Deception on His Mind Read online

  “We're being opposed,” she said. “One of the council opposes us. Who? Malik? Yes, it's Malik, isn't it? That mule-faced upstart provides this town with a single patch of green that he calls a park—and names it after one of his heathen relatives—and suddenly he decides he's a man with a vision. It's Akram Malik, isn't it? And the council's backing him instead of falling on their knees and thanking God I've the money, the connections, and the inclination to put Balford back on the map.”

  “It wasn't Akram,” Theo said. “And it wasn't about the redevelopment.” For some reason, he looked away for a moment before he met her eyes squarely. It was as if he was gathering the nerve to go on. “I can't believe you didn't hear what happened. It's all over town. It was about this other matter, Gran. About this business on the Nez.”

  “Oh, piffle the Nez.” There was always something coming up about the Nez, mostly questions having to do with public access to a part of the coastline that was becoming increasingly fragile. But questions about the Nez came up on a regular basis, so why some long-haired ecologist would choose the redevelopment meeting—her redevelopment meeting, damn everyone—to blither on about speckle-bellied gorse sitters or some other fanciful form of wildlife was beyond her comprehension. This meeting had been in the works for months. The architect had taken two days from his other projects to be here and the city planner had flown to England at her personal expense. Their presentation had been initiated, calculated, orchestrated, and illustrated to the last detail, and the fact that it could be derailed by anyone's concern about a crumbling promontory of land that could be discussed at any date, in any place, at any time … Agatha felt her trembling heighten. She worked her way to the sofa and lowered herself to it. “How,” she asked her grandson, “did you let this happen? Didn't you object?”

  “I couldn't object. The circumstances—”

  “What circumstances? The Nez will be there next week, next month, and next year, Theo. I fail to see how a discussion about the Nez was a burning necessity today of all days.”

  “It wasn't about the Nez,” Theo said. “It was about this death. The one that occurred out there. A delegation from the Asian community came to the meeting and demanded to be heard. When the council tried to fob them off till another time—”

  “Heard about what?”

  “About this man who died on the Nez. Come on, Gran. The story was all over the front page of the Standard. You must have read it. And I know Mary Ellis must have gossiped about it.”

  “I don't listen to gossip.”

  He went to the tea table and poured himself another cup of cold Darjeeling. He said, “Be that as it may,” in a tone that told her he didn't believe her for an instant, “when the council tried to turn away the delegation, they took over the hall.”

  “They? Who?”

  “The Asians, Gran. There were more of them outside, waiting for a sign. When they got it, they started putting on the pressure. Shouting. Brick throwing. It got ugly fast. The police had to settle everyone down.”

  “But this was our meeting.”

  “Right. It was. But it turned into someone else's. There was no getting round it. We'll have to reschedule when things quiet down.”

  “Stop sounding so unmercifully reasonable.” Agatha thumped her stick against the carpet. It made virtually no noise, which aggravated her more. What she wanted was a good bout of pan throwing. A few broken pieces of crockery also wouldn't have gone down ill. “‘We'll just have to reschedule …?’ Where do you think that sort of mind set will get you in life, Theodore Michael? This meeting was arranged to accommodate our needs. We requested it. We as good as stood in a queue tugging at our forelocks to get it. And now you tell me that a puling group of uneducated coloureds who no doubt didn't even take time to bathe before presenting themselves—”

  “Gran.” Theo's fair skin was flushing. “The Pakistanis bathe quite as much as we do. And even if they didn't, their hygiene's hardly the point, is it?”

  “Perhaps you'll tell me what the point is.”

  He came back to his seat, opposite her. His teacup rattled in its saucer in a manner that made her want to howl. When would he learn how to carry himself like a Shaw, for God's sake?

  “This man—his name was Haytham Querashi—”

  “I know that very well,” she snapped.

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Ah,” he said. He placed his teacup carefully on the table and kept his attention on it, rather than on his grandmother, as he continued. “Then you probably also know that he was due to marry Akram Malik's daughter next week. Evidently, the Asian community doesn't believe that the police are moving fast enough to get to the bottom of what happened to Querashi. They brought their grievance to the council meeting. They were especially hard … well, they were hard on Akram. He tried to control them. They walked all over him. He was fairly humiliated about the whole deal. I couldn't ask for another meeting after that. It wouldn't have been right.”

  Despite what the disruption had done to her own plans, Agatha found herself taking pleasure in this piece of information. In addition to the man's raising her ire by bullying his way into her special passion—redeveloping Balford—she hadn't forgiven Akram Malik for taking her place on the town council. He hadn't actually run against her, but he hadn't turned down the appointment when someone was needed to fill her place until a by-election could be called. And when that by-election had been held and she herself had been too ill to stand for the seat, Malik had done so, campaigning as earnestly as if he'd been after a seat in the House of Commons. She was delighted, therefore, at the thought of the man's embarrassment at the hands of his own community.

  She said, “That must have got right up old Akram's nose, having his precious Pakis take the mickey out of him in a public forum. How I wish I'd been there.” She saw Theo wince. Mr. Compassion. He always pretended to be such a bleeding heart. “Don't tell me you don't feel the same, young man. You're a Shaw at the end of the day and you know it. We have our ways and they have theirs, and the world would be a better place if all of us kept to our own.” She rapped her knuckles on the table to get his attention. “Just try to tell me you disagree. You had more than one run-in with coloured boys when you were in school.”

  “Gran …” What was that note in Theo's voice? Impatience? Ingranation? Mollification? Condescension? Agatha's eyes narrowed upon her grandson.

  “What?” she demanded.

  He didn't reply at once. He touched the rim of his teacup in a meditative gesture, looking deep in thought. “That's not all,” he said. “I stopped at the pier. After what went on at the meeting, I thought it would be a good idea to make sure the attractions were running smoothly. That's why I'm late, by the way.”

  “And?”

  “And it was good that I went. There was a dust-up among five blokes out on the pier, right outside the arcade.”

  “Well, I hope to God you sent them packing, whoever they were. If the pier gets the reputation as a spot for the local hooligans to aggravate tourists, we may as well lay redevelopment to rest.”

  “It wasn't hooligans,” Theo said. “It wasn't tourists either.”

  “Then who?” She was becoming agitated again. She could feel an ominous rush of blood in her ears. If her pressure was on the rise, there'd be hell to pay when she next saw the doctor. And no doubt another six months of enforced convalescence, which she didn't think that she could endure.

  “They were teenagers,” he said. “Just kids from the town. Asian and English. Two of them had knives.”

  “This is just what I was talking about. When people don't keep to their own, there's trouble. If one allows immigration from a culture with no respect for human life, then one can hardly quail before the prospect of representatives from that culture walking about with knives. Frankly, Theo, you were lucky the little heathens weren't carrying scimitars.”

  Theo got up abruptly. He walked to the sandwiches. He picked one up, then put it down. He settled his shoulders.


  “Gran, the English boys were the ones with the knives.”

  She recovered quickly enough to say tartly, “Then I hope you relieved them of them.”

  “I did. But that's not actually the point.”

  “Then kindly tell me what the point is, Theo.”

  “Things are heating up. It's not going to be pleasant. Balford-le-Nez is in for some trouble.”

  INDING A SUITABLE ROUTE TO GET OUT TO ESSEX WAS a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't. Barbara faced the choice of crossing most of London and weaving her way through mind-numbing traffic or risking the vehicular uncertainties of the M25, which orbited the megalopolis and even at best of times required one to put all plans for a timely arrival at one's destination temporarily on hold. With either choice, she would get to sweat. For the coming of evening hadn't brought with it the slightest corresponding drop in temperature.

  She chose the M25. And after throwing her haversack into the back seat and grabbing a fresh bottle of Volvic, a packet of crisps, a peach, and a new supply of Players, she set off on her prescribed holiday. The fact that it wasn't a bonafide holiday didn't bother her in the least. She'd be able to say airily, “Oh, I've been to the sea, darling,” should anyone ask her how she'd spent her time away from New Scotland Yard.

  She drove into Balford-le-Nez and passed St. John's Church just as its tower bells were chiming eight o'clock. She found the seaside town little changed from what it had been during the annual summer holidays she'd spent there with her family and with her parents’ friends: the corpulent and odoriferous Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins—Bernie and Bette—who yearly followed the Haverses’ rust-spotted Vauxhall in their own compulsively polished Renault, all the way from their London neighbourhood in Acton east to the sea.

  The approach to Balford-le-Nez hadn't altered at all in the years since Barbara had last been there. The wheat fields of the Tendring Peninsula gave way on the north of the Balford Road to the Wade, a tidal marsh into which flowed both the Balford Channel and a narrowing estuary called the Twizzle. When the tide was in, the water of the Wade created islands out of hundreds of boggy excrescences. When the tide was out, what remained in its ebb were flats of mud and sand across which green algae stretched slimy arms. To the south of the Balford Road, small enclaves of houses still stood. Stucco-walled and squat, sparse of vegetation, these were some of the old summer cottages occupied by families who, like Barbara's own, came to escape the seasonal heat of London.

  This year, however, there was no escaping. The wind that blew in the Mini's window and ruffled Barbara's crop of ill-cut hair was nearly as hot as the wind she'd felt as she'd driven out of London a few hours earlier.

  At the junction of the Balford Road and the High Street, she braked and considered her options. She had nowhere to stay, so there was that to see to. Her stomach was rumbling, so there was food to dig up. She was in the dark as to what kind of investigation into the Pakistani man's death was actually in progress, so there was that to suss out as well.

  Unlike her superior officer, who never seemed to manage a decent meal, Barbara wasn't one to deny her stomach its due. Accordingly, she turned left down the gentle slope of the High Street beyond which she had her first glimpse of sea.

  As had been the case in her girlhood, there was no dearth of eating establishments in Balford, and most of them appeared not to have changed hands—or been painted—in the years since she last had been a visitor. She settled on the Breakwater Restaurant, which served its meals—perhaps with ominous intent—directly next door to D. K. Corney, a business establishment whose sign announced that its employees were Funeral Directors, Builders, Decorators, and Heating Engineers. Sort of one-stop shopping, Barbara decided. She parked the Mini with one of its front tyres on the kerb and went to see what the Breakwater had to offer.

  Not much, she discovered, a fact that other diners must have been aware of, because although it was the dinner hour, she found herself alone in the restaurant. She chose a table near the door in the hope of catching an errant sea breeze should one fortuitously decide to blow. She plucked the laminated menu from its upright position next to a vase of plastic carnations. After using it to fan herself for a minute, she gave it a look-over and decided that the Mega-Meal was not for her despite its bargain price (£5.50 for pork sausage, bacon, tomato, eggs, mushrooms, steak, frankfurter, kidney, hamburger, lamb chops, and chips). She settled on the restaurant's declared speciality: buck rarebit. She placed her order with a teenaged waitress sporting an impressive blemish precisely in the middle of her chin, and a moment later she saw that the Breakwater Restaurant was going to provide her with its own form of one-stop shopping.

  Next to the till lay a tabloid newspaper. Barbara crossed to fetch it, trying to ignore the unsavoury sucking sounds that her trainer-shod feet made as she trod the sticky restaurant floor.

  The words Tendring Standard were printed across the masthead in blue. They were accompanied by a lion rampant and the boast “ESSEX NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR.” Barbara took this journal back to her table and laid it on the plastic cloth, which was artfully embossed with tiny white flowers and splattered with the remains of a successful lunchtime.

  The tabloid was a well-thumbed journal from the previous afternoon, and Barbara had to look no further than the front page because the death of Haytham Querashi was apparently the first “suspicious demise” that had occurred on the Tendring Peninsula in more than five years. As such, it was getting the journalistic red carpet treatment.

  The front page displayed a picture of the dead man as well as a photo of the site where his body had been found. Barbara studied both pictures.

  In life, Haytham Querashi had looked innocuous enough. His dark face was pleasant but largely forgettable. The caption beneath his picture indicated that he was twenty-five years old, but he looked older. This was the result of his sombre expression, and his balding head added to the effect. He was clean-shaven and moon-faced, and Barbara guessed that he would have been given to carrying too much extra weight in middle age, had he lived to see it.

  The second picture depicted an abandoned pillbox sitting on the beach at the foot of a cliff. It was built of grey, pebble-studded concrete, hexagonal in shape with an entry that was low to the ground. Barbara had seen this structure before, years earlier on a walk with her younger brother when they'd noticed a boy and a girl glancing round surreptitiously before crawling inside on an overcast day. Barbara's brother had innocently wondered if the two teenagers were intent on playing war. Barbara had commented ironically that an invasion was definitely what they had in mind. She'd steered Tony clear of the pillbox. “I c'n make machine gun noises for them,” he'd offered. She'd assured him that sound effects were not required.

  Her dinner arrived. The waitress positioned the cutlery—which appeared to be indifferently washed—and settled the plate in front of her. She'd been scrupulous about avoiding a scrutiny of Barbara's bandaged face when taking her order, but now the girl gave it an earnest look and said, “C'n I ask? D'you mind?”

  “Lemonade,” Barbara said in reply. “With ice. And I don't suppose you have a fan you can turn on, have you? I'm about to wilt.”

  “Broke yesterday,” the girl said. “Sorry.” She fingered the blemish on her chin in an unappetising fashion. “It's just that I was thinking of doing it myself, when I've got the money. So I was wondering: Did it hurt much?”

  “What?”

  “Your nose. Haven't you had it fixed? Isn't that why you've got all those bandages?” She picked up the table's chrome napkin dispenser and studied her reflection. “I want a bobbed one myself. Mum says to thank God for what I have, but I say why did God invent plastic surgery if we weren't meant to use it? I'm planning to do my cheekbones as well, but the nose comes first.”

  “It wasn't surgery,” Barbara said. “I broke it.”

  “Lucky you!” the girl exclaimed. “So you got a new one on National Health! Now, I wonder …” Clearly, she was meditating on the prospect of
walking rapidly into a door with proboscis at the ready.

  “Yeah, well, they don't ask how you want it set,” Barbara said. “Had they bothered to inquire, I would have requested a Michael Jackson. I've always been a slave to perpendicular nostrils.” And she crackled her newspaper meaningfully.

  The girl—whose nametag identified her as Suzi—leaned one hand against the table, noted what Barbara was reading, and said confidentially, “They should never've come here, you know. This's what happens when they go where they're not wanted.”

  Barbara set down her paper and speared a portion of poached egg on her fork. She said, “Pardon?”

  Suzi nodded at the newspaper. “Those coloureds. What're they doing here anyway? Besides raising a ruckus, which they did real proper this afternoon, as a matter of fact.”

  “They're trying to improve their lot in life, I expect.”

  “Hmph. Why don't they improve it somewheres else? My mum said there'd be trouble eventually if we let them settle round here, and look what's happened: One of them overdoses down on the beach and all the rest start carrying on and shouting it's murder.”

  “It's a drug-related death?” Barbara began to scan the paragraphs of the story for the pertinent details.

  “What else could it be?” Suzi asked. “Everyone knows they swallow bags of opium and God knows what else back in Pakistan. They smuggle it into this country in their stomachs. Then when they get here, they get locked up in a house till they do a poo and get it all out of their system. After that they're free to go. Didn't you know? I saw that on the telly once.”

  Barbara recalled the description of Haytham Querashi that she'd heard on television. The newsreader had identified him as recently arrived from Pakistan, hadn't he? She wondered for the first time if she'd misread all her cues in dashing out to Essex on the strength of a televised demonstration and Taymullah Azhar's mysterious behaviour.