Believing the Lie (19 page)

“I wanted to speak to you for a moment before I fetch my wife,” Nicholas said. “I must tell you that I’m completely on board with talking to you and with having the project featured in this film if it comes to it. But Allie’s going to take some convincing. I thought I’d give you a heads-up.”

“I see. Can you give me some idea…?”

“She’s rather private,” he said. “She’s from Argentina and she’s self-conscious about her English. Frankly, I think she speaks it perfectly well, but there you have it. Plus…” He tipped his fingers beneath his chin and looked thoughtful for a moment before saying, “She’s protective of me, as well. There’s that.”

Deborah smiled. “This film isn’t an exposé or anything, Mr. Fairclough. Although, to be honest it could turn into that if you’re enslaving recovering addicts for your own purposes. I suppose I should ask if you need protecting for some reason?”

She’d meant it lightheartedly, but she couldn’t help noting how seriously he took the question. He appeared to be tossing round a few possibilities, and she found this detail rather telling. He finally said, “Here’s what I think it is. She worries that I’ll be disappointed in some way. And she worries where disappointment will lead me. She wouldn’t
say
that, but one has a way of knowing these things
about one’s wife. After a bit of time together. If you know what I mean.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Two years last March.”

“You’re quite close, then.”

“We are indeed, I’m pleased to say. Let me fetch her to meet you. You don’t look all that frightening, do you.”

He sprang up from his chair and left her in the drawing room. Deborah looked around. Whoever had decorated it had an artistic flair that she could well appreciate. The furniture reflected the period from which the house had come, but it managed to remain secondary to the features of the room. Aside from the fireplace, the most notable of these were columns: slender poles surmounted with capitals that were bowls carved with birds and fruits and leaves. They stood at the sides of the bay windows, they formed the ends of the inglenook’s benches, they held up a shelf that ran round the room just beneath the frieze. The restoration of this room alone must have cost a fortune, Deborah reckoned. She wondered where a reformed drug addict had managed to come up with such a sum.

Her gaze went to the bay window. From there it fell upon the table and the coffee service that sat upon it, waiting for someone’s use. The fan of magazines next to this caught her attention, and she idly fingered through them. Architecture, interior design, gardening. And then she came to one that caused her hand to stop abruptly.
Conception,
this one was called.

Deborah had seen it often enough during the endless appointments she’d had with specialists before receiving the disheartening diagnosis that had sunk her dreams, but she’d never looked through it. It had seemed too much like tempting fate. She picked it up now, however. There might well be, she thought, a form of sisterhood between Nicholas Fairclough’s wife and herself, and this could be useful.

Quickly, she flipped through it. It consisted of the types of articles one might expect in a magazine of such a name. Appropriate diets during pregnancy, antenatal vitamins and supplements, postpartum depression and related problems, midwives, breast-feeding. All of it
was here. But in the back was something curious. A number of pages had been torn out.

Footsteps came along the corridor, and Deborah replaced the magazine on the table. She got to her feet and turned as she heard Nicholas Fairclough say, “Alatea Vasquez y del Torres Fairclough,” and added with an appealing, boyish laugh, “Forgive me. I rather love saying that name. Allie, this is Deborah St. James.”

The woman was, Deborah thought, quite exotic: olive skinned and dark eyed, with cheekbones defining an angular face. She had an abundance of coffee-coloured hair so wiry that it sprang from her head in a billowing mass, and enormous gold earrings shone through it when she moved. She was an odd match for Nicholas Fairclough, former drug addict and family black sheep.

Alatea crossed the room to her, a hand extended. She had large hands, but they were long fingered and slim like the rest of her. “Nicky tells me you seem harmless enough,” she said with a smile. Her English was heavily accented. “He has told you I have a concern about this.”

“About my being harmless?” Deborah asked. “Or about the project?”

“Let’s sit and have a chat.” Nicholas was the one to speak, as if worried that his wife wouldn’t understand Deborah’s mild joke. “I’ve made coffee, Allie.”

Alatea poured. She wore gold bangles on her wrists—first cousins to her earrings—and they slid down her arm as she reached for the coffeepot. Her gaze seemed to fall on the magazines as she did this, and for a moment she hesitated. She cast a glance at Deborah. Deborah smiled in what she hoped was an encouraging fashion.

Alatea said, “I was surprised about this film of yours, Ms. St. James.”

“It’s Deborah. Please.”

“As you wish, of course. It is small up here, what Nicholas is doing. I did wonder how you learned about him.”

Deborah was ready for this. Tommy had done his homework on the Faircloughs. He’d found a logical point of entry for her. “It wasn’t me, actually,” she said. “I just go where I’m pointed and do the
preliminary research for the filmmakers at Query Productions. I’m not sure exactly how they decided upon you”
—
with a nod at Nicholas—“but I think it had to do with an article about your parents’ house.”

Nicholas said to his wife, “It was that sidebar again, darling.” And to Deborah, “There was a piece written about Ireleth Hall, my parents’ place. It’s an historic old pile on Lake Windermere with a topiary garden round two hundred years old that my mother’s brought back. She mentioned this place—our home—to the reporter and as it’s a bit of an architectural conversation piece, he trotted over to have a look. Not sure why. Perhaps it was a historical-restorations-are-in-the-blood-of-the-Faircloughs kind of thing. This place was given to us by my father and I reckoned taking it on was better than looking a gift horse. I think Allie and I would have preferred something new with all the mod cons in working order, though. Isn’t that the case, darling?”

“It’s a beautiful home,” Alatea said in reply. “I feel fortunate to live here.”

“That’s because you always insist upon seeing the glass half-full,” Nicholas told her, “which makes me a very lucky man, I suppose.”

“One of the film producers,” Deborah said to Alatea, “brought up the Middlebarrow Pele Project at an early meeting we had in London, when we were looking at all the possibilities. Frankly, no one knew what a pele tower was, but there were several people who knew about your husband. Who he is, I mean. As well as other things.” She didn’t elaborate upon those things. It was obvious to them all what they were.

“So this film,” Alatea said, “I do not have to be involved? It is, you see, a matter of my English—”

Which sounded, Deborah thought, not only excellent but charming.

“—and the fact that Nicky has done all of this on his own.”

“I wouldn’t have done it without you in my life,” Nicholas put in.

“But that is another matter entirely.” She turned as she spoke and her hair lifted, that billowing effect caused by its wiry nature. “The
pele project…this is about you and what you have done and what you are achieving on your own. I am only your support, Nicky.”

“As if that’s not important,” he said, rolling his eyes at Deborah as if to add, “You see what I have to put up with?”

“Nonetheless, I have no real part and I want no part.”

“You’ve no worries on that score,” Deborah assured her. Anything to get their agreement, she thought. “And really, I do want to stress that nothing may come of this anyway. I don’t make the decisions. I only do the research. I create a report, take pictures to accompany it, and everything goes to London. The people at the production company decide what will be in the film.”

“See?” Nicholas said to his wife. “No worries.”

Alatea nodded but she didn’t look convinced. Still she gave her blessing with the words, “Perhaps you should then take Deborah to see the project, Nicky. That seems like a good place to begin.”

ARNSIDE
CUMBRIA

When her husband had left with the red-haired woman, Alatea sat for a moment looking at the fan of magazines on the table in the bay window’s alcove. They had been gone through. While this shouldn’t have been odd, considering the woman had been waiting for Nicholas to fetch his wife for an introduction and it
was
natural for one to flip idly through magazines while waiting, there was nonetheless very little that did not set Alatea’s nerves on edge these days. She told herself that it meant absolutely nothing that
Conception
was now on the top of the stack. While it was a little embarrassing that a stranger might conclude that Alatea was obsessed with the subject of the magazine, it hardly meant anything would come of her conclusion. This woman from London was not here to talk to her or to wander through the labyrinth of her personal history. She was here because of what Nicholas was doing. And it was likely that she
wouldn’t have been here at all had Nicholas been just some ordinary individual trying to develop yet another way to help addicts turn their lives around. The fact that he wasn’t just some ordinary bloke, the fact that the misdeeds of his misspent youth had garnered him so much publicity because of his father…That was what made the story a good one: the son of Lord Fairclough, self-redeemed from a life of dissolution.

Alatea hadn’t known about the Baron Fairclough of Ireleth part of Nicholas’s past when she’d first met him, or she would have run from his presence. Instead, she’d known only that his father was a manufacturer of everything imaginable that one might find in a bathroom, a fact that Nicholas had made light of. What he hadn’t mentioned was his father’s title, his father’s service to the cause of pancreatic cancer, and his father’s subsequent position of prominence. So she’d been prepared to meet a man prematurely aged by his son’s having thrown away twenty years of his life. She’d not been prepared to meet the vital presence that was Bernard Fairclough. Nor had she been altogether prepared for that way Nicholas’s father looked at her through his heavy-framed spectacles. “Call me Bernard,” he’d said, and his eyes had gone from her own to her bosom and back again. “Welcome to the family, my dear.”

She was used to men’s eyes on her bosom. That had not been the problem. It was natural. Men were men. But men didn’t usually then gaze upon her with speculation on their faces. What is someone like you doing with my son? was the unspoken question Bernard Fairclough had asked her.

She had seen that look each time Nicholas had introduced her to a member of his family. To them all, she and her husband were unsuited and although she wanted to make her physical appearance the reason for her unsuitability as the wife of Nicholas Fairclough, she reckoned it was more than that. They thought of her as a gold digger. She was not from their country; they knew nothing about her; her courtship had been disturbingly brief. To them this meant she was after something, undoubtedly the family fortune. Especially did Nicholas’s cousin Ian think this, because he was the man in charge of Bernard Fairclough’s money.

What Nicholas’s family didn’t think was that she could possibly be in love with him. She’d so far expended a great deal of effort to assure them of her devotion. She’d given them not a single reason to doubt her love for Nicholas, and ultimately, she’d come to believe she’d soothed the concerns of them all.

There was no reason their concerns should not be soothed, for she
did
love her husband. She
was
devoted to him. God in heaven, she was hardly the first woman on earth who had fallen in love with a man less attractive than herself. It happened all the time. So for every person to gaze upon her so speculatively…This had to stop, but she wasn’t sure how to halt it.

Alatea knew that she had to resolve her anxieties about this and other matters in some way. She had to stop starting at shadows. It was not a sin to enjoy the life she had. She hadn’t sought it. It had come to her. That had to mean it was the path that she was intended to follow.

Still, there was the magazine mixed among the others on the table and now on the top of them. Still, there was the way the woman from London had looked at her. How did they really know who this woman was, why she was here, and what she intended? They didn’t. They had to wait to find out. Or so it seemed.

Alatea picked up the coffee service on its tray. She carried it into the kitchen. She saw next to the telephone the scrap of paper upon which she’d first written the message from Deborah St. James. She hadn’t taken note of the name of the company Deborah St. James represented when she’d taken the message, but the woman herself had mentioned it, thank God, so Alatea had a place to start.

She went to the second floor of the house. Along a corridor where servants once had slept, she had designated a tiny bedroom as their design centre while she and Nicholas worked upon the house. But she also used the room as her lair and it was here that she kept her laptop.

It took forever to access the Internet from this location, but she managed to do so. She stared at the screen for a moment before she began to type.

BRYANBARROW
CUMBRIA

It had been easy to bunk off school. Since no one with any brains would actually
want
to cart him all the way to Ulverston and beyond and since Kaveh
did
have brains, it had been a simple matter. Lie in bed, clutch the stomach, say Cousin Manette had served him something that must have been bad on the previous evening, claim he had already been sick twice during the night, and act appreciative when Gracie reacted as he’d known she’d react. She’d flown to Kaveh’s bedroom and he’d heard her crying out, “Timmy’s been sick! Timmy’s not well!” and he did feel a very small twinge of guilt because he knew from Gracie’s voice that she was afraid. Poor dumb kid. It didn’t take a genius to know she was worried that someone else from her family might suddenly kick the bucket.