Believing the Lie il-17

by Elizabeth George

  Bernard tried to present his earlier excuse, saying, “I’ve no idea why there were payments to Vivienne. It’s possible that Ian felt he had to…” He stumbled here, looking for a reason. “Perhaps this was a means of protecting me.”

  “From what, exactly?” Valerie asked. “As I recall, Vivienne accepted employment in a more senior position with a firm in London. She wasn’t dismissed. Or was she? Is there something I don’t know?” And then to Freddie, “Exactly how much money are we talking about?”

  Freddie named the sum. Freddie named the bank. Valerie’s lips parted. Manette could see the whites of her teeth, gritted together. Her gaze fixed on Bernard. He looked away.

  Valerie said to him, “How would you prefer me to interpret this, Bernard?”

  Bernard said nothing.

  She said, “Shall I believe she’s been blackmailing Ian for some reason? Perhaps he was cooking the books and she knew it so he cooked them some more, benefitting her? Or perhaps she promised to take herself out of the picture and say nothing to Niamh of his sexual proclivities as long as he paid her… although that wouldn’t explain why he continued to pay her once he left Niamh for Kaveh, would it, darling? So let’s go with the first idea. Freddie, is there any indication Ian was cooking the books?”

  “Well, only in that the payments to Mignon have increased as well. But as to any money going his own way, there’s nothing — ”

  “Mignon?”

  “Right. Her allowance has taken a rather large jump,” Freddie said. “Problem with that, the way I see it, is that the jump doesn’t actually match necessary expenses, if you know what I mean. Of course there was the surgery, but that would have been one payment, wouldn’t it? And considering she lives right here on the property, what has she got in the way of actual expenses? I know she does tend to spend a bit on her Internet shopping, but really, how much can that cost? Well, of course, I suppose it could cost a fortune, couldn’t it, if one became addicted to shopping on the Internet or something, but…”

  Freddie babbled on a bit. Manette knew he could feel the tension between her parents and she knew his babbling was a reaction to this. He had to have known that they’d be walking into a minefield, talking to her parents together about the money going out to Vivienne and to Mignon, but in his Freddie innocence, he hadn’t considered exactly how many mines lay within that field, waiting to explode.

  There was silence at the end of Freddie’s remarks. Valerie had her gaze concreted on Bernard. Bernard ran his hand back over his head. He opted for an attempt at redirection, saying to Manette, “I wouldn’t have thought this was possible for you.”

  “What?” Manette said.

  “You know very well. I thought our relationship was rather different to what it apparently is. My error, I see.”

  To which Freddie said quickly, “I say, Bernard, this has nothing to do with Manette,” and with such firmness that Manette looked at her former husband. Freddie put his hand on hers and squeezed it, going on to say, “Her concerns are completely legitimate, in the circumstances. And she only knows about the payments because I told her. This is a family business — ”

  “And you’re not family,” Bernard snapped. “You were once, but you took yourself out of that position and if you think — ”

  “Do not,” Manette cut in, “talk to Freddie that way. You’re lucky to have him. We’re all lucky to have him. He appears to be the only honest person working in a position of responsibility at the company.”

  “Does that include you, then?” her father asked.

  “I’m not sure that matters,” Manette told him, “because it certainly includes you.” Perhaps, she thought, she would have said nothing at the end of the day, not wishing to be the one to devastate her own mother. But her father’s remarks to Freddie took things too far in Manette’s eyes, although she didn’t pause to consider why this was the case since the only thing her father had actually said was the absolute truth: Freddie wasn’t a member of the family any longer. She’d seen to that. She said to her mother, “I think Dad has something he’d like to say, something he’d like to explain about himself and Vivienne Tully.”

  “I’m taking that point very well, Manette,” Valerie said. And to Freddie, “Stop the payments to Vivienne at once. Contact her through the bank to which the payments have gone. Tell them to inform her it’s my decision.”

  Bernard said, “That’s not — ”

  “I don’t care what it is and it isn’t,” Valerie said. “Nor should you. Or have you a reason to be paying her that you’d care to explain?”

  Bernard’s expression was agonised. Had things been different, Manette thought she might actually have felt sorry for him. She gave passing consideration to what shits men were, and she waited for her father to attempt to lie his way out of this situation as he was surely going to do, in the hope that she would say nothing about their conversation and what he’d admitted to her about his affair with Vivienne Tully.

  But Bernard Fairclough had always been the luckiest bastard on the planet, and that proved to be the case in that moment. For the door burst open as they sat there waiting for Bernard to answer, and the wind swept in. As Manette turned, thinking she and Freddie had left it off the latch, her brother Nicholas strode into the room.

  LANCASTER

  LANCASHIRE

  Deborah knew the only course open to her was to speak to the woman with Alatea Fairclough. If indeed she was correct in her surmise that what was going on with Alatea had to do with conceiving a child, then she seriously doubted that Alatea was going to be willing to talk about it, especially to someone who’d already been found out as misrepresenting her true purpose in Cumbria. Nor was she likely to unburden herself to a tabloid journalist. Thus, the other woman seemed like the only possibility to get to the bottom of Alatea’s odd behaviour and to learn whether it had anything to do with the death of Ian Cresswell.

  She rang Zed on his mobile. He barked, “You took your bloody sweet time. Where the hell are you? What’s going on? We had a deal and if you’re reneging — ”

  She said, “They’ve gone into a science building.”

  “Well, that’s got us nowhere in a basket. Could be she’s just taking a course. Mature student, right? The other could be doing the same thing.”

  “I must talk to her, Zed.”

  “I thought you already went that route with no result.”

  “I don’t mean Alatea. Obviously, she’s not going to talk to me any more than she’s going to talk to you. I mean the other, the woman she fetched from the disabled soldiers’ home. She’s the one I need to talk to.”

  “Why?”

  And here was where things got tricky. “They seem to have a relationship of some sort. They were talking quite companionably all the way from the car park to the science building. They seemed like friends, and friendships mean confidences shared.”

  “They also mean keeping those confidences to oneself.”

  “Of course. But I find that, outside of London, the Met have a certain cachet with people. Say ‘Scotland Yard CID’ and show your identification and suddenly what was sworn to secrecy gets offered for police consumption.”

  “Same thing with a reporter’s work,” Zed noted.

  Was he joking? Deborah wondered. Probably not. She said, “I take your point, of course.”

  “Then — ”

  “I think I might be a less threatening presence.”

  “How so?”

  “It seems obvious. First, it would be two against one: two complete strangers confronting a woman about her friendship with another woman. Second… Well, there’s your size, Zed, which you have to admit could be rather threatening.”

  “I’m a lamb. She’ll see that.”

  “Perhaps she would. But then there’s the entire matter of who we are. She’ll want to see our identification. Picture the result. I show her mine, you show her yours, and what’s she going to think — let alone do — when she sees the Met in bed with The
Source? It wouldn’t work. The only route we have is for me to talk to this woman privately, see where that takes us, and share the information with you.”

  “And how’m I s’posed to know you’ll do that? I see this as a bloody good route to a double cross.”

  “With your ability to break the story of Scotland Yard’s presence up here on the front page of The Source at any moment? Believe me, Zed, I’m hardly going to play games with you.”

  He was silent. Deborah had retreated a safe distance from the George Childress Centre. She had it in sight, but she didn’t want to risk being seen by Alatea Fairclough should she and the other woman emerge. The way she reckoned, the safest route to take at this point was to return to the disabled soldiers’ home and to wait there for Alatea and her companion to turn up. It could take hours, obviously, but there didn’t seem to be any other choice but a long wait in Zed’s car.

  Which was what she told him. She also said that if he had any other ideas she would be happy to entertain them.

  Luckily, he hadn’t. He wasn’t stupid. He did see that a direct confrontation of the two women together, right on the campus of the University of Lancaster, bore the distinct possibility of getting them nowhere. Superficially at least, the women were engaged in nothing that even looked suspicious. “Aha! What’re you two doing together?” was a very likely route to “None of your business.”

  Zed saw that, although he made it clear to Deborah that he also didn’t like it. It wasn’t his style, he told her, to sit and wait. Journalists didn’t do that. Journalists dug and confronted and got the story. That was at the very core of what a journalist was. That was part of the rich tradition of the profession.

  Deborah wanted to scoff at that one, but she made various murmurs of assent. Too right, yes indeed, I understand. But at the moment they didn’t even know the name of the woman with whom Alatea had come to the university, and without this at the very least, neither one of them could dig for anything.

  She brought Zed round to her way of thinking, albeit reluctantly. He finally said he would meet her at the same spot where she’d hopped out of the car earlier. They’d head back to the disabled soldiers’ home and there they would wait for the return of Alatea Fairclough and her companion. They’d lay their plans during their wait, he said. And there would be a plan, Sergeant Cotter. No way was he going to miss out on this story because of some double dealing at her end.

  “There’ll be no double dealing,” Deborah said. “I recognise that you’ve got me in a tricky spot if I don’t work with you, Zed.”

  He chuckled. “That’s what good reporters do.”

  “Yes, I’m definitely learning that,” she told him.

  They rang off. Deborah waited a few more minutes to see if Alatea and her companion might emerge. They did not. From Deborah’s recollection of the notice board inside the building’s lobby, there were no lecture halls within. It was given over to offices and laboratories. This meant that Alatea and the other woman were probably not there as mature students, as Zed had suggested. And since reproductive science was one of the disciplines studied there, Deborah was certain she was on the track of what Alatea Fairclough had to hide.

  VICTORIA LONDON

  Barbara Havers had to return to the Yard. She needed Winston Nkata’s expertise, and other than a return to Victoria Street, the only way she reckoned she could get it was to convince him to disappear for a few hours and to meet her somewhere with access to the Web. She didn’t have that at her bungalow. She didn’t even own a laptop, having long considered them a drain on the time of the individuals who possessed them. The whole world of the information superhighway was too bloody much for her. She’d liked things better when everything had been controlled simply by on and off switches and when the push-button telephone and telly remotes were as far as technology had gone. Make a few calls and put the burden of information searching on someone else. That was the ticket.

  Now, however, things were different. It was the investigator’s mental shoe leather that got worn down, not the real thing. But while she was finally, albeit reluctantly, developing her capabilities in the area of digging through the ether of the World Wide Web, she was nowhere close to Winston’s level. How did one locate naughty underwear ads featuring a specific model? That was the question. He would have the answer.

  She reckoned she could phone him, but that wouldn’t be the same. She needed to see what was on the screen as a result of his relentless Googling, clicking, and double-clicking.

  So she took herself back to New Scotland Yard. She rang him from the lobby. Meet me in the library, she told him. They had a cloak-and-dagger state of affairs going on. The guv needed to be kept in the dark.

  “Barb…,” he replied.

  Barbara knew exactly what it meant when Winston used that tone. But she also knew how to quell his concerns.

  “The inspector needs some information,” she said. Winnie, she knew, would do anything for Lynley. “You c’n break away, can’t you? It won’t take long.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Looking up dirty pictures.”

  “On a Met computer? You gone dead mad?”

  “Hillier’s orders,” she said. “Really, Winnie, d’you think I actually want to do this? The inspector’s following up on something. It’ll probably turn out to be a fat old cow modelling bras and knickers.”

  He said he’d meet her in the library. But he also said — and this was Winston through and through — that if he ran into the guv and she wanted to know where he was heading, he would tell her the truth.

  “But you will try to avoid her, won’t you?” Barbara clarified. “The inspector’s already in trouble with her for bringing me into this. I bring you into it as well and she’s going to go for his jugular.”

  That did it, as she hoped it would. He would avoid Isabelle Ardery as best he could.

  He was, apparently, successful in this. When Barbara reached the Met’s library on the twelfth floor, Nkata was waiting. He confessed that he’d run into Dorothea Harriman, however, and this wasn’t good news. The departmental secretary had methods of discovery so advanced that she’d probably read Winston’s intentions about the library by looking at his shoelaces. Well, it couldn’t be helped.

  They set to work. Winston’s capable fingers flew across the keys. Once he had the spelling of Alatea Fairclough’s lengthy birth name, he was unstoppable. Screen after screen flashed by. Barbara didn’t attempt to keep up. Winston didn’t explain what he was doing or where they were heading on the Web. He just glanced at things, made a decision of some sort, hit a few more keys, and off they went. He would have done fine in forensic computer work, Barbara reckoned. She was about to tell him this, when a furious “Sergeants Havers and Nkata,” told her that Dorothea Harriman had let something drop and Isabelle Ardery had managed to unearth them.

  Nkata swung round from the computer. If a black man could have been said to go pale, that was what happened. Barbara herself went empty. What was it with the bloody superintendent? she wondered. Was this about Lynley and where he was and why he wasn’t performing nightly between her legs? Or was it about holding the rest of them beneath her thumbnail, like insects about to be pinned to a board?

  Winston stood slowly. He looked at Barbara. She said, “I borrowed Winston for a few minutes, guv. Something I needed to look up and he’s clever with this stuff. I can do it, but it takes me forever and I’m generally hopeless when it comes to figuring where to go next.”

  Isabelle looked her over. Her gaze rested most meaningfully on Barbara’s tee-shirt, which was perfectly readable since she’d flung her donkey jacket on a nearby chair. Christ died for our sins… Let’s not disappoint him clearly did not amuse.

  Ardery said, “Holiday’s over, Sergeant Havers. I want you back at work and wearing something appropriate within an hour.”

  Barbara said, “Due respect, guv — ”

  “Don’t push this, Barbara,” Isabelle told her. “You may have si
x days, six weeks, or six months of holiday time due, but it seems rather obvious that you’re not on holiday. That being the case, get back to work.”

  “I was only going to say — ”

  “Sergeant Havers!” Isabelle barked this time. “Do it now.”

  Barbara said it in a rush. “Guv, I can’t get home and change my clothes and be back in an hour. It’s impossible. Plus I need to get over to University College. If you’ll let me have a day — this day, this one day more, I swear — I’m out of here in thirty seconds and I’m back tomorrow dressed like…” She couldn’t come up with a name. “Like whoever.” She wanted to add “Picture me gorgeous” but she reckoned the superintendent would respond with “I’d rather picture you dead,” so she let that one go. She did add, “I twisted Winston’s arm, guv. Please don’t take things out on him.”

  “Things?” the superintendent snapped. “What things would those be, Sergeant Havers?”

  Next to her, Barbara heard Winston moan, just a small sound that the superintendent didn’t take note of, thank God. She said, “I don’t know. Just… whatever… things. Stress of the job. Life.”

  “Referring to what?” Isabelle was furious now. Barbara wondered how much further she could dig herself.

  “Guv, I don’t know,” she said, although being without Lynley to bonk was fairly high on her list. “I didn’t mean anything by that, anyway. Just something to say.”

  “Yes? Well, don’t play round with ‘just something to say,’ all right? Finish what you’re doing here, then get out of this building. I’ll see you here tomorrow morning and if I do not, you’ll be a traffic warden in Uzbekistan by tomorrow afternoon. Is that clear?”