If Snow Hadn't Fallen (a Lacey Flint short story)

other masks I’d seen recently, the ones worn by Aamir’s killers, and wondered if I’d ever be able to look at a mask again without shuddering.
    I fixed my eyes straight ahead on the traffic, the lights, the people scurrying along the pavement, and thought that their pre-Christmas stress was almost visible, hovering above them like warm breath in cold air.
    I don’t do Christmas. With no family and little in the way of friends, it’s a bit tricky. If I’m not working, I stock up on DVDs and library books and batten down the hatches. This year, though, I had leave booked. This year I planned to spend the day with someone who by then would be serving a life sentence for multiple murder.
    Hey, maybe this year would be different.
    ‘You have to be like Caesar’s wife in a case like this,’ said Tulloch half an hour later, when I joined her on Aamir’s doorstep and kicked the snow off my boots. ‘We all do.’
    ‘Whiter than white?’ I suggested. Tulloch glared and then gestured for me to go ahead.
    Aamir’s flat was on the first floor of an early-twentieth-century house. At the top of the stairs, I spotted the crime-scene tape around one of the doors and stepped to one side. Tulloch unlocked the door.
    The flat was four good-sized rooms – living, bed, bath and kitchen – and was contemporary and Western in style. It did not seem like the home of a scion of the Chowdhury family. The living space was decorated in shades of oatmeal and ivory. Apart from traces of grey fingerprint powder, it was immaculately tidy.
    ‘Quite stylish, isn’t it?’ Tulloch said.
    ‘Feels like the sort of place
you
would live in,’ I replied, as I stepped further into the room and peered into a gleaming white kitchen. The stark cooking area bore no resemblance to the crowded kitchen at the Chowdhury family home, where every work surface was crowded with implements and exotic ingredients and gleaming copper hung from every inch of ceiling.
    ‘I wanted you to see it,’ she went on, ‘because of your theory that Aamir might have been seeing a white woman. I admit this does feel to me like the taste of an educated Western woman.’
    She was right. I thought briefly of the young women on the list I’d made at the Baileys’ house, the sisters and girlfriends of the suspects, and simply couldn’t see a woman from that background in this flat.
    I began a slow prowl around the room. The bookshelf was busy, but the books seemed to be mainly medical textbooks. On the top shelf was something book-shaped wrapped in purple cloth.
    ‘That’ll be the Koran,’ said Tulloch, who was watching me. ‘There’s also a prayer mat in a bedroom cupboard.
    ‘Shoplifting incident aside, I’d barely expect someone like Aamir to come on to the radar screen of our five suspects,’ I said. ‘He was educated, a doctor, he obviously had money. It doesn’t make sense.’
    ‘He spent a lot of time in their neighbourhood,’ said Tulloch. ‘His own family lived close by. A lot of people in the area report seeing him or his car fairly regularly.’
    ‘Do you burn someone to death because they’ve caught you shoplifting?’
    ‘Most racist murders I can think of are provoked by much less. Isn’t that the point? It’s about skin colour, not actions.’
    I reached the bedroom and paused on the threshold. How exactly, I wondered, had Aamir’s parents felt about the double bed in the room? Weren’t Muslim men supposed to be celibate until marriage? Or, if some level of experimentation were permitted, surely they wouldn’t entertain their partners at home?
    ‘Anything on the Shahid Karim money-laundering lead?’ I called back over my shoulder.
    ‘Nothing we can prove so far,’ replied Tulloch. ‘Karim seems to be quite close to Aamir’s older brother. We’re keeping an eye on it.’
    On the wall facing me was a large, framed photograph of a modern ballet. Lilac smoke filled a large, empty space in which androgynous figures stretched and twisted their bodies into impossible shapes. In the forefront was a male figure wearing leggings that matched his pale-brown skin so closely he almost looked nude. Both his arms were stretched high, and balanced on his hands in a manner that looked impossible, certainly for any length of time, was a waif-like fair-haired woman with large eyes and a heart-shaped face. There was something about the way she hung in mid-air, head back, hair flowing down, that looked decidedly sensual.
    ‘That’s