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."
^o
"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 held 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.
Sahlah was allowed to be part of the discussion because, after all, it was her fiance whose life had been taken. Otherwise, she'd not have been included, and she knew it. It wasn't the way of the Muslim men of her acquaintance to give merit to what a woman had to say, and although her father was a gentle man whose tenderness often showed itself only in the soft pressure of his knuckles against her cheek as he was passing by, when it came to convention, he was Muslim to the core.
He devoutly prayed five times each day; he was on his third reading of the Holy Qur'aan; he made certain that a portion of the profits from his business went to the poor; and twice already he'd paced in the footsteps of millions of Muslims who had walked the perimeter of the Ka'bd.
Thus on this night, while Sahlah herself was permitted to listen to the men's discussion, her mother merely served the purpose of bringing food and drink from the kitchen to the front room, while Sahlah's sister-in-law made herself scarce. Yumn did this for two reasons, naturally.