As he scuttled away to fetch the telephone messages, Muhannad spoke again. “Cousin, we'll speak later, I hope. Hadiyyah, good evening. It was—” His face softened with the truth of his words and his other hand cradled the back of her head in a tender gesture. He bent and kissed her crown. “It was truly a pleasure to meet you at long last.”
“Will you come again? C'n I meet your wife and your little boys?”
“Everything”—he smiled—”in good time.”
He took his leave of them, and Azhar—casting a quick look at Barbara—followed him out of the hotel. Barbara heard him say urgently, “Muhannad, a moment,” as he got to the door. She wondered what on earth he was going to say to his cousin by way of explanation. No matter how one examined the situation, it didn't look good.
“Here we are.” Basil Treves was back with them, Barbara's messages fluttering from his fingers. “He was most courteous over the phone. Quite surprising, for a German. Will you be joining us for dinner, Sergeant?”
She told him that she would be doing so, and Hadiyyah said, “Sit with us, sit with us!”
Treves didn't look any happier at this turn of events than he'd looked at breakfast on Monday morning when Barbara had blithely crossed the invisible barrier that the hotelier erected between his white guests and his guests of colour. He patted Hadiyyah on the head. He looked at her with the special sort of superficial benignity one reserves for small animals to which one is violently allergic. “Yes, yes. If she wishes,” he said heartily, past the aversion in his eyes. “She can sit anywhere she wishes to sit, my dear.”
“Good, good, good!” Reassured, Hadiyyah scampered off. A moment later, Barbara heard her chatting with Mrs. Porter in the hotel bar.
“It was the police,” Treves said confidentially. He nodded at the telephone messages in Barbara's hand. “I didn't want to say as much in front of …those two. You know. One can't be too careful with foreigners.”
“Right,” Barbara said. She quelled the desire to smack Treves’ face and tramp on his feet. Instead, she went up the stairs to her room.
She tossed her shoulder bag onto one of the twin beds and went to the other. She slouched down onto it and examined her telephone messages. Each was made out to the same name: Helmut Kreuzhage. He'd phoned at three that afternoon, then again at five and at six-fifteen. She looked at her watch and decided to try him in his office first. She punched the German number into the phone and fanned herself with the plastic tray that she took from beneath the room's tin tea pot.
“Hier ist Kriminalhauptkommisar Kreuzhage/’
Bingo, she thought. She identified herself slowly in English, thinking of Ingrid and her modest command of Barbara's native tongue. The German switched languages immediately, saying, “Yes. Sergeant Havers. I'm the man who took the telephone calls here in Hamburg from Mr. Haytham Querashi.” He spoke with only the barest hint of an accent. His voice was pleasant and mellifluous. He must have driven Basil Treves half mad, Barbara thought, so little did he sound like a postwar cinema Nazi.
“Brilliant,” Barbara said fervently, and thanked him for returning her call. She quickly made clear to him all of the circumstances surrounding her having tracked him down.
He made a grave clucking sound on his end of the phone when she told him about the trip wire, the old concrete steps, and Haytham Querashi's fatal fall. “When I had a look at his phone records from the hotel, the number for Hamburg police was among them. We're checking into every possible lead. I'm hoping you can help us out.”
“I fear I have little that would be of help,” Kreuzhage said.
“Do you remember your conversations with Querashi? He phoned Hamburg police more than once.”
“Oh, ja, I do remember quite well,” Kreuzhage answered. “He wished to share some information about activities which he believed to be ongoing at an address in Wandsbek.”
“Wandsbek?”
“Ja. A community in the western sector of the city.”
“What sort of activities?”
“That, I fear, is where the gentleman became rather vague. He would describe them only as illegal activities involving both Hamburg and the port of Parkeston in England.”
Barbara felt her fingertips tingle. Bloody hell. Could it actually be possible that Emily Barlow was right? “That sounds like a smuggling operation,” she said. Kreuzhage coughed phlegmily. He was a brother smoker, Barbara realised, but heavier on the fags than she. He held the phone away from his face and spat. She shuddered and vowed to ease up on the weed.
“I would be hesitant to limit my conclusions to smuggling,” the German said.
“Why?”
“Because when the gentleman mentioned the port of Parkeston, I arrived at the same conclusion. I suggested he phone Davidwache an der Reeperbahn. This is the harbour police here in Hamburg. They would be the ones to deal with smuggling, you see. But that, I am afraid, he was loath to do. He wouldn't even entertain the notion, which suggested to me that his concerns did not revolve around smuggling at all.”
“Then what did he tell you?”
“He would say only that he had information about a felonious activity that was ongoing, operating out of an address in Wandsbek, although he did not know that it was Wandsbek, of course. Just that it was in Hamburg.”
“Oskarstrafie 15?” Barbara guessed.
“You've found the address among his things, I take it. Ja, that was the location. We looked into it, but found nothing at all.”
“He was on the wrong track? Did he have the wrong German city?”
“There is no real accurate way to know,” Kreuzhage replied. “He may well have been correct about the illicit goings on, but Oskarstrafie 15 is a large apartment building with some eighty units inside, behind a locked front door. We have no cause to inspect those units and could not do so on the unfounded suspicions of a gentleman phoning from another country.”
“Unfounded suspicions?”
“Mr. Querashi had no real evidence to speak of, Sergeant Havers. Or if he had it, he was not willing to share it with me. But on the strength of his passion and sincerity, I did place the building under surveillance for two days. It sits on the edge of Eichtalpark, so it was easy enough to place my men in an area where they could not be seen. But I have not the manpower to …how do you call it …sit out a building?”
“Stake out a building?”
“That American term, ja, this is it. I have not the manpower or the financial resources to stake out a building the size of Oskarstrafie 15 for the length of time it would take to ascertain if illegal activity is going on there. Not, I am afraid, with so little to go on.”
It was hardly an unreasonable position, Barbara thought. Doubtless, stormtrooping one's way into people's private homes and apartments had gone out of fashion in Germany after the war.
But then she remembered.
“Klaus Reuchlein,” she said.
“Ja? He is …?” Kreuzhage waited politely.
“He's some bloke living in Hamburg,” Barbara said. “I don't have his address, but I have his phone number. I'm wondering if there's any chance that he lives at Oskarstrafie 25.”
“This,” Kreuzhage said, “could indeed be ascertained. But beyond that …” He was good enough to sound regretful. He went on to tell her—in the sombre tone of a man with a thorough knowledge of the evils that other men do—that there were many arenas of misbehaviour which could possibly span the North Sea and tie England to Germany. Prostitution, counterfeiting, gun running, terrorism, extremism, industrial espionage, bank robbery, art theft …The wise policeman did not confine his suspicions to smuggling when two countries were connected in a criminal way. “This I tried to point out to Mr. Querashi,” he said, “so that he might see how difficult was the task he wished me to perform. But he insisted that an investigation of Oskarstrafie 15 would provide us with the information we needed to make an arrest. Alas, Mr. Querashi had never been to Oskarstrafee 25.” Barbara could hear him sigh. “An inves
tigation? Sometimes people do not understand how the law regulates what we as policemen can and cannot do.”
How true. Barbara thought of the police dramas she'd seen on the telly, those programmes in which the rozzers regularly wrestled confessions from suspects who went from defiant to compliant within the convenient space of an hour. She made noises of agreement and asked Kreuzhage if he would check on Klaus Reuchlein's whereabouts. “I have a phone call into him as well,” she explained, “but something tells me he's not going to return it.”
Kreuzhage assured her he would do what he could. She rang off. She spent a moment just sitting on the bed, letting its hideous counterpane soak a bit of the sweat from the backs of her legs. When she felt she had the energy to do so, she went to the shower and stood under it, too hot even to entertain herself with her usual medley of rock ‘n’ roll oldies.
FTER DINNER, BARBARA ENDED UP ON THE PLEASURE pier solely because Hadiyyah had extended the invitation. In her usual impulsive and generous manner, the little girl had announced, “You must come with us, Barbara. We're going to the pier, Dad and I, and you must come as well. She must, Dad, mustn't she? It'll be ever so much more fun if she comes.” She'd craned her neck to see her father, who listened to the invitation soberly. The final diners of the evening, they were finishing their sorbet-du-jour. It was lemon this night, and they'd had to consume it in a rush before the heat reduced it to slop. Hadiyyah had waved her spoon in the air as she spoke, sending lemon droplets across the table cloth.
Barbara would have preferred a quiet sit on the lawn above the sea. Mingling with the doubtlessly odoriferous pleasure seekers on the Balford pier and building up a new patina of sweat were activities she could have done without. But Azhar had been preoccupied throughout dinner, allowing his daughter to carry the conversation happily in whatever direction she chose, and at any length. This behaviour was so unlike him that Barbara knew it had to be connected with Muhannad Malik's departure from the Burnt House and whatever had been said between the two men in the car park prior to that departure. So she was willing to accompany Azhar and his daughter to the pleasure pier if for no other reason than to prise from the man an account of what had passed between him and his cousin.
Thus she found herself on the pier at ten o'clock, jostled by the sunburned masses, her nostrils assailed by the mixed odours of lotions, sweat, frying whitebait, sizzling hamburgers, and popping corn. The noise was even more deafening at night than during the day, possibly because the carnies grew more desperate for custom as the closing hour approached. So they shouted for attention, attempting to beguile passers-by into tossing balls or spinning wheels or shooting ducks, and in order to be heard they had to match the volume of the calliope music from the roundabout and the whistles, bells, pops, and mechanical explosions of the games in the arcade.
It was to the arcade that Hadiyyah led them, having each of them by the hand. “What fun, what fun!” she sang out, and she seemed oblivious of the fact that what passed between her father and her friend was mostly silence.
On every side of them, a glistening throng played video and pin ball machines in the din. Small children raced among the fruit machines, shouting and laughing. A crowd of adolescent boys drove virtual reality race cars to the accompaniment of admiring shrieks from teenaged girls. A line of elderly women sat at a counter playing bingo, with the numbers being boomed out on a microphone that was wielded by a clown-suited man whose make-up had long since suffered the worst it could suffer from the relentless heat. No one in the arcade, Barbara noted, was Asian.
For her part, Hadiyyah seemed unmindful of everything: the noise, the smell, the temperature, the crowd, and being one of two parts of a distinct minority. She released her grip on her father and Barbara and whirled about, dancing from foot to foot. She crowed, “The crane grab! Dad, the crane grab!” and dashed in the direction of that particular game.
When they caught up with her, she was pressed against the front of the machine, her nose to the glass as she studied its contents. It was filled with stuffed animals: pink pigs, spotted cows, giraffes, lions, and elephants. “Giraffe, giraffe,” she sang out, poking her finger at the animal she wanted her father to try to win for her. “Dad, c'n you do the giraffe for me? He's ever so good at the crane grab, Barbara. Just wait till you see.” She spun on one foot and grabbed her father's arm. She urged him forward to the machine. “And when you win a giraffe for me, you must win something for Barbara next. An elephant, Dad. Remember the elephant you won for Mummy? Remember how I cut out its stuffing? I didn't mean to, Barbara. I was only five years old, and I was playing vets with it. It needed an operation, but it lost its stuffing when I cut it open. Mummy was in such a rage about that. She shouted and shouted. Didn't she, Dad?”
Azhar didn't answer. Instead, he applied his attention and his efforts to the crane grab. He did it as Barbara assumed he would do it: with the sort of solemn concentration that he gave to everything. He missed on the first try as well as the second. But neither he nor his daughter lost heart. “He's just practising,” Hadiyyah informed Barbara confidently. “He always practises first. Right, Dad?”
Azhar went about his business. On his third try, he positioned the crane quickly, dropped its hook efficiently, and snagged the giraffe that his daughter wanted. Hadiyyah shouted with delight and swept the small stuffed animal into her arms as if she'd just been given the single gift she'd desired for the length of her eight short years.
“Thank you, thank you!” she cried and hugged her father round the waist. “It'll be my souvenir from Balford. It'll be how I remember what a fine time we had on our holiday. Try for another. Please, Dad, won't you? Try for an elephant for Barbara's souvenir.”
“Another time, kiddo,” Barbara said hastily to the girl. The thought of being presented with a stuffed animal from Azhar was somehow disconcerting. “We don't want to drop our lolly all in one place, do we? What about pin ball? Or the roundabout?”
Hadiyyah's face lit. She darted ahead of them, squirming through the crowd on her way to the door. To get there, she had to pass the virtual reality race cars, and in her haste for fun, she elbowed her way into the group surrounding them.
It happened quickly, too quickly to see if what occurred was merely an accident or an intentional act. One moment Hadiyyah had disappeared into a mass of scantily clad adolescent bodies. The next moment she was sprawled on the floor.
Someone hooted with laughter, a sound barely discernible above the raucous noise of the arcade. But it was loud enough for Barbara to hear it, and she shot into the group without another thought.
“Shit. Pakis,” someone was saying.
“Just lookit that dress.”
“An Oxfam special.”
“Thinks she's going to meet the Queen.”
Barbara grabbed the limp, sweaty T-shirt of the boy nearest to her. She twisted it into her hand and jerked until he was less than two inches from her face.
“My little friend,” she said evenly, “appears to have tripped somehow. I'm sure one of you gentlemen would like to help her, wouldn't you?”
“Sod you, bitch” was his succinct reply.
“Not even in your dreams,” she said.
“Barbara.” Azhar spoke somewhere behind her, sounding eminently reasonable as he always sounded.
In front of her, Hadiyyah was struggling to her knees among the Doc Martens, sandals, and trainers that surrounded her. Her silk dress had become soiled in her fall, and beneath her arm the seam had ripped. She didn't look so much hurt as surprised. She gazed round, her face bewildered at the sudden confusion.
Barbara gripped the boy's T-shirt more firmly. “Think again, wanker-man,” she said quietly. “I said that my little friend needs some help.”
“Fuck that, Sean. There's two of them and ten of us,” someone to Barbara's left advised.
“Right,” Barbara said pleasantly in answer, speaking to Sean and not to his counsellor. “But I don't imagine that any of you have one of these.”
With her free hand she felt in her shoulder bag until she had her police identification. She flipped this open and jammed it into Sean's face. She was too close for him to be able to read it, but reading it wasn't what she had in mind for him.
“Help her up,” she said.
“I di'n't do nothing to her.”
“Barbara.” Azhar spoke again.
She saw him out of the corner of her eye. He was going to Hadiyyah. “Leave her,” Barbara said. “One of these young louts”—another twist of the T-shirt—”is hot to prove what a gent he can be. Isn't that right, Sean? Because if one of these young louts”—another more savage twist of the shirt—”fails to prove what needs to be proved, the whole flaming lot of them are going to be phoning Mummy and Daddy from the nick tonight.”
Azhar, however, ignored Barbara's words. He went to his daughter and helped her to her feet. The adolescents gave him plenty of space to do so. “You've not hurt yourself, Hadiyyah?” He reached for her giraffe, which had flown from her hands as she'd fallen.
“Oh no!” she wailed. “Dad, it's got all ruined.”
Sean still in her grasp, Barbara looked over. The giraffe had somehow become stained with ketchup. Its head had been flattened by someone's shoe.
A boy out of Barbara's range of vision sniggered. But before she could deal with him, Azhar said, “This is something that can be easily repaired.” He spoke like a man who was aware of everything else in life that was well beyond mending. He worked his way out of the group, Hadiyyah walking in front of him, his hands on his daughter's shoulders.
Barbara saw the dejected angle at which the child held her head. She itched to head-butt Sean and drive her knee directly into his bollocks, but instead she released him and wiped her hand on her trousers. “It takes real dreck to go after an eight-year-old girl,” she said. “Why don't the lot of you celebrate the accomplishment by doing yourselves proud somewhere else?”
Deception on His Mind Page 50