A Set of Lies

by Carolyn McCrae

  “How would he know? He’s hardly stepped inside the place for years.”

  “How big is it? He was a bit vague about that.”

  “He would be. As I said, he’s hardly been here since 1946.”

  “So how long do you think it would take?”

  “Well there are four storeys plus the attics…”

  “How many rooms?” Fergal asked, more relaxed now that Skye seemed to have accepted the need for his visit.

  “Main rooms? Well, there’s the kitchen, the dining room, the library, the main drawing room and the back drawing room on the ground floor, and obviously the corridor of old staff rooms. We don’t have a ‘downstairs’ as such, just the back of the ground floor where the butler and housekeeper had their parlours.”

  “It sounds very Downton Abbey.”

  “It’s not nearly so grand. It’s just a really nice eighteenth century house where my family has lived for generations,” she replied coldly.

  “Look, I’m really sorry I have to do this,” Fergal apologised.

  “Anyway, as you said, someone will be doing it so it might as well be you. Are you making a note of all this?” she added in as business-like a tone as she could manage.

  “Yes, carry on.”

  “Then there are three bedrooms on the first floor each with its own bathroom, they are a bit dated but they work. On the second floor there are four smaller bedrooms and a bathroom. Then on the third floor are the old staff bedrooms, they’re tiny and there’s eight of them. Then above that there are the rooms of the attics.”

  “And all these rooms are full of furniture and stuff?”

  “Some are empty but, yes, most are pretty cluttered. And some of the ‘stuff’, as you call it, hasn’t been moved for a very long time.”

  “It sounds like I’ll be hard pushed to do it in a couple of days but I’ll try. I really don’t want to be any longer than I have to.”

  “Let’s get it over with then.”

  “I was hoping you’d say it would be OK for me to come over this weekend.”

  “This weekend? I suppose so.”

  “Tomorrow evening then? I checked out the hotels near you and I thought The George in Yarmouth.”

  “Nice.” She had already decided he wasn’t a bed and breakfast sort of person.

  “I promise I’ll be out of your hair on Monday.”

  “And I’ll be left on my own?”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it but if I do a thorough enough job there might be a chance.”

  “I’ll just have to help you then.”

  “I really would appreciate that.”

  Fergal found himself reluctant to put the phone down.

  He had some sympathy for Skye. She was only twenty-one years old, had no family and was about to be thrown out of the only home she had ever known. He thought she could probably do with a friend.

  “Would you join me at The George for a meal tomorrow evening? It might be easier if we meet on neutral territory first, you know, get to know each other a bit before we do the difficult stuff?”

  “OK.”

  Fergal wondered if there had been reluctance in her voice and decided it was surprise.

  “I’ll see you at seven-thirty then.”

  “OK.”

  “At The George.” Fergal wanted to make sure she knew where he would be.

  “OK. Yes. The George Hotel, tomorrow, seven-thirty,” she confirmed as if talking to a child.

  Skye put the phone down and shook her head.

  She had had no intention of having anything to do with anyone who had any connection with her father, she considered it to be fraternising with the enemy. She was angry with herself for giving in just because the man had a kind voice and had shown her some sympathy.

  “Drat,” she said. It had been one of Audrey’s favourite words. “Drat drat drat drat drat.”

  *

  It was several minutes before she opened her laptop and typed Fergal Shepherd into the search engine. There was only one relevant response and ten minutes later she knew more than she thought she would ever need to about the man on the phone with the kind voice.

  Fergal Nicholas Shepherd was thirty-four years old, though she thought he had sounded younger than that. He had been to a decent public school, spent a gap year travelling in Europe and gained a Double First in History at Cambridge. He had worked in various Management Consultancy and City firms. His hobbies were cricket and rugby. He had a flat in an expensive area of east London but spent his weekends in his cottage in Burford, near Oxford. He had a wide circle of friends who all seemed to have been to the same school. It all seemed to Skye fairly typical for the only son in a privileged and well-connected family. She was intrigued, however, to read that his mother was Gayle Shepherd.

  Skye rather liked what she had seen of Gayle Shepherd. As a politician who was happy to discuss most topics with most people she was on the television almost as often as Sir Arthur, voicing her opposition to everything he stood for. Why, Skye wondered, would her son be working for Sir Arthur? She would ask him over their dinner. It would give her something to talk about other than the painful subject of The Lodge.

  *

  “Conservatory or posh restaurant?” Fergal asked brightly as he held out his hand to shake hers in the hotel foyer where he had been waiting for her at exactly seven-thirty the next evening. “We should go straight in as the bar is a tad crowded and there’s a large group of noisy sailing types who’ve taken over the garden.”

  Skye thought Fergal looked almost exactly as he did in the photographs she had seen on the internet. His hair was perhaps a shade lighter and a centimetre or two longer, and she thought his eyes definitely bluer than they had appeared in those images. With his expensive jeans teamed with a white open-necked button-down Oxford cotton shirt he seemed to have come straight from an identikit of a young American executive of the 1990s.

  Fergal found Skye more attractive than he had imagined, not having been able to find any images of her on any social media site. He had looked her up on the internet but had found nothing about her other than the date of her birth and that she was recorded as resident at The Lodge in electoral rolls since 2010. She seemed more mature, calmer and more poised than he had been led to believe in his brief meeting with Lady Barbara.

  Her long dark brown hair was tied apparently artlessly at the back of her neck. He realised he had, for some reason, imagined her to be blonde. Without thinking he checked her hands for rings, he always did that when he met attractive women, but her only jewellery was an unusual gold pendant hanging on a delicate gold chain around her neck. She was wearing a denim dress that could have been taken as smart or casual. He thought it was well judged.

  “Posh restaurant please,” Skye answered politely.

  “Any particular reason?” Fergal asked as he led her towards the hotel’s dining room. “I would have put you down as more of an informal sort of person.”

  Skye understood that he was trying to be friendly so she tried to take all of what Audrey had described as ‘defensive-churlishness’ from her voice. “Firstly you’ll be on an expense account and I would like my father to have to pay as much as possible for my meal, and secondly, in the conservatory there will so many people making so much noise we couldn’t have a proper conversation.” She did wonder whether she sounded a bit pompous.

  Fergal smiled. Skye was not turning out to be what he had anticipated. “Fair enough. Good thing I booked both just in case.”

  The two were shown to their table and sat, each deciding what they thought of the other.

  “May I ask you a question?” Skye glanced up from her menu. Fergal nodded so she continued. “Why, as your mother’s son, do you work for Sir Arthur?”

  “You’ve checked up on me then?”

  “There’s no hiding place with the internet.”

  “That’s true, though I have to say you keep a very low profile. I couldn’t find you on Twitter or Facebook or any other social media si
te at all.”

  “You checked too.”

  “Of course.”

  “No. I’ve never got into that stuff. Anyway, what about my question?”

  “I’ve only worked for him for a few days.” Fergal was wondering whether he sounded too defensive, as though he was justifying himself.

  “Even so,” Skye prompted and it was a few empty seconds before Fergal replied.

  “You mean why do I, the son of an only slightly right of centre, pro-European, inclusive politician who is dedicated to the democratic process, work for Sir Arthur who is perhaps the most reactionary, bigoted, hypocritical, right-wing, anti-everything politician there is?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Perhaps I don’t hold the same views as my mother? It’s not obligatory you know.” Fergal smiled.

  “Granted. I certainly don’t hold the same views as my father, though I’ve never lived with him or been under his influence.”

  “I applied for the job probably because of who my mother is and what I believe in. I was born and brought up in a north London liberal-with-a-small-l environment. Although I attended a conservative-with-a-small-c public school followed by Cambridge, all those teachers and tutors and professors who influenced me were what your father would undoubtedly call ‘subversives’. I was, if you like, attracted to seeing whether the enemy was really as bad as he was made out to be.”

  The waiter who had been hovering took their orders and left them alone.

  “And is he?”

  “Is he what?”

  “As awful as you expected?”

  “Every bit.”

  “Really?”

  “And although in many ways he’s a buffoon I believe he is actually quite dangerous.”

  “Audrey said that. We watched him on the television and he just ranted about voters being imbeciles, about every political party being rubbish and that no government in this country can possibly be trusted to solve the problems they themselves have caused. It made her really upset, angry and upset. But surely he can’t do anything, can he?”

  “Your father is no democrat. He has been in Parliament for many years but to him it’s just a club where men just like him, that is white, past middle age and of independent financial means meet to drink and to eat and, incidentally, to make the rules by which the lesser classes must live.”

  “That just makes him an anachronism, surely, not dangerous?”

  Fergal was perhaps more relaxed than he should have been. He had set off from Oxford conscious that the visit was likely to be an awkward one but the drive to Lymington had been straightforward and, as he had sat on the top deck of the ferry in the sunshine enjoying the view of The Needles and the approaching island, he had almost felt that he was going on holiday. He had relaxed further when he realised that Skye, who he had expected to be antagonistic and a younger, female version of her father, was turning out to be attractive and intelligent.

  Had the day not turned out so well he would, perhaps, have been more cautious.

  “He is more dangerous than you could possibly imagine. There is every chance he is working towards overthrowing whichever government is elected next May and replacing it with a cabal of men who all firmly believe that they have a responsibility to return the country to greatness. Whatever happens he won’t leave the question of Europe to a referendum. He won’t leave it to the judgement of the electorate he despises. He plans to lead England into complete isolation, from Europe, from the US which he considers past saving, and from every other country in the world. We will stand alone, proudly, as we have so often in the past. That’s what he plans.”

  “Really?” Skye tried to see if Fergal could be joking but he appeared to be entirely serious.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “He’s mad.”

  “I’m afraid so. He and his cronies aren’t ready to put their plans into operation yet so he stays in Parliament and argues his case on any platform the media give him. He doesn’t give a fig about what happens in Scotland or any by-election that may crop up between now and next May. He doesn’t even care who gets the most seats in that election and who negotiates their way into being Prime Minister as by then he will have everything in place to take over.”

  “A coup?”

  “Call it that if you like.”

  “It all sounds so, well, so un-English.”

  “Probably. Yet he goes on every chat show and phone-in he can worm his way onto and wraps himself in a cloak of Englishness, hoping to win the support of the masses he despises. He really is a very dangerous man with very dangerous friends but those friends would be nothing without him. Without Sir Arthur’s authority they would just be a group of old men getting quietly sozzled in their St James’s clubs dreaming of returning England to an idyllic condition which undoubtedly never existed anyway.”

  “His authority? Where on earth do they get that idea?”

  “He gets it from his being the very epitome of what a great many people think this country should stand for.”

  “My blood is one hundred percent English blood and my ancestors have been members of the establishment since Tudor times,” Skye quoted.

  “He does say that rather often doesn’t he?” Fergal grinned. “And because of that he is their keystone.”

  “Really?”

  Fergal nodded. “Luckily there are people who are working to stop him.”

  “Are you one of them?”

  “Not directly, no. I’m not infiltrating his office to find out what his plans are.”

  “But you are keeping your eyes and ears open just in case he lets slip something of his plan for overthrowing the government in some sort of pseudo-military coup?” Skye tried to sound as if she was joking but when she saw that Fergal was taking her seriously she continued in disbelief, “You were joking weren’t you? They couldn’t overthrow the government, could they? I mean, they wouldn’t put soldiers on the streets, would they? Surely that sort of thing doesn’t happen in England?”

  “It might not be a military coup with the army on street corners but it would be very easy to bring the country to its knees just by orchestrating riots in city centres, by Denial of Service Attacks, you know, making computer systems fail in financial institutions, airports, air traffic control, government websites, power supplies… the list is all-encompassing. Just imagine every cash machine in the country failing at the same time.”

  “Really? They could do all that?”

  “Absolutely they could. They’ve been rehearsing elements of their plan over the past few years. You may have noticed. And then, with the country on its knees, he will miraculously offer the solution. Everyone will be grateful when order is restored, even if that order is on Sir Arthur’s terms.”

  Fergal had a few moments to think as the waiter served their food. He had said far too much. These were not topics he should be discussing with a girl he had only just met, and she Sir Arthur’s daughter.

  As the waiter withdrew Fergal tried a broad smile. Perhaps he could convince her he had been joking. “It’s possible, but hardly likely. Not in England anyway.”

  Skye found his backtracking unconvincing. He had seemed completely honest as he had described what seemed to her to be a scenario nobody would joke about. She carefully concentrated on her food for a few moments. “OK. I can see why you applied for a job in his office but why did he offer it to you? He must know who your mother is and he must know that you’re highly unlikely to be on his side.”

  “Perhaps I was offered the job because I was the best candidate?” Fergal was happy that the subject was turning away from dangerous ground, but the measure of self-deprecating humour he had intended in his answer was missing. He simply sounded arrogant.

  “Perhaps you were the only applicant.” Then, worried that that was what Audrey called ‘a cheap shot’, she continued with a softer tone. “No, sorry, that wasn’t fair. Seriously though, surely he wouldn’t have wanted a fifth columnist in his camp?”

 
“I don’t think he was the one who decided on hiring me. If he was then it was probably an act of hubris. Anyway, I have nothing to do with his political office.”

  “No?” Skye was doubtful.

  “No. I told you. I work in his private office in Oxford. I don’t even work in the same city as the political lot. They’re all in London.”

  “So you’ve nothing to do with his plot to overthrow the government?”

  “Absolutely nothing. I’ve just been hired as his researcher on his big project.”

  “His ‘big project’? What on earth is that?”

  “His history of the Lacey family.”

  “A family history?” Skye managed to sound both interested and doubtful.

  “As I’ve said, his influence is predicated on the image that he presents. He wants a book published detailing his ancient lineage so all the world can see that he is the member of an ancient English family, one born and bred for centuries to rule.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “I’m not. I don’t think there has been a long line of Laceys any more than there’s been a long line of Shepherds or Smiths or Joneses. But then everyone comes from a long line don’t they?”

  “Audrey always laughed when he claimed that. She said we’re quite a new family really, certainly not a dynasty like the Spencers or the Howards.”

  “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts,” Fergal quoted.

  “I haven’t heard that one. That’s good. Who said it?”

  “An American senator, Daniel Moynihan, in the ‘70s I think. Anyway your father is determined to have ‘his own facts’ to back up his opinion of himself.”

  “And you’re helping him with that?”

  “He will use whatever facts I find to back his preconceived idea that he has an absolute right to rule.”

  “That’s rubbish.”

  “He wants this book to show us mortals how important he is.”

  “Tosh.” Skye used one of Audrey’s favourite words.

  “Agreed. I think there is also more than a small element of vanity and self-justification. He wants to leave something to posterity since he is the end of what he thinks of as the Lacey dynasty.”