Believing the Lie il-17

by Elizabeth George

  “You’ve gone to see about a room for me,” he assured her. “I’ve just booked in and you’re letting me use this thing to check for crucial messages. Twenty minutes?”

  She nodded. She pocketed the ten- and twenty-pound notes and headed for the stairs to play her part. He waited till she’d mounted them and made the turn round the landing before he began to write.

  The story led in every direction. Its parts were like tributaries pouring into the Amazon, and all he had to do was paddle up them. He began to do so.

  He went first with the Scotland Yard angle and the irony attached to it: A detective sent up to Cumbria to investigate the drowning of Ian Cresswell ends up stumbling upon an illegal surrogacy deal that could — bet on it — lead to an entire illegal surrogacy ring that fed on the desperation of couples struggling to conceive. Then he touched on the artistic angle: The struggling playwright so desperate to support herself that she was willing to sell her body in pursuit of the higher calling of her art. He moved directly from there to the deception angle and was pounding away at the tale of Nick Fairclough’s ignorance in the manner of his wife’s deal with Lucy Keverne when his cell phone rang.

  Yaffa! he thought. He needed to tell her that all was well. She would be worrying about him. She would want to encourage him. She would have words of wisdom and he wanted to hear them and more than that he wanted to interrupt her with the news of his impending triumph.

  “Got it,” he said. “Darling, it’s hot.”

  “I didn’t know you and I were that close,” Rodney Aronson said. “Where the bloody hell are you? Why aren’t you back in London by now?”

  Zed stopped typing. “I’m not in London,” he said, “because I’ve got the story. All of it. From bloody alpha to sodding omega. Hold the front page because you’re going to want this plastered across it.”

  “What is it?” Rodney didn’t sound like a man experiencing a come-to-Jesus moment.

  Zed rattled it all off: the surrogacy deal, the starving artist, the husband in ignorance. He saved the very best for last: the humble reporter — that would be me, he pointed out — working hand-in-glove with the detective from New Scotland Yard.

  “She and I cornered the woman in Lancaster,” Zed announced. “And once we had her — ”

  “Hang on,” Rodney said. “‘She and I’?”

  “Right. The Scotland Yard detective and I. She’s called DS Cotter. Detective sergeant. She’s the one investigating the Cresswell death. Only she got sidetracked onto Nick Fairclough and his wife and as it turned out, that was a dynamite direction. Not for her, of course, but for me.”

  Rodney said nothing at his end. Zed waited for the kudos to flow. He waited in vain. For a moment he thought they’d been cut off. He said, “Rod? You there?”

  Rodney finally said, “You are one fucking loser, Zedekiah. You know that, don’t you? One fucking class-A loser.”

  “Sorry?”

  “There is no Detective Cotter, you idiot.”

  “But — ”

  “Detective Inspector Lynley is up there, the bloke whose wife took a bullet from a twelve-year-old kid last winter. Sound familiar? It was front-page news for two weeks.” He didn’t wait for Zed to make a reply. Instead he went on with, “Jesus, you are pathetic, you know? Get back to town. Collect your wages. You and The Source are through.”

  ARNSIDE

  CUMBRIA

  Alatea saw them in the driveway. Their body language told her everything. This was not a conversation between strangers who happen to come upon each other in passing at the same destination. This was an exchange between colleagues, friends, or associates. The exchange was one of information shared. She could tell this much when the woman tilted her head towards Arnside House in the manner of someone speaking about it. Or, more likely, speaking about a person within it. Or, most likely, speaking about her. About Alatea, once Santiago. About her past and what would now be her future.

  Alatea didn’t wait to see anything more pass between the woman and the man from Scotland Yard. Her world was collapsing so quickly around her that the only idea she had in her mind was flight. She would have run like a lioness in pursuit of food if she had a single place she could go, but her routes were limited so she was forced to calm herself long enough to think, just to think.

  The woman needed confirmation of Alatea’s identity. The detective, obviously, would give it, courtesy of Alatea herself, who could have denied, who should have denied, but who had not thought quickly enough to deny. That much was established, for what else could they have to discuss with each other? The only questions that possibly remained were those that Alatea herself could ask. Had the woman outside with the Scotland Yard detective sent photos of Alatea to Raul Montenegro already? If she had not, was she open to bribery, a payment for maintaining silence, for reporting to Raul that Santiago Vasquez y del Torres, who had become Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, who had married Nicholas Fairclough to escape a past that tied her to a man she had learned to hate, was not in Cumbria, was not in England, was nowhere in the UK to be found? If she was open to bribery, Alatea was safe. Only for now, of course. But now was all she had.

  She ran to the stairway. She flew to the bedroom she shared with Nicholas and from beneath the bed, she brought out a locked box. A key from her dressing table gained her access, and within the box she had money. Not a lot, not a fortune, not what Raul was paying to find her, surely. But along with her jewellery, perhaps there was enough to tempt this woman who was closing in now, who was hearing the truth from the detective even as Alatea gathered what she could to keep that truth from spilling out of the hidden corners of her life.

  She was back down stairs when the expected knock sounded against the front door. The woman would not know Alatea had seen her in conversation with Inspector Lynley. For a moment this gave Alatea the upper hand, and she intended to use it.

  She pressed her slick hands against her trouser legs. She closed her eyes briefly and said, “Dios mio por favor,” and then she opened the door with as much assurance as she could muster.

  The red-haired woman spoke first, saying, “Mrs. Fairclough, I’ve not been truthful with you. May I come in and explain?”

  “What do you want from me?” For her part, Alatea was stiff and formal. There was nothing to shame her, she told herself. She had already paid the price of Raul’s help in altering her body. She would not pay more.

  “I’ve been following you and watching you,” the woman said. “You must know that — ”

  “What is he paying you?” Alatea asked.

  “There’s no money involved.”

  “There’s always money involved. I can’t afford to pay what he’s paying, but I ask you… No, I beg you…” Alatea turned from the woman to where she’d placed the strongbox and her jewellery. “I have this,” she said as she scooped up these things. “I can give you this.”

  The woman took a step backwards. She said, “I don’t want these things. I’m here only to — ”

  “You must take them. And then you must leave. You don’t know him. You cannot know what people like him are capable of.”

  The woman thought, her brows drawn together and her eyes on Alatea as she weighed the words she’d heard. Alatea thrust the money and the jewellery at her once again, but the woman nodded and she said, “Ah. I do see. I’m afraid it might be too late, Mrs. Fairclough. Some things are unstoppable and I think he could be one of them. There’s a desperation to him… He doesn’t say exactly but I get the impression there’s a lot on the line for him just now.”

  “He’d make you believe that. That’s how he is. It was clever of him to use a woman. For reassurance, he thinks. To calm my fears. While all the while his intention is to destroy me. He has the power to do this and he intends to use it.”

  “There’s no story, though. No real story. Not a story that a paper like The Source would care about.”

  “And this is supposed to reassure me?” Alatea demanded. “What does a story in The
Source have to do with anything? What does it have to do with what he’s asking of you? You’ve photographed me, haven’t you? You’ve followed me and you’ve photographed me and that’s the proof he wants.”

  “You don’t understand,” the other woman said. “He doesn’t need proof. These types never do. Proof is nothing to them. They start their business just this side of the law and if they slip over onto the other side, they have a score of solicitors to take care of the problem.”

  “Then let me buy your photos,” Alatea said. “If he sees them, if he sees me in them…” She took off her wedding rings, the diamond and the band. She took off a large emerald that Valerie Fairclough had given her as a wedding gift. She said, “Here. Please. Take these as well. In exchange for your photos.”

  “But photos are nothing. They’re meaningless without words. It’s the words that count. It’s what’s written that counts. And anyway, I don’t want your money and I don’t want your jewellery. I just want to apologise for… well, for everything but especially for how I might have ruined things for you. We’re much the same, you and I. With different cause, I daresay, but otherwise the same.”

  Alatea clung to what an apology from this woman might mean. She said, “So you won’t tell him?”

  The woman looked regretful. “I’m afraid he knows. That’s the point. That’s why I’ve come. I want you to be ready for what might come next and to know it’s my fault and to know how terribly sorry I am. I tried to keep things from him, but these people have ways of finding things out and once he came to Cumbria… I’m so sorry, Mrs. Fairclough.”

  Alatea took this in fully and realised what it meant, not only to her but to Nicky and to their life together. She said, “He’s here, in Cumbria?”

  “He’s been here for days. I thought you would have known. Didn’t he — ”

  “Where is he now? Tell me.”

  “Windermere, I think. Other than that, I don’t know.”

  Nothing else remained to be said, but many things remained to be done. Alatea said good-bye to the woman and like someone in a dream, she gathered everything she’d brought down from the bedroom in the hope of bribing her. It was just as well, she thought, that the woman had refused her offerings. She would need them now herself in the coming days, for she’d run out of options.

  She went back up the stairs to the bedroom and threw the jewellery and money onto the bed. From the box room at the end of the corridor, she brought out a small valise. There was little enough time to gather the things she would need.

  Back in the bedroom, she went to the chest of drawers. It stood between two windows and the sound of a car door slamming outside drew her attention to the front of the house again. She saw that, on the worst possible day, Nicky had come home from the pele project early. He was now in conversation with the red-haired woman. He was violent faced. His voice grew loud although through the glass of the window, Alatea could not understand his words.

  But understanding the words didn’t matter. Only the fact that they were speaking to each other mattered. That in conjunction with Nicky’s expression gave testimony to the topic between them. Seeing this, Alatea saw also that even when it came to escape, she was out of options. She could not leave in her car, for Nicky and the woman stood on the fan of gravel across which she would need to drive. She could not go by foot to the railway station at the far end of Arnside village, for the only route there went directly between her husband and the woman where they stood talking. So she prayed for some kind of answer to come to her and she paced the room until she saw it. It was through the window, just as the vision of Nicky and the red-haired woman had been. But it was the window on a wall perpendicular to that which overlooked the driveway. This window offered a view of the lawn and beyond it the seawall sketched a stony line of demarcation between the lawn and the sea walk along the bay, beyond which was the bay itself.

  Today was one of the days during which the tide had ebbed for miles. This meant the remaining sands were hers. She could cross them and make for Grange-over-Sands a few miles away. Another railway station awaited her there. All she needed to do was to reach it.

  Just a few miles, then. That was all she needed, and she would be free.

  WINDERMERE

  CUMBRIA

  Tim had spent the night beneath a caravan at Fallbarrow Park, at the edge of the lake. On his way there from Shots! he’d pinched a blanket from the Windermere fire station, where a smoke-scented stack of them just inside an open door seemed like a message telling him that here were his means of passing the time until Toy4You was ready for him. He himself was ready for Toy4You. He felt the need for escape like a weight on his chest. Soon, he told himself, he’d have the only answer he’d wanted to the question that his life had become since Kaveh Mehran had sauntered into it.

  The caravan provided him shelter from the night’s rain, and against a tyre and huddled into his stolen blanket, he escaped the worst of the cold. Thus he’d slept rough and when he returned to the business centre towards the end of an afternoon the day of which he’d spent sulking round the town, he looked as bad as he felt, most of his bones aching and every inch of him reeking.

  Toy4You directed one glance at him and had one whiff of him and said, in brief, “No way in hell.” He pointed him in the direction of the loo, told him to do what he could to make himself less malodorous, and when Tim emerged he handed him three twenty-pound notes. “Go into town and get something decent to wear,” he told him. “If you think you’re going to meet your fellow actors looking like that, think again. They won’t want anything to do with you.”

  Tim said, “What’s the problem? It’s not like we’ll have our clothes on, is it?”

  Toy4You made a thin line of his lips. “Get something to eat, as well. I don’t want you complaining in the middle of things that you’ve missed your dinner.”

  “I’m not going to complain.”

  “That’s where they all begin.”

  “Fuck,” Tim said as he took the money. “Whatever.”

  “Exactly right,” Toy4You said sardonically. “That’s the spirit, mate. Fuck whatever.”

  When he left Shots! Tim headed back for the shops. He found, oddly enough, that he was hungry. He’d thought it unlikely he’d ever be eating again, but a hunger came on him as he passed the fire station again and the scent of bacon on the grill formed a cloud through which he passed. The smell made his mouth water unexpectedly. It put him in mind of breakfasts in his childhood: hot bacon rolls and scrambled eggs. His stomach rumbled accordingly. Okay, he thought, so he would find something to eat. He’d get the clothing first, though. He knew where an Oxfam was in the centre of town, and that would do when it came to trousers and some kind of jersey. No way in hell was he about to purchase something new from one of the other shops. Waste of money, that. He wouldn’t need new clothes after today.

  At Oxfam he found a pair of old corduroy trousers, worn in the arse, but they were in his size and that was good enough for Tim. To this he added a polo-neck sweater and as he already had shoes, socks, and an anorak, he needed nothing else. The purchase left him with plenty of money to buy a meal, but he reckoned he’d just get a sandwich from the grocery, perhaps a bag of Kettle Chips and a drink as well. The rest he’d post to Gracie inside a card. He’d write a message about taking care of herself first and worrying about the rest of the world later because no one, he would tell her, was about to take care of her no matter how nice she tried to be to them. Then he’d apologise about Bella. He still felt dead awful that he’d damaged Bella. He hoped the woman at the electronics repair shop could fix her properly.

  It was funny, though, Tim thought as he left Oxfam with his purchases and made for the grocery. He was actually feeling a bit lighter. He’d made a decision and relief came with it. It was odd to consider that for so very long he’d felt so terribly wretched when all he ever had had to do was simply decide.

  WINDERMERE

  CUMBRIA

  They had to wa
it nearly a half hour at the police station in Windermere, which was where Freddie drove them. They had Tim’s laptop with them as well as the map the boy had printed out. Both of them had thought that simply walking into the police station and announcing they had information about a child pornography ring was going to light a serious conflagration under someone’s office chair, but that had not been the case. Like a doctor’s surgery, they had to wait their turn and as each moment passed, Manette’s anxiety climbed roofward.

  “It’s all right, old girl,” Freddie had murmured more than once. He’d taken to holding her hand as well, and he made gentle finger circles upon it, just as he’d done in the early days of their marriage. “We’ll manage it all in time.”

  “Whatever it is,” Manette said. “Freddie, you and I both know it could already have happened. It could be going on while we’re waiting here. He could be… they could be… I blame Niamh for this.”

  “No point in blaming,” Freddie said quietly. “That’s not going to get us the boy.”

  When at last they were ushered into an office, Freddie quickly logged on to Tim’s e-mail and brought up the exchanges the boy had had with Toy4You as well as the photos and videos that had been sent to him. Once again and ever the gentleman, Freddie made sure that Manette couldn’t see what the films were, but she could tell from the expression on the constable’s face that they were indeed as bad as Freddie had indicated.

  The constable picked up a phone and punched in three numbers. He said to whoever answered, “Connie, you’re going to want to look at a laptop I’ve got my paws on… Will do.” He rang off and said to Freddie and Manette, “Five minutes.”

  “Who’s Connie?” Manette asked.

  “Superintendent Connie Calva,” he said. “Head of Vice. Have anything else?”

  Manette remembered the map. She fished it out of her bag and handed it over. She said, “Tim had this amongst the things on his desk. Freddie thought it best to bring it. I don’t know how useful… I mean, we don’t know the streets involved. They could be anywhere.”