Deception on His Mind (48 page)

“These are all his calls?” Barbara asked. “For his entire stay?”

“Every trunk call,” Treves corrected her. “For the local calls he made, of course, there is no record.”

Barbara hunched over the desk and began to examine the print out page by page. She saw that the long distance phone calls had been few and far between in the earliest days of Querashi's stay, and at that time they'd been made to a single number in Karachi. In the last three weeks of his stay, however, the international calls had increased, tripling in the final five days. The vast majority had been made to Karachi. Only four times had he phoned Hamburg.

She reflected on this. Among the telephone messages that callers had left for Haytham Querashi during his absence from the Burnt House, there had been none from any foreign country, because surely the competent WPC Belinda Warner would have made that point to her superior officer when reporting earlier that afternoon on the telephone chits she'd been given to research. So either he always got through to his intended party, or he didn't leave a message for a return call when he didn't get through. Barbara looked at the length of each of the calls and saw confirmation for this latter interpretation of the printout: The longest call he'd made was forty-two minutes, the shortest thirteen seconds, surely not enough time to leave anyone a message.

But the pile-up of calls so close to his death was what Barbara found intriguing, and it was clear to her that she needed to track down whoever was at the other end of the telephone numbers. She glanced at her watch and idly wondered what time it was in Pakistan.

“Mr. Treves,” she said, preparatory to disengaging herself from the man, “you're an absolute marvel.”

He put a hand to his breast, humility incarnate. “I'm only too glad to help you, Sergeant. Ask anything of me—anything at all—and I'll comply to the best of my ability.
And
with complete discretion, of course. Upon that you may rely. Should it be information, evidence, recollections, eye-witness accounts—”

“As to that …” Barbara decided that there was no time like the present to weasel from the man the truth about his own whereabouts on the night that Querashi died. She considered how best to ease it out of him without his awareness. “Last Friday evening, Mr. Treves …”

He was immediately all attention, eyebrows raised and hands clasped beneath the third button on his shirt. “Yes, yes? Last Friday evening?”

“You saw Mr. Querashi leave, didn't you?”

He did indeed, Treves told her. He was in the bar doing his bit with the brandy and the port. He saw Querashi coming down the stairs, reflected in the mirror. But hadn't he already imparted this information to the sergeant?

Of course he had, she reassured him hastily. What she was leading up to were the
others
in the bar. If Mr. Treves was pouring brandy and port, it seemed logical to conclude that he was pouring it for other guests in the bar. Was that the case? And if so, did any of the others leave at the same time Querashi did, perhaps following him?

“Ah.” Treves lifted an index finger heavenward as he ascertained her point. He went on to tell her that the only people to leave the bar when Querashi left the Burnt House were poor old Mrs. Porter with her zimmer, clearly not fleet enough of foot to be in hot pursuit of anyone, and the Reeds, an ageing couple from Cambridge who'd come to the Burnt House to celebrate their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. “We do a special for birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries,” he confided. “I dare say they wanted to have at their champagne and chockies.”

As for the rest of the hotel residents, they had hung about the bar and the lounge till half past eleven. He could vouch for each and every one of them, he told her. He was with them all evening.

Fine, Barbara thought. And she was pleased to see that he was none the wiser at having just provided her with an alibi for his own whereabouts. She thanked him, said goodnight, and with the computer print out tucked beneath her arm, she took herself up the stairs.

In her room, she went directly to the phone. It stood on one of the two wobbly bedside tables, next to a dusty lamp that was shaped like a pineapple. With the print out in her lap, Barbara punched for an outside line and then tapped in the first number in Germany. Several clicks and the connection was made. A phone began ringing somewhere across the North Sea.

When the ringing stopped, she drew in a breath to identify herself. But instead of a human being, she found she was listening to an answer machine. A male voice spoke in machine-gun German. She caught the number seven and two nines, but other than that and the word
chüs
at the end—which she took for a German form of “cheerio bye-bye”—she gleaned nothing whatsoever from the message. The beep sounded, and she left her name, her phone number, and a request for a return call, all with the hope that whoever listened to her message spoke English.

She went on to the second number in Hamburg and found herself on the line with a woman saying something as unintelligible as had the male voice on the answer machine. But at least this was a real human being, and Barbara wasn't about to let her slip through her grasp.

God, how she wished she'd studied foreign language at the comprehensive! All she knew how to say in German was
“Bitte zwei Bier”
which didn't seem applicable in the situation. She thought, Bloody hell, but gathered her wits enough to say,
“Ich spreche
… I mean …
Sprechen vous
… No, that's not right …
Ich bin ein
calling from England … Hell! Damn!”

This was apparently sufficient stimulus, because the response came in English, and the words were surprising. “Here is Ingrid Eck,” the woman said curtly and with an accent so heavy that Barbara half-expected to hear
Das Deutschlandlied
playing in the background. “Here is Hamburg Police.
Wer ist das, bitte?
How may I help you?”

Police? Barbara thought. Hamburg police?
German
police? What in hell was a Pakistani in England doing phoning the German police?

She said, “Sorry. Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers here. New Scotland Yard.”

“New Scotland Yard?” the woman repeated.
“Ja?
To who will you wish”—
vill
and
vish,
she said—”to speak at this location?”

“I'm not sure,” Barbara said. “We're looking into a murder and the victim—”

“You have a German victim?” Ingrid Eck asked at once. Except she said
haff
and
wictim
and went on to clarify with “Has a German national been involved”—
inwolwed
—”in a homicide, please?”

“No. Our victim is Asian. Pakistani, in fact. A bloke called Haytham Querashi. And he phoned this number two days before he was killed. I'm trying to trace the call. I'd like to speak to whoever he phoned. Can you help me?”

“Oh.
Ja.
I see.” And then she spoke past the receiver, rapid German of which Barbara caught the words
England
and
mord.
Several voices answered, many gutturals like the clearing throats of a half dozen men afflicted with serious postnasal drip. Barbara's hopes lifted at the passion of their conversation, only to be dashed when Ingrid's voice came back over the line.

“Here is Ingrid another time,” she said. “I feel terror that we can be of no help.”

Terror? Barbara thought before she made the correction to
I'm afraid.
“Let me spell out the name for you,” she said helpfully. “Foreign names are odd when you hear them, aren't they, and if you see it written down, you might recognize it. Or someone else might if you pass it round.”

With stops and starts and at least five pauses to make corrections in the spelling, Ingrid took Haytham Querashi's name. She said in her creative and broken English that she would display it and circulate it round the station, but New Scotland Yard weren't to get their hopes up about receiving a helpful answer. Many hundred people worked at
Polizeihochhaus
in Hamburg in one division or another, and there was no telling if the right person would see the circulated and displayed name any time soon. People were beginning to take their summer holidays, people were overworked, people's focus was on German rather than English problems. …

So much for European unity, Barbara thought. She asked Ingrid to do her best, left her own number, and rang off. She blotted her hot face on the hem of her T-shirt, thinking how unlikely it was that she'd find an English-speaking recipient at the other end of her next set of phone calls. It had to be well after midnight in Pakistan, and since she didn't know a word of Urdu in which to tell an Asian sleeper why his slumber had been shattered by the ringing of his phone, Barbara decided to rustle up someone who could do the job for her.

She went up the stairs and made her way down the corridor to the section of the hotel in which Querashi's room had been. She paused before the door behind which she'd heard television voices on the previous night. Azhar and Hadiyyah had to be within. It was unthinkable that Basil Treves might have deviated from his odious separate-but-equal philosophy by placing the Asians in part of the hotel where his English guests would have their delicate sensibilities disrupted by a foreign presence.

She knocked quietly and said Azhar's name, then knocked again. The key turned in the lock within, and he was standing before her in a maroon dressing gown with a cigarette in his hand. Behind him, the room was semi-dark. A bedside lamp was shaded by a large blue handkerchief, but enough light was apparently left for him to read by. A bound document of some sort lay next to his pillow.

“Is Hadiyyah asleep? Can you come to my room?” she asked him.

He looked so startled at the request that Barbara felt her face begin to flame at the implication behind her words. She said hurriedly, “I need you to phone some numbers in Pakistan for me,” and went on to explain how she'd come by them.

“Ah.” He glanced at the gold watch on his thin wrist. “Have you any idea what time it is in Pakistan, Barbara?”

“Late.”

“Early,” he corrected her. “Extremely early. Would your purposes not be better served by waiting till a more reasonable hour?”

“Not when we're dealing with a murder,” she said. “Will you make the calls for me, Azhar?”

He looked over his shoulder into the room. Beyond him, Barbara could see the small humped figure of Hadiyyah in the second bed. She was sleeping with a large stuffed Kermit tucked in beside her.

“Very well,” Azhar said, and stepped back into the room. “If you'll give me a moment to change …”

“Forget it. You don't need to get dressed. This'll probably take less than five minutes. Come on.”

She didn't give him a chance to argue. She set off down the corridor in the direction of the stairs. Behind her, she heard the sound of his door closing, followed by the scrape of the key as he locked up. She waited for him at the top of the stairs.

“Querashi was phoning Pakistan at least once a day in the last three weeks. Whoever got those calls is bound to remember if they've heard he's dead.”

“The family has been informed,” Azhar told her. “Aside from them, I can't think whom he might have been phoning.”

“That's what we're about to find out.”

She shoved open the door of her room and ushered him inside. From the floor, she scooped up the underclothes, the drawstring trousers, and the T-shirt that she'd worn earlier that day. She tossed them into the clothes cupboard with an “Excuse the mess,” and led him to the bedside table, where the computer print out lay on the dingy counterpane.

“Have at it,” she said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

He sat and looked at the print out for a moment, cigarette in his mouth and a plume of smoke rising like a vaporous serpent above his head. He tapped his fingers beneath one of the circled numbers and finally glanced in her direction.

“Are you certain you wish me to place these calls?”

“Why wouldn't I be certain?”

“We sit among opposing forces, Barbara. Should the parties at the other end of these numbers speak only Urdu, how will you know I'm relating the truth of the conversation to you?”

He had a point. Prior to fetching him, she hadn't dwelt long upon Azhar's reliability as a conduit of information. She hadn't thought about the question at all. She wondered why. Nonetheless she said, “Our objective's the same, isn't it? We both want to get to the bottom of who killed Querashi. I can't think you'd do something to bury the truth once you knew it was the truth. Frankly, you've never seemed that type.”

He gazed at her, his expression something between thoughtful, enlightened, and perplexed. He finally said, “As you wish,” and picked up the phone.

Barbara dug her cigarettes out of her bag, lit up, and dropped onto the dressing table's lime-cushioned stool. She moved an ashtray within reach of both of them.

Azhar used his long fingers to shove back a wing of black hair that had fallen across his forehead. He placed his cigarette into the ashtray and said, “It's ringing. Have you a pencil?” Then a moment later: “It's a recording, Barbara.” He frowned, listening. He jotted notes on the print out. He left no message, however, when the recording finished. He just rang off. “This number—” And he ticked off one of them. “This is a travel agency in Karachi. World Wide Tours. The message gave their hours of operation, none of which”—he smiled and reached for his cigarette—”happen to be between midnight and seven
A.M.”

Barbara looked at the print out. “He phoned them four times last week. What d'you make of that? Honeymoon plans? The great escape from his marriage?”

“Doubtless he was merely arranging for his family's transport, Barbara. They would have wanted to be here to celebrate his marriage to my cousin. Shall I continue?”

She nodded. He went on to the next number. The connection was made, and within moments he was speaking Urdu. Barbara could hear the voice on the other end of the line. The words, at first hesitant, quickly became both urgent and passionate. The conversation went on some minutes, with English interspersed where there was no Urdu translation. Thus, she heard her own name mentioned as well as
New Scotland Yard, Balford-le-Nez, Burnt House Hotel,
and
Essex Constabulary.