Deception on His Mind

by Elizabeth George

  She shoved past them and followed Azhar and his daughter out of the arcade. For a moment she didn't see where they'd gone because the number of pleasure-seekers seemed to have grown. On her every side was a mass of black leather trousers, nose studs, nipple rings, dog collars, and chains. She felt as if she'd just burst into a crowd of S & M conventioneers.

  Then she saw her friends. They were to her right, Azhar leading his daughter out of the pavilion and onto the open section of the pier. She joined them.

  “…manifestation of people's fear,” Azhar was saying to Hadiyyah's bowed head. “People fear what they don't understand, Hadiyyah. Fear drives their actions.”

  “I wouldn't've hurt them,” Hadiyyah said. “I'm too little to hurt them anyway.”

  “Ah, but they aren't afraid of being hurt, khushi. What they're afraid of is being known. Here is Barbara now. Shall we continue our evening? Allowing a group of strangers to determine whether we find joy in this outing seems ill-advised.”

  Hadiyyah raised her head. Barbara felt a tightness in her chest at the sight of her little friend's bleak face. “I think those planes are calling to us, kiddo,” she said heartily, indicating a ride nearby: tiny aeroplanes soaring and falling round a central pole. “What d'you say?”

  Hadiyyah watched the planes for a moment. She'd been carrying her soiled and ruined giraffe, but now she handed it over to her father and straightened her shoulders. “I especially love aeroplanes,” she said.

  THEY WATCHED HER when they couldn't ride with her. Some of the amusements were child-sized: the miniature Army Jeeps, the train, the helicopters, and the planes. Others were made for larger occupants, and in these the three of them rode together, dashing from the teacups to the Ferris wheel to the roller coaster, always managing to stay at least one step ahead of disappointment and dejection. It wasn't until Hadiyyah insisted on three consecutive rides on the miniature sailing ships—“They make my stomach go whoop-dee-do,” she explained—that Barbara had a chance to talk to Azhar alone.

  “I'm sorry about what happened,” she said to him. He'd taken out his cigarettes and offered her one. She accepted. He lit them both. “Rotten thing. On her holiday and everything.”

  “I'd love to shield her from every pain.” Azhar watched his daughter and smiled at her laughter as her stomach whoop-dee-do'd on the simulated wave which crested and fell beneath her tiny ship. “But that's the desire of every loving parent, isn't it? It's a wish that's both reasonable to possess and completely impossible to fulfill.” He lifted his cigarette to his lips and kept his eyes fixed to Hadiyyah. He said, “Thank you, however.”

  “For?”

  He canted his head in the direction of the arcade. “Coming to her aid. It was good of you.”

  “Bloody hell, Azhar. She's the best. I like her. I love her. What the hell else did you expect me to do? If I'd had my way, we wouldn't have walked out of that place like three of the meek with prospects of inheritance on our minds. Believe me.”

  Azhar turned his head to Barbara. “You're a pleasure to know, Sergeant Havers.”

  Barbara felt her face get hot. She said, “Yeah. Well,” and in some confusion she drew in on her cigarette and made a study of the beach huts on the shore, half-lit by lamps that were shaped like old gaslights, half-shadowed by the darkness. Despite the balminess of the night, most of the huts were closed up, their daytime occupants gone to the hotels and cottages where they spent their holiday nights.

  She said, “I'm sorry about the hotel, Azhar. About Muhannad. You know. I saw the Thunderbird when I pulled into the car park. I thought I could avoid him and duck upstairs. I was desperate for a shower, or I would have cooled my heels in a pub or something. Which, I realise, is probably what I should have done.”

  “It was inevitable that my cousin should know we're acquainted,” he told her. “I should have told him at once. That I didn't has caused him to question my commitment to our people. And rightfully so.”

  “He looked pretty cheesed off when he left the hotel. How'd you explain things?”

  “As you yourself explained them to me,” Azhar said. “I told him your presence had been requested by DCI Barlow and that it was as much a surprise to you as it had been to me to find yourself involved in a situation in which a member of the opposition happens to be someone with whom you're acquainted.”

  Barbara could feel him looking at her, and her face grew even hotter. She was glad of the shadow cast by the sailing ship ride. At least it kept her safe from the sort of scrutiny that was Azhar's stock-in-trade.

  She was overcome by a strong compulsion to tell him the truth. Except she couldn't have said at the moment precisely what the real truth was. She seemed to have lost her grip upon it sometime during the last several days. And for the life of her, she couldn't identify when the facts had clothed themselves in such slippery garments. She wanted to offer him something in reparation for the lies she'd told. But as he himself had said, he and she represented opposing forces.

  “How did Muhannad take that information?” she asked.

  “My cousin has a temper,” Azhar replied. He flicked ash from his cigarette onto the pier. “His is a nature that sees enemies everywhere. It was easy for him to conclude that the notes of caution I've attempted to strike during our conversations these last few days were evidence of my duplicity. He feels betrayed by one of his own, and that makes things difficult between us at the moment. This isn't unreasonable, however. Deception is the one sin in a relationship that people find nearly impossible to forgive.”

  Barbara felt as if he was playing her conscience like a violin. To quell both her pangs of guilt and her desire for absolution, she kept the conversation anchored on his cousin. “You didn't deceive him for malicious reasons, Azhar. Hell, you didn't deceive him at all. He didn't ask you if you knew me, right? Why should you have volunteered the information?”

  “A point which Muhannad has difficulty accepting at the moment. Thus”—he shot her an apologetic glance—”my usefulness to my cousin may be at an end. And yours to DCI Barlow as well.”

  Barbara immediately saw where he was heading. “Holy hell, are you saying Muhannad'll tell Emily about us?” She felt her face flame yet another time. “I mean …not us. There isn't any us. But you know what—”

  He smiled. “I have no way of knowing what Muhannad may do, Barbara. In many ways, he keeps his own counsel. Until this weekend, I hadn't seen him in nearly ten years but as a teenager, he was much the same.”

  Barbara thought about this—about everything that keeping his own counsel could imply—especially in relation to the afternoon's interview with Fahd Kumhar. She said, “Azhar, that meeting today, the one at the nick …”

  He dropped his cigarette to the pier and ground it out. Over their shoulders, the ship ride was ending yet again. Hadiyyah called out for one last go. Her father nodded, gave a ticket to the operator, and watched his daughter sail the sea again. He said, “The meeting?”

  “With Fahd Kumhar. If Muhannad is someone who keeps his counsel like you're saying, is there any chance he already knew that bloke? Before he walked into the room, I mean.”

  At once, Azhar looked cautious, guarded, and most importantly, unwilling to speak. Barbara wished that his cousin could have been with them that very second, so clearly did Azhar's expression show where his true loyalties lay.

  She said, “The reason I'm asking is that Kumhar's reaction was so extreme. You'd think the sight of you and Muhannad would have been a relief, but it didn't seem to be at all. He knotted himself up in a proper twist, didn't he?”

  “Ah,” Azhar said. “This is a class issue, Barbara. Mr. Kumhar's reaction—consternation, subservience, anxiety—is born of our culture. When he heard my cousin's name pronounced, he recognised a member of a higher social and economic group than his own. His name—Kumhar—is what we call Kami, the artisan caste of labourers, carpenters, potters, and the like. My cousin's name—Malik—indicates membership in the landowning group of our
society.”

  “D'you mean he was gibbering like that because of someone's last name?” Barbara found that the explanation strained credulity. “Bloody hell, Azhar. This is England, not Pakistan.”

  “So I expect you understand my point. Mr. Kumhar's reaction is hardly any different to an Englishman's discomfort when in the presence of another Englishman whose pronunciation of the language or choice of vocabulary reveals his class.”

  Damn the man. He was so insufferably and consistently astute.

  “Excuse me?”

  The voice came from behind them. Barbara and Azhar swung round to see a mini-skirted girl with waist-length blonde hair standing uneasily next to an overfull rubbish bin. She was carrying a giraffe identical to the one that Azhar had earlier scooped up for his daughter, and she shifted her weight from one sandaled foot to the other, her gaze moving uneasily from Azhar to Barbara to the sailing ship ride and back to Azhar.

  “I've been looking for you everywhere,” she said. “I was with them. I mean I was there. Inside. When the little girl …” She lowered her head and examined the giraffe before thrusting it in their direction. “Would you give her this, please? I wouldn't want her to think …They act up, that lot. That's how it is. That's just how they are.”

  She pressed the stuffed animal into Azhar's hand, smiled fleetingly, and hurried back to her companions. Azhar watched her go. He spoke some words quietly.

  “What was that?” Barbara asked him.

  “‘Let not their conduct grieve thee,’ “he said with a smile and a nod at the girl's retreating back. “‘They injure Allah not at all.’”

  HADIYYAH COULDN'T HAVE been more delighted with her new giraffe. She held it happily to her thin chest, tucking its head under her chin. The other giraffe, however, she refused to part with. She clutched it in her other hand, saying, “It's not his fault he got smirched with ketchup,” as if the stuffed animal were a personal friend. “We c'n wash him up, I expect. Can't we, Dad? ‘N’ if all the ketchup won't come out, we can just pretend he escaped from a lion when he was little.”

  The buoyancy of children, Barbara thought.

  They spent another hour enjoying the pleasure pier's attractions: losing themselves in the Hall of Mirrors, intrigued by the hologram exhibition, tossing balls at a basket, trying their luck at archery, deciding what they would have printed upon their souvenir T-shirts. Hadiyyah settled on a sunflower, Azhar chose a steam train—although Barbara found that she couldn't imagine him actually wearing anything less formal than one of his spotless linen shirts—and Barbara herself went for a cartoon egg that was shattered on rocky ground beneath a wall, with the words SCRAMBLE HUMPTY-DUMPTY arching over the picture.

  Hadiyyah sighed with pure pleasure as they made their way towards the exit. The attractions were beginning to shut down for the night, and as a result the noise had abated and the crowd had thinned out considerably. What remained were mostly couples now, boys and girls who sought the shadows as eagerly as they had earlier sought the games and amusements. Here and there, an entwined duo leaned against the pier railing. Some watched the lights of Balford fanned out on the shore, some listened to the sea as it slapped against the pilings beneath them, and some ignored everything but each other and the pleasure afforded by another's body pressed to one's own.

  “This,” Hadiyyah announced dreamily, “is the very best place in the whole wide world. When I grow up, I'm going to spend every one of my holidays here. And you'll come with me, won't you, Barbara? Because we'll know each other for ever and ever. Dad'U come with us, won't you, Dad? And Mummy as well. And this time when Dad wins Mummy an elephant, I won't cut it open on the kitchen floor.” She gave another sigh. Her eyelids were beginning to droop. “We got to get postcards, Dad,” she added with a little stumble as she failed to lift her foot high enough when she took a step. “We got to send a postcard to Mummy.”

  Azhar stopped. He took the two giraffes from the little girl and handed them to Barbara. Then he lifted his daughter and settled her legs round his waist.

  “I c'n walk,” she protested sleepily. “I'm not tired. Not one little bit.”

  Azhar kissed the side of her head. For a moment he stood motionless with his daughter in his arms, as if awash in an emotion that he wished to feel but not to exhibit.

  Watching him, Barbara was overwhelmed for an instant with a longing that she didn't wish to identify, much less to experience. So she fumbled with the plastic bag in which their three T-shirts were folded, placing the two giraffes within it, finding it necessary to rearrange the bag's position on her arm. It was a moment in which her daily armour of derision and irony failed her entirely. There, on the pier in the company of a father and his child, circumstances suggested that she assess the elements comprising her personal life.

  But she wasn't a woman who embraced such suggestions, so she looked about for other intellectual, emotional, and psychological employment. She found it without difficulty: Trevor Ruddock was heading in their direction, having just emerged from the brightly lit pavilion.

  He was wearing sky-blue overalls, attire so out of character in him that Barbara could only conclude it was a uniform worn by the maintenance and custodial crews who took care of the pier after it closed for the night. But it wasn't the overalls that caused her to take a second and closer look at young Mr. Ruddock. He worked on the pier, after all. He'd been released from the nick some hours earlier. His presence at Shaw Attractions was hardly illogical, considering the hour. But the bulging backpack he was wearing slung over his shoulders was a less than reasonable accessory to his sartorial ensemble.

  His eyes adjusting to the difference in lighting from the pavilion to the pier, Trevor didn't see Barbara and her companions. He went to a shed at the east side of the pavilion, where he unlocked its door and disappeared inside.

  As Azhar started to move towards the exit again, Barbara put a hand on his arm. “Hang on,” she said.

  He followed the direction of her gaze, seemed to see nothing, and looked back at her, perplexed. “Is there …?”

  “Just a little something I want to check out,” she said. The shed, after all, was a perfect place to cache contraband. And Trevor Ruddock clearly had something other than his evening meal in his possession. With Balford's nearness to Harwich and Parkeston … it didn't make sense to let an opportunity like this one pass her by.

  Trevor emerged—sans backpack, Barbara noted—pushing a large trolley. It was equipped with brooms and brushes, with buckets and dust pans, with a coiled hose pipe and an assortment of unidentifiable bottles, tins, and cannisters. Cleansers and disinfectants, Barbara concluded. The upkeep of Shaw Attractions was serious business. She wondered momentarily if Trevor's backpack had merely been a means of transporting all of his cleaning accoutrements. It was a possibility. She knew there was only one way to find out.

  He took off towards the end of the pier, obviously with the intention of working his way towards and into the pavilion from the future site of the restaurant. Barbara seized the opportunity. She grabbed Azhar's elbow and hustled him across the pier to the shed. She tried the door, which Trevor had swung shut behind him. She found she was in luck. He hadn't relocked it.

  She ducked inside. “Just keep watch for me,” she requested of her friend.

  “Watch?” Azhar shifted the bulk of Hadiyyah's weight from one arm to the other. “For what? Barbara, what are you doing?”

  “Just checking out a theory,” she said. “I won't be a tick.”

  He said nothing else, and as she couldn't see him, she could only assume he was doing his bit and keeping an eye open for anyone approaching the shed with an intent to enter. For her part, she considered what Helmut Kreuzhage had told her from Hamburg earlier in the evening: Haytham Querashi had suspected someone of an illegal activity involving both Hamburg and the nearby English harbours.

  Drug smuggling was the obvious illegal activity of choice, despite what Kriminalhauptkommisar Kreuzhage had said to discourage this lin
e of thought. It brought in big money, especially if the drug was heroin. But an illegal activity that involved smuggling didn't limit itself to narcotics. There was pornography to consider, as well as loose jewels like diamonds, explosives, and small arms, any of which could be carried onto the pleasure pier via backpack and hidden in a shed.

  She looked round for the backpack, but it was nowhere in sight. She began a search. The only light inside came from what the partially open doorway allowed, but it was sufficient for her to see by once her eyes became accustomed to the gloom. The shed was outfitted with a set of cupboards, and she went through these swiftly. She found nothing inside but five cans of paint, brushes, rollers, overalls, and tarpaulins, in addition to extra cleaning supplies.

  Aside from the cupboards, there were two deep drawers and a chest. The drawers held tools for small repairs: spanners, screw drivers, pliers, a crow bar, nails, screws, and even a small saw. But nothing else.

  Barbara went on to the chest. Its lid made a squeak that, she swore, probably could have been heard in Clacton. The backpack lay within, the sort of aluminum-framed rucksack that students use when they hitchhike during their holidays, determined to see the world.

  Anticipation rising, feeling and believing that at last she was getting somewhere, Barbara lifted the pack out and laid it on the floor. But her hopes were dashed when she saw the contents. And confusion quickly took hope's place.

  The backpack contained a hotchpotch of useless articles, at least articles that were useless to her present purposes. She emptied the pack of salt cellars fashioned like lighthouses, fishermen, anchors, and whales; pepper mills posing as Scotties and pirates; a plastic tea set; two dirty Barbie dolls; three unused and sealed decks of cards; a mug commemorating the short-lived marriage of the Duke and Duchess of York; a small London taxi missing a wheel; two pairs of child-sized sunglasses;

  an unopened box of Beehive nougats; two Ping-Pong bats, a net for the game, and a box of balls.