Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(30)

“Yes?” Agatha encouraged her pleasantly. “As it's gone near half past ten, Mary …?”

“I thought … don't you want … it's just that my hours's supposed to be just till nine. We agreed on that, you and me, right?”

Agatha waited for more. Mary squirmed, looking as if a centipede were crawling up her thigh.

“It's just that … As it's getting late …”

Agatha raised an eyebrow.

Mary looked defeated. “Give me call when you're ready, ma'm.”

Agatha smiled. “Thank you, Mary. I shall do so.”

She turned back to her contemplation of the easels as Mary Ellis took herself off into the bowels of the house. On the first easel Balford-le-Nez in the past was represented by seven neatly arranged photographs taken during its fifty-year heyday as a holiday hotspot between 1880 and 1930. Central to the pictures was a large depiction of Agatha's first love, the pleasure pier, and petalling out from this carpel were additional pictures of the locations that had once attracted visitors. Bathing machines lined the seafront at Princes Beach; parasol-shaded women strolled along a crowded High Street; waders gathered at the outer end of a longshore net being landed on the beach by a lobster boat. Here was the famous Pier End Hotel, and there the distinguished Edwardian terrace overlooking the Balford Promenade.

Damn the coloureds, Agatha thought. If not for them and their surly demands that everyone in Balford lick their backsides because one of their kind had probably got a comeuppance he'd richly asked for. … If not for them, Balford-le-Nez would be one step closer to becoming the seaside resort it once had been and was meant to be. And what had the Pakis been howling about? What had they destroyed her meeting time before the town council to beat their skinny chests about?

“It's a civil liberties question to them,” Theo had said at dinner, and blast the idiot if he didn't look as though he agreed with the bloody barrel of them.

“Perhaps you wouldn't mind explaining that to me,” Agatha had requested of her grandson. Her words were icy. She noted the look of instant discomfort they seemed to arouse in Theo. His heart bled too readily for Agatha's liking. His belief in fair play, the equality of man, and justice given to all on demand were certainly not attributes he'd inherited from her. She knew what he meant by the phrase “a civil liberties question,” but she wanted to coerce him into saying it. She wanted this because she wanted a fight. She was looking for an all-out, hands-down pitched battle, and if she couldn't manage one as she was now—trapped inside a body that threatened to fail her at any moment—then she'd settle for verbal fisticuffs. A good row was better than nothing.

Theo wouldn't rise to the challenge, though. And upon reflection Agatha had to admit that this refusal to take her on could actually be interpreted as a positive sign. He needed to toughen up if he was to man the helm of Shaw Enterprises after her death. Perhaps his skin was already thickening.

“The Asians don't trust the police,” he said. “They don't believe they're getting equal treatment. They want to keep the town focused on the investigation in order to put pressure on the CID.”

“It seems to me that if they desire to be treated equally—which I can only assume means that they wish to be treated like their English counterparts—then they might consider acting for once like their English counterparts.”

“There've been plenty of demonstrations that the whites have organised over the years,” Theo said. “The poll tax riots, the blood sports protests, the movement against—”

“I'm not speaking about demonstrations,” she cut in. “I'm speaking about being treated English when they decide to start acting English. And dressing English. And worshipping English. And bringing up their children English. If an individual decides to immigrate to another country, he should not expect the country to cater to his whimsies, Theodore. And if I'd been in your place at the council meeting, you may depend upon it: I'd have said just that.”

Her grandson folded his napkin precisely and laid it perpendicular to the table edge as Agatha had taught him. “I've little doubt of that, Gran,” he said wryly. “And you would've waded right into the riot afterwards and beaten in a few heads with your stick.” He pushed back his chair and came to hers. He laid his hand on her shoulder and kissed her forehead.

Agatha gruffly pushed him away. “Stop your nonsense. And Mary Ellis has yet to bring in the cheese.”

“None for me tonight.” Theo headed towards the doorway. “I'll fetch the display from the car.”

Which he had done, and she stood before it now. Balford-le-Nez of the present was depicted in all its decrepitude on the centre easel: the abandoned buildings along the seafront with boarded windows and wooden architraves shedding their paint like sunburned skin; the moribund High Street where every year another shop closed its doors a final time; the grubby indoor swimming pool whose stink of mildew and woodrot couldn't possibly be captured by a camera's lens. And like the easel displaying Balford of the past, among these pictures of Balford now was a photo of the pier, which Agatha had purchased, which Agatha had renovated, which Agatha Shaw had restored and rejuvenated, breathing life like a god into her personal Adam, making the pleasure pier an unspoken promise to the sea town where Agatha had spent her life.