Believing the Lie il-17

by Elizabeth George

  He rang her mobile at once. Of course, it went immediately to her voice mail. He said, “You must know I’m rather unhappy with you at the moment. We had an arrangement, you and I. Where the hell are you?” but there was nothing more to add. He knew Deborah. There was no point in trying to move her from the obdurate stand she had taken with regard to matters in Cumbria.

  Still he had a look round the town for her before he left, telling himself he owed Simon that much. This ate up more of his day and accomplished nothing save an extended study of Milnthorpe, which, for some reason, appeared to have a plethora of Chinese takeaways round the market square. He finally returned to the inn, wrote her a note, left it with the receptionist, and went on his way.

  When his phone rang on the approach to the M56, then, he thought at first it was Deborah, ready to be profuse with her apologies. He answered without glancing at the incoming number, barking, “What?” only to hear Sergeant Havers’s voice instead.

  She said, “Right. Well. Hullo back at you. Which one is it, then? Did you have a personality transplant or a toss-and-turn night?”

  He said, “Sorry. I’m on the motorway.”

  “Heading…?”

  “Home, where else?”

  “Not a good idea, sir.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Just ring me when you can talk. Find a services area. I don’t want you crashing that expensive motor of yours. I’ve already got the Bentley on my conscience.”

  The next services area was a Welcome Break, and he had to travel some way to find it. It was a quarter of an hour before he got there, but the car park wasn’t crowded and there was virtually no one inside the unappealing sprawl of sticky-floored cafeteria, shops, newsagents, and children’s play area. He bought himself a coffee and took it to a table. He rang Havers’s mobile.

  “Hope you’re sitting down,” were her words when she answered.

  “I was sitting down the first time we spoke,” he reminded her.

  “Okay, okay.” She brought him up to the minute on what she’d been doing, which appeared mostly to be keeping out of Isabelle Ardery’s sight in order to do research on the Internet, for which she seemed to be developing a distinct liking. She talked about a Spanish graduate student; her neighbour Taymullah Azhar, with whom Lynley was acquainted; the town of Santa Maria de la Cruz, de los Angeles, y de los Santos; and finally the five sons of the mayor of that town. She ended with the purpose of her call, always someone who liked to build to dramatic moments:

  “And here’s the situation in a nutshell. There is no Alatea Vasquez y del Torres. Or perhaps better put: There is and there isn’t an Alatea Vasquez y del Torres.”

  “Hadn’t you already established that Alatea’s probably from another part of the family?”

  “To borrow unblushingly from rock ’n’ roll history, sir: That was yesterday and yesterday’s gone.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning Alatea’s from this part of the family. She’s just not Alatea.”

  “Who is she, then?”

  “She’s Santiago.”

  Lynley tried to take this in. Around him, a cleaner was industriously mopping the floor, casting meaningful glances in his direction as if with the hope he’d vacate the premises, giving access to the floor beneath his chair. He said, “Barbara, what on earth do you mean?”

  “I mean exactly what I say, sir. Alatea is Santiago. Santiago is Alatea. Either that or they are identical twins, and if I remember my biology correctly, there is no such thing as identical twins of the male-female sort. A biological impossibility.”

  “So we’re talking about… What, exactly, are we talking about?”

  “Cross-dressing, sir. Impeccable female impersonation. A tasty secret one would hope to keep from the family, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would say, yes. In certain circumstances. But in these circumstances — ”

  Havers cut in. “Sir, here’s how it is: The trail on Santiago goes dead when he’s about fifteen years old. That’s when, I daresay, he started passing himself off as someone called Alatea. He ran away from home round then as well. I got that, among other details, from a phone call to the family.”

  She began to tell him what she’d learned from her earlier meeting with the graduate student Engracia after that call the young woman had placed to Argentina: the family wanted Alatea to come home; her father and her brothers now understood; Carlos — “He’s the priest,” Havers reminded Lynley — made them understand; everyone was praying for Alatea’s return; they’d been searching for years; she must not continue to run; Elena Maria’s heart was broken-

  “Who’s Elena Maria?” Lynley felt as if his head were filling with wet cotton wool.

  “Cousin,” Havers said. “Way I figure it, Santiago did a runner because he liked to cross-dress, which — let’s face it — probably didn’t go down a treat with his brothers and his dad. Latin types, you know? Macho and all that, if you’ll pardon the stereotyping. Anyway, somewhere along the line he met up with Raul Montenegro — ”

  “Who the dickens — ”

  “Rich bloke in Mexico City. Rolling in enough lolly to build a concert hall and name it for his mum. Anyway, Santiago meets him, and Raul likes him, as in Raul likes him, because Raul likes to bat for the same side, if you know what I mean. And he prefers his partners young and nubile. From what I’ve seen in photos, he prefers them well oiled as well, but that’s neither here nor there, eh? Anyway, we’ve got heaven in a basket for these two blokes. On the one hand we have Santiago, who likes dressing up and making himself up like a woman, which, over time, he’s learned to do bloody well. On the other hand, we have Raul, who meets Santiago and has no problem whatsoever with Santiago’s dressing habits since he — Raul — is bent like a twig but would rather not have anyone actually know that. So he takes up with Santiago, who, when he’s fixed himself up, looks like a gorgeous dolly bird, and Raul can even take him out in public. They keep company, so to speak, until something better comes along.”

  “That something better being…?”

  “Nicholas Fairclough, I expect.”

  Lynley shook his head. It was all so wildly improbable. He said, “Havers, tell me: Are you surmising all this, or do you actually have any real facts?”

  She was unoffended. “Sir, it all fits. Santiago’s mum knew exactly who we were talking about when Engracia asked her about Alatea. She didn’t know who Engracia was other than someone looking for Alatea, so she also wouldn’t have known that we’d already turned up the fact that there were only sons in the family. Since we knew there were only sons, Engracia and I both thought Alatea was someone else in the extended family — just like you did — but when I followed the trail on Santiago and then went back in time with Alatea’s modeling pictures to find the youngest ones of her… Believe me, sir, she’s Santiago. He ran off to take up life as a woman with no one the wiser because of how he looks, and once he met Raul Montenegro, he was set. Things probably just went swimmingly between them — Alatea and Raul — till Nicholas Fairclough came along.”

  Lynley had to admit there were possibilities in this. For Nicholas Fairclough, former drug addict and drunk, was probably not going to want his parents to know that he was now living with a man posing as his wife, with a false marriage certificate the only documentation that would give this person the right to remain in the country anyway.

  “Could Ian Cresswell somehow have discovered all this?” Lynley said, more to himself than to Havers.

  “Give that barker a bone,” was how Havers put her agreement to this consideration. “’Cause all things considered, sir, when he first saw her, who’d have known what he was looking at better than Ian Cresswell?”

  MILNTHORPE

  CUMBRIA

  Deborah was feeling rotten even before the receptionist at the Crow and Eagle handed her Tommy’s message. For everything that she’d been trying to do was falling apart at the seams.

  She’d tried to draw the horrib
le reporter from The Source along the primrose path of there being no story to be got from what they learned from Lucy Keverne in Lancaster. Since Zed Benjamin still thought of Deborah as the Scotland Yard detective he’d assumed her to be from the first, she had hoped that when she said, “Well, my work here is finished,” he’d go along and conclude his own work was finished in Cumbria as well. After all, if the putative detective had decided there was no case to answer, it stood to reason there was also no story.

  But that was not how Zed Benjamin looked at matters, as things turned out. He said the story was just beginning.

  This had filled Deborah with horror at what she might be exposing Alatea and Nicholas Fairclough to, so she had asked Zed Benjamin what sort of story he thought he had. “Two people want to pay a woman more than they’re supposed to pay her to be a surrogate mother for their child,” she pointed out. “How many people like that are there in the country? How many people don’t have a friend or a relative who’s willing to be a surrogate for free, just for compassion’s sake? It’s a ridiculous law and there’s no story to write.”

  But again, that wasn’t how Zed Benjamin saw it. The law itself was the story, he declared. It produced desperate women looking for desperate remedies using desperate means to attain them.

  Deborah said, “Pardon me for saying so, Mr. Benjamin, but I hardly think The Source is going to issue a clarion call for women’s reproductive issues upon your recommendation.”

  “We’ll see,” he’d promised.

  They’d parted ways at the door to her lodgings, and she’d trudged inside, only to be given a sealed envelope with her name written on the outside in a cursive she recognised from years of receiving letters from Tommy while she studied photography in California.

  The message was brief: Deb, What can I say? Tommy. And it was true enough. What could he say? She’d lied to him, she’d ignored his phone call on her mobile, and now he was as upset with her as Simon was. What a mess she’d made of things.

  She went to her room and began to pack up her belongings. As she did so, she considered the various ways in which she’d utterly bollocksed up everything. First, there was the matter of Simon’s brother, David, whom she’d strung along by refusing to make up her mind about the open adoption he was trying to arrange purely out of a desire to help them. Then there was Simon, whom she’d alienated in any number of ways but particularly by being so bloody minded about remaining in Cumbria when it was clear that their real business in the county — which had been to assist Tommy with his enquiry into Ian Cresswell’s death — was completed. Finally, there was Alatea Fairclough, whose hopes for a surrogacy were now probably dashed by Deborah’s bashing into her private affairs when all she wanted was what Deborah herself wanted: the chance to bring a child into the world.

  Deborah stopped packing for a moment and lowered herself to the bed. She thought about how much of her life had been dominated over the last few years by something completely out of her control. It was beyond her power to grant her own wish. She could do nothing to make herself a mother simply because she wanted to be one. Alatea Fairclough had probably gone through exactly what she herself was going through.

  Deborah could see at last why the South American woman had been so fearful of her presence and so reluctant to talk to her. She and her husband were set to pay someone to carry a baby for them and for all she knew, Deborah had been sent there to Cumbria by Lancaster University’s reproduction scientists to sniff out the truth behind her arrangement with Lucy Keverne before they went forward with all the procedures required for a surrogate pregnancy. And there’d be a handful of them, no doubt about it. None of which would begin until the scientists and the doctors were certain about Alatea Fairclough and the surrogate.

  So Deborah had been dogging the poor woman since the moment she herself had set foot in Cumbria when all along, she and Alatea Fairclough had in common the most agonising of desires, something granted so easily to other women, something often even deemed a “mistake” in the lives of other women as well.

  Deborah realised she owed apologies everywhere for how she’d conducted herself over the past few days. She had to begin those apologies with one to Alatea Fairclough. Before leaving Cumbria for the south, she resolved, that was what she was going to do.

  MILNTHORPE

  CUMBRIA

  So much of what Zed had said to the Scotland Yard detective was bluster, and he knew it. After he dropped her off at her hotel, he didn’t return to Windermere. Instead, he went across the main road through Milnthorpe and made his way to the street that ran east to west along the market square. There was a Spar shop at a junction where another street led off to a grim-looking housing estate of unremittingly grey roughcast, and he parked nearby and went inside. It was cluttered and hot and it suited both his mood and his thoughts.

  He browsed aimlessly for a few minutes before caving in and buying a copy of The Source. This he carried the short distance to Milnthorpe Chippy, which stood not far from an impressive butcher shop in whose front window an array of venison pies was displayed.

  Inside the chippy, Zed bought a double order of haddock and chips and a Fanta Orange. Once he had his food arranged on the table in front of him, he unfolded The Source, and he girded himself to look at the day’s lead story and, worse, at its byline.

  That louse Mitchell Corsico had both. It was a nothing story, a real piece of rubbish: A very minor member of the royal family had been outed with a bastard child who was mixed-race, photos included. She was a girl. She was five years old. She was also pretty in that way that mixed-race people often are, having received the best of every chromosome from her progenitors. Her royal father could not accede to the throne unless the present monarch and family and extended family were all partying on a ship in the Atlantic the moment that it hit an iceberg, and that detail robbed the story not only of legs but also toes. However, this fact clearly was of no matter to Mitchell Corsico or, obviously, to Rodney Aronson, who would have made the decision to give the tale the front page, no matter how minor the minor member of the royal family was.

  The front page suggested this could well be the explosive revelation of the year, the decade, or even the century, and The Source was squeezing it like the udders of a dying cow. Rodney had given it the full treatment: three-inch headline, photos grainy and otherwise, the byline for Mitch, and a jump to page 8 — now that said volumes about what Rodney really thought he was offering for public consumption, didn’t it? — where the story went into the uninspiring background of the child’s mother and the even less inspiring background of the minor royal, who, unlike a lot of the monarchical family, at least had been born with a chin.

  Of course, the tabloid had to take care, political correctness being all the rage. But really, it was a who-bloody-gives-a-toss piece to offer to the public anyway. Zed’s conclusion was that it had to have been a very slow day in the sewers for this to be what Rodney had come up with.

  Zed reckoned this might actually put him in a good position to snag the front page when he lined up his Cumbria facts and worked them into a story. So he pushed The Source to one side, doused his haddock and chips with malt vinegar, popped open his Fanta Orange, and began to sort through what he’d gathered on Nick Fairclough and the delectable Alatea.

  Big was not a word that could be used to describe the story he had. The Scotland Yard detective had been right in that. Nick Fairclough and his wife were going to pay a woman more than just her expenses to have a baby for them, and while this wasn’t legal, it also wasn’t a story. The question was how to make it into one, a sensational one, or at least a member-of-the-royal-family-has-a-bastard-child one.

  Zed considered his options, which were all those details he had to work with. Essentially, he had eggs, sperm, man, woman, another woman, and money. Whose eggs, whose sperm, which man, which woman, and whose money? were the various topics to be massaged into an epic piece of journalism.

  Here, too, there were possibilities. Perh
aps poor Alatea’s eggs were not good enough (was there such a thing? he wondered) to do what they needed to do, such as to drop (did they drop?) into her wherever to meet up with Nick’s you-know-what. Since they weren’t good enough, someone else’s eggs had to be used. But Nick and Alatea didn’t want the family wise to this for reasons of …what? Inheritance? What were the laws on inheritance these days? Was there an inheritance involved, anyway, beyond a firm manufacturing toilets and other unappealing products, the mention of which could turn the story into a real boffola with Zed the butt of every joke in Fleet Street? Or perhaps Nick’s swimmers weren’t up to the job? Years of drug use had rendered them too weak to make the journey or to do much poking when they reached the destination? So someone else’s swimmers were being used with the resulting baby being passed off as a bona fide Fairclough? That would be nice.

  Or perhaps it was all about the money that was going to be paid to Lucy Keverne? With Nick’s history, wasn’t it possible that he was selling a little something on the side — other than toilets — to collect enough money to pay the woman? Could the doctors be on the take as well? That was another possibility.

  By the time Zed had finished his double order of haddock and chips, he’d reached the conclusion that the best angle from which to write the tawdry tale of buying a baby-making machine — which was how he was going to sell it to Rodney — was to begin with Nick Fairclough. His reasoning behind this was simple enough. He knew human nature, perhaps not perfectly but well enough. And what he knew about human nature told him that the moment he and the Scotland Yard detective had left Lucy Keverne, she’d picked up the phone to ring Alatea Fairclough and to let her know the worst.

  That left him with Nick and putting a little pressure on him for the real tale behind the deal with the woman in Lancaster.