Deception on His Mind

by Elizabeth George

  “A part-time employee?” Armstrong looked towards Emily. He said, “If I may …?” as if he believed he was under her supervision. He went to one of the shelves and pulled down a ledger, which he carried to the table. He said, “We've always been careful about our records. In Mr. Malik's position, employing illegals could be disastrous.”

  “Is that a problem round here?” Barbara asked. “As far as I know, illegals generally head for a city. London, Birmingham, places where there's a large Asian community.”

  “Hmm, yes. I expect they do,” Armstrong said as he flipped through a few pages of the ledger, examining the dates at the top. “But we're not that far from the harbours, are we? Illegals can always slip through the net at the port, so Mr. Malik insists upon vigilance, lest any of them end up here.”

  “If Mr. Malik were employing aliens, could Haytham Querashi have uncovered that fact?” Barbara asked.

  Ian Armstrong looked up. He clearly saw the direction in which the questions were heading, and he appeared frankly relieved to have the spotlight removed from him. Nonetheless, he didn't seem to attempt to skew his answer. “He might have suspected. But if someone presented him with well-forged papers, I don't see how he would have sussed them out. He wasn't English after all. How would he have known what to look for?”

  Barbara wondered what being English had to do with it.

  Armstrong looked over a page he'd selected. Then he went through two others. “These are the most recent part-timers,” he told them. “But there's no Kumhar among them. Sorry.”

  Then Querashi would have known him in another context, Barbara concluded. She wondered what it was. The Pakistani organisation that Emily had told her had been founded by Muhannad Malik? It was a possibility.

  Emily was saying, “What about someone given the sack by Querashi, part time or otherwise? Would he be listed there?”

  “The terminated employees have personnel files, naturally,” Armstrong said, indicating the filing cabinets along one wall. But as he spoke, his voice drifted off, and he sat back in his chair, looking thoughtful. Whatever he was thinking apparently served to ease his mind, because he finally took out a handkerchief and blotted his face with it.

  “You've thought of something else?” Emily asked him.

  “A terminated employee?” Barbara said.

  “It may be nothing. I only know about it, actually, because I had the word from one of his fellow employees in shipping after it happened. There was quite a to-do, evidently.”

  “About what?”

  “Trevor Ruddock, a boy from the town. Haytham gave him the sack about three weeks ago.” Armstrong went to one of the filing cabinets and fingered through a drawer. He brought out a folder and carried it to the table, reading a document contained inside. “Yes, here it is. … Oh dear. Well, it's not very nice.” He looked up and smiled. He'd obviously read good tidings for himself in Trevor Ruddock's file, and apparently he wasn't above celebrating the fact. “Trevor was sacked for stealing, it says here. The report's in Haytham's writing. It seems he caught Trevor red-handed with a shipping crate of goods. He sacked him on the spot.”

  “You said a boy,” Barbara noted. “How old is he?”

  Armstrong referred to the file. “Twenty-one.”

  Emily was with her. “Has he a wife? Children?”

  And Armstrong wasn't far behind them. “No,” he said. “But he lives at home, according to his employment application. And I do know that five children live there, along with Trevor, his mum, and his dad. And from the address he's given …” Armstrong looked up at the two police officers. “Well, it isn't exactly an upmarket area. I should guess his family needed whatever money he made. That's the way it is in that part of town.”

  Having said this, he seemed to realise that any attempt to direct their suspicions onto another could serve to heighten their suspicions about him. He continued hastily. “But Mr. Malik intervened for the boy. There's a copy here of a letter he wrote, asking another businessman in town to give Trevor a chance to redeem himself through a job.”

  “Where?” Barbara asked.

  “At the pleasure pier. And doubtless that's where you can find him. I mean, if you want to speak with him about his relationship with Mr. Querashi.”

  Emily reached forward and shut off her tape recorder. Armstrong looked relieved, off the hook at last. But when Emily spoke, she put him back on. “You won't be leaving town within the next few days, will you?” she asked pleasantly.

  “I have no plan to go—”

  “Good,” Emily Barlow said. “We'll no doubt need to speak with you again. With your in-laws as well.”

  “Of course. But as to this other matter … to Trevor … to Mr. Ruddock …? Surely you'll be wanting to …” Still, he wouldn't complete the sentence. He didn't dare. Ruddock's got a motive were the words that Ian Armstrong couldn't afford to speak. Because although Haytham Querashi had cost both men their jobs, only one of them had immediately benefitted from the Pakistani's death. And all of them round the table knew that the chief beneficiary of the Tendring Peninsula's first act of deadly violence in five years was sitting in Querashi's erstwhile office, having resumed the job that Querashi's arrival in England had cost him.

  LIFF HEGARTY SAW THEM COME OUT OF THE mustard factory together. He hadn't seen them go in together. Instead, he'd seen only the short, dumpy bird with the pudding-basin haircut who'd climbed out of a dilapidated Austin Mini carrying a shoulder bag the size of a pillar box. He hadn't given her much thought, other than wondering why a woman with her body was wearing drawstring trousers that served only to emphasise the absence of a waist. He'd seen her, evaluated her personal appearance, absently registered her as someone unlikely to browse through Hegarty's Adult Distractions, and consequently dismissed her. It was only upon his second sight of her that he realised who—or rather what—she was. And then he knew that the day, which had already started out bad, had the distinct potential for becoming worse.

  The second time the bird came into view, she was with another woman. This one was taller, so physically fit that she looked like she could wrestle a polar bear to the ground, and so commanding in the way she carried herself that there could be only one explanation for what she was doing at Malik's Mustards in the aftermath of the death on the Nez. She was the fuzz, Cliff realised. She had to be. And the other—with whom she stood in the kind of conversation that suggested professional if not personal intimacy—therefore had to be a copper as well.

  Shit, he thought. The last thing he needed was to have the cops prowling round the industrial estate. The town council was bad enough. They loved to harass him, and despite the lip-service they gave to bringing Balford back from the dead economically, they'd equally love to drive him out of business. And those two cops—two female cops—would probably be only too delighted to weigh in with the opposition once they got a look at his jigsaws. And there was no doubt that they'd see them. If they popped in for a chat, which they were bound to do given enough time to pin down everyone who might have laid eyes on the corpse before he was a corpse, they'd end up getting an eyeful of their own. That visit itself, beyond the questions they'd be asking which he'd be doing his best to avoid answering, was one of several upcoming events that Cliff didn't anticipate with boundless joy.

  His business was almost entirely mail-order, so Cliff could never understand what the fuss was about when it came to his puzzles. It wasn't like he advertised them in the Tendring Standard or stuck up posters in the shops on the High Street. He was more discreet than that. Hell, he was always discreet.

  But discretion didn't count for much once the coppers decided to start causing a bloke aggro. Cliff knew that from his Earl's Court days. When cops took that route, they began popping up on one's doorstep daily. Just a question, Mr. Hegarty. Could you help us out with a problem, Mr. Hegarty? Would you step down to the nick for a chat, Mr. Hegarty? There's been a burglary (or mugging or purse snatching or assault, it never mattered which), and we're wonderin
g where you were on the night in question? Can we have a bit of a go with your dabs? Just to clear you of suspicion, of course. And on and on until the only way to get them to give it a rest was to move out, move on, and start over somewhere else.

  Cliff knew he could do that. He'd done it before. But that was in the days when he was alone. Now that he had someone—and not just some hanger-on this time but someone with a job, a future, and a decent place to live on the strand in Jaywick Sands—he wasn't about to be forced out again. Because while Cliff Hegarty could set up business anywhere, Gerry DeVitt couldn't so easily get employment in the building trade. And with the promise of Balford's future redevelopment so close to coming true, Gerry's own future was looking rosy. He wouldn't pull up stakes at this point, when at long last there was the prospect of making some decent money.

  Not that money was Gerry's preoccupation, Cliff thought. Life would be a hell of a lot easier if only that were the case. If Gerry just trundled off to the job each morning and worked himself to exhaustion blow-torching away at that restaurant on the pier, life would be grand. He'd come home hot, sweaty, and tired, with nothing more on his mind than dinner and sleep. He'd keep thinking about the bonus that the Shaws had promised him could he have the building up and running by the next bank holiday. And he wouldn't turn his concerns anywhere else.

  As he'd obviously been doing that very morning, much to Cliff's rising anxiety.

  Cliff had come into the kitchen at six A.M., having awakened from a fitful sleep by the sudden knowledge that Gerry was no longer in bed at his side. He'd wrapped himself in a terry-cloth bathrobe and found Gerry where he'd apparently been for some time, standing fully clothed at the open window. This looked out upon five feet of concrete promenade, beyond which was the strand, beyond which was the sea. Gerry had been standing there, holding a mug of coffee, thinking the sort of private thoughts that always made Cliff begin to worry.

  Gerry wasn't a bloke who generally kept his thoughts private at all: To him, being lovers meant living in each other's socks, which in its turn meant engaging in soulful conversations, frequent breast barings, and endless evaluations of “the state of the relationship.” Cliff couldn't really abide this way of being involved with a bloke, but he'd learned to put up with it. These were Gerry's digs, after all, and even if that hadn't been the case, he liked Gerry well enough. So he'd schooled himself to cooperate in the conversation game with a fair amount of grudging good grace.

  But recently, the situation had altered subtly between them. Gerry's concern for the state of their union seemed to have faded. He'd stopped talking so much about it and, more ominously, he'd stopped clinging quite so tightly to Cliff. This made Cliff want to start clinging to him. Which was ludicrous, daft, and just plain idiotic. Which pissed Cliff off, because most of the time it was Cliff who needed space and Gerry who never wanted him to have it.

  Cliff had joined him at the kitchen window. Over his lover's shoulder he'd seen that bright snakes of early morning light were beginning to crawl across the sea. Backlit against them, a fishing boat chugged north. Gulls were silhouetted against the sky. While Cliff was no lover of natural beauty, he knew when a vista offered the opportunity for contemplation.

  And that's what Gerry had appeared to be doing when Cliff came upon him. He seemed to be thinking.

  Cliff had put his hand on Gerry's neck, knowing that in the past, their roles would have been reversed. Gerry would have offered the caress, a gentle touch but one that demanded in spite of itself, saying: Acknowledge me, please, touch me in turn, tell me you love me as well, as much, as blindly, as selflessly as I love you.

  Before, Cliff would have wanted to shrug Gerry's hand away. No, truth be told, his first reaction would have been wanting to slap Gerry's hand away. In fact, he would have wanted to swat Gerry right across the room, because that touch of his—so solicitous and tender—would have made demands upon him that he hadn't the energy or the ability to meet. But this morning he'd found himself playing Gerry's role, wanting a sign from Gerry that their relationship was still intact and foremost in the other man's thoughts.

  Gerry had stirred beneath his hand, as if roused from sleep. His fingers made an effort at contact, but their graze felt to Cliff like a duty done, similar to one of those dry, stiff-lipped kisses exchanged by people who've been together too long.

  Cliff had let his hand drop from Gerry's neck. Shit, he thought, and wondered what to say. He started with the obvious. “Couldn't sleep? How long've you been up?”

  “A while.” Gerry raised his coffee mug.

  Cliff had observed the other man's reflection in the window and tried to read it. But because it was a morning rather than a nightime image, it showed little more than the shape of him, a beefy man who was bulky and solid with a body hard and strong from labour.

  “What's wrong?” Cliff had asked him.

  “Nothing. I couldn't sleep. It's too hot for me. This weather's unbelievable. You'd think we were living in Acapulco.”

  Cliff had tested the water in a way that Gerry himself might have done had their positions been reversed. He said, “You wish we were living in Acapulco. You and all those nice young Mexican boys …”

  And he'd waited for the kind of reassurance that Gerry himself once would have wanted from him: Me and nice young Mexican boys? You daft, mate? Who gives a flying one for a greasy kid when I can have you?

  But it hadn't come. Cliff drove his fists into the pockets of his bathrobe. Hell, he thought with self-directed disgust. Who would've thought that he'd be wearing the sodding shoes of insecurity? He—Cliff Hegarty and not Gerry DeVitt—was the one who'd always said that permanent fidelity was nothing but a pit stop on the road to the grave. He was the one who'd preached about the dangers of seeing the same tired face at breakfast every morning, of finding the same tired body in bed every night. He'd always said that after a few years of that, only the knowledge of having had a secret encounter with someone new on the side—someone who liked the thrill of the chase, the pleasures afforded by anonymity, or the excitement of deception—would stimulate a bloke's body into performing for a long-term lover. That's just the way it was, he'd always said. That was life.

  But Gerry wasn't supposed to believe that Cliff had actually meant what he said. Flaming hell, no. Gerry was supposed to say with sardonic resignation, “Right, mate. You keep on talking, ‘cause that's what you're good at, and talk is just talk.” The last thing Cliff had ever expected was that Gerry might take his words to heart. Yet with a stomach quickly turning sour, Cliff forced himself to admit that Gerry must have done exactly that.

  He wanted to say belligerently, Look, you want to end it, Ger? But he was too frightened at what his lover's answer might be. He realised in a flash of clarity that no matter how much he talked about roads to the grave, he didn't really want to split from Gerry. Not just because of these digs in Jaywick Sands, a few feet from the beach, where Cliff liked to roam, nor because of the old speedboat that Gerry had lovingly restored and in which the two of them roared across the sea in the summer, and not because Gerry had been talking about an Australian holiday during the months when wind rattled the house like a Siberian cyclone. Cliff didn't want to split with Gerry because … well, there was something bloody comforting in being hooked up with a bloke who said he believed in permanent fidelity … even if one never got round to mentioning that particular point to him.

  Which is why Cliff said with far more indifference than he actually felt, “You looking for a Mexican boy these days, Ger? Got a taste for dark meat instead of white?”

  Gerry turned from the window at that. He set his cup on the table. “You been keeping count? Want to tell me why?”

  Cliff grinned as he raised his hands in mock defence. “No way. Hey, this i'n't about me. We been together long enough for me to know when somethin's on your mind. All's I'm asking is do you want to talk about it?”

  Gerry side-stepped and crossed the kitchen to the fridge. He opened it. He began to gather
the ingredients for his usual breakfast, placing four eggs into a bowl and sliding four bangers out of their wrapper.

  “You cheesed off about something?” Cliff reached for the tie of his bathrobe nervously. He retied it and returned his hands to his pockets. “Okay, I know I mouthed off nasty when you cancelled our Costa Rica holiday, but I thought we'd set ourselfs straight about that. I know the pier job's a big one for you, and along with that house renovation. … What I'm saying's that I know there hasn't been enough work in the past and now there is and you want to take the pickin's and you can't take time off. I understand. So if you been cheesed off about what I said—”

  “I haven't been cheesed off,” Gerry said. He cracked the eggs and whipped them in the bowl while the bangers began to hiss on the cooker.

  “Okay. Well, good.”

  But was it good, really? Cliff didn't think so. Lately, he had begun to notice changes in Gerry: the uncharacteristic, lengthy silences, the frequent weekend retreats to the small garage, where he played his drums; the long nights he spent working on that private remodelling job in Balford; the intense evaluative looks he'd taken to giving to Cliff when he thought Cliff wouldn't notice. So sure, maybe Ger wasn't cheesed off at the moment. But he was definitely something.

  Cliff knew that he ought to say more, but what he realised was that he very much wanted to leave the room. He figured that it would be wiser, anyway, just to pretend everything was fine despite all contradictory indications. That made more sense than running the risk of finding out something he didn't want to know.

  Still, he remained in the kitchen. He watched the way his lover was moving, and he tried to suss out what it meant that Gerry was seeing to his breakfast with such a combination of assurance and concentration. It wasn't that assurance and concentration were out of character in Gerry. To be a success in his line of work, he needed both qualities. But neither of them was a quality that Gerry usually demonstrated when he was with Cliff.