same activity now as she spun between the summer wheat fields on the road to Harwich.
Only this time she didn't scrutinise which facts she was spotlighting in the investigation and why she was spotlighting them. Instead, she studied the underpinning of her own discomfort.
She didn't much like the result of her study because she concluded that she herself might well be the problem in the investigation into Querashi's death. Did finding guilt among the Pakistanis cut a little too close to the home of Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers?
Perhaps she wouldn't have felt the smallest degree of uneasiness with seeing Muhannad Malik as everything from a street thug to a pimp had Taymullah Azhar and his appealing daughter not been hovering on the periphery of the investigation.
This final consideration gave her a jolt she could have done without. She found that she didn't want to speculate upon whose investigative mind was actually clear and whose was clouded.
And she definitely didn't want to reflect upon her feelings for Azhar and Hadiyyah.
She pulled into Harwich determined to gather information objectively. She followed the High Street as it wound towards the sea, and she found World Wide Tours tucked between a takeaway sandwich shop and an Oddbins that was advertising a cut-rate price on amontillado.
World Wide Tours comprised one large room with three desks at which two women and a man were working. It was sumptuously decorated, but oddly in the fashion of a by-gone era. The walls were papered in a faux William Morris print and hung with gilt-framed drawings of turn-of-the-century families on suitable holidays. The desks, chairs, and shelves were heavy mahogany. Five large palms stood in pots, and seven enormous ferns hung from the ceiling, where a fan circulated the air and rustled their fronds. Overall, there was an artificial Victorian fussiness to the whole setup that made Barbara want to blast the office with a fire hose.
One of the two women asked if Barbara required assistance. The other spoke into the telephone while their male colleague scanned a computer screen, murmuring, "Lufthansa, come on."
Barbara presented her warrant card. She saw by the presence of a name placard that she was speaking to someone called Edwina.
"Police?" Edwina said, pressing three fingers to the hollow of her throat as if she expected to be accused of something more untoward than accepting employment in a tastelessly reproduced office directly out of Charles Dickens. She glanced at her fellow workers. The man - his name placard identified him as Rudi - poked at the key board of his computer and swivelled his chair in their direction. He acted the part of Ed-wina's echo, and when he spoke the dread word again, the third employee brought her telephone conversation to an end. This person was called Jen, Barbara saw, and she gripped both sides of her chair seat as if thinking it might suddenly become airborne. The arrival of an officer of the law, Barbara thought not for the first time, always brought people's subconscious guilt to the surface.
"Right," Barbara said. "New Scotland Yard."
"Scotland Yard?" This came from Rudi.
"You're here from London? I hope there's no trouble?"
There well might be, Barbara realised. The little sod spoke with a German accent.
She could almost hear Inspector Lynley's posh public-school voice intoning his number-one credo of policework: There is no such thing as coincidence in murder. Barbara examined the young bloke head to toe. Tubby as a wine cask, cropped red hair receding from his forehead, he didn't look like a party to a recent murder. But then no one usually did.
She fished her photographs from her shoulder bag and showed them Querashi's first, saying,
"This bloke look familiar to you lot?"
The other two gathered round Edwina's desk, shoulders hunched over the picture which Barbara placed dead centre. They examined it in silence, while above their heads the fern fronds sussurated and the ceiling fan spun. It was nearly a minute before anyone answered, and then it was Rudi, speaking to his colleagues and not to Barbara.
"This is the chap who inquired about air tickets, isn't it?"
"I don't know," Edwina said doubtfully. Her fingers pulled at the skin just beneath the hollow of her throat.
Jen said, "Yes. I remember him. I served him, Eddie. You were out of the office." She met Barbara's eyes squarely. "He came in - when was it, Rudi? - perhaps three weeks ago? I don't quite recall."
"But you remember him," Barbara said.
"Well, yes. I mean, there aren't actually many ..."