Deception on His Mind (47 page)

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I don't mean to ignore you. But I'm juggling the pier, the work on the restaurant, the plans for the hotel, this town council business …” As his voice drifted off, his gaze began to travel to that blasted open window, but he seemed to realise what he was doing because he quickly brought himself back to her. “And this heat,” he said. “I'm never my best in this sort of heat.”

She observed him through eyes which she narrowed. Truth or lie? she wondered. He went on.

“I've put a call in about another special town council meeting, by the way. I did that this morning. They'll get back to us, but we can't expect anything soon because of this business with the Asians and the dead man on the Nez.”

This was progress, she admitted, and she felt the first stirrings of encouragement that she'd experienced since she'd had her stroke. It was snail-like and maddening to be sure, but it was progress all the same. Perhaps, after all, Theo was as fully ingenuous as he claimed to be. For the moment, she decided to believe that he was.

“Excellent,” she said. “Excellent, excellent. So by the time we meet with the council again, we'll have the necessary votes in our pockets. I dare say, Theo, I've come to see that disruption of yesterday's meeting as a stroke of divine intervention. This gives us an opportunity to massage each council member personally.”

Theo's attention appeared to be on her, and while she had him interested, she intended to make the most of their conversation. She said, “I've already seen to Treves, by the way. He's ours.”

“Is he?” Theo said politely.

“He is indeed. I spoke to the insufferable man myself this afternoon. Surprised? Well, whyever not speak to him? Why ever not set our ducks in position before we pick up our guns?” She could feel her excitement rising as she spoke. It came upon her like a sexual arousal, heating her up between the legs the way Lewis used to do when he kissed the back of her neck. She suddenly realised that it mattered to her very little whether Theo was listening or not. She'd been holding back her enthusiasm all day—there was absolutely no point in sharing her plans with Mary Ellis—and now she needed and intended to vent it. “It took practically nothing to get him on our side,” she said happily. “He loathes the Pakis as much as we do and he's willing to do anything to help our cause. ‘Shaw Redevelopment serves the interests of the community at large,’ he told me. What he meant was that he'd cut his own throat if that would keep the Pakis in their place. He wants an English name wherever a name's going to be seen: on the pier, on the park, on the hotels, on the leisure centre. He doesn't want Balford to be a stronghold for coloureds. He hates Akram Malik especially,” she added with great satisfaction, and she felt the same frisson of pleasure she'd experienced on the phone when it had first become clear to her that she and the loathsome hotelier had at least one characteristic in common.

Theo looked down at his hands, and she noted that he'd pressed his thumbs together tightly. He said, “Gran, what does it really matter that Akram Malik named a patch of lawn, a fountain, one wooden bench, and a laburnum tree in memory of his mother-in-law? Why's that put you into such an uproar?”

“I am
not
in an uproar. And I'm certainly not in an uproar about that rodent-filled green of Akram Malik's.”

“Aren't you?” Theo raised his head. “As I recall it, you didn't have any dreams of redevelopment until the
Standard
ran that article about the park's dedication.”

“Then your recollection is incorrect,” Agatha countered. “We worked on the pier for ten long months before Akram Malik opened that park.”

“The pier, yes. But the rest of it—the hotel, the leisure centre, the buildings along the Marine Parade, the pedestrian walkways, the restoration of the High Street—none of that was even part of the picture until Akram's park. But once you read the story in the
Standard,
you couldn't rest till we'd hired architects, picked the brains of city planners from here to hell and back, and made sure everyone within hearing distance knew that long-range plans for Balford-le-Nez were in your hands.”

“Well, what of it?” Agatha demanded. “This is my town. I've been here all my life. Who has more right to invest in its future than I?”

“If that's all this was about—investing in Balford's future—I'd agree,” Theo said. “But Balford's future plays a minor role when it comes to your hidden agenda, Gran.”

“Does it?” she asked. “And what, exactly, is my hidden agenda supposed to be?”

“Getting rid of the Pakistanis,” he said. “Making Balford-le-Nez too expensive a location for them to buy property here, freezing them out economically, socially, and culturally by ensuring that there's no land available for them to build a mosque, no shop open in which they can buy
halal
meats, no employment available where they can find work—”

“I'm providing them work,” Agatha cut in. “I'm providing everyone in this town with work. Who do you expect to work in the hotels, the restaurants, or the shops if not Balford's inhabitants?”

“Oh, I'm certain you've spots allocated for the remaining Pakistanis that you can't drive out. Manual labour, washing dishes, making beds, scrubbing floors. Jobs that'll keep them in their places, ensuring they don't get above themselves.”

“And why should they get above themselves?” Agatha demanded. “They owe their very lives to this country, and it damn well behooves them to keep that in mind.”

“Come on, Gran,” Theo said. “Let's not pretend we're living out the last days of the Raj.”

She bridled at this, but more at the weary tone in which it was said than at the words themselves. All at once, he sounded so much like his father that she wanted to hurl herself at him. She could hear Lawrence in him. At this very moment, she could even
see
Lawrence. He'd sat in that same chair, solemnly telling her that he meant to leave his studies and marry a Swedish volleyball player twelve years his senior with nothing more to recommend her than enormous bosoms and a leathery tan.

“I'll cut you off without a shilling,” she'd shouted, “without a farthing, without a bloody half-crown.” And it hadn't mattered to her in the least that the old money had gone out of use. All that had mattered was stopping him, and to this end she'd thrown all of her resources. She'd manoeuvred, manipulated, and ultimately managed to do nothing but drive her son from the house and into his grave.

But old habits didn't so much die hard as they refused to die at all without being extirpated through determined effort. And Agatha had never been one to demand of herself the same dedication to expunging one's defects of character that she demanded of others. So she said, “You listen to me, Theo Shaw. If you've a problem with my redevelopment plans and a wish to seek employment elsewhere as a result, just speak up now. You're easily enough replaced, and I'm happy to do it if you find me so repugnant to deal with.”

“Gran.” He sounded dispirited, but she didn't want that. She wanted surrender.

“I'm quite serious. I speak my mind. Always have done. Always will do. So if that's causing you to lose sleep at night, perhaps it's time we each went our own way. We've had a good run of it: twenty years together. That's longer than most marriages last these days. But if you need to go your own way like your brother, go. I'm not holding you back.”

The mention of his brother would serve to remind him of the manner in which his brother had left: with ten pounds and fifty-nine pence in his pocket, to which sum she'd added not one penny in the ten years he'd been gone. Theo rose, and for a terrible moment she thought she'd misjudged him, seeing a need for a maternal bond where he'd long outgrown it. But then he spoke, and she knew she'd won.

“I'll start phoning the council members in the morning,” he said.

She felt her face's rigidity loosen into a smile. “You see, don't you, how we can use that disturbance in the council meeting to our own advantage? We'll win this, Theo. And before we're through, we'll have
Shaw
in lights all round this town. Think what life will be like for you then. Think of the man you'll be.”

He looked away from her, but not at the window. To the door this time, and to whatever lay beyond it. Despite the heat that seemed to throb in the air, he shuddered. Then he headed towards the door.

“What?” she asked him. “It's nearly ten. Where're you going?”

“To cool off,” he said.

“Where do you expect to do that? It's no cooler outside than it is in this house.”

“I know,” he said. “But the air's fresher, Gran.”

And the tone of his voice gave her an inkling of the cost that was attached to winning.

INCE SHE HAD BEEN THE LAST DINER THAT NIGHT
, it was easy for Basil Treves to waylay Barbara. He did so as she passed the residents’ lounge, having decided to forego postprandial coffee in favour of a prowl along the clifftop, where she hoped to encounter an errant sea breeze.

“Sergeant?” Snake-like, Treves sibilated when he whispered her title. The hotelier was in 007 mode. “I didn't want to intrude on your meal.” A screw driver in Treves’ hand indicated that he'd been in the process of making some sort of adjustment to the large-screen television on which Daniel Day-Lewis was in the process of swearing eternal fidelity to a bosom-heaving woman prior to jumping through a waterfall. “But now that you're finished … If you've a moment …?”

Rather than wait for a response, he took Barbara's elbow between his thumb and index finger and firmly guided her down the passage to reception. He slid behind the desk and removed a computer print out from its bottom drawer. “More information,” he said conspiratorially. “And I thought it best not to share it with you while you were engaged with … well, with others, if you know what I mean. But as you're free at the moment … You
are
free, aren't you?” He peered past her shoulder as if expecting Daniel Day-Lewis to dash out of the lounge and come to her rescue, flintlock rifle at the ready.

‘Tree's my middle name.” Barbara wondered why the odious man didn't do something about the condition of his skin. It was flaking off into his beard in significant clumps this evening. He looked as if he'd dipped his face into a plate of pastry crumbs.

“Excellent,” he said. He gave a glance round for eavesdroppers, and apparently finding none but still deciding to proceed with caution, he leaned over the counter to speak confidentially and to share the gin on his breath. “Phone records,” he exhaled gustily. “I had a new system put in last year, thank God, so I've a record of everyone's trunk calls. Before, all calls went through the switchboard and we had to keep records by hand and time them, the calls not the records, that is. An utterly byzantine method and hardly accurate. Let me tell you, Sergeant, it led to the most unpleasant rows at check-out time.”

“You've tracked down Mr. Querashi's outgoing calls?” Barbara said encouragingly. She found herself marginally impressed. Eczema or not, the man was actually proving himself to be a bit of a gold mine. “Brilliant, Mr. Treves. What have we got?”

As usual, he preened himself at her use of the plural pronoun. He turned the computer print out 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.