Believing the Lie (25 page)

“I daresay it’ll be tipped eventually,” Lynley said. “I’m not sure how long I can carry off the pretence of idle curiosity for the benefit of anyone who happens to be watching. Fairclough’s wife knows, by the way. He did tell her.”

“That makes things a bit easier.”

“Relatively, yes. And I agree with you, Simon. We need you inside that boathouse for more reasons than one.”

“Meaning?” Deborah asked the question. She had her digital camera on the table next to her glass of port, and she’d brought a small notebook out of her shoulder bag as well. She was, Lynley saw, taking seriously her part in this little investigation of theirs. He smiled at her, grateful for the first time in months to be in the presence of longtime friends.

“Ian Cresswell didn’t take the scull out on a regular basis,” Lynley told her. “But Valerie Fairclough takes her boat out several times a week. While the scull was indeed tied at the spot where the stones were loose on the dock, it wasn’t a set position for it. People on the estate seem to tie up the watercraft wherever there’s an opening.”

“But someone seeing the scull in place could have loosened the stones while he was out on the lake that night, yes?” Deborah said.

“That would make it someone on the estate at that moment,” her husband said. “Was Nicholas Fairclough there that night?”

“If he was, no one saw him.” Lynley turned to Deborah. “What sort of reading did you get off Fairclough?”

“He seems perfectly lovely. And his wife’s quite beautiful, Tommy. I can’t exactly gauge the effect she has on men, but I’d guess she could make a Trappist monk give up his vows without much effort on her part.”

“Something between her and Cresswell, then?” St. James offered. “With Nicholas taking issue over it?”

“Hardly, as the man’s homosexual,” said Lynley.

“Or bisexual, Tommy.”

“And there’s something else,” Deborah went on. “Two things,
actually. They might not be important at all, but if you want me to look for things intriguing…”

“I do,” Lynley said.

“Then there’s this: Alatea Fairclough has a copy of
Conception
magazine. It’s got pages torn out of the back, and we might want to put our hands on a copy and have a look at what they are. Nicholas told me they’ve been trying to conceive.”

St. James stirred. His expression said that the magazine meant nothing and would have meant nothing to anyone else save Deborah, whose own concerns about conceiving would probably cloud her judgement.

Lynley saw that Deborah read her husband as well as he himself had done because she said, “This isn’t
about
me, Simon. Tommy’s looking for anything unusual and what I was thinking…What if his drug use has made Nicholas sterile but Alatea doesn’t want him to know that? A doctor may have told her but not him. Or she might have convinced a doctor to lie to him, for his ego, to keep him on the straight and narrow. So what if, knowing he can’t give her children, she asked Ian to lend a hand in the matter, if you know what I mean?”

“Keeping it in the family?” Lynley asked. “Anything’s possible.”

“And there’s something else,” Deborah said. “A reporter from
The Source
—”

“Jesus God.”

“—has been there four times, ostensibly doing a story on Nicholas. Four times but nothing’s come of it, Tommy. One of the blokes at the Middlebarrow Pele Project told me.”

“If it’s
The Source
, there’s dirt on someone’s shoe soles,” St. James pointed out.

Lynley thought about whose shoe soles those might be. He said, “Cresswell’s lover has evidently been on the estate—on the grounds of Ireleth Hall—for some time now, working on a project for Valerie. He’s called Kaveh Mehran.”

“PC Schlicht mentioned him,” St. James said. “Has he got motive?”

“There’s the will and insurance to be looked into.”

“Anyone else?”

“With motive?” Lynley told them about his meeting with Mignon Fairclough: her insinuations about her parents’ marriage followed by her denial of those insinuations. He also told them about the holes in the background of Nicholas Fairclough that she’d been only too happy to fill in. He ended with, “She’s rather a piece of work and I have the impression she’s got a hold over her parents for some reason. So Fairclough himself might bear looking into.”

“Blackmail? With Cresswell somehow in the know?”

“Emotional or otherwise, I daresay. She lives on the property but not in the house. I suspect Bernard Fairclough built her digs for her and I wouldn’t be surprised if one reason was to get her out of his hair. There’s another sister as well. I’ve yet to meet her.”

He went on to tell them that Bernard Fairclough had put a videotape into his hands. He’d suggested Lynley watch it because if there was indeed someone behind Ian’s death, then he needed to “see something rather telling.”

This turned out to be a video of the funeral, made for the purpose of sending to Ian’s father in Kenya, too frail to make the trip to say farewell to his son. Fairclough had watched it at Lynley’s side, and as things turned out, it was what he
didn’t
see that he wanted to point out. Niamh Cresswell, Ian’s wife of seventeen years and the mother of his two children, had not attended. Fairclough pointed out that, at least to be of support to those grieving children, she might have turned up.

“He gave me a few details on the end of Ian Cresswell’s marriage.” Lynley told them what he knew, to which St. James and Deborah said simultaneously, “Motive, Tommy.”

“Hell hath no fury. Yes. But it’s not likely that Niamh Cresswell could prowl round the grounds of Ireleth Hall without being seen and so far no one’s mentioned her being there.”

“Still and all,” St. James said, “she’s got to be looked into. Revenge is a powerful motive.”

“So is greed,” Deborah said. “But then, so are all the deadly sins, aren’t they? Why else be deadly?”

Lynley nodded. “So we’ll have to see if she benefits in any way other than vengeance,” he said.

“We’re back to the will. Or an insurance policy,” St. James said. “That information’s not going to be easy to suss out while keeping your head down about why you’re really here in Cumbria, Tommy.”

“Not for me going at it directly. You’re right about that,” Lynley said. “But there’s someone else who can do it.”

LAKE WINDERMERE
CUMBRIA

By the time they’d concluded their meeting, it was too late for Lynley to place the call he needed to make. So instead he phoned Isabelle. Truth was, he was missing her. Truth was, he was also glad to be away from her. This wasn’t due to any disinclination on his part for her company. This was, instead, due to his need to know how he felt about her when they were apart. Seeing her every day at work, seeing her several nights each week, made it nearly impossible for him to sort through his feelings for the woman aside from those that were clearly sexual. At least now he had a feeling to name: longing. Thus he knew he missed her body. What remained to be seen was whether he missed the rest of the package comprising Isabelle Ardery.

He waited till he’d got back to Ireleth Hall to place the call from his mobile. He stood just to the side of the Healey Elliott, and he punched in the number and waited for it to go through. He thought about how he was all at once wishing that she were with him. There had been something in the easy conversation between himself and his friends and something more in the way Simon and Deborah communicated with each other that made him want that for himself once again: that familiarity and assurance. He understood that, more specifically, what he really wanted was a return to the way he and his wife had talked to each other in the morning, over dinner at night, in bed together, even as one or the other of them bathed. For
the first time as well, however, he realised that Helen herself didn’t need to be that woman but that someone else—somewhere else—could. This felt, in part, like a betrayal of a most beloved wife, cut down through no fault of her own by a senseless act of violence. Yet he also understood that this feeling was part of getting on with life, and he knew Helen would have wanted that for him as much as she’d wanted their life together.

The ringing stopped on the other end, in London. He heard, “Damn,” faintly, then the sound of Isabelle’s mobile hitting something, and then there was nothing at all.

He said, “Isabelle? Are you there?” and he waited. Nothing. Again he said her name. When there was no response, he ended the call, the connection apparently gone.

He punched in her number again. The ringing began. It continued. Perhaps she was in the car, he thought, unavailable. Or in the shower. Or engaged in something that made it impossible—

“’Lo? Tommy? Joo jus’ call?” And then a sound he didn’t want to hear: something knocking against the side of her mobile, a glass, a bottle, what did it matter. “I’s thinking of you an’ here you are. How’s tha’ for mental tepe…tele…te
lep
athy?”

“Isabelle…” Lynley found he couldn’t say more. He ended the call, put the mobile in his pocket, and returned to his room in Ireleth Hall.

CHALK FARM
LONDON

B
arbara Havers had spent the first part of her day off visiting her mother in the private care home where she was domiciled in Greenford. The call was long overdue. She hadn’t been there in seven weeks, and she’d been feeling the weight of guilt grow heavier with every day once she’d reached the three-week point. She’d admitted the worst to herself: that she welcomed having work piled upon her so she wouldn’t have to go and witness the further disintegration of her mother’s mind. But there had come a point when continuing to live with herself meant she had to make the journey to that pebbledash house with its neat front garden and spotless curtains hanging behind windows that fairly gleamed in sun or rain, so she took the Central Line from Tottenham Court Road, not because it was faster but because it wasn’t.

She wasn’t liar enough to tell herself she was travelling in this manner to give herself time to think. The last thing she really wanted to do was to think about anything, and her mother was only one of the subjects she didn’t want pressing in on her mind. Thomas Lynley was another: where he was, what he was doing, and why she
hadn’t been informed about either. Isabelle Ardery was yet another: whether she was actually going to be named to the position of detective superintendent permanently and what that would mean to Barbara’s own future with the Met, not to mention to her working relationship with Thomas Lynley. Angelina Upman was still another: whether she—Barbara—could have a friendship with the lover of her neighbour and friend Taymullah Azhar, whose daughter had become a needed bit of sparkle in Barbara’s life. No. The reason she took the train was avoidance, pure and simple. Additionally, the distractions afforded by the Tube were vast and continually shifting, and what Barbara wanted was distractions because they gave her conversation openers that she could use with her mother when she finally saw her.

Not that she and her mother had conversations any longer. At least not the sort of conversations one might deem normal between a mother and daughter. And this day had ultimately been no different to others in which Barbara spoke, hesitated, watched, and felt desperate to end the visit as soon as possible.

Her mother had fallen in love with Laurence Olivier, the younger version. She was completely swept away by Heathcliff and Max de Winter. She wasn’t sure who he was exactly—the man she kept watching on the television screen—tormenting Merle Oberon when he wasn’t leaving poor Joan Fontaine completely tongue-tied. She only knew that they were meant to be together, she and this handsome man. That he was, in reality, long dead and gone was no matter to her.

She didn’t recognise the older version of the actor. Olivier doing the job on poor Dustin Hoffman’s teeth—not to mention Olivier rolling round the floor with Gregory Peck—made no impact on her at all. Indeed, whenever an Olivier film other than
Wuthering Heights
or
Rebecca
was brought to her attention, she became quite ungovernable. Even Olivier as Mr. Darcy could not sway her from either of the other two films. So they looped endlessly through a television in her mother’s bedroom, a feature that Mrs. Florence Magentry had installed in order to save the sanity of her other residents as well as her own. There were only so many times one could watch devious Larry destroy poor David Niven’s tenuous claim on happiness.

Barbara had spent two hours with her mother. They were heart-sore hours, and she felt the pain of them all the way home from Greenford. So when she’d run into Angelina Upman and her daughter, Hadiyyah, on the pavement just outside the big house in Eton Villas where they all lived, she’d accepted their invitation to “look at what Mummy bought, Barbara” as a means of clearing her mind of the images of her mother cradling one breast tenderly as she watched the flickering screen display Max de Winter in torment over the death of his evil first wife.

She was with Hadiyyah and her mother now, having dutifully admired two ultramodern lithographs that Angelina had managed to “practically pinch, Barbara, they were such a bargain,
weren’t
they, Mummy?” from a vendor in the Stables Market. Barbara admired them. Not to her taste, but she could indeed see how they were going to work in the sitting room of Azhar’s flat.

Barbara gave thought to the fact that Angelina had apparently taken her daughter to one of the places absolutely
verboten
by the little girl’s father. She wondered if Hadiyyah had mentioned this to her mother or if, perhaps, Angelina and Azhar had agreed in advance that it was time Hadiyyah began to experience more of the world. She had her answer when Hadiyyah clapped her hands over her mouth and said, “I for
got
, Mummy!” Angelina replied, “No matter, darling. Barbara will keep our secret. I hope.”

“You will, Barbara, won’t you?” Hadiyyah asked. “Dad’ll be so cross if he knows where we went.”

“Don’t nag, Hadiyyah,” Angelina said. And to Barbara, “Would you like a cup of tea? I’m parched and you look a bit rough round the edges. Difficult day?”