Believing the Lie (69 page)

This gave Manette a feeling of disquiet. She was of a mind that devastating grief should produce in someone an equal devastation of spirit, of the sort that precluded doing one’s house up as if in the expectation of visitors. But nothing was out of place in this room, not a single cobweb clung to the heavy oak ceiling beams, and even
in the hidden area high above the old fireplace where meat had once hung to be smoked and preserved during long winters, it appeared that someone had used a mop and a cleaning agent on the smoky walls.

Freddie said, “Well, no one can claim he’s letting the place go to ruin, eh?” as he looked round.

Manette called out, “Tim? Are you here?”

This was mostly for effect, since she knew very well that even if Tim was present, he was hardly going to come leaping down the stairs or in from the fire house, open-armed in greeting. Nonetheless, they checked the place systematically as they went: The hallan was empty, the fire house was as well. Like the kitchen, every room into which they popped their heads was neat and clean. It all looked as it had when Ian had been alive, only better kept up, as if a photographer might be arriving at any moment to shoot pictures for a magazine article on Elizabethan buildings.

They went up the stairs. A building of this age would have hidey-holes aplenty, and they did their best to search them out. Freddie voiced his opinion that Tim was long gone and who could really blame him after what he’d been going through. But Manette wanted to make absolutely sure. She looked under beds and poked into wardrobes and even pressed on some of the ancient panelled walls to see if there were hidden chambers. She knew she was being ridiculous but she couldn’t help herself. There was something essentially wrong with the entire picture of Bryan Beck farm, and she was intent upon understanding what it was because for all they knew the real truth was that Kaveh had done something to Tim to drive him off and then had made a show of looking for him afterwards.

Tim’s bedroom was the last place they looked, and here, too, all was in order. The fact that it was the bedroom of a fourteen-year-old boy was nowhere in evidence, although his clothing still hung in the wardrobe, and his tee shirts and jerseys were folded within the chest of drawers.

“Ah,” Freddie said, approaching a table that did service as a desk beneath a window. On this sat Tim’s laptop computer, its top open as if it had been recently used. “This might give us something,” he
told Manette. He sat down, stretched his fingers, and said, “Let’s see what we can see.”

Manette went to his side and said, “We don’t have his password. What do we know about delving into other people’s computers without passwords?”

Freddie looked at her and smiled. “Ah, you of little faith,” he said. He began to whittle away at the problem, which didn’t turn out to be much of a problem at all. Tim’s computer was set to remember his password. They needed only his user name, which Manette knew since she had done her best to e-mail Tim regularly. The rest, as Freddie said, was bingo.

He chuckled at the ease of it all and said to Manette, “I do wish your back had been turned, old girl. You might actually have thought I was some sort of genius.”

She squeezed his shoulder. “You’re genius enough for me, my dear.”

As Freddie set about examining e-mails and trails to various websites, Manette looked at what was on the desk along with the computer. School books, an iPod with its docking station and speakers, a notebook filled with disturbing pencil drawings of grotesque alien beings consuming various body parts of humans, a book on bird watching—where had
that
come from? she wondered—a pocketknife that she unfolded to see a chilling brown crust of blood on its largest blade, and a map printed from the Internet. She took this last and said, “Freddie, could this be—?”

Car doors slammed outside the house. Manette leaned over the table to look out of the window. She thought it likely that Kaveh had returned, that, perhaps, he’d found Tim himself and had brought him home, in which case she and Freddie would need to be off the boy’s computer posthaste. But the arrivals weren’t Kaveh, as things turned out. They were, instead, an older Asian couple, possibly Iranian like Kaveh. With them was a teenage girl, who looked up at the manor house with a long-fingered hand pressed against her lips. She shot a glance at the older couple. The woman took her arm and together all three of them approached the front door.

They had to belong to Kaveh in some fashion, Manette thought.
There were few enough Asians in this part of Cumbria, and hardly any at all in the countryside. They’d come on a surprise visit, perhaps. They’d come to call on their way from Point A to Point Z. Who knew
why
they’d come? It didn’t matter because they’d knock on the door and no one would answer and then they’d skedaddle so that she and Freddie could get on with things.

But that didn’t happen. Apparently with a key in their possession, they let themselves inside. Manette murmured, “What on earth…?” And then, “Freddie, someone’s arrived. It’s an older couple and a girl. I think they belong to Kaveh. Shall I…?”

Freddie said, “Damn. I’m getting somewhere here. Can you…I don’t know…Can you handle them in some way?”

Manette left the room quietly, closing the door behind her. She made a suitable amount of noise as she descended the stairs. She called out, “Hullo? Hullo? C’n I help you?” and she came face-to-face with everyone in the passage between the kitchen and the fire house.

The best course was bluffing, Manette decided. She smiled as if there was nothing unusual in her being inside the manor house. She said, “I’m Manette McGhie. I’m Ian’s cousin. You must be friends of Kaveh? He’s not here at the moment.”

They were more than friends of Kaveh, as it happened. They were his parents come up from Manchester. They’d brought his fiancée, newly come from Tehran, to see what was going to be her home in a few short weeks. She and Kaveh had not yet met. It was not the usual done thing for her future in-laws to bring the bride to call, but Kaveh had been anxious—well, what bridegroom wouldn’t be?—and so here they were. Just a little premarital surprise.

The girl’s name was Iman and she’d dropped her gaze in an appealingly diffident fashion while all this was being said. Her hair—copious, lustrous, and black—fell forward to hide her face. But the glimpse Manette had caught of it had been enough to see she was very pretty.

“Kaveh’s fiancée?” Manette’s smile froze as she took this on board. At least there was an explanation now for the pristine state of the house. But as to everything else, these waters were deep and
this poor girl was probably going to drown in them. Manette said, “I had no idea Kaveh was engaged. Ian never told me about that.”

Whereupon the waters became deeper still.

“Who is Ian?” Kaveh’s father asked.

EN ROUTE TO LONDON

When his mobile rang, Lynley was nearly seventy miles from Milnthorpe, fast approaching the junction for the M56, and more than a little disturbed. He’d been played for a fool by Deborah St. James, and he was far from happy about it. He’d turned up at the Crow and Eagle as agreed at half past ten, expecting to find her with her bags packed and ready for the drive back to London. He’d not been concerned at first when she was not waiting for him in the lobby since he’d seen her hire car in the car park, so he knew she was somewhere about the place.

“If you’d ring her room, please,” he’d said to the receptionist, a girl in a crisp white blouse and black wool skirt who’d done so obligingly with a “Who shall I tell her…?”

“Tommy,” he said, and he saw the flash of a knowing look strike her features. The Crow and Eagle was, perhaps, a hotbed of hot beds—as Sergeant Havers would have put it—a central location for daily assignations among the landed gentry. He added, “Fetching her for the drive back to London,” and then was immediately irritated with himself for doing so. He walked away and studied the ubiquitous rack of brochures featuring tourist highlights in Cumbria.

The receptionist cleared her throat after a moment and said, “No answer, sir. Could be she’s in the dining room?”

But she wasn’t. Nor was she in the bar, although what Deborah would have been doing in the bar at half past ten in the morning was a mystery to him. Since her car was there, right next to where he’d parked the Healey Elliott, he sat down to wait. There was a bank across the street from the hotel, a market square in the town,
an old church with an appealing graveyard…He reckoned she could be having a final look round the place before the long drive.

It didn’t occur to him for some ten minutes that if the receptionist had been ringing Deborah’s room, she clearly hadn’t yet checked out of the hotel. When it
did
occur to him, he moved fairly rapidly from there to a conclusion of “Bloody maddening woman.”

He rang her mobile at once. Of course, it went immediately to her voice mail. He said, “You must know I’m rather unhappy with you at the moment. We had an arrangement, you and I. Where the hell are you?” but there was nothing more to add. He knew Deborah. There was no point in trying to move her from the obdurate stand she had taken with regard to matters in Cumbria.

Still he had a look round the town for her before he left, telling himself he owed Simon that much. This ate up more of his day and accomplished nothing save an extended study of Milnthorpe, which, for some reason, appeared to have a plethora of Chinese takeaways round the market square. He finally returned to the inn, wrote her a note, left it with the receptionist, and went on his way.

When his phone rang on the approach to the M56, then, he thought at first it was Deborah, ready to be profuse with her apologies. He answered without glancing at the incoming number, barking, “What?” only to hear Sergeant Havers’s voice instead.

She said, “Right. Well. Hullo back at you. Which one is it, then? Did you have a personality transplant or a toss-and-turn night?”

He said, “Sorry. I’m on the motorway.”

“Heading…?”

“Home, where else?”

“Not a good idea, sir.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Just ring me when you can talk. Find a services area. I don’t want you crashing that expensive motor of yours. I’ve already got the Bentley on my conscience.”

The next services area was a Welcome Break, and he had to travel some way to find it. It was a quarter of an hour before he got there, but the car park wasn’t crowded and there was virtually no one inside
the unappealing sprawl of sticky-floored cafeteria, shops, newsagents, and children’s play area. He bought himself a coffee and took it to a table. He rang Havers’s mobile.

“Hope you’re sitting down,” were her words when she answered.

“I was sitting down the first time we spoke,” he reminded her.

“Okay, okay.” She brought him up to the minute on what she’d been doing, which appeared mostly to be keeping out of Isabelle Ardery’s sight in order to do research on the Internet, for which she seemed to be developing a distinct liking. She talked about a Spanish graduate student; her neighbour Taymullah Azhar, with whom Lynley was acquainted; the town of Santa Maria de la Cruz, de los Angeles, y de los Santos; and finally the five sons of the mayor of that town. She ended with the purpose of her call, always someone who liked to build to dramatic moments:

“And here’s the situation in a nutshell. There is no Alatea Vasquez y del Torres. Or perhaps better put: There is and there isn’t an Alatea Vasquez y del Torres.”

“Hadn’t you already established that Alatea’s probably from another part of the family?”

“To borrow unblushingly from rock ’n’ roll history, sir: That was yesterday and yesterday’s gone.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Alatea’s from this part of the family. She’s just not Alatea.”

“Who is she, then?”

“She’s Santiago.”

Lynley tried to take this in. Around him, a cleaner was industriously mopping the floor, casting meaningful glances in his direction as if with the hope he’d vacate the premises, giving access to the floor beneath his chair. He said, “Barbara, what on earth do you mean?”

“I mean exactly what I say, sir. Alatea is Santiago. Santiago is Alatea. Either that or they are identical twins, and if I remember my biology correctly, there is no such thing as identical twins of the male-female sort. A biological impossibility.”

“So we’re talking about…What, exactly, are we talking about?”

“Cross-dressing, sir. Impeccable female impersonation. A tasty secret one would hope to keep from the family, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would say, yes. In certain circumstances. But in these circumstances—”

Havers cut in. “Sir, here’s how it is: The trail on Santiago goes dead when he’s about fifteen years old. That’s when, I daresay, he started passing himself off as someone called Alatea. He ran away from home round then as well. I got that, among other details, from a phone call to the family.”

She began to tell him what she’d learned from her earlier meeting with the graduate student Engracia after that call the young woman had placed to Argentina: the family wanted Alatea to come home; her father and her brothers now understood; Carlos—“He’s the priest,” Havers reminded Lynley—
made
them understand; everyone was praying for Alatea’s return; they’d been searching for years; she must not continue to run; Elena Maria’s heart was broken—

“Who’s Elena Maria?” Lynley felt as if his head were filling with wet cotton wool.

“Cousin,” Havers said. “Way I figure it, Santiago did a runner because he liked to cross-dress, which—let’s face it—probably didn’t go down a treat with his brothers and his dad. Latin types, you know? Macho and all that, if you’ll pardon the stereotyping. Anyway, somewhere along the line he met up with Raul Montenegro—”

“Who the dickens—”

“Rich bloke in Mexico City. Rolling in enough lolly to build a concert hall and name it for his mum. Anyway, Santiago meets him, and Raul likes him, as in Raul
likes
him, because Raul likes to bat for the same side, if you know what I mean.
And
he prefers his partners young and nubile. From what I’ve seen in photos, he prefers them well oiled as well, but that’s neither here nor there, eh? Anyway, we’ve got heaven in a basket for these two blokes. On the one hand we have Santiago, who likes dressing up and making himself up like a woman, which, over time, he’s learned to do bloody well. On the other hand, we have Raul, who meets Santiago and has no problem whatsoever with Santiago’s dressing habits since he—Raul—is bent like a twig but would rather not have anyone actually
know that. So he takes up with Santiago, who, when he’s fixed himself up, looks like a gorgeous dolly bird, and Raul can even take him out in public. They keep company, so to speak, until something better comes along.”