Read If Snow Hadn't Fallen (a Lacey Flint short story) for Free Online Page B

wanted you to know how sorry I am about that.’
    ‘Your sorrow does not bring my brother back. And it does not compare to ours.’
    I turned to face the son who’d spoken. The youngest – and the only one not wearing traditional dress. ‘I know that,’ I said.
    ‘You put the flames out,’ said the father, and I was glad to turn away from the accusation I could see in his son’s eyes. ‘And you put water on his burning skin. He would have suffered much more had it not been for you.’
    For a second the man’s pain shimmered across his face. He almost seemed about to break down again, to scream the way he had in the park. Then it was gone.
    ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t save him,’ I said. ‘I won’t disturb you any longer.’
    I got up and took a card from my pocket. ‘If you need to contact me at any time,’ I said, leaving it on the table. I avoided looking at any of the women, but I made sure the card was close to the girl doing homework.
    ‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ I said, just before I left the room, ‘was your son engaged to be married?’
    All movement in the kitchen stopped.
    ‘Why do you ask?’ said Mr Chowdhury.
    ‘I know he didn’t live here with you,’ I said, ‘and I understand that’s quite unusual in your culture. I just wondered if he was preparing to be married.’
    ‘My son was a doctor at St Thomas’s,’ he replied. ‘He worked on call and had to be within a twenty-minute journey of the hospital. He used to say that it made very little difference, that my wife and my daughters were round at his flat so much that it never really felt as though he’d moved out.’
    I risked a smile, and saw it returned. He made a strange, old-fashioned, Eastern gesture. I’d never seen it before, but it had the feel of a blessing about it. As I left, I turned to the mother one last time. She met my eyes with her large, brown ones and I had a feeling that however long I stood there, she would continue looking back.
    ‘I don’t know, Ma’am,’ I said over the phone to Tulloch a few seconds later. ‘I left a card behind so they can contact me if they choose, but you were right, it probably was a waste of time.’
    ‘Probably,’ she agreed. ‘There was something I should have mentioned before, but I just didn’t think of it. I tried to call you back, but you must have put your phone on silent.’
    I pulled my phone out. Sure enough, one missed call from Tulloch.
    ‘The Chowdhury family are Pakistani in origin,’ Tulloch went on. ‘Both parents were born there. But the burka isn’t traditionally worn by women from Pakistan. There are a few exceptions, but it’s generally women from the Arabian countries – you know, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran – who cover themselves completely. Whoever you saw in the park last night, we can’t assume it was a family member.’
    I hadn’t thought of that and admitted as much.
    ‘Chin up, Flint, we’ll get there.’ Tulloch sounded a lot more optimistic than I did. ‘We’ve actually got another lead,’ she went on.
    ‘Oh? Anything you can share?’
    ‘Let’s just say our prime witness, Mr Karim, isn’t the upstanding citizen he’d have us believe. We think he’s involved in some small-scale money laundering. And he’s very close to the Chowdhury family. It’s not impossible either that Aamir was involved too and they had a difference of opinion professionally, or that Aamir found out and was threatening to blow the whistle. Either way, we’re going to bring him in first thing tomorrow.’
    That certainly was a good lead. There had always been something about Karim’s testimony that had struck me as just a bit too convenient.
    ‘Fingers crossed,’ I said.
    ‘In the meantime, I’m at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital,’ she said.
    ‘How is he?’ I asked.
    ‘Sore, tired, fighting off an infection, can’t stand on his feet for more than five minutes without collapsing, and grouchy as a bear with an axe in its skull.