Believing the Lie il-17

by Elizabeth George

  “Pay dirt,” Barbara murmured.

  “This is…?”

  “Sorry. Just an expression. We might be getting somewhere.”

  She smiled. “Ah. ‘Pay dirt.’ I like this very much.” Then her expression altered as a distant voice bridged the thousands of miles between London and Argentina. The rapid-fire Spanish began again. There were many comprendos and many more sis. A few sabes? and several no sabos and then gracias over and over again.

  When the call was completed, Barbara said, “Well? Yes? What’ve we got?”

  “A message for Alatea,” Engracia said. “This woman Dominga says to tell Alatea she must come home. She says to tell her that her father understands. She says the boys also understand. Carlos, she says, has made all of the family pray and what they pray for is for her safe return.”

  “Did she happen to mention who the hell she is?”

  “A member of the family, it seems.”

  “A sister who didn’t get in that old picture? A sister born after the picture was taken? A wife of one of the boys? A cousin? A niece? What?”

  “She did not say, at least not clearly. But she told me the girl ran from her home when she was fifteen. They thought she went to Buenos Aires and they search for her there for many years. Particularly Elena Maria searches. Dominga said Elena Maria’s heart was broken and Alatea must be told that as well.”

  “How many years are we talking about that she’s been gone, then?”

  “Alatea? Thirteen,” Engracia said.

  “And she ended up in Cumbria,” Barbara murmured. “By what route and how the hell…?”

  She’d been speaking to herself but Engracia replied, reaching for one of the copied articles she’d already looked at. Barbara saw it was the piece on Raul Montenegro. Engracia said, “Perhaps this man helped her? If he has enough money to pay for a symphony music hall, he has more than enough to purchase a ticket to London for a beautiful woman, no? Or a ticket to any place else. Indeed, to any place she might like to go.”

  LAKE WINDERMERE

  CUMBRIA

  They were like a tableau for thirty seconds or so, although the thirty seconds seemed much longer. During this period, Mignon directed her gaze from one person to another and her face blazed with a triumph that she’d obviously been waiting years to feel. Manette felt like a character in the midst of a stage play. This was the climax of the drama, and everything afterwards was going to provide them with the catharsis guaranteed in all Greek tragedies.

  Valerie was the first person to move. She stood and said in that well-bred fashion of hers that Manette knew so well, “Please excuse me,” and she began to leave the great hall.

  Mignon said in a burble of laughter, “Don’t you want to know more, Mum? You can’t leave now. Wouldn’t you like to have it all?”

  Valerie hesitated, then turned and looked at Mignon. “You make a very good case for strangling one’s children at birth,” she said, and she left them.

  The inspector followed her. Obviously, new light was being shed upon everything and there was now a very good chance, Manette thought, that he was reconsidering whatever conclusions he’d drawn about Ian’s death. She was doing the same herself because if Ian had known about this child of her father’s… if he’d made some kind of threat regarding this child and what he knew about her… if, indeed, it had come down to a choice between the truth being revealed or a lie continuing to be lived… Manette saw how her cousin’s life had been in danger, and she reckoned the detective saw it as well.

  She didn’t want to believe what Mignon had revealed about this child Bianca, but she could see by the expression on her father’s face that Mignon’s revelation was the truth. She didn’t know how she felt about this, and she didn’t know when she might even be able to sort through her feelings in the matter. But she saw how Mignon felt about it: just another reason to blame their father for whatever she believed had been lacking in her life.

  Mignon said to him happily, “Oh my, Dad. Well, at least you and I are going down in this ship together, aren’t we? I do expect there’s some consolation in that for you. To be doomed but to see your favourite child — that would be me, wouldn’t it? — doomed alongside you? Rather like King Lear and Cordelia. Only… Who’s playing the Fool?”

  Bernard’s lips were as thin as a bowl of workhouse gruel. He said, “I think you’re rather mistaken, Mignon, although you’ve got the serpent’s-tooth part of it bang on the money.”

  She wasn’t the least taken aback. “D’you think marital forgiveness actually runs that far?”

  He said, “I don’t think you know the first thing about marriage or forgiveness.”

  At this Manette glanced at Freddie. He was watching her, his dark eyes concerned. She understood he was worried for her, anxious about how she was taking in being a witness to her family’s destruction. Before her eyes, the world as she’d known it was undergoing a cataclysmic change. She wanted to tell him she could cope with that, but she knew she didn’t want to cope alone.

  Mignon said to their father, “Did you really think you could keep Bianca a secret forever? My God, what an enormous ego you have. Tell me, Dad, what was poor little Bianca to make of everything when she learned about her father and his other family? His legitimate family. But you hadn’t got that far along in your consideration of the future, had you? As long as Vivver was willing to play the game your way, you probably didn’t think one moment beyond what kind of fuck she was and how often you could manage it.”

  “Vivienne,” her father replied, “is going home to New Zealand. And this conversation is quite finished.”

  “I’ll say when it’s finished,” Mignon told him. “Not you. Never you. She’s younger than we are, this Vivienne of yours. She’s younger than Nick.”

  Bernard walked to the front door then, passing Mignon to do so. She tried to grab his arm, but he shook her off. Manette expected her sister to use that gesture as an opportunity to topple from the sofa to the floor and proclaim herself the victim of abuse, but instead, she merely carried on talking. She said, “I’ll speak to Mother. I’ll tell her the rest. How long you’ve been having an affair with Vivienne Tully: Is it ten years, Dad? Longer than that? How old she was when it all began: She was twenty-four, wasn’t she? Or was she younger? How Bianca came about: She wanted her, didn’t she? She wanted a baby and you did as well, didn’t you, Dad? Because when Bianca was born, Nick was still out there doing his Nick thing and you were still hoping that someone, somewhere, some bloody time was going to give you a decent male child, weren’t you, Dad? And won’t Mother just love hearing that?”

  Bernard said, “Do your worst, Mignon. It is, I think, what you’ve always wanted.”

  “I hate you,” she said.

  “As always,” he replied.

  “Did you hear me? I hate you.”

  “For my sins,” Bernard said, “believe me, I know. And perhaps I deserve it. Now leave my house.”

  There was a moment of impasse during which Manette thought her sister might refuse. Mignon stared at her father as if waiting for something that Manette knew very well was never going to appear. Finally, she shoved her zimmer to one side. She smiled, rose, and strolled easily out of her father’s life.

  When the door was closed upon her, Bernard took a linen handkerchief from his pocket. He wiped his glasses with it, then he used it against his face. Manette could see that his hands were shaking. Everything was on the line for him, not the least a marriage of more than forty years.

  He finally looked from Manette to Freddie and back to Manette. He said, “I’m so sorry, my dear. There are so many things…”

  “I’m not sure they matter any longer.” How odd, Manette thought. She’d waited most of her life for this moment: with herself in a superior position and Bernard made vulnerable, with Bernard looking at her and actually seeing her, not as a daughter, not as a substitute for the kind of son he’d wished for, but as a person in her own right, fully capable of anything he hi
mself could do. She no longer knew why all of that had been so important to her. She only knew that she didn’t feel what she’d expected to feel with his recognition of her washing over her at last.

  Bernard nodded. He said, “Freddie…”

  Freddie said, “If I’d been told, I would have probably stopped it all from happening. But then, I don’t know, do I? I’m not sure.”

  “You’re a good, honest man, Fred. Stay that way.” Bernard excused himself and went to the stairs. He climbed them heavily and Manette and Freddie listened to his footfalls. Eventually, they faded. A door closed quietly somewhere above them.

  “We should probably leave, old girl,” Freddie said to Manette. “If you’re able, that is.”

  He came to her and she allowed him to help her to her feet, not because she needed it but because it felt good to feel someone solid at her side. They left the great hall and went outdoors. It wasn’t until they were in the car and heading along the drive in the direction of the gate that she began to weep. She tried to do this silently, but Freddie glanced in her direction. He pulled the car over at once and stopped. Gently, he took her into his arms.

  He said, “It’s a tough one. Seeing one’s parents like that. Knowing how one has demolished the other. I expect your mother knew something wasn’t quite right, but perhaps it was easier just to ignore it. That’s the way these things are sometimes.”

  She cried against his shoulder but she shook her head.

  He said, “What? Well, of course, your sister’s mad as a rabid dog, but there’s nothing much new in that, is there? I do wonder, though, how you managed to emerge so… well, so normal, Manette. It’s rather miraculous when you think about it.”

  At this, she wept harder. It was all too late: what she now knew, what she should have seen, and what she finally understood.

  LAKE WINDERMERE

  CUMBRIA

  Lynley found Valerie Fairclough walking along one of the paths already laid out in the unfinished children’s garden. When he joined her, she began to speak as if they had been interrupted in the midst of a conversation about this very spot. She pointed out where work on the wrecked ship had already begun and told him about the ropes, swings, and sand that would be a feature of it. She indicated the spot designated for monkey bars and a roundabout. She took him past the smaller children’s section, where horses, kangaroos, and large frogs already stood on their heavy spring bases, waiting for riders who would laugh and crow with the simple fun of bouncing upon them. There would be a fort as well, she said, because boys loved forts to play soldiers in, didn’t they? And for the girls there would be a playhouse stocked with everything in miniature that one would find in a real house because wasn’t the truth of the matter — and all sexism aside — that girls liked to play inside houses and make up games in which they were married with children and a husband who came home at night and presided over dinner?

  She laughed mirthlessly when she said that last bit. Then she went on to say that the children’s area would be, in short, every child’s dream place to play.

  Lynley thought it all quite odd. What she was building was more suitable for a public park than a private home. He wondered what her expectation of its use really was, whether she had a larger picture in mind, one that meant opening Ireleth Hall to the public in the manner of so many great houses across the country. It was quite as if she’d known an enormous change was coming and was preparing for it.

  He said to her, “Why did you arrange for me to come to Cumbria?”

  Valerie looked at him. At sixty-seven years old, she was a striking woman. In her youth she would have possessed great beauty. Beauty and money: a powerful combination. She could have chosen from a score of men of similar background to her own, but she had not done so.

  “Because I’ve suspected for quite some time.”

  “What?”

  “Bernard. What he was up to. I didn’t know for certain that he was ‘up to’ Vivienne Tully, of course, but I probably should have realised that as well. When he didn’t mention her after the second time she and I met, those trips to London of his that became more frequent, so many things associated with his foundation that needed his attention … There are always signs, Inspector. There are always clues, red flags, whatever you wish to call them. But it’s generally easier to ignore them than to face the unknown that’s going to arise out of the wreckage of a forty-two-year marriage.” She picked up a discarded plastic coffee cup, something left by one of the workers. She frowned at this and crushed it into her pocket. She shaded her eyes and looked out at the lake, at storm clouds that were brewing on the hills to the west. “I am surrounded by liars and knaves. I wanted to smoke them out of their hiding places. You” — and here she cast him a small smile — “you were my fire, Inspector.”

  “What of Ian?”

  “Poor Ian.”

  “Mignon could have killed him. She had motive, a very strong motive if it comes to that. By your own admission, she was in the boathouse. She could have gone in there earlier and loosened the stones somehow, in an undetectable way. She could even have been in there when he returned. She could have pulled him from the scull, pushed him from it…”

  “Inspector, that sort of revenge is far beyond Mignon’s ability to plan. Besides, she would have seen no immediate monetary gain in that. And the only thing Mignon has ever been able to see clearly is the monetary gain of the moment.” She turned from the lake, then, and looked at Lynley. She said, “I knew the stones were loose. I’d told Ian as much, more than once. He and I were the only ones who used the boathouse regularly, so I told no one else. There was no need. I warned him to take care getting in and out of his scull. He said not to worry, that he would take care and when he had a moment, he’d fix the dock. But I think that night he had other things on his mind. He must have done. It was quite out of the ordinary that he came to row that late anyway. I think he wasn’t paying close enough attention. It was always an accident, Inspector. I knew that from the first.”

  Lynley considered this. “And that filleting knife I found in the water with the stones?”

  “I threw it there. Just to keep you here, in case you decided too soon it was an accident.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “Are you terribly angry?”

  “I ought to be.” They turned and headed back towards the house. Above the walls of the topiary garden, the towering mass of shaped shrubbery loomed and behind it Ireleth Hall itself, sand coloured and teeming with history. He said, “Didn’t Bernard think it unusual?”

  “What?”

  “Your asking for an investigation into his nephew’s death.”

  “Perhaps he did, but what could he say? ‘I don’t want that’? I would have asked why. He would have tried to explain. Perhaps he would have said it was unfair to Nicholas, to Manette, to Mignon to suspect them, but I would have argued it’s better to know the truth about one’s children than to live a lie and that, Inspector, would have taken us far too close to the truth Bernard himself didn’t want me to know. He had to run the risk you wouldn’t unearth Vivienne. He really had no choice in the matter.”

  “For what it’s worth, she’s returning to New Zealand.”

  She made no response to this. She took his arm as they worked their way along the path. She said, “What’s odd is this: After more than forty years of marriage, a man often becomes a habit. I must consider whether Bernard is a habit I would prefer to break.”

  “Might you?”

  “I might. But first I want the time to think.” She squeezed his arm and looked up at him. “You’re a very handsome man, Inspector. I’m sorry you lost your wife. But I hope you don’t intend to remain alone. Do you?”

  “I haven’t thought about it much,” he admitted.

  “Well, do think about it. We all have to choose eventually.”

  WINDERMERE

  CUMBRIA

  Tim spent hours in the business centre waiting for the time to be right. It hadn’t taken
him that long to reach the town once he’d left Kaveh that morning. He’d leaped over a drystone wall and jogged across a lumpy paddock in the direction of dense woods comprising fir trees and birches. He’d remained there — in a shelter of autumn-hued bracken backed by the trunk of a fallen spruce — until he was certain Kaveh had driven off, and then he’d worked his way over to the road to Windermere, where two lifts took him to the middle of town, at which point he began his search.

  He’d had no luck in finding a restorer of broken toys. At long last, he’d had to settle upon an establishment called J. Bobak amp; Son, a shop dedicated to the repair of all things electrical. Inside this place three aisles crammed with broken kitchen appliances led to the back, where J. Bobak turned out to be a woman with grey plaits, a lined face, and bright pink lipstick that ran up the cracks above her lips while Son turned out to be a kid in his twenties with Down’s syndrome. She was tinkering with something that looked like a miniature waffle iron. He was working on an old-time wireless that was nearly the size of a Mini. All round both Son and his mother stood various appliances in various stages of repair: television sets, microwaves, mixers, toasters, and coffeemakers, some of which looked as if they’d been waiting for expert electrical ministrations for a decade or more.

  When Tim presented J. Bobak with Bella, she’d shaken her head. This poor lump of arms and legs and body couldn’t be repaired at all, he was told, even if J. Bobak amp; Son repaired toys, which they did not. At least, she couldn’t be repaired in a way that would be pleasing to her owner. He’d be better off saving his money to buy a new doll. There was a toy shop-

  It had to be this doll, he told J. Bobak. He knew it was rude to interrupt and the expression on J. Bobak’s face indicated she was about to tell him so. He went on to explain the doll belonged to his little sister and their dad had given it to her and their dad was dead. This got to J. Bobak. She laid the doll’s pieces out on the shop counter and pursed her bright pink lips thoughtfully. Her son came to join her. He said, “Hi,” to Tim, and “I don’t go to school any longer but you’re supposed to be in school, eh? Betcher doing a bunk today.” His mum said, “Trev, you see to your own job, luv. There’s a good boy,” and patted him on his shoulder as he snuffled noisily against his arm and went back to the enormous radio.