Believing the Lie il-17

by Elizabeth George

  “God, Deborah.” Simon rubbed his forehead while Tommy shifted his feet on the ground.

  Inanely, Deborah thought how Tommy always wore Lobb’s shoes. They must have cost a fortune, she reckoned, but of course they would last forever and the pair he had on he’d probably had since he was twenty-five years old. They weren’t scuffed, of course. Tommy’s man Charlie Denton — valet, butler, man Friday, equerry, whatever in Tommy’s life — would never have allowed scuff marks on Tommy’s shoes. But they were worn and comfortable, rather like friends, and-

  Simon was speaking and she realised she’d deliberately plugged her ears to his words. He would think that all this had to do with her, with them, with this stupid open adoption business, which, of course, he had no idea she’d put a stop to, so she decided to tell him then and there.

  “I phoned David,” she said. “I told him no. Definitely not. I can’t cope with it, Simon.”

  Simon’s jaw moved. That was all.

  Hurriedly, Deborah said to Tommy, “So let’s say Ian Cresswell found out about all of this. He protests. He says that their children — his and Niamh’s — are already putting up with just about enough in their lives and they can’t be asked to cope with their mother carrying a baby for his cousin’s wife. There’s too much confusion. He puts his foot down.”

  “They’re divorced,” Tommy pointed out gently.

  “Since when did divorce mean people stop trying to control each other if they can get away with it? Let’s say he goes to Nicholas. He appeals to him. Nicholas knows what’s going on or he doesn’t know but in either case, the appeal goes nowhere so Ian says he’s going to have to talk to Nicholas’s father about it. The last thing anyone wants is to have Bernard Fairclough drawn into this. He’s already spent most of Nicholas’s life believing he’s a wastrel. And now this, this terrible division in the family — ”

  “Enough,” Simon said. “Really. I do mean it. Enough.”

  The paternal tone behind his words was an electric shock, thirty thousand volts running through her body. Deborah said, “What did you say to me?”

  Simon said, “It doesn’t take a Freudian to know where this is coming from, Deborah.”

  The electric shock turned in an instant to fury. Deborah began to speak. Simon cut her off.

  “This is a flight of fancy. It’s time for both of us to get back to London. I’ve done what I can here” — this to Tommy — “and unless we want another go at the boathouse, I daresay what appears to be the case about Ian Cresswell’s death is indeed the case.”

  That he would actually dismiss her like this … Deborah had never wanted to strike her husband, but she wanted it badly in that moment. Temper, Deb, temper, her father would have said, but never had her father been taken so lightly by this man who stood implacably before her. God, he was insufferable, she thought. He was pompous. He was so bloody self-righteous. He was always so sure, so certain, so 100 percent full of his sodding scientific knowledge, but some things had nothing to do with science, some things had to do with the heart, some things weren’t about forensics, microscopes, bloodstains, computer analyses, graphs, charts, amazing machinery that would take a single thread and connect it to a manufacturer, a skein of wool, the sheep it had come from, and the farm on the Hebrides where that sheep had been born …She wanted to scream. She wanted to scratch out his eyes. She wanted-

  “She does have a point, Simon,” Tommy said.

  Simon looked at him and his expression asked his old friend if he’d entirely lost his mind.

  Tommy said, “I don’t doubt there was bad blood between Nicholas and his cousin. Something’s not right with Bernard as well.”

  “Granted,” Simon said, “but a scenario in which Ian’s former wife…” He waved off the entire idea.

  Tommy then said, “But it’s too dangerous, Deb, if what you’re saying is true.”

  “But — ”

  “You’ve done good work up here, but Simon’s right about going back to London. I’ll take it from here. I can’t let you put yourself in harm’s way. You know that.”

  He meant more than one thing. All of them knew it. She shared a history with Tommy and even if she hadn’t done, he would never allow her to come close to a danger that could take her from Simon as Tommy’s own wife had been taken from him.

  She said numbly, “There’s no danger here. You know that, Tommy.”

  “If murder’s involved, there’s always danger.”

  He’d said all he would say on the topic. He left them, then, and left her with Simon there in the car park.

  Simon had said to her, “I’m sorry, Deborah. I know that you want to help.”

  She’d said bitterly, “Oh you know that, do you? Let’s not pretend this isn’t about punishing me.”

  “For what?” He sounded so bloody surprised.

  “For saying no to David. For not solving our problem with one little word: yes. That’s what you wanted, an instant solution. Without once considering how it would feel to me with an entire second family hovering out there, watching my every move, evaluating what sort of mummy I’d be…” She was close to tears. This infuriated her.

  Simon said, “This has nothing to do with your phoning David. If you’ve made up your mind, I accept it. What else can I do? I might have other wishes, but — ”

  “And that’s what counts. That’s what always counts. Your wishes. Not mine. Because should my wishes be granted in any matter, the power shifts, doesn’t it, and you don’t want that.”

  He reached towards her, but she backed away. She said, “Just go about your business. We’ve said enough at this point.”

  He waited for a moment. He was watching her, but she couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t look at his eyes and see the pain and know how far back into his past it reached.

  He finally said, “We’ll talk later,” and he went to his car. Another moment and he’d driven away, out of the car park and about his business. Whatever it was. It didn’t matter to Deborah.

  She left the car park herself. She went towards the front door of the inn. She’d got just inside when she heard someone say, “Hang on. You and I need to talk,” and she turned to see that, of all people, the red-headed giant was coming in the entrance. Before she had a chance to say anything, he continued. “Your cover’s been blown. It can be on the front page of The Source tomorrow or you and I can strike a deal.”

  “What sort of deal?” Deborah asked him.

  “The kind that gets us both what we want.”

  GREAT URSWICK

  CUMBRIA

  Lynley knew that Simon was right about Deborah: She needed to stay clear of things from this point forward. They didn’t know exactly what they were dealing with and anything that might put her into danger was unacceptable on so many levels that most of them didn’t bear talking about.

  He’d been wrong to bring them into this. It had seemed a simple enough job that he could sort through with their help in a day or so. That wasn’t turning out to be the case, and he needed to finish things before Deborah did something that he, she, and Simon would regret.

  When he left them in Milnthorpe, he headed north, then east. Then he took the road that coursed down the spatulate landmass at whose tip sat Barrow-in-Furness. Barrow wasn’t his destination, however. He wanted to speak to Manette Fairclough privately, and that meant a trip to Great Urswick.

  The route he followed took him through the hilly Victorian sea town of Grange-over-Sands, along the estuary where wintering birds formed a living landscape across the mudflats, establishing hierarchies in the search for food. It was abundant here, replenished daily by the tides from Morecambe Bay.

  After Grange-over-Sands, the road opened to grey water, deceptive in its calm, along one side of the car and pastures on the other side, broken by the occasional line of cottages where seaside holiday makers came in better weather. This was far south in Cumbria, not the land of the lakes so treasured by John Ruskin and William Wordsworth and his daffodils.
Here most people got down to the serious hand-to-mouth of daily living, which comprised generations of fishermen out on the shifting sands of the bay, first with horses and carts and now with tractors and always within inches of losing their lives to the quicksand if they made a wrong decision. And then there was no saving them if the tide came in. There was only waiting for their bodies to turn up. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they did not.

  At Bardsea, he turned inland. Great Urswick was landlocked, one of those villages that seemed to exist merely because it was at a crossroads and contained a pub. To get to it, one traveled through a countryside completely unlike the dramatic fells, slate-studded screes, and sudden eruptions of limestone of the upper lakes. This part of Cumbria looked more like the Broads. One climbed briefly through a village and then out onto a landscape flat and windswept, suitable for grazing.

  Buildings in Great Urswick didn’t look like part of Cumbria, either. They were prettily painted, but they were not done up in the vernacular of the Lakes. No neatly stacked slate fronted them for a consistency of appearance. Here, they were roughcast. Some even were clad in wood, a strange building material for this part of the world.

  Lynley found Manette’s home alongside a large pond, which appeared to be the centrepiece of the village. Swans floated on it, and it was thick with reeds here and there to protect them, their nests and their young. There were two cars parked in front of the house, so he reckoned he could kill two birds by speaking to both Manette and her former husband, with whom, Bernard Fairclough had revealed, his daughter still lived. He went to the door.

  A man answered. This, Lynley reckoned, would be Freddie McGhie. He was a decent-looking bloke, neat as a pin, dark hair, dark eyes. Helen would have declared how squeaky clean he is, darling, but she would have meant it in the best possible sense because everything about him was perfectly groomed. He wasn’t dressed for work, but he still managed to look like someone who’d stepped out of an advertisement for Country Life.

  Lynley introduced himself. McGhie said, “Ah yes. Bernard’s guest from London. Manette said she’d met you.” He sounded affable, but there was a sense of questioning in his tone. There was, after all, no reason that Bernard Fairclough’s guest from London would come a-wandering into Great Urswick and knock on Freddie McGhie’s front door.

  Lynley said he was hoping to speak to Manette if she was at home.

  McGhie glanced towards the street as if for answer to a question he didn’t ask. Then he said as if remembering his manners, “Oh yes. Well, of course. It’s just that she didn’t mention…”

  What? Lynley wondered. He waited politely for elucidation.

  “No matter,” McGhie said. “Do come in. I’ll fetch her.”

  He ushered Lynley into a sitting room that overlooked the back garden and the pond beyond it. The dominant indoor feature was a treadmill. It was state of the art with a screen that featured readouts, buttons, and assorted gee-gaws. To accommodate it and a rubber mat for preliminary stretching, much of the other furniture in the room had been stacked and lined against a far wall. McGhie said, “Oh, sorry. Not thinking. The kitchen’s better. It’s just this way,” and he walked on.

  He left Lynley there in the kitchen for a moment and went off, calling Manette’s name. As his footsteps sounded against rising stairs, however, the kitchen’s exterior door opened, and Manette herself came inside. Lynley reflected — as he hadn’t done before — that she looked nothing like her sister. She had her mother’s height and her mother’s rangy build but, unfortunately, she’d inherited her father’s hair. This was sparse enough to see to her skull, although she kept the cut of it short and curly as if to hide its scarcity. She was dressed for running, obviously the person who used the treadmill in the district’s often inclement weather. She saw Lynley at once and said, “Goodness. Well, hello,” and her glance went to the door through which he’d come because she obviously heard her former husband calling her name.

  She said, “Excuse me,” and went in the same direction as McGhie. Lynley heard her call out, “Down here, Freddie. I was out for a run,” and then his reply of, “Oh, I say, Manette,” which was all Lynley heard because at that point their voices became hushed. He caught McGhie’s “Should I…?” and his “Happy to, you know,” without knowing the what or the why of each. Still, when Manette returned, she had Freddie McGhie in tow. Her choice of words was apparently deliberate when she said to Lynley, “A nice surprise for us, this. Did Dad want you to pop in to see us for some reason?”

  “I did want to speak to you both,” Lynley said.

  They exchanged a look. He realised it was more than time to drop the pretence, which hadn’t worked with Mignon and which certainly wasn’t going to work with anyone else.

  He took out his police identification and handed it to Manette. Her eyes narrowed. She pushed it to McGhie and while he was examining it, she asked the obvious question, “What’s this about? I can’t think it likely Scotland Yard’s on the trail of replacing their lavatories and they’ve sent you up here to evaluate our line of loos. What’s your guess, Freddie?”

  McGhie was blushing faintly, and Lynley didn’t think his growing colour had anything to do with lavatories. He said to her, “I’d thought…” He shrugged, one of those you know movements in which a couple’s history allows them to communicate in a truncated fashion.

  Manette barked a laugh. “I appreciate the vote of confidence,” she said. “But I have a feeling the inspector here likes them a little less long in the tooth.”

  “Don’t be stupid. You’re only forty-two,” Freddie said to her.

  “Female years are like dog years, Freddie. When it comes to men, I’m closer to eighty. What can I do for you, Inspector?”

  He said, “Your father’s asked me to look into Ian Cresswell’s death.”

  Manette’s response was to McGhie. “I rest my case.” There was a kitchen table at which she then sat. A bowl of fruit was in the centre of it, and she took a banana and began to peel it. She said, “Well, this must put a real pin in poor Mignon’s balloon.” She used her foot to push one of the other chairs out. “Sit,” she told Lynley. She said the same to McGhie.

  Lynley thought at first that the gesture indicated her full cooperation, but she disabused him of that notion straightaway. She said, “If Dad thinks I’m about to finger anyone for anything, I’d appreciate your telling him that kite won’t fly. As a matter of fact, no kite’s launching from this house at all. Honest to God, I can’t believe he’d do this to his own family.”

  “It’s more a matter that he wants to be sure of the local police,” Lynley told her. “That happens, actually, more often than people think.”

  “What’s that exactly?” Manette enquired. “Someone pops down to London and asks for a second investigation into a matter already settled by the coroner so Scotland Yard takes up the case? Just like that? Please, Inspector. You can’t think I’m that stupid.”

  McGhie said to Lynley, “What’s prompted this? It was a straightforward matter according to the coroner.”

  “Dad’s throwing his weight,” Manette said to him. “God only knows how, but I reckon he knows someone who knows someone who’s willing to pull a few strings or make a donation to the widows and orphans. That’s how these things happen. My guess is he wants to see if Nick’s involved, no matter what the coroner said. God knows how Nick would have managed things, but with his history I daresay anything’s possible.” She looked at Lynley. “I’m right, am I not? You’re here to see if I can assist in putting the screws on my brother.”

  “Not at all,” Lynley said. “It’s only a matter of getting a clear understanding of where everyone fits.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that sometimes a death is placed too conveniently in time. A coroner wouldn’t be looking at that. There’d be no reason to if the circumstances are straightforward enough.”

  “So that’s why you’re here? You’re determining the conve
nience, as you say, of my cousin’s drowning? And whom did Ian’s death convenience? Because I must tell you it didn’t convenience me. What about you, Freddie? Were you convenienced?”

  McGhie said, “Manette, if Scotland Yard’s here — ”

  “Oh bother,” she cut in. “If Scotland Yard’s here, my father probably handed over some cash. A new wing on their offices. Who the hell knows what else? You’ve been looking at the books, Freddie. You’ll find it if you look hard enough. There’ll be a payout that you can’t understand. Beyond the others you can’t understand.”

  Lynley said to McGhie, “Are there irregularities with the books, then, in your father-in-law’s business?”

  “I was joking,” Manette said, and then to McGhie, “Wasn’t I, Freddie?” in a tone whose meaning was don’t say a word.

  What Freddie did say was, “Former.”

  “What?”

  “Former father-in-law.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Current. Former. It doesn’t matter,” Manette said. “What matters is that Ian drowned, it was an accident, and if it wasn’t an accident, you need to be looking at who was convenienced by his death, which wasn’t me. That being the case, it seems to me, if I’m remembering this right, the big convenience is the one that fell into Kaveh Mehran’s lap.”

  McGhie said to her, “What’s going on there?”

  She said to him, “I haven’t told you. Kaveh’s now sole owner of the farm.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Hardly. Ian left it to him. Or so he claims. I expect he’s telling the truth as it wouldn’t take a big effort to check out the paperwork.”