Believing the Lie (40 page)

“See?” Hadiyyah cried, grabbing her father’s hand. “
See
, Dad? Mummy and I took Barbara to Mummy’s own hairdresser yesterday. Doesn’t Barbara look nice?
Everyone
at the Dorchester noticed her.”

Azhar said, “Ah. Yes. I do see,” which Barbara felt was akin to being damned with very faint praise indeed.

She said, “Bit different, eh? Scared the dickens out of myself when I looked in the mirror this morning.”

“It’s not at all frightening,” Azhar told her gravely.

“Right. Well. I meant that I didn’t recognise myself.”

“
I
think Barbara looks lovely,” Hadiyyah told her father. “So does
Mummy. Mummy said the hair makes Barbara look like light’s coming from her face and it makes her eyes show nicely. Mummy says Barbara’s got beautiful eyes and she must show them off. Dusty told Barbara she’s to let her fringe grow out so that there’s no fringe any longer as well but instead she’ll have—”

“
Khushi
,” Azhar cut in, not unkindly, “you and your mother have done very well. And now, as Barbara is eating her breakfast, you and I must be off.” He offered a long and sombre look at Barbara. “It does suit you well,” he said before he gently put his hand on his daughter’s head and directed her to turn so that they could go.

Barbara watched them walk back in the direction of their flat, Hadiyyah taking a skip and a hop and chattering all the while. Azhar had always been a sober sort of bloke in the time she had known him, but she had the feeling there was something here that comprised more than his usual gravitas. She wasn’t sure what it was, although since Angelina wasn’t currently employed, his concerns might have had to do with the fact that he and not his partner was going to be footing the bill for their costly teatime excursion at the Dorchester. Angelina had pulled out the stops on that one, beginning with champagne with which she had toasted Barbara’s burgeoning beauty, as she’d called it.

Barbara shut the door thoughtfully. If she’d put Azhar into a difficult position, she needed to do something about it and she wasn’t quite sure what that was going to be other than slipping him a few quid on the side, which he was unlikely to take from her.

When she was ready for her day, she began the mental preparation for what lay ahead. Although she was still officially taking her few days off work, part of what comprised her agenda had to be a visit to New Scotland Yard. This was going to put her on the receiving end of some good-natured jibes from her colleagues once they got a look at her hair.

In another situation she might have been able to prolong the inevitable since she was still on holiday. But Lynley needed information that was going to be more easily gleaned at the Yard than anywhere else, so there was nothing for it but to head to Victoria Street and to try to avoid being noticed wherever she could.

She had a name—Vivienne Tully—but not much else. She’d tried to get more as she’d left the building in Rutland Gate and a quick survey of the cubbies for the post had given her a bit. Vivienne Tully resided in flat 6, so her small stack of letters told Barbara, and a quick dash up the stairs allowed her to find this flat on the third floor of the building. It was, indeed, the sole flat on the floor, but when Barbara knocked, she learned only that Vivienne Tully had a house cleaner who also answered the door if someone showed up while she was hoovering and dusting. One polite question about Ms. Tully’s whereabouts revealed that the house cleaner spoke limited English. Something Baltic seemed to be her native tongue, but the woman recognised Vivienne Tully’s name well enough and through pantomime, a magazine grabbed up from a cocktail table, and much gesturing at a longcase clock, Barbara was able to ascertain that Vivienne Tully either danced for the Royal Ballet or she’d gone to see the Royal Ballet with someone called Bianca or she and her friend Bianca had gone to a ballet dance class. In any case, it all amounted to the same thing: Vivienne Tully wasn’t at home and was not likely to be home for at least two hours. Barbara’s appointment to be beautified precluded her hanging about to accost the woman, so she had scarpered to Knightsbridge with Vivienne Tully a blank page upon which something needed to be written.

Her visit to the Yard was supposed to take care of this, at the same time as it allowed her to see what there was to see about Ian Cresswell, Bernard Fairclough, and the woman from Argentina whom Lynley had also mentioned: Alatea Vasquez y del Torres. So she fired up her Mini and set off towards Westminster, holding to her heart the hope that she’d see as few of her colleagues as possible as she skulked round the corridors of New Scotland Yard.

She had fairly good luck in this department, at least at the start. The only people she saw were Winston Nkata and the departmental secretary Dorothea Harriman. Dorothea, long the picture of sartorial perfection and possessing an unmatchable degree of excellence in the area of all things related to personal grooming, took one look at Barbara, stopped dead in the tracks of her crippling five-inch stilettos, and said, “Brilliant, Detective Sergeant. Abso
lute
ly brilliant.
Who did it?” She touched Barbara’s hair with her slender and speculative fingers. Without waiting for an answer, she went on. “And just look at the sheen. Gorgeous, gorgeous. Acting Detective Superintendent Ardery is going to be delighted. You wait and see.”

Waiting and seeing were the last things Barbara wanted to do. She said, “Ta, Dee. Bit different, eh?”

“
Different
does not do justice,” Dorothea said. “I want the name of the stylist. Will you share it with me?”

“’Course,” Barbara said. “Why wouldn’t I share it?”

“Oh, some women won’t, you know. Battle of females on the prowl. That sort of thing.” She took a step away and sighed, her gaze fixed on Barbara’s hair. “I’m green with envy.”

The idea that Dorothea Harriman might be envious of her hairstyle made Barbara want to hoot with laughter, as did the notion that she herself was intent upon capturing a man with this makeover she’d been forced to endure. But she restrained herself and gave the other woman Dusty’s name as well as the name of the Knightsbridge salon. This would be right up Dee’s alley, Barbara reckoned, as she had little doubt that Dorothea spent vast amounts of time and most of her wages in Knightsbridge.

Winston Nkata’s reaction was less extreme, and Barbara thanked her stars for this. He said, “Looks good, Barb. Guv see you yet?” and that was it.

Barbara said, “I was hoping to avoid her. If you see her, I’m not here, okay? I mean I’m here but not here. I just need access to the PNC and some other stuff.”

“DI Lynley?”

“Mum’s the word.”

Nkata said he’d cover for Barbara as best he could but there was no telling when Acting Superintendent Isabelle Ardery was going to appear in their midst. “Best be prepared with some sort of story,” he advised. “She’s not happy ’bout the inspector going off without letting her know where he’ll be.”

Barbara gave Nkata a closer look when he said this. She wondered what he knew about Lynley and Isabelle Ardery. But Nkata’s expression betrayed nothing and while this was habitual for him, Barbara
decided it was safe to conclude that he was merely remarking upon the obvious: Lynley was a member of Ardery’s team; the assistant commissioner had pulled him off to see to some matter unrelated to Ardery’s concerns; she was cheesed off about this.

Barbara found an inconspicuous spot where she could access the Yard’s computer with its myriad sources of information. She started first with Vivienne Tully and she began, with very little difficulty, to amass the pertinent details about her. They ranged from her birth in Wellington, New Zealand, to her education from primary school there to university in Auckland to an impressive, advanced degree at the London School of Economics. She was the managing director of a firm called Precision Gardening, which manufactured gardening tools—hardly a high-glamour job, Barbara thought—and she was also an executive director of the Fairclough Foundation. A bit of delving turned up a further connection with Bernard Fairclough, Barbara found. In her early twenties she’d been the executive assistant to Bernard Fairclough at Fairclough Industries in Barrow-in-Furness. Between her time at Fairclough Industries and Precision Gardening, she’d been an independent business consultant, which Barbara reckoned in the way of the modern world could indicate either an attempt at developing her own business or a period of unemployment that had lasted four years. As of now, she was thirty-three years old, and a photo of her showed a woman with spiky hair, quite a boyish dress sense, and a rather frighteningly intelligent face. Her eyes communicated the fact that Vivienne Tully didn’t suffer fools. In conjunction with her background and her general appearance, they also suggested ferocity of independence.

As far as Lord Fairclough was concerned, Barbara found nothing curious. There was plenty curious about his wayward son, though, as Nicholas Fairclough hadn’t exactly trod the straight and narrow in his teens and twenties and records showed car crashes, arrests for drink driving, bungled burglaries, shoplifting, and sale of stolen goods. He seemed a straight enough arrow now, though. He’d paid all of his debts to society and from the day of his marriage, not a hair of his head had even been ruffled.

That brought Barbara to Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, her of the
mouthful name. Aside from that name, Barbara had in her crumpled notes the town from which she’d sprung, communicated to her as Santa Maria di something-or-other, which wasn’t exactly helpful as she quickly found out. Santa Maria di et cetera turned out to be to the towns and villages in a Latin American country what Jones and Smith were to surnames in her own. This, she reckoned, was not going to be like pinching candy from a five-year-old.

She was considering her approach when the acting superintendent found her. Dorothea Harriman had, alas, waxed eloquent on the subject of Barbara’s hair, failing to append to her waxing a convenient lie about having seen Barbara at a location that was not New Scotland Yard. Isabelle Ardery thus accosted her on the twelfth floor, where Barbara had hidden herself in the Met’s library, a convenient location from which she could access the Met’s databases in peace and in secrecy.

“Here you are, then.” The acting superintendent had come upon Barbara with the stealth of a hunting cat, and her satisfaction was feline as well. She looked like a cat, decapitated mouse in jaws.

Barbara said, “Guv,” with a nod. She added, “Still on holiday,” on the very slight chance that Isabelle Ardery was there to requisition her for work.

Ardery didn’t go in that direction, nor did she acknowledge Barbara’s status as being off rota for the moment. She said, “I’ll see the hair first, Sergeant.”

Barbara hardly wanted to know what second was going to be, considering the superintendent’s tone. She stood to give Ardery a better look.

Ardery nodded. “Now that,” she said, “is actually a haircut. We could go as far as to call it a style.”

Considering what she’d paid for it, Barbara thought, they ought to be calling it a night at the Ritz. She waited for more.

Ardery walked round her. She nodded. She said, “Hair and teeth. Very good. I’m quite pleased to know you can take direction when your feet are to the fire, Sergeant.”

“I live to please,” Barbara said.

“As to the clothing—”

Barbara said to remind her, “On holiday, guv?” which she believed adequately explained her ensemble of tracksuit trousers, tee shirt emblazoned with
Finish Your Beer…Children in China Are Sober
, red high-top trainers, and donkey jacket.

“Even on holiday,” Ardery said, “Barbara, you’re a representative of the Met. When you walk in the door—” Abruptly, she brushed aside whatever she’d intended to say as her gaze came to rest on Barbara’s tattered notebook. She said, “What are you doing here?”

“Just needed to get some information.”

“Needing to get it here suggests a police matter.” Isabelle put herself in a position to see the screen of the computer’s monitor. She said, “Argentina?”

“Holidays,” Barbara said airily.

Isabelle looked further. She scrolled back to the previous screen and the one before that. She said, reading the list of
Santa Maria di
towns, “Developing a fondness for the Virgin Mary? Holidays suggest resorts. Skiing. Seaside visits. Jungle excursions. Adventures. Eco-journeys. Which are you interested in?”

“Oh, just playing with ideas at the moment,” Barbara told her.

Isabelle turned to her. “I’m not a fool, Sergeant. If you wanted to look for holiday possibilities, you wouldn’t be doing it here. That being the case and since you’ve asked for time off, I think it’s safe to conclude you’re doing some work for Inspector Lynley. Am I correct?”

Barbara sighed. “You are.”

“I see.” Isabelle’s eyes narrowed as she thought this one through. It seemed to lead her to a single conclusion. “You’ve been in contact with him, then.”

“Well…more or less. Right.”

“Regularly?”

“Not sure what you mean,” Barbara said. She also wondered where the hell this was going. It was not as if she had a thing with DI Lynley. If Ardery thought that, she was clearly off her nut.

“Where is he, Sergeant?” the superintendent asked directly. “You know, don’t you?”

Barbara considered her answer. Truth was, she did know. Truth
also was, Lynley hadn’t told her. His mentioning of Bernard Fairclough had done that. So she said, “He hasn’t told me, guv.”

But Ardery took another meaning from the moments in which Barbara had been considering her options. She said, “I see,” in a way that told Barbara she saw something other than the truth of the matter. “Thank you, Sergeant,” the superintendent added. “Thank you very much indeed.”

Ardery left her then. Barbara knew she could call her back before she got to the door of the library. She knew she could clarify. But she did not do so. Nor did she ask herself why she was allowing the superintendent to believe something that was patently untrue.

Instead, she turned back to her work with Santa Maria di whatever. Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, she thought. Whoever she was, and not Isabelle Ardery, was the crux of the matter in hand.