As usual, he preened himself at her use of the plural pronoun. He turned the computer printout round on top of the desk so that it faced her.
She could see that he'd circled perhaps two dozen phone calls. They all began with the same double noughts. It was a list of foreign calls, Barbara realised.
"I did take the liberty of carrying our investigation a leetle further, Sergeant. I do hope I wasn't overstepping the mark." Treves took up a pencil from a holder fashioned out of seashells glued to an erstwhile soup tin. He used it as a pointer as he went on. "These numbers are in Pakistan: three in Karachi and another in Lahore. That's in the Punjab, by the way. And these two are Germany, both of them Hamburg. I didn't phone any of them, mind you. Once I saw the international code, I found that all I needed was the telephone directory. The country and city codes are listed there." He sounded slightly chagrined by this final admission. Like so many people, he had doubtlessly assumed that policework comprised cloak-and-daggering when it didn't comprise stake-outs, shoot-outs, and lengthy car chases in which lorries and buses crashed into each other as the bad guys manoeuvred wildly through urban traffic.
"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 com64 plete 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?