Believing the Lie (43 page)

“Nearly seven feet tall. A nonstarter, then?”

“It’s doubtful, but at this point, anything’s possible.” Lynley thought about the likelihood of a seven-foot-tall redheaded reporter managing to escape the notice of Mignon Fairclough. Only in the dead of a very dark night could this have happened, he reckoned.

He said, “We’ve our work cut out, one way or the other.” It signaled an end to their conversation and he knew the sergeant would take it that way. But before she could do so, he had to know, even if he didn’t want to understand why he had to know. He said, “Are you carrying this off without the superintendent’s knowledge? She
still thinks you’re on holiday? You’ve not run into her at the Met, have you?”

There was a silence. In it, he knew what the answer was. He avoided St. James’s glance as he said, “Damn. That’s going to make things difficult. For you, I mean. I’m sorry, Barbara.”

She said airily, “Truth to tell, the guv’s a bit tense, Inspector. But you know me. I’m used to tense.”

MILNTHORPE
CUMBRIA

Deborah hated being at odds with her husband. This was due in part to the disparity in their ages and due in part to his disability and all the baggage attendant upon that. But most of all, it was due to the differences in their characters, which defined how each of them looked at life. Simon went at things logically and with remarkable disinterest, making it nearly impossible to argue with him because she looked at things through a cloud of emotion. In a battle where the warring armies marched onto the field from either the heart or the head, those battalions from the head won each skirmish. She was often left with that most useless of declarations to put a full stop to any heated conversation between herself and her husband:
You don’t understand
.

When Simon left her in their room at the inn, she did what she knew had to be done. She phoned his brother, David, and gave him what she called
their
decision. “I so much appreciate how you’ve thought of us, David,” she told him, and she meant every word. “But I can’t get my mind round sharing a baby with its birth parents. So we’re saying no.”

She could tell that David was disappointed, and she had little doubt that the rest of Simon’s family would be disappointed as well. But Simon’s family were not being asked to open their lives and their hearts to the virtual unknown. David said, “You know, it’s all a lottery, Deb, any way you go at parenthood,” to which she’d said, “I
do know that. But the answer’s the same. The complications involved…I wouldn’t be able to cope.”

So it was over. In a day or two, the pregnant girl in question would move on her way towards another couple eager for a child. Deborah was glad she’d made the decision, but she felt disconsolate all the same. Simon wouldn’t be pleased, but she couldn’t see any answer other than the one she’d given. They simply had to move on.

She could tell her husband was more than ill-at-ease with going down the surrogacy route. She’d actually thought it would appeal to him since he was a scientist. But for him the miracles of modern medicine were turning out to be “dehumanising, Deborah.” Locking himself up in a doctor’s loo and seeing to the appropriate deposit made into the equally appropriate sterile container…And then there was the matter of harvesting her eggs and what that involved and the additional matter of the surrogate and monitoring the surrogate throughout the pregnancy and even finding the surrogate in the first place.

Who is this person? he reasonably asked. And how do you make sure of all the things you need to make sure of?

This person is just a womb we’re hiring, was how Deborah explained it to him.

If that’s what you think the extent of her involvement would be, Simon replied, then you’ve got your head in the clouds. We’re not hiring a vacant room in her house to store furniture, Deborah. This is a life that’s growing inside her body. You seem to think she’ll ignore that.

There’ll be a contract, for heaven’s sake. Look here, in the magazine, there’s a story about—

That magazine, he said, needs to go into the rubbish.

Deborah, however, didn’t toss it away when he left the room. Instead, she phoned David and when she’d done so, she’d sat and looked at the copy of
Conception
that Barbara Havers had overnighted to her. She gazed at the photos of the six-time surrogate, posing with the happy families she’d helped. She reread the article. Finally, she turned to the back where the advertisements were.

Everything related to reproduction had some sort of listing, she saw, but despite the hopeful article in the magazine itself, nothing referred to surrogacy. Phoning a legal service listed on the page told her why this was the case. Advertising oneself as a surrogate mother was illegal, she learned. The hopeful mother had to find her own surrogate. A relative is best, she was told. Have you a sister, madam? A cousin? Even mothers have carried their own grandchildren for their daughters. How old is your own mother?

God, nothing was easy, Deborah thought. She had no sister, her mother was dead, she was an only child of only children. Simon’s sister was a possibility but she couldn’t imagine the madcap Sidney—currently in the throes of love with a mercenary soldier, for heaven’s sake—allowing her million-pound model’s body to be the launching pad for her brother’s child. There were definite limits to sororial love, and Deborah reckoned she knew what they were.

The law was not her friend in this matter. Advertising everything else related to reproduction appeared to be entirely legal—from clinics offering money to women willing to have their eggs harvested to lesbian couples looking for sperm. There were even adverts for groups who wanted to talk donors out of donating in the first place, along with counseling services for donors, recipients, and everyone in between. There were help lines listed and assistance offered from nurses, doctors, clinics, and midwives. There were so many options heading in so many different directions that Deborah wondered someone didn’t simply advertise in
Conception
with the single word
HELP!

This thought finally took her to the matter of the magazine itself and how it had come to her attention: through Alatea Fairclough, who had torn out these very same pages that were now eating at Deborah’s peace of mind. With herself in turmoil over the matter, Deborah began to see more clearly how Alatea could be viewing her own situation. What if Alatea knew she couldn’t carry a baby to term? Deborah asked herself. What if she hadn’t yet shared that information with her husband? What if she—just as Deborah herself was proposing to do—was searching for a surrogate mother? Here
she was in England, away from her native land, away from friends and relatives who might have volunteered for the job…Was there someone she could turn to in their stead? Was there someone she could ask to carry her petri dish child made with Nicholas Fairclough?

Deborah thought about this. She compared Alatea to herself. She had Sidney St. James, unlikely candidate though she was. Whom did Alatea have?

There was a possibility, she realised, one that fitted in with what had happened in the boathouse at Ireleth Hall. She needed to tell Simon about it. She needed to talk to Tommy as well.

She left the room. Simon had been a good while gone on his walk, and she punched in his mobile number as she descended the stairs. Speaking with Tommy in the car park, he told her they were just about to—

She told him to wait. She was coming to meet them both.

Nicholas Fairclough was what stopped her, however. He was the last person she expected to see in the tiny lobby of the Crow and Eagle, but there he was. And he was waiting for her. He rose when he saw her and he said, “I reckoned this is where you’d be.” He spoke as if she’d been making an effort to hide herself from him, and she pointed this out.

His reply of, “No, I get that much. The best place to hide anything is always in plain sight.”

She frowned. He was completely altered. He was very drawn and his cherubic face had gone unshaven. He didn’t seem to have had much sleep, for there were circles under his eyes. There was also nothing friendly or affable about him.

He made no preamble to his remarks. He said, “Look. I know who you really are. And here’s what
you
need to know: I didn’t touch Ian. I wouldn’t have touched Ian. The fact that my father thinks I might have done something tells you the state our family is in, but it sure as hell doesn’t tell you anything else. You”—and here he jabbed a finger at her although he didn’t touch her—“need to get the hell back to London. There’s sod-all to learn from hanging about. Your bloody investigation is over. And leave my wife alone, all right?”

“Are you—”

“Stay away.” He backed off and when he was far enough, he turned on his heel and left her.

Deborah remained. She felt her heart pounding hard in her chest and the blood started singing in her ears. There was, she knew, only one explanation when every single statement he’d made was considered. For whatever inconceivable reason, Nicholas Fairclough actually believed that she was the Scotland Yard detective come to Cumbria to look into his cousin’s death.

There was only one way he could have reached that conclusion, and her digital camera had captured that way.

MILNTHORPE
CUMBRIA

Zed Benjamin had faded out of the picture on the previous day after his brief encounter with Nicholas Fairclough in the Milnthorpe market square. Luckily, there were enough stalls in the square that he’d been able to get out of view of the café in which Fairclough had been meeting with the Scotland Yard woman, so after Fairclough had a few final words with her, all it took was a few more minutes of waiting before she emerged from the café as well. And then it was nothing to see where she was going since where she was going turned out to be the Crow and Eagle at the junction of the main road through Milnthorpe and the route to Arnside. So on this day Zed had parked himself there in the early a.m., in the vicinity of a NatWest, and he’d been skulking round the cashpoint for hours, eyes on the inn, waiting for the woman to emerge. This garnered him many a look of suspicion from people going in and out of the bank, and a few pointed words from other people using the cashpoint. He was even prodded once in the chest by an old bag telling him to “move away, laddie, or I’ll have the coppers on you…I know your kind, I do,” so he began to hope that something would happen soon on the Scotland Yard end of
things or he was going to get hauled into the nick for loitering with intent.

He’d had his morning phone call with Yaffa, and this was on his mind. She hadn’t returned his kissy noises, the reason turning out to be that his mother wasn’t in the room and a show of affection hadn’t been necessary to keep Susanna Benjamin happy. Plus, it also turned out that there were problems developing with Micah out in Tel Aviv, apparently getting a bit weary with playing Yaffa’s brother Ari. In conversation with Micah, she had said
attractive
in reference to Zed. It was no big thing for goodness sake, she’d told Micah, but he hadn’t been pleased. And while Zed had been dwelling on the fact that Yaffa had used the word
attractive
to refer to him, she’d gone on to say that there was, sadly enough, a very good chance that she was going to have to move on soon to other lodgings.
Quite beside himself
was how she put it in reference to Micah. She was afraid his worry over her commitment to him was going to put him off his studies. For a man in medical school, this was out of the question. But you know how it is when a man becomes uneasy about his woman, Zed.

Actually, Zed had no idea how it was when a man became uneasy about his woman since he’d so far spent his adult years avoiding women altogether.

Yaffa said that she thought she could appease her fiancé for a while longer, but only for a while. Then she would either have to move on or she would have to return to Tel Aviv.

Zed hadn’t known what to say. He was hardly in a position to beg her to stay. He wasn’t even sure why begging her to stay crossed his mind in the first place. Yet that entreaty was what was on the tip of his tongue at the end of their conversation. What was not on the tip of his tongue was
have a nice trip home, then
, which was something of a surprise to him.

She’d rung off before he could say anything at all. He wanted to ring her back and tell her that he’d miss her terribly, he hadn’t intended her to think from his silence that he wouldn’t, he’d enjoyed their every conversation, in fact she was just the sort of woman…
But he couldn’t go that far. Alas and alack, he thought. They’d have to be Keats and Fanny writing tortured letters to each other and there was an end to the matter.

Zed was so consumed with his thoughts about Yaffa and Micah and the great irony of stumbling across a woman who was—let’s face it—perfect for him, only to find her engaged to another man, that when Nick Fairclough turned up at the Crow and Eagle and went inside, the importance of this didn’t register at first. He merely thought, Ah, there’s old Nick Fairclough, and he’d pulled his cap more firmly down on his head and slouched to reduce his size so as to make himself less noticeable. It was only after Fairclough’s visit to the inn was so brief and only after he strode out with a stony expression on his face that Zed realised what one and one amounted to, which was Fairclough plus the detective equals Something Worthy of Note Happening.

Then the detective herself came out. She was on her mobile. A detective on her mobile meant that Developments were about to develop. Fairclough had left and the detective was following. Zed needed to be following as well.

His car wasn’t far away. He’d parked on the pavement just a short distance down the Arnside Road, so he dashed for this as the red-haired woman went round the corner of the inn, where, no doubt, her own car was parked. He fired his car up and waited for her to emerge. No way was she going anywhere at this point without him on her tail.

He counted the seconds. They turned into minutes. What was it? he wondered. Car trouble? Flat tyre? Where the hell was she…?

Finally, a car did emerge from the car park round back of the Crow and Eagle, but this was no hire car and she wasn’t driving it. It was, instead, a sleek copper-coloured antique thing of the sort costing God only knew what, and it was driven by a bloke who looked perfectly at ease in it, not to mention well-heeled, because how else could he have afforded the thing? Another guest at the inn, Zed concluded. The bloke took off towards the north.