A Necessary End Read Free Page A

rubbish. In no time at all the four of them had crossed the road and entered the old Riverview Hotel, where the Hon Honoria was booked to stay the night. For the first time that evening, she was quiet. Banks noticed in the muted light of the hotel lobby how pale she had turned.
    Only when they got to the room, a suite with a superb view over the terraced river-gardens, did Chas and Dave relax. Honoria sighed and sank into the sofa, and Dave locked the door and put the chain on while Chas headed over to the cocktail cabinet.
    â€œPour me a gin-and-tonic, will you, dear?” said Honoria in a shaky voice.
    â€œWhat the hell was all that about?” Chas asked, also pouring out two stiff shots of Scotch.
    â€œI don’t know,” Banks said. “There was a small demonstration outside. I suppose it could have—”
    â€œSome bloody security you’ve got here,” said Dave, taking his drink and passing the gin-and-tonic to Honoria.
    She gulped it down and put her hand to her brow. “My God,” she said, “I thought there was nobody but farmers and horse-trainers living up here. Look at me, I’m shaking like a bloody leaf.”
    â€œLook,” Banks said, hovering at the door, “I’d better go and see what’s happening.” It was obvious he wasn’t going to get a drink, and he was damned if he was going to stand in as a whipping boy for the security organizers. “Will you be all right?”
    â€œA damn sight safer than we were back there,” Dave said. Then his tone softened a little and he came to the door with Banks. “Yes, go on. It’s your problem now, mate.” He smiled and lowered his voice, twitching his head in Honoria’s direction. “Ours is her.”
    In the rush, Banks had left his raincoat in the Community Centre, and his cigarettes were in the right-hand pocket. He noticed Chas lighting up as he left, but hadn’t the audacity to ask for one. Things were bad enough already. Flipping up his jacket collar against the rain, he ran down to the market square, turned right in front of the church and stopped dead.
    The wounded lay groaning or unconscious in the drizzle, andpolice still scuffled with the ones they’d caught, trying to force them into the backs of the cars or into the Black Maria. Some demonstrators, held by their hair, wriggled and kicked as they went, receiving sharp blows from the truncheons for their efforts. Others went peacefully. They were frightened and tired now; most of the fight had gone out of them.
    Banks stood rooted to the spot and watched the scene. Radios crackled; blue lights spun; the injured cried in pain and shock while ambulance attendants rushed around with stretchers. It defied belief. A full-blown riot in Eastvale, admittedly on a small scale, was near unthinkable. Banks had got used to the rising crime rate, which affected even places as small as Eastvale, with just over fourteen thousand people, but riots were surely reserved for Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, Bristol or London. It couldn’t happen here, he had always thought as he shook his head over news of Brixton, Toxteth and Tottenham. But now it had, and the moaning casualties, police and demonstrators alike, were witness to that hard truth.
    The street was blocked off at the market square to the south and near the Town Hall, at the junction with Elmet Street, to the north. The gaslamps and illuminated window displays in the twee tourist shops full of Yorkshire woollen wear, walking gear and local produce shone on the chaotic scene. A boy, no more than fifteen or sixteen, cried out as two policemen dragged him by his hair along the glistening cobbles; a torn placard that had once defiantly read NO NUKES flapped in the March wind as the thin rain tapped a faint tattoo against it; one policeman, helmet gone and hair in disarray, bent to help up another, whose moustache was matted with blood and whose nose lay at