you at long last."
"Will you come again? C'n I meet your wife and your little boys?"
"Everything" - he smiled - "in good time."
He took his leave of them, and Azhar - casting a quick look at Barbara - followed him out of the hotel. Barbara heard him say urgently,
"Muhannad, a moment," as he got to the door.
She wondered what on earth he was going to say to his cousin by way of explanation. No matter how one examined the situation, it didn't look good.
"Here we are." Basil Treves was back with them, Barbara's messages fluttering from his fingers.
"He was most courteous over the phone.
Quite surprising, for a German. Will you be joining us for dinner, Sergeant?"
She told him that she would be doing so, and Hadiyyah said, "Sit with us, sit with us!"
Treves didn't look any happier at this turn of events than he'd looked at breakfast on Monday morning when Barbara had blithely crossed the invisible barrier that the hotelier erected between his white guests and his guests of colour. He patted Hadiyyah on the head. He looked at her with the special sort of superficial benignity one reserves for small animals to which one is violently allergic. "Yes, yes. If she wishes," he said heartily, past the aversion in his eyes. "She can sit anywhere she wishes to sit, my dear."
"Good, good, good!" Reassured, Hadiyyah scampered off. A moment later, Barbara heard her chatting with Mrs. Porter in the hotel bar.
"It was the police," Treves said confidentially.
He nodded at the telephone messages in Barbara's hand. "I didn't want to say as much in front of ... those two. You know. One can't be too careful with foreigners."
"Right," Barbara said. She quelled the desire to smack Treves' face and tramp on his feet.
Instead, she went up the stairs to her room.
She tossed her shoulder bag onto one of the twin beds and went to the other. She slouched down onto it and examined her telephone messages.
Each was made out to the same name:
Helmut Kreuzhage. He'd phoned at three that afternoon, then again at five and at six-fifteen.
She looked at her watch and decided to try him in his office first. She punched the German number into the phone and fanned herself with the plastic tray that she took from beneath the room's tin tea pot.
"Hier ist Kriminalhauptkommisar Kreuzhage."
Bingo, she thought. She identified herself slowly in English, thinking of Ingrid and her modest command of Barbara's native tongue.
The German switched languages immediately, saying, "Yes. Sergeant Havers. I'm the man who took the telephone calls here in Hamburg from Mr. Haytham Querashi." He spoke with only the barest hint of an accent. His voice was pleasant and mellifluous. He must have driven Basil Treves half mad, Barbara thought, so little did he sound like a postwar cinema Nazi.
"Brilliant," Barbara said fervently, and thanked him for returning her call. She quickly made clear to him all of the circumstances surrounding her having tracked him down.
He made a grave clucking sound on his end of the phone when she told him about the trip wire, the old concrete steps, and Haytham Querashi's fatal fall. "When I had a look at his phone records from the hotel, the number for Hamburg police was among them. We're checking into every possible lead. I'm hoping you can help us out."
"I fear I have little that would be of help,"
Kreuzhage said.
"Do you remember your conversations with Querashi? He phoned Hamburg police more than once."
"Qh,ja, I do remember quite well," Kreuzhage answered. "He wished to share some information about activities which he believed to be ongoing at an address in Wandsbek."
"Wandsbek?"
"Ja. A community in the western sector of the city."
"What sort of activities?"
"That, I fear, is where the gentleman became rather vague. He would describe them only as illegal activities involving both Hamburg and the port of Parkeston in England."
Barbara felt her fingertips tingle. Bloody hell.
Could it actually be possible that Emily Barlow was right? "That sounds like a smuggling operation," she said. Kreuzhage coughed phlegmily.
He was a brother smoker, Barbara realised, but heavier on the fags than she. He held the phone away from his face and spat. She shuddered and vowed to ease up on the weed.
"I would be hesitant to limit my conclusions to smuggling," the German said.
"Why?"
"Because when the gentleman mentioned the port of Parkeston, I arrived at the same conclusion.
I suggested he phone Davidwache an der Reeperbahn. This is the harbour police here in Hamburg. They would be the ones to deal with