there in town with English children; she spoke the language by virtue of both birth and exposure and not from having had to learn it as an adult. Therefore, in her father's mind she was English, and as verifiably English as any child with porcelain cheeks that flushed like peach skin after play. She was, in fact, as English as Akram secretly longed to be.
Muhannad was right in this, Sahlah realised. Although their father attempted to wear two different suits of cultural clothing, his true love was with the three-piece suits and brollies of his adopted country despite his duty's entanglement with the shalwār-gamīs of his heritage. And from the moment of his children's births, he'd expected them to share and understand this perplexing dichotomy. At home they were to be dutiful: Sahlah subdued and obedient, honing skills in homemaking to please a future husband; Muhannad respectful and industrious, preparing himself to shoulder the burdens of the family business and eventually producing sons who would shoulder that burden in their turn. Beyond the home, though, the two Malik children were to be quintessentially English. Counselled by their father to mix with their schoolmates, they were supposed to establish friendships in order to garner respect and affection for the family name and consequently for the family business. And to this latter end, Akram monitored their schooldays, looking for signs of social progress where he could not possibly hope to find them.