Believing the Lie

by Elizabeth George

  That brought Barbara to Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, her of the mouthful name. Aside from that name, Barbara had in her crumpled notes the town from which she’d sprung, communicated to her as Santa Maria di something-or-other, which wasn’t exactly helpful as she quickly found out. Santa Maria di et cetera turned out to be to the towns and villages in a Latin American country what Jones and Smith were to surnames in her own. This, she reckoned, was not going to be like pinching candy from a five-year-old.

  She was considering her approach when the acting superintendent found her. Dorothea Harriman had, alas, waxed eloquent on the subject of Barbara’s hair, failing to append to her waxing a convenient lie about having seen Barbara at a location that was not New Scotland Yard. Isabelle Ardery thus accosted her on the twelfth floor, where Barbara had hidden herself in the Met’s library, a convenient location from which she could access the Met’s databases in peace and in secrecy.

  “Here you are, then.” The acting superintendent had come upon Barbara with the stealth of a hunting cat, and her satisfaction was feline as well. She looked like a cat, decapitated mouse in jaws.

  Barbara said, “Guv,” with a nod. She added, “Still on holiday,” on the very slight chance that Isabelle Ardery was there to requisition her for work.

  Ardery didn’t go in that direction, nor did she acknowledge Barbara’s status as being off rota for the moment. She said, “I’ll see the hair first, Sergeant.”

  Barbara hardly wanted to know what second was going to be, considering the superintendent’s tone. She stood to give Ardery a better look.

  Ardery nodded. “Now that,” she said, “is actually a haircut. We could go as far as to call it a style.”

  Considering what she’d paid for it, Barbara thought, they ought to be calling it a night at the Ritz. She waited for more.

  Ardery walked round her. She nodded. She said, “Hair and teeth. Very good. I’m quite pleased to know you can take direction when your feet are to the fire, Sergeant.”

  “I live to please,” Barbara said.

  “As to the clothing— ”

  Barbara said to remind her, “On holiday, guv?” which she believed adequately explained her ensemble of tracksuit trousers, tee-shirt emblazoned with Finish Your Beer… Children in China Are Sober, red high-top trainers, and donkey jacket.

  “Even on holiday,” Ardery said, “Barbara, you’re a representative of the Met. When you walk in the door— ” Abruptly, she brushed aside whatever she’d intended to say as her gaze came to rest on Barbara’s tattered notebook. She said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Just needed to get some information.”

  “Needing to get it here suggests a police matter.” Isabelle put herself in a position to see the screen of the computer’s monitor. She said, “Argentina?”

  “Holidays,” Barbara said airily.

  Isabelle looked further. She scrolled back to the previous screen and the one before that. She said, reading the list of Santa Maria di towns, “Developing a fondness for the Virgin Mary? Holidays suggest resorts. Skiing. Seaside visits. Jungle excursions. Adventures. Eco-journeys. Which are you interested in?”

  “Oh, just playing with ideas at the moment,” Barbara told her.

  Isabelle turned to her. “I’m not a fool, Sergeant. If you wanted to look for holiday possibilities, you wouldn’t be doing it here. That being the case and since you’ve asked for time off, I think it’s safe to conclude you’re doing some work for Inspector Lynley. Am I correct?”

  Barbara sighed. “You are.”

  “I see.” Isabelle’s eyes narrowed as she thought this one through. It seemed to lead her to a single conclusion. “You’ve been in contact with him, then.”

  “Well… more or less. Right.”

  “Regularly?”

  “Not sure what you mean,” Barbara said. She also wondered where the hell this was going. It was not as if she had a thing with DI Lynley. If Ardery thought that, she was clearly off her nut.

  “Where is he, Sergeant?” the superintendent asked directly. “You know, don’t you?”

  Barbara considered her answer. Truth was, she did know. Truth also was, Lynley hadn’t told her. His mentioning of Bernard Fairclough had done that. So she said, “He hasn’t told me, guv.”

  But Ardery took another meaning from the moments in which Barbara had been considering her options. She said, “I see,” in a way that told Barbara she saw something other than the truth of the matter. “Thank you, Sergeant,” the superintendent added. “Thank you very much indeed.”

  Ardery left her then. Barbara knew she could call her back before she got to the door of the library. She knew she could clarify. But she did not do so. Nor did she ask herself why she was allowing the superintendent to believe something that was patently untrue.

  Instead, she turned back to her work with Santa Maria di whatever. Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, she thought. Whoever she was, and not Isabelle Ardery, was the crux of the matter in hand.

  MILNTHORPE

  CUMBRIA

  The end product St. James had to deal with was that his wife was simply afraid. Afraid, she was projecting them into a future for which she’d come up with half a dozen alternative scenarios, none of which did anything to assuage her fears. What was to St. James a potential solution to their long-thwarted desire for a family was no solution at all to her. There were too many variables that they couldn’t control, she’d argued, and reluctantly he had to admit that there was a great deal of truth in what she said. An open adoption could indeed invite into their lives not only an infant in need of a loving family but also a birth mother, birth father, birth grandparents on both sides, and God only knew who else. It wasn’t a simple matter of scooping up an infant from the arms of a social worker and— it had to be said— hoping that the child and young adult growing out of that infant would not be one who felt the need to develop a second life with a birth family he or she scouted out when of an age to do so. Deborah was completely right in this, but so was he: There would be no guarantees in any route to parenthood, he’d told her.

  His brother was pressing him for an answer. This girl in Southampton couldn’t wait forever, David had said. There were other interested couples. “Come along, Simon. It’s either yes or no, and it’s not like you not to make a decision.”

  So St. James had spoken to Deborah again. Again, she’d been adamant. They’d gone back and forth for a quarter of an hour, at the end of which he’d set out for a walk. They hadn’t actually parted badly, but they needed a little space for the heat of their discussion to dissipate.

  He’d left the Crow and Eagle and walked in the direction of Arnside, along the road that skirted the River Bela and ultimately the mudflats of Milnthorpe Sands. As he walked, he tried not to think but rather merely to breathe in the rain-washed, damp day. He needed to clear his mind of this whole adoption business once and for all. If he didn’t— and if Deborah didn’t— it was going to poison their marriage.

  The damn magazine hadn’t helped matters. Deborah had it in hand at this point, and she’d read the bloody thing from cover to cover. From a story in Conception she had concluded decisively that she wanted to go the surrogacy route: her egg, his sperm, a petri dish, and a host mother. She’d read a story of a six-time surrogate and the altruism she extended towards other women. “It would be our child,” was the point she kept making. “Ours and no one else’s.” Well, it would be and it wouldn’t, to his way of thinking. There were dangers here as well as dangers in the other routes of adoption.

  The day was a fine one although the night had seen buckets of rain pouring down on Cumbria. But now the air felt clean and crisp, and the sky displayed an ashen wealth of cumulus clouds. Out on the mudflats, the stragglers from various flocks of birds heading to Africa and the Mediterranean still hunted for ragworms, lugworms, and tellins. He recognised the plovers and the dunlans among them but as to the rest, he could not have said. He watched them for a while and admired the simplicity o
f their life. Then he turned and walked back into Milnthorpe.

  In the car park of the inn, he found Lynley just arriving. He walked over to join him as his friend got out of the Healey Elliott. They had a moment of mutual admiration for the saloon’s sleek lines and handsome paint job before St. James said, “But you didn’t come by to prompt further vehicular envy on my part, I expect.”

  “Any chance to lord it over you in the transportation area is a chance I must grab on to. But in this case, you’re right. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “A mobile would have done. This was a bit of a drive.”

  “Hmm, yes. But part of the gaff is blown. I reckoned a few hours away from the Faircloughs wouldn’t go amiss.” Lynley told him of his evening encounter with Valerie, Bernard, and Mignon Fairclough. “Now that she knows Scotland Yard’s involved, she’ll make short work of letting everyone else know as well.”

  “That could be good.”

  “It’s actually as I’d have preferred it.”

  “But you’re uneasy?”

  “I am.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of who Fairclough is. Because of who Hillier is. Because of Hillier’s damnable propensity for using me to serve his own ends.”

  St. James waited for more. He knew the history of Lynley’s relationship with the assistant commissioner. It included at least one attempted cover-up of a long-ago crime. He wouldn’t have put it past Hillier to use Lynley another time in a similar capacity in which one of their own— as Hillier would no doubt think of Fairclough, Lynley, and himself— had something serious he wished to bury and Lynley was supposed to wield the shovel. Anything was possible, and both of them knew it.

  Lynley said, “It may all be a smoke screen.”

  “Which part of it?”

  “Fairclough wanting me to look into Ian Cresswell’s death. That’s certainly what Mignon Fairclough indicated last evening. It was a look-no-further-than-the-bloke-who-employed-you kind of remark. It’s something I’d already thought of myself and dismissed, however.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I just can’t make sense of it, Simon.” Lynley leaned against the side of the Healey Elliott, arms crossed at his chest. “I can see how he’d ask for the Met’s involvement if a murder had occurred and he’d been accused or suspected and wanted to clear his name. Or if one or more of his children had been accused or suspected and he wanted to clear their names. But this was deemed an accident from the first, so why find someone to look into it if he himself is guilty of something or if he suspects one of them is?”

  “That rather suggests Mignon herself is throwing up a smoke screen, doesn’t it?”

  “It would explain her trying to divert attention onto her father last night. Evidently, Cresswell wanted Bernard to cut her off.” Lynley explained the financial arrangement Mignon apparently had with her father. “She wouldn’t have wanted that. And since Cresswell kept the books and knew every move Bernard made financially, there’s the additional possibility that he wanted someone else cut off as well.”

  “The son?”

  “He’s the likely choice, isn’t he? With Nicholas’s past, Cresswell would have argued not to trust him with a penny, and who could blame him? Nicholas Fairclough might be a recovering methamphetamine user but that’s the key word: recovering and not recovered. Addicts never recover. They merely cope day-to-day.”

  Lynley would know about that, St. James acknowledged, because of his own brother. “And has Fairclough handed money to his son?”

  “I want to look into that. The other daughter and her husband are my means to the information.”

  St. James looked away. Noise and odours were coming from an open door into the back of the hotel: the crashing and banging of pots along with the smell of frying bacon and burnt toast. He said to Lynley, “What about Valerie Fairclough, Tommy?”

  “As killer?”

  “Ian Cresswell was no blood to her. He was her husband’s nephew and he had the potential to damage her children. If he wanted to cut off Mignon and he doubted Nicholas’s long-term recovery, he’d steer Fairclough away from helping them financially as Fairclough tended to do. And Valerie Fairclough’s behaviour that day was decidedly strange according to Constable Schlicht: dressed to the nines, perfectly calm, a phone call announcing ‘a dead man floating in my boathouse.’”

  “There’s that,” Lynley admitted. “But she could have been the intended victim as well.”

  “Motive?”

  “Mignon declares her father is hardly ever there. He’s in London repeatedly. Havers is looking into that end of things, but if something’s not right with the Faircloughs’ marriage, Bernard could have hopes to rid himself of his wife.”

  “Why not divorce her?”

  “Because of Fairclough Industries. He’s run it forever and of course he’d stand to walk away with a great deal of money if it was part of a settlement unless there’s some sort of prenuptial agreement we’re not privy to. But as of now it’s still her company, and I daresay she can throw her weight into whatever decisions are made at the place if she wants to.”

  “Another reason for her to want Ian dead, Tommy, if he’d been recommending decisions not to her liking.”

  “Possibly. But wouldn’t it make more sense for her to have Ian fired? Why kill him when she had the power to cut him off as easily as he wanted to cut off two of her children?”

  “So where do we stand?” St. James pointed out to him that the fillet knife they’d brought up from the water looked perfectly innocent to the naked eye, not a scratch upon it. The stones they’d also brought up bore no recent scratches to indicate they’d been jemmied away from the dock. They could get Constable Schlicht out to the boathouse and the local SOCO boys involved, but they were going to need the coroner to reopen the case and they had virtually nothing to give him in order to encourage him to have another look at Ian Cresswell’s death.

  “The answer lies with the people,” Lynley said. “They all bear a closer looking into.”

  “Which means, I think, that my usefulness to you has run its course,” St. James said. “Although there’s a final route we might go with the fillet knife. And another conversation that might be had with Mignon.”

  Lynley was about to reply to these suggestions when his mobile rang. He looked at the caller and said, “It’s Havers. This could tell us where we need to head next.” He flipped the phone open and said, “Tell me you’ve got something meaningful, Sergeant, because all we’re running into here is one dead end after another.”

  ARNSIDE

  CUMBRIA

  Alatea had gone out early to plant bulbs because she wanted to avoid her husband. She’d slept poorly, with her mind racing hour after hour, and at the first sign of dawn, she’d slipped out of bed and faded out of the house.

  Nicholas had slept badly as well. Something was very wrong.

  The first evidence of this had come over dinner on the previous evening. He toyed with his food, mostly cutting the meat and moving it round the plate, mostly slicing the potatoes neatly and piling them up like poker chips. To her question of what was bothering him, he’d smiled vaguely and said, “Just a bit off my food tonight,” and ultimately he’d pushed away from the table and wandered off into the drawing room, where he’d sat in the fireplace inglenook briefly and then paced the room as if it were a cage and he the imprisoned animal on display.

  When they’d gone to bed, things had been worse. With a rising feeling of dread, she’d approached him. A hand on his chest, she’d said, “Nicky, something’s wrong. Tell me,” although the truth was that she feared hearing his answer more than she feared her own restless mind and where it took her when she allowed it free rein. He’d said, “Nothing. Really, darling. Just tired or something. Just a bit on edge,” and when she’d not been able to prevent a look of alarm washing over her features, he’d gone on to say, “You’re not to worry, Allie,” and she knew he was reassuring her that whatever was going on inside hi
m, it bore no relationship to his past with drugs. She hadn’t thought it had, however, but she played along, saying, “You might want to talk to someone, Nicky. You know how it is,” and he nodded. But he looked at her with so much love in his face that she realised whatever was on his mind most likely had to do with her.

  They hadn’t made love. This, too, was unlike her husband because she had approached him and not the opposite, and he’d long loved to be approached by her because he was not a fool and he knew very well how disparate was everything about them, at least everything visible to a world that judged people’s equality by external matters. So the fact that she would want him at least as often as he wanted her had always thrilled Nicholas, who had always responded. This too was a sign.

  So when Alatea left the house and made her way to the garden, it was in part because she needed to do something to take her mind off the terrifying possibilities that had been assailing her throughout the night. But it was also in part to avoid seeing Nicholas because eventually what was bothering him was going to come out into the open and she didn’t think she’d be able to face it.

  There were several thousand bulbs to be planted. She planned the lawn to be filled with early glories of the snow so that a bank of blue upon green would fall from the house down to the seawall, and this was going to take considerable work, for which she was glad. She would not, of course, be able to complete it in this one morning. But she could make a very good start. She set upon it with shovel and spade and the hours passed quickly. When she was sure her husband would have left Arnside House to make the drive to Barrow-in-Furness for his half day at Fairclough Industries prior to his work at the pele project, she finished up what she was doing and stretched and rubbed the sore spots on her back.

  It was only when she headed to the house that she saw his car and understood that Nicholas hadn’t gone to work at all. Her gaze then went from the car to the house, and the dread she felt crept up her spine.