Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(32)

“Gran.” Theo's face was flaming.

My God, Agatha thought. He's twenty-six years old with the sexual maturity of a teenager. She could only imagine with a shudder what it was like to be on the receiving end of his earnest grappling. At least his grandfather—for all his faults, one of which happened to be dropping dead at the age of forty-two—had known how to take a woman and be done with it. A quarter of an hour was all Lewis had ever needed, and on the nights when she was extremely lucky, he managed the act in less than ten minutes. She considered sexual intercourse a medicinal requirement of marriage: One kept the juices flowing in every part of the body if one wished for health.

“What did they promise us, Theo?” she asked. “You pressed for another special council meeting, of course.”

“Actually, I …” He remained standing as she did. But he reached for one of his precious fossils and turned it over in his hand.

“You did have the presence of mind to demand another meeting, didn't you, Theo? You didn't let those coloureds take command and do nothing about it, did you?”

His look of discomfort was the answer.

She said, “My God.” He was so like his brainless mother.

Despite herself, Agatha needed to sit. She lowered her body onto the seat of the balloon-backed chair and sat as she had been taught to sit in girlhood, ramrod straight. She said, “What on earth is the matter with you, Theodore Michael? And sit down, please. I don't want a stiff neck to mark this encounter.”

He pulled an old armchair round to face her. It was covered in faded corduroy, upon its seat a frog-shaped stain the origin of which Agatha didn't care to speculate upon. “It wasn't the time,” he said.

“It wasn't … what?” She'd heard him perfectly, but she'd found long ago that the key to bending others to her will was to force them to examine their own with such diligence that they ended up rejecting whatever idea they'd begun with, in favour of hers.

“It wasn't the time, Gran.” Theo sat. He leaned towards her, bare arms resting on his fawn, linen-draped legs. He had a way of making wrinkles look like haute couture. She didn't think such a sense of fashion was seemly in a man. “The council had their hands full with keeping a lid on Muhannad Malik. Which they failed to do, as things turned out.”

“It wasn't his meeting.”

“And with the issue being a man's death and the Asians’ concerns about how it was being handled by the police—”

“Their concerns. Their concerns/’ Agatha mocked.

“Gran, it wasn't the time. I couldn't make demands in the middle of chaos. Especially demands about redevelopment.”

She thumped her stick on the carpet. “Why not?”

“Because it seemed to me that getting to the bottom of the Nez killing was more pressing an issue than the funding of the renovation of the Pier End Hotel.” He help up his hand. “No, wait a moment, Gran. Don't interrupt. I know this project is important to you. It's important to me as well. And it's important to the community. But you've got to see that there's hardly a point in infusing money into Balford if there isn't going to be a community left.”

“You certainly can't be suggesting that the Asians have the power or even the temerity to destroy this town. They'd be cutting their own throats.”

“I'm suggesting that unless the community is a place where future visitors don't have to be afraid of being accosted by someone with a grudge against the colour of their skin, any money we pour into redevelopment is money we might as well send up in flames.”

He was surprising her. For a moment Agatha saw the shadow of his grandfather in him. Lewis would have thought exactly the same way.

“Hmph,” she sniffed.

“You see I'm right, don't you.” He phrased it not as a question, she noted, but as a statement, which was like Lewis as well. “I'll give it a few days, let the tension pass, and organise another meeting then. It's for the best. You'll see.” He glanced at a carriage clock on the mantelpiece and got to his feet. “And now it's time you were in bed. I'll fetch Mary Ellis.”

“I shall ask for Mary Ellis when I'm ready, Theodore. Stop treating me like—”

“No arguments.” He went to the door.

She spoke before he could open it. “You're going out, then?”

“I said I'd fetch—”

“I don't mean out of the room. I mean out. Out. Out of the house. Are you going out again tonight, Theo?” His expression told her she'd pushed too far. Even Theo—malleable as he was—had his limits. Too much delving into his personal life was one of them. “I ask because I wonder about the wisdom of these nocturnal wanderings of yours. If the situation in the town is as you suggest—tense—I dare say no one should be out and about after dark. And you've not been taking the boat out again, have you? You know how I feel about sailing at night.”

Theo regarded her from the doorway. There it was once again, that look of Lewis's: the features settling into a pleasant mask beneath which she could read absolutely nothing. When had he learned to dissemble so? she wondered. And why had he learned it?

“I'll fetch Mary Ellis,” he said. And he left her with her questions unanswered.