Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(117)

“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.