Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“I'm knackered, Azhar. I'll have to cry off tonight. But thanks. Tell Hadiyyah I'm happy to watch a film with her another time. Hopefully, when the heroine isn't as skinny as a pencil with a silicone chest.”

His gaze was unwavering. He studied her the way other people studied the labels on tins in supermarkets. Barbara wanted to writhe away, but she managed to restrain herself. He said, “You must have returned to work today.”

“Why'd you think-”

“Your clothing. Has your”-he searched for a word, a euphemism undoubtedly-“situation been resolved at New Scotland Yard, Barbara?”

There was no point in lying. Despite the fact that she'd been able to keep from him the full knowledge of what had occurred to put her there, he knew that she'd been placed on suspension. She was going to have to start dragging herself out of bed and down to work each morning, beginning with the very next day, so he would deduce sooner or later that she wasn't spending her waking hours feeding the ducks in Regent's Park any longer. “Yeah,” she said. “It was resolved today.” And she drew in deeply on her cigarette so that she'd have to turn her head and blow the smoke away from his face, thus hiding her own.

“And? But what am I asking? You're dressed for work, so it must have gone well.”

“Right.” She offered him a spurious smile. “It did. All the way. I'm still gainfully employed, still in CID, still have my pension intact.” She'd lost the confidence of the only person who counted at the Yard, but she didn't add that. She couldn't imagine an occasion when she would.

“This is good,” Azhar said.

“Right. It's the best.”

“I'm happy to know that nothing from Essex affected you here in London.” Again, that level gaze of his, dark eyes the colour of chocolate drops in a face with nut-brown skin that was amazingly un-lined on a man of thirty-five.

“Yeah. Well. It didn't,” she said. “Everything worked out brilliantly.”

He nodded, looking past her finally, above her head and up into the fading sky. The lights from London would hide all but the most brilliant of the coming night's stars. Even those that shone would do so through a thick pall of pollution that not even the growing darkness could dissipate. “As a child, I drew my greatest comfort from the night,” he told her quietly. “In Pakistan, my family slept in the traditional way: the men together, the women together. So at night, in the presence of my father, my brother, and my uncles, I always believed that I was perfectly safe and secure. But I forgot that feeling as I came into adulthood in England. What had been reassuring became an embarrassment from my past. I found that all I could remember were the sounds of my father and my uncles snoring and the smell of my brothers breaking wind. For some time when I came to be alone, I thought how good it was to be away from them at last, to have the night for myself and for whomever I wished to share it with. And that's how I lived for a while. But now I find that I would willingly return to that older way, when whatever one's burdens or secrets were, there was always a sense-at least at night-of never having to bear them or keep them alone.”

There was something so comforting in his words that Barbara found herself wanting to grasp the invitation to disclosure that they implied. But she stopped herself from doing so, saying, “P'rhaps Pakistan doesn't prepare its children for the world's reality.”

“What reality is that?”

“The one that tells us we're all alone.”

“Do you believe that to be the truth, Barbara?”

“I don't just believe it. I know it. We use our daytimes to escape our nighttimes. We work, we play, we keep ourselves busy. But when it's time to sleep, we run out of distractions. Even if we're in bed with someone, their act of sleeping when we can't manage it is enough to tell us that we've got only ourselves.”

“Is this philosophy or experience speaking?”

“Neither,” she said. “Just the way it is.”

“But not,” he said, “the way it has to be.”

At the comment, alarm bells went off in Barbara's head, then quickly receded. Coming from any other bloke, the remark could have been construed as a chat-up line. But her personal history was an illustration of the fact that Barbara wasn't the type of bird blokes chatted up. Besides, even if she'd ever had the odd moments of Aph-rodisian allure, she knew this wasn't one of them. Standing in the semi-dark in a rumpled linen suit that made her look like a transvestite toad, she knew quite well that she was hardly a paragon of desirability. So, ever articulate when it counted, she said, “Yeah. Well. Whatever,” and tossed her cigarette to the ground, where she mashed it with the sole of her shoe. “Goodnight, then,” she added. “Enjoy the mermaid. And thanks for the fag. I needed it.”

“Everyone needs something.” Azhar reached into his shirt pocket again. Barbara thought he was going to offer his cigarettes another time. But instead, he extended to her a folded piece of paper. “A gentleman was here looking for you earlier, Barbara. He asked me to make sure you got this note. He tried to fix it to your door, he said, but it wouldn't stay in place.”

“Gentleman?” Barbara knew only one man to whom that word would automatically be applied by a stranger after a mere moment's conversation. She took the piece of paper, scarcely daring to hope.

Which was just as well, because the writing on the note-a sheet of paper removed from a small spiral notebook-wasn't Lynley's. She read the eight words: Page me as soon as you get this. A number followed them. There was no signature.

Barbara refolded the note. Doing so, she saw what was written on the outside of it, what Azhar himself must have seen, interpreted, and understood the moment it had been handed over. DC Havers was printed in block capitals across it. C for Constable. So Azhar knew.

She met his gaze. “Looks like I'm back in the game already,” she said as heartily as she could manage. “Thanks, Azhar. This bloke say where he'd be waiting for the page?”

Azhar shook his head. “He said only that I should make sure you had the message.”

“Okay Thanks.” She gave him a nod and turned to walk away.

He called her name-sounding urgent-but when she stopped and glanced back, he was studying the street. He said, “Can you tell me…” and then his voice died away. He drew his eyes back to her as if the effort cost him.

“Tell you what?” she asked, though she felt apprehension dance along her spine when she said the words.

“Tell me… How is your mother?” Azhar asked.

“Mum? Well… She's a bloody disaster when it comes to jigsaw puzzles, but otherwise I think she's okay.”

He smiled. “That's good to know.” And with a quiet goodnight, he slipped into the house.

Barbara went to her own lodgings, a tiny cottage that sat at the bottom of the back garden. Sheltered by the limbs of an old false acacia, it was not much larger than a potting shed with mod cons. Once inside, she peeled herself out of her linen jacket, tossed the string of faux pearls onto the table that served purposes as diverse as dining and ironing, and went to the phone. There were no messages on her machine. She wasn't surprised. She punched in the number for the pager, punched in her own number, and waited.

Five minutes later, someone phoned. She made herself wait through four of the double-rings before she answered. There was no reason to sound desperate, she decided.

Her caller, she discovered, was Winston Nkata, and her back went up the instant she heard that unmistakable mellifluous voice with its mixed flavours of Jamaica and Sierra Leone. He was in the Load of

Hay tavern just round the corner on Chalk Farm Road, he told her, finishing up a plate of lamb curry and rice that “was not, do believe me, something my mum would ever put on the table for her favourite son, but it's better than McDonald's although not by much.” He would set off straightaway for her digs. “Be there in five minutes,” he said, and rang off before she had a chance to tell him that his mug was just about the last one she wanted to see putting in an appearance on her doorstep. She hung up the phone, muttered an expletive, and went to the refrigerator to graze.