Believing the Lie (14 page)

Cowley eyed Zed with no small degree of suspicion. His son held his scissors poised, but he’d stopped cutting his father’s hair. George said over his shoulder to him, “Get on with it, Dan,” and looked away from Zed. So much for friendly conversation, Zed thought.

“Lovely farm you’ve got,” Zed said. “Unusual to have it actually part of the village.”

“Not mine,” George remarked sourly.

“You run it, though, don’t you? Doesn’t that make it as good as yours?”

George cast him a look indicative of scorn. “Not hardly. And what’s it to you anyway?”

Zed glanced at the man’s son. Daniel’s face flushed. Zed said, “Nothing, actually. It merely looks an interesting place. The big house and all that. I’ve a curiosity about old buildings. It’s an old manor house, isn’t it? The bigger building?”

Cowley scowled. “Could be. Dan, are you cutting or not? I’m not ’bout to sit here all day in the cold. We’ve things to see to.”

Daniel said quietly to Zed, “Elizabethan, it is. We used to live there.”

“Dan!”

“Sorry.” He resumed his cutting. It looked like something he’d been doing for years, as he used both the comb and the scissors efficiently.

Cowley said to Zed, “So who bloody wants to know and why?”

“Eh?”

“The house. The farm. Why’re you asking about ’em? What’s your interest? You’ve some sort o’ business in the village?”

“Oh.” Zed thought of the approach that would glean him the most
information with the least revelation on his part. “Just interested in the history of the places I visit. In the Willow and Well, the barman was saying that’s the oldest building in the village, that manor house.”

“Wrong, he is. Cottage’s older by a hundert years.”

“Is it really? I expect a place like that could be haunted or something.”

“That why you’re here? You looking for ghosts? Or”—sharply—“for something else?”

God, the man was suspicious, Zed thought. He wondered idly if the bloke had pieces of silver shoved up the chimney or something very like, with Zed there to case the joint, as the saying went. He said affably to Cowley, “Sorry. No. I’m only here visiting. I don’t mean to unnerve you.”

“Not unnerved. I c’n take care of m’self and Dan, I can.”

“Right. Of course. I expect you can.” Zed went for a jolly tone. “I don’t expect you get many people asking questions about the farm, eh? Or actually many people here at all, especially this time of year. Asking questions or doing anything else.” He winced inwardly. He was going to have to do something about developing a subtlety of approach.

Cowley said, “’F you like history, I c’n give you history,” but he crossed his arms beneath the sheet that was keeping the hair from his clothing, and his posture suggested nothing was forthcoming, in spite of his words.

Daniel said, “Dad,” in a tone that took a position between advising and warning.

“Didn’t say nothing, did I,” Cowley said.

“It’s only that—”

“Just cut the bloody hair and have done.” Cowley looked away, this time to the manor house behind the wall. It was all of stone, neatly whitewashed right to the top of its chimneys, and its roof looked as if it had been recently replaced. “That,” he said, “was meant to be mine. Got bought out from under my nose, it did, with no one the wiser till the job was done. And look what happened: what
needed
to happen. That’s how it is. ’N am I surprised? Not bloody likely. You pay the wages in the end, you do.”

Zed looked at the man in utter confusion. He reckoned “what happened” was the death of Ian Cresswell, who, he knew, had lived in the manor house. But, “Wages?” he asked, while what he was thinking was, What the hell is the man going on about?

“Of sin,” Daniel said in a low voice. “The wages of sin.”

“That’s right, that is,” George Cowley said. “He paid the wages of sin right and proper. Well, there he is and here we are and when affairs get settled and the farm goes up for sale again, we’ll be there this time and make no mistake. Bryan Beck farm is meant to be ours, ’n we’ve not been scrimping from day one in our lives to have it go to someone else a second time.”

From this it seemed to Zed that Ian Cresswell’s sin had been purchasing Bryan Beck farm before George Cowley had been able to do so. Which meant—and this was useful, wasn’t it?—that Cowley had a motive to murder Cresswell. And
that
meant it was only a matter of time before New Scotland Yard came calling, which also meant that all he himself had to do was wait for their arrival. Confirm they’re here, use their presence to sex up his story, and get the hell back to London, where he could resume his life. Yes. Things were looking up.

He said, “You’re talking about Mr. Cresswell’s purchase of the farm, I take it.”

Cowley looked at him as if he were mad. “Purchase of the farm?”

“You said ‘the wages of sin.’ I reckoned purchasing the farm was his sin.”

“Bah! That was bloody wrong, that was. That put us where it did, me and Dan. But no one pays wages ’cause of property.” He loaded the final two words with derision, and he seemed to feel Zed was dim enough to require further elucidation. “Indecent, it was, him and that Arab lodger of his. And what’re those kids of his still doing there? That’s the question
I
ask, but no one’s answering, are they. Well, that’s indecent on top of indecent. And I tell you this: More wages are coming, an’ they’re bound to be big. You can count on that.”

SWARTHMOOR
CUMBRIA

Tim Cresswell hated Margaret Fox School, but he put up with it because it spared him from having to go to a comprehensive where he might be expected to make friends, which was pretty much the last thing he wanted. He’d had friends once, but he’d learned that having them meant having to look at the smirks on their faces when they twigged what was going on in his life. Having friends meant having to overhear their murmurs of speculation as he passed them in one corridor or another on his way to lessons. The fact was, he didn’t care if he ever had a friend again, since those he’d once possessed had ceased
being
friends just about the time his dad had walked out on the family to arse-fuck a limp-wristed Iranian. Word had gone round about
that
soon enough, for Tim’s mum didn’t possess the sense to keep her outrage to herself, especially if she was certain about being the aggrieved party in a situation. And she was definitely that, wasn’t she. Turned out his dad had been fucking other men for years, exposing her to disease, disaster, disgust, disrespect, all the other disses there were, because one thing Niamh was especially good at was listing those disses to whoever wanted to hear them. She made sure Tim knew them from the word go, and in response he broke a few things, he burned a few things, he hurt a few people, he dismembered a kitten—never mind that the poor thing was already dead—and he ended up in Margaret Fox School just outside of Ulverston. Here Tim intended to stay, but to manage that he had to do just enough to be cooperative and not enough to be given the boot back into the system where the normies were educated.

Most kids boarded at Margaret Fox School because they were too disturbed to live with their families. But there were day pupils as well, and Niamh Cresswell had seen to it that Tim was placed among them. All the better to force his father or Kaveh Mehran to cart him from Bryanbarrow all the way to Ulverston and back each day, a drive that took forever, ate up their time together, and punished them for putting a real bazooble of a crater in Niamh’s pride. Tim
went along with it all because it got him far away from everyone who knew the story of what had happened to his parents’ marriage, which was just about everyone in Grange-over-Sands.

But one of the things he hated about Margaret Fox School was the rule about the stupid Societies, always spelled with a capital, just like that. In addition to regular lessons, one was required to belong to three Societies: one each of academic, creative, and physical. The philosophy was that the Societies supposedly eased the whacked-out pupils of Margaret Fox School into a semblance of normal behaviour, sort of tricking them into acting as if they could function beyond the high walls that enclosed the grounds of the institution. Tim despised the Societies because they forced him into contact with the other pupils, but he’d managed to find three that kept that contact to a bare minimum. He’d signed on for the Ramblers, the Sketchers, and the Philatelists, since each of these were activities he could do alone even if other people were present. They didn’t require communication of any kind, other than listening to the staff member in charge of each Society drone on about the subject of supposed interest.

Which was exactly what was going on just now at the regular meeting of the Ramblers. Quincy Arnold was doing his usual blah blah blah at the end of their afternoon walk. This had been a nothing stagger on the public footpath from Mansriggs over to Mansriggs Hall and from there up to Town Bank Road, where the school van picked them up, but the way QA was banging on about it, you’d think they’d just scaled the Matterhorn. The big deal had been the view of Ben Cragg—wahoo to another bloody tooth of limestone, Tim thought—but the ultimate goal was evidently what all this afternoon wandering was leading up to: what QA called the Big Adventure on Scout Scar. Said adventure would not happen till spring, and in the meantime all the rambling they were doing was to prepare them for the enchantment to come. Blah blah blah whatever. QA could blather like no one else, and he could be positively orgasmic about limestone escarpments and—pound on, my heart—glacial erratics. Yew trees blasted by the winds, dangerous screes where sure footing was crucial, larks and buzzards and cuckoos on the wing, daffodils tucked into hazel coppices. It sounded about as interesting to Tim as learning Chinese
writing from a blind man, but he knew the value of looking at QA when the bloke was doing his blah blahs, although he kept his expression hovering between indifference and loathing, always on guard against being deemed cured.

He had to have a piss, though. He knew he should have done a side-of-the-road job before they’d embarked on the ride back to the school at the end of the walk. But he hated pulling his prick out in public because one never knew how it would be taken among this lot with whom he had to walk. So he squeezed back the urges and now he suffered through QA’s summary of their afternoon’s timeless adventure, and when they were at last released onto the school grounds with the gates shut behind them, he made a dash for the nearest loo and let it flow. He made sure some of it went on the floor and some onto his trouser leg. When he was finished, he examined himself in the mirror and picked at a spot on his forehead. He achieved a bit of blood—always nice—and left to fetch his mobile phone.

They weren’t allowed, of course. But the day pupils could have them as long as they got checked in every morning and ticked off on a list that was kept in the headmaster’s office. To rescue them every afternoon, one had to trek to the headmaster, receive a permission slip, and then trek back to the tuck shop where in a locked bank of pigeonholes behind the till the mobiles were deposited for safekeeping.

On this day, Tim was the last to retrieve his. He checked for messages as soon as the mobile was in his hand. There was nothing, and he felt his fingers start to tingle. He wanted to throw the mobile at someone, but instead he walked to the tuck shop door and from there to the central path that would take him to the drop-off area where he would wait with the other day pupils to score their lifts for the trip home from school. They could only ride with approved drivers, of course. Tim had three but with his dad dead he was down to two, which meant one, really, because there was no way in hell that Niamh was going to drive to fetch him, so that left Kaveh. And so far Kaveh had done the job because he had no choice and he’d not yet worked how to get out of it.

Tim didn’t care. It was nothing to him who came to fetch him. What was important now was the deal he’d struck with Toy4You
and the fact that he’d had no response to his latest message, sent this morning on his way into school. He got into contact once again:

Tim looked up from the screen. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted action. He’d kept his part of the bargain and it was only fair that Toy4You do exactly the same. It always came down to this in the end, he thought bitterly. People played each other like a deck of cards and he was bloody sick and tired of it all. But what choice did he have? He could start all over, but he didn’t want that. It had taken long enough to find Toy4You.

He punched in his answer.
Where

He flipped the phone closed and shoved it into his pocket. A fat girl whose name he didn’t know was watching him from a bench. His eyes met hers and she lifted her school skirt. She spread her legs. She had on no knickers. He wanted to spew all over the path but instead he went for a distant bench and sat down to wait for his ride back to Bryanbarrow. He considered the ways he could torment Kaveh on the long trip home, and he congratulated himself for the piss on his trousers. That would get up old Kaveh’s nose in more ways than one, he thought with an inward chuckle.

ARNSIDE
CUMBRIA

Alatea Fairclough was mesmerised by Morecambe Bay. She’d never seen anything like it. The ebb tide emptied its vast expanse, leaving behind one hundred twenty square miles of varying kinds of sands. But these were sands so dangerous that only the unwary, the lifelong fishermen of the area, or the Queen’s Guide went out on them. If anyone else wandered into the empty bay—and people did all the time—they ran the risk of ending their days on earth by stumbling onto an area of quicksand that was, to the casual observer, indistinguishable from solid ground. Or far out in the bay they stood too long on rises of sand that seemed safe, like islands, only to find that the flood tide cut them off and then covered them in its return. And when, instead of a mere flood tide, a tidal bore brought the water swirling back into the bay at the speed of a galloping horse, things happened with a dizzying quickness as a vast surge of water covered everything in its path. And that was the thing about the tidal bore that Alatea found so hypnotic. It seemed to come from nowhere, and the speed of the torrent suggested a power driven by a force beyond any man’s control. The thought of this generally filled her with peace, however: that there
was
a force beyond man’s control and that she could turn to that force for solace when she was most in need.