Deception on His Mind

by Elizabeth George

  “Guv?” a woman's voice shouted from somewhere in the building. “Bloke called Kayr al Din Siddiqi at London University. You hear that, Guv? He can do Arabic if you fax something over.”

  “Belinda Warner,” Emily said drily. “The girl can't type a bloody report, but give her a phone and she's magic. Right,” she shouted back, and sent the yellow-bound book to the copier machine. She pulled Haytham Querashi's cheque book from the evidence bag.

  Seeing it, Barbara realised there was another direction to head in besides the road signposted to Ian Armstrong's door. She said, “Querashi wrote a cheque two weeks ago. He's entered it on the stub. Four hundred pounds to someone called F. Kumhar.”

  Emily found the entry and frowned down at it. “Not exactly a fortune, but not a paltry sum. We'll need to track him down. Or her.”

  “The cheque book was locked inside that leather case, by the way, and there was a jewellery receipt locked with it. From Racon Jewellery, here in town. The receipt has Sahlah Malik's name on it.”

  “Odd to lock up a cheque book,” Emily said. “It's not as if anyone but Querashi could have used it.” She tossed it to Barbara. “Have a go with it. See to the jewellery receipt as well.”

  It seemed a generous offer, considering the moment of friction between them over Ian Armstrong's potential guilt. And Emily increased the generosity of it with her next words. “I'll have a second go with Mr. Armstrong. Between the two of us, we should finally be able to make some decent headway today.”

  “Right,” Barbara said, and she wanted to thank the other woman: for seeing to her battered face, for allowing her to work at her side, for even considering her take on the case. But instead she said, “I mean, if you're sure.”

  “I'm sure,” Emily said with the ease and the confidence Barbara remembered. “As far as I'm concerned, you're one of us.” She slipped her sunglasses on and took up her key ring. “Scotland Yard has a professional caché that the Asians are going to respect and even my super might acknowledge. I need them off my back. I need him off my back. I want you to do what you can to make that happen.”

  Calling out to her subordinates that she was heading off to put Mr. Armstrong through his paces, Emily shouted, “And I've got the mobile if you want me,” in the direction of the back of the building. She nodded at Barbara and shot down the stairs.

  Alone in the DCI's office, Barbara fingered through the items from the evidence bag. She thought about what conclusions she could draw from those items when they were presented in conjunction with Emily's determination that a trip wire had been used to murder Haytham Querashi. A key potentially to a safe deposit box, a passage in Arabic, a cheque book with an Asian name inscribed in it, and one very curious jewellery receipt.

  That last seemed the best place to start. If there were details to be eliminated in the search for a killer, it was always wise to go with the most accessible of them first. It gave one the decided feeling of success, no matter how irrelevant to the case it was.

  Barbara left the fan Rolfing the intemperate air. She descended the stairs and went out to the street, where her Mini was soaking in the day's growing heat like a tin on the top of a barbecue.

  The steering wheel was hot to the touch and the worn seats embraced her like the hug of an inebriated uncle. But the engine started with less mechanical coquetry than usual, and she drove down the hill and turned right in the direction of the High Street.

  She hadn't far to go. Racon Original and Artistic Jewellery was situated on the corner of the High Street and Saville Lane, and it had the distinction of being one of only three businesses that were apparently still operational in a row of seven.

  The shop was not yet open for the day, but Barbara knocked on the door in the hope that someone was in the back room, which she could see through a doorway just beyond the counter. She rattled the handle and knocked a second time, more aggressively. This effected the desired result. A woman with formidably styled hair of an equally formidable shade of red appeared in that doorway and gestured to the CLOSED sign in the front window. “Not quite ready for the day yet,” she called with an air of determined good cheer. And doubtless because she'd come to realise the folly of turning away any potential customer in the current business climate of Balford, she added, “Is it an emergency, love? D'you need a birthday gift or something?” and came forward to open the door anyway.

  Barbara displayed her warrant card. The woman's eyes widened. She said, “Scotland Yard?” and turned for some reason to glance at the room from which she'd emerged.

  “I'm not after a gift,” Barbara told her. “Just some information, Mrs. …?”

  “Winfield,” she said. “Connie Winfield. Connie of Racon.”

  It took Barbara a moment to realise that the other woman wasn't identifying her place of genesis a la Catherine of Aragón. She was referring to the name of the shop. “This is your business, then?”

  “Quite.” Connie Winfield closed the door behind Barbara and patted it smartly. She returned to the counter and began arranging the display inside. This was covered with a maroon flannel cloth, which she folded back to reveal earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and other baubles. Not the standard stuff of jewellery stores, all were of unique design, leaning heavily towards coins, beads, feathers, polished stones, and leather. Where precious metal was used, it was the traditional gold or silver, but fashioned unusually.

  Barbara thought of the ring she'd seen in the leather case in Querashi's room. A traditional design with a single ruby, the ring had definitely not been purchased here.

  She fished out the receipt that had been in Querashi's possession. She said, “Mrs. Winfield, this receipt—”

  “Connie,” the other woman replied. She'd gone on to a second display case and was uncovering the ornaments within it. “Everyone calls me Connie. Always have done. I've lived here all my life, and I never saw the point of becoming Mrs. Winfield to people who used to see me running down the street in a dirty nappy.”

  “Right,” Barbara said. “Connie.”

  “Even my artists call me Connie. That's who do my jewels, by the way. Artists from Brighton to Inverness. I sell their pieces on consignment, which is why I've been able to ride out the recession when most of the shops—the luxury shops, that is, not the grocery or the chemist or the necessary shops—have had to close their doors these last five years. I've got a good mind for business, always have done. And when I opened Racon ten years ago, I said, ‘Connie, don't you put all your money into stock, darling girl.’ That's as good as setting sail to Port Failure with all engines blasting, if you know what I mean.”

  From beneath the counters she began taking display stands made of polished wood and artfully shaped like trees. These were devoted to earrings, and their beads and coins jangled together as Connie set them on the counter and deftly arranged them to their best advantage. She worked energetically, and Barbara couldn't help wondering if the attention she was giving to the products on sale was typical of a morning's activity or the nervous reaction to a visit from the police.

  Barbara laid the receipt next to one of the earring trees. She said, “Mrs.—Connie, this receipt is from your shop, isn't it?”

  Connie picked it up. “Says Racon right on the top,” she agreed.

  “Can you tell me what purchase went with it? And what does the phrase ‘Life begins now’ refer to?”

  “Hang on.” Connie went to a corner of the shop, where an oscillating floor fan stood. She switched this on, and Barbara was relieved to note that unlike the fan in Emily's office, it worked as one might hope an oscillating fan would work. Connie opted for the medium setting.

  She carried the receipt over to the till, where a black notebook lay. This bore the words RACON JEWELLERY embossed in gold. Connie opened it. “AK means the artist,” she explained to Barbara. “That's how we identify the pieces. This is Aloysius Kennedy, a bloke from Northumberland. I don't sell many of his pieces because they get a bit pricey for the sort of trade we do in Balfo
rd. But this one …” She licked her middle finger and leafed through a few pages. She ran a long acrylic fingernail—painted, it seemed, to match her hair—down the page. “The 162 refers to the stock number,” she said. “And in this case—yes. Here it is. It was one of his hinged wrist cuffs. Oooh. This was a lovely one. I haven't another exactly like it, but—” she switched to sales mode—”I can show you something close if you'd like to have a look.”

  “And ‘Life begins now?’” Barbara said. “What would that refer to?”

  “Common sense, I expect,” Connie said, and she laughed a little too forcefully at her own small joke, showing tiny child-like white teeth. “We'll have to ask Rache, won't we? This's her writing.” She went to the doorway to the back room and called, “Rache, love-boodle. We got Scotland Yard in the shop asking about a receipt of yours. Could you bring me a Kennedy?” She shot Barbara a smile. “Rachel. My daughter.”

  “Ra of Racon.”

  “You're quick, aren't you?” Connie acknowledged.

  From the back room, footsteps clacked on a wooden floor. In a moment, a young woman stood in the doorway. She kept to the shadows and held a box in her hand. She said, “I was seeing to the shipment from Devon. She's doing shells this time. Did you know?”

  “Is she? Cor, you can't tell that woman a thing about what sells, can you? This is Scotland Yard, Rache.”

  Rachel moved forward only slightly but enough for Barbara to see that she was nothing like her mother. Despite her unnaturally flaming hair, Connie was a pretty-featured woman with flawless skin, long eyelashes, and a delicate mouth. In contrast, her daughter looked as if someone had put her together from the discarded pieces of five or six unattractive individuals.

  Her eyes were abnormally wide set, and one of them drooped as if she suffered from a form of palsy. What went for her chin was a small protuberance of flesh beneath her lower lip, below which was her neck. And where her nose should have been, she'd obviously once had nothing at all. A cosmetically created projection served to take its place, and while it was shaped like a nose, it had insufficient bridge, so it dipped into her face as if a thumb had been pressed into a model made of clay.

  Barbara didn't know where to look without seeming offensive to the young woman. She racked her brains to remember what people with deformities wanted from their fellow men: Staring was crass, but gazing elsewhere while attempting to speak to the victim of such physical disfigurement seemed even more cruel.

  “What c'n you tell Scotland Yard about this, sweet thing?” Connie said. “It's a Kennedy piece with your writing on it, and you sold it to …” Her voice drifted off as she read the name at the top of the receipt for the first time. She raised her eyes to her daughter, and her daughter met her gaze. A subtle communication seemed to pass between them.

  “The receipt indicates that it was sold to Sahlah Malik,” Barbara told Rachel Winfield.

  Rachel finally came forward into the direct light of the shop. She stood some two feet from the counter on which the receipt lay. She looked at it tentatively as if it were an alien creature best not approached too quickly. Barbara could see that a vein in her temple was throbbing, and while she gave the receipt an arm's length scrutiny, she hugged herself and, with the hand not holding the box she'd brought from the back room, she rubbed her thumb fiercely against her upper arm.

  Her mother went to her side and, with a cluck, fussily rearranged the younger woman's hair. She pulled a bit of it forward and fluffed another bit of it outward. Rachel looked irritated, but didn't shake her mother off.

  “Your mum says this is your handwriting,” Barbara told her. “So you must have made the sale. Do you recall it?”

  “Not a sale exactly,” Rachel said. She cleared her throat. “More like a trade. She makes some of our jewellery, Sahlah does, so we sort of bartered. She doesn't … well, she doesn't have any money of her own.” She indicated a display of ethnic necklaces. They were heavy with foreign coins and carved beads.

  “So you do know her,” Barbara said.

  Rachel went at things from another angle. “It would be an inscription, what I've written there. ‘Life begins now’ would be an inscription for the inside of the bracelet. We don't do inscriptions here, though. We have the pieces sent out if someone wants one.” She placed the box on the counter and prised it open. Inside, an object was wrapped in soft purple cloth. Rachel removed this and laid a gold bracelet on the counter. Its style was in keeping with the overall fashion of the rest of the jewellery in the shop. While its purpose was obvious by its circular shape, its design was indefinite, as if it had been poured into a malleable mould that had been allowed to take whatever shape chance gave it. “This is a Kennedy piece,” Rachel said. “They're all different, but it'll give you the general idea of what AK-162's like.”

  Barbara fingered the bracelet. It was unique. And had she seen one similar to it among Querashi's belongings, she would have remembered it. She wondered if he'd been wearing it the night he died. Although the bracelet could have been removed from his body after he'd fallen to his death, it hardly seemed likely that his killer had then tossed his car in order to find it. And had he died for a bracelet worth £220? It was a possibility, but a conjecture that Barbara was unwilling to hang her next pay rise on to.

  She took up the receipt again and gave it a second observation. Rachel and her mother said nothing, but another look passed between them and Barbara could feel a tension that she wanted to pursue.

  The reaction of the women told her that, in one way or another, they had a connection with the murdered man. But what sort of connection might it be? she wondered. She knew the risks inherent in drawing premature conclusions—especially drawing premature conclusions that were prompted by something as potentially baseless as personal appearance—but it was difficult to see Rachel Winfield in the guise of Querashi's putative lover. It was difficult to see Rachel Winfield in the guise of anyone's lover. No devastating beauty herself, Barbara knew the role that an appealing countenance played in attracting men. So it seemed logical to conclude that, whatever the connection might be, it wasn't a romantic or sexual one. On the other hand, the young woman had a nice body, so there was that to consider as well. And under cover of darkness … But Barbara realised that she was getting ahead of herself. The real question was Querashi's possession of the receipt and what it was doing among his belongings when the bracelet wasn't.

  Thinking of the receipt, she glanced at the till. Next to this with its cover curled open lay a booklet of receipts heretofor unused. Barbara registered their colour. They were white. And the receipt from Querashi's room was yellow.

  She saw upon this latter paper what she might have noted before had she not been concentrating on the name Sablah Malik, the phrase ‘Life begins now,’ and the cost of the item. Printed in minuscule letters at the bottom of the page were two more words: Business Copy.

  “This is the shop's receipt, isn't it?” she asked Rachel Winfield and her mother. “The customer gets the original white one from the book by the till. The shop keeps the yellow as a record of the sale.”

  Connie Winfield interjected hastily, “Oh, we're never as clever as that, are we, Rache? We just tear the receipt off and shove one of the two copies over. I don't expect we mind much which one they get, so long as we keep one for ourselves. Isn't that so, love-boodle?”

  But Rachel, it seemed, had realised her mother's mistake. She blinked hard when Barbara reached for the receipt book. Those documenting previous sales were folded back along with the booklet's cover. Barbara leafed through them. Every copy left in was yellow.

  She saw they were numbered and she riffled through the pages to find the original of the copy she had in her possession. It was receipt number 2395: 2394 and 2396 were in book in yellow, and 2395 wasn't there in either colour.

  Barbara closed the book, saying, “Is this always in the shop? What do you do with it when you lock up for the night?”

  “It goes under the cash drawer in the
till,” Connie said. “Fits snug as a bug. Why? Have you found something wrong with it? God knows me and Rache are a bit loose when it comes to our bookkeeping, but we've never done something illegal.” She laughed. “You can't cook the books when the chef's yourself, if you know what I mean. There's no one to cheat. ‘Course, I suppose we could cheat the artists if we had a mind to, but that'd catch up with us in the end because we give them an accounting twice a year and they have the right to go over our books themselves. So if we have any sense at all—and I like to think that we do, mind you—we can—”

  “This receipt was among a dead man's belongings,” Barbara cut in.

  Connie gulped and raised a closed fist to her sternum. And she kept her eyes so fixed to Barbara that it seemed only too clear whose face she was determined not to glance at. Even when she spoke, she didn't look at her daughter. “Fancy that, Rache. How d'you suppose it happened? Are you talking about that bloke from the Nez, Sergeant? I mean, you're the police and that bloke's the only dead man round here that the police are interested in. So it must be him. He must be the dead man. Yes?”

  “The same,” Barbara said.

  “Fancy that,” Connie breathed. “I couldn't say for money how he came to have one of our receipts. What about you, love-boodle? D'you know anything about this, Rache?”

  One of Rachel's hands closed over a fold in her skirt. It was one of those Asian skirts, Barbara noted for the first time, the translucent sort that were sold in open air markets all over the country. The skirt didn't exactly tie the girl to the Asian community. But it also didn't extricate her from a situation in which her reluctance to speak was indicating that she was—however tangentially—involved.

  “Don't know a thing,” Rachel said faintly. “P'rhaps that bloke picked it up off the street or something. It has Sahlah Malik's name on it. He would have recognised that. P'rhaps he meant to give it back to her and he never had the chance.”

  “How would he have known Sahlah Malik?” Barbara asked.