Believing the Lie (21 page)

“Can’t that sort of thing backfire?”

“That’s half the fun. But I’m careful and once they start talking about getting together in one port or another, I end it with a bang.” She moved towards the kitchen, going on to say, “I should offer you coffee or something. I’ve only the instant kind, I’m afraid. Would you like a cup? Or tea? I’ve only bags. I could do you a cup of either.”

“Coffee is fine. But I hate to trouble you.”

“Do you indeed? How well-bred of you to say so.” She was out of his line of vision in the kitchen banging about, so he took the opportunity to look round the place. Aside from the plethora of boxes, there was unwashed crockery on most available surfaces. The plates and bowls looked to have been there for some time because when he lifted one, it left a perfect ring beneath it that was untroubled by the dust that formed a fine down elsewhere.

He moved closer to the computer. She hadn’t been lying, he saw at a glance.
God how I know what you mean,
she had written.
There are times when life gets in the way of what’s really important. In my case, we used to do it every night. And now I’m lucky for once a month. But you should talk to her about it. Really. Of course, I say that and don’t myself talk to James. How I wish. But never mind. What I wish can’t happen. If only, though.

“We’ve advanced to the point of revealing our miserable marriages,” Mignon said behind him. “Really, it’s incredible. The process is always exactly the same. You’d think someone along the line would have a bit of imagination when they’re setting about seduction, but they never do. I’ve got the kettle on. Coffee’ll be just a minute. I’ll need you to carry your own cup.”

Lynley joined her in the kitchen. It was tiny but kitted out with everything one would need. He saw she would have to do some washing up soon, however. There were very few plates left and she was using the last available mug for his coffee. She was having nothing herself. He said, “Wouldn’t you prefer a real relationship?”

She eyed him. “Like my parents’, perhaps?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “They seem quite devoted.”

“Oh yes. They are. Perfectly devoted, entirely compatible, and everything else that goes along with it. Just look at them. Billing and cooing. Did they do that bit for you?”

“I’m not sure I’d recognise a bill or a coo.”

“Well, if they didn’t engage in a few rounds of it yesterday, they’ll show you today, I’m sure. Watch for an exchange of looks suggesting deep waters. They’re good at that.”

“All form and no substance?”

“I didn’t say that.
Devoted
was what I said. They’re devoted and compatible, with all the trimmings. I think it’s to do with the fact that my father’s rarely here. It’s quite perfect for them both. Well, for him at least. As for Mother, she doesn’t complain and why should she? As long as she can fish, go to lunch with friends, manage my life, and spend vast amounts of her money on the gardens, I expect her existence is fine. And it
is
her money. Not Dad’s, by the way, but he’s never minded that as long as he has free use of it. Not what I would want in a marriage but as I don’t want a marriage at all, who am I to judge theirs?”

The water came to a boil and the kettle clicked off. Mignon set about the exercise of making him a cup of coffee, although she didn’t bother to do it deftly. She spooned in a heap of the instant powder, leaving a trail of it between jar and mug, and when she stirred it, the liquid slopped over the edge of the mug and onto the worktop. She
used the same spoon to dig into a sugar bowl, did a bit more slopping, added milk, and slopped some more. She handed over the mug without wiping off the excess coffee and said in what Lynley judged the understatement of the year, “Sorry. I’m not at all domestic.”

“Nor am I,” he responded. “Thank you.”

She hobbled back to the sitting room, tossing over her shoulder, “What sort of car is that, by the way?”

“Car?”

“That amazing thing you’re driving. I saw it when you arrived yesterday. Quite stylish but it must absolutely swill petrol like a camel at the oasis.”

“Healey Elliott,” he told her.

“Never heard of it.” She found a chair unburdened by magazines and boxes. She deposited herself into it with a thud and said to him, “Find a spot. Move anything. It hardly matters.” And as he was searching for a place to sit, “So what were you doing at the boathouse? I saw you there yesterday with my father. What’s the attraction?”

He made a note about being more careful in his movements. It was appearing that aside from occupying herself with the Internet, Mignon spent her time in observation of what was going on round the property. He said, “I’d thought about taking that scull out on the lake but my natural bent towards sloth got the better of me.”

“Just as well.” She jerked her head in the general direction of the boathouse. “Last person who used it drowned. I reckoned you were tiptoeing down there to have a look at the scene of the crime.” She chuckled grimly.

“Crime?” He took a sip of the coffee. It was ghastly.

“My cousin Ian. Surely you’ve been informed. No?” She told him much of what he already knew, as blithely as she’d told him everything else. He wondered about her general frankness of conversation. In his experience, such commitment to ostensible veracity hid, in reality, a wealth of information.

Ian Cresswell had definitely been murdered, as far as Mignon was concerned. Her reasoning was that, as far as she knew, people rarely died just because someone else
wished
them to. To his raised eyebrow
upon hearing this, she went on. Her brother, Nicholas, had had to stumble along in Cousin Ian’s sainted footsteps for most of his life. From the moment dear Ian had arrived from Kenya to take up residence with the Fairclough family upon the death of his mother, it had been Ian this and Ian that and why can’t you be more like Ian? First-class pupil at St. Bees, he was, first-class athlete, first-class nephew to his uncle Bernard, shining star, blue-eyed boy, never put so much as a toenail wrong.

“I reckoned when he dumped his family and took up with Kaveh, that would open Dad’s eyes to our darling Ian. I’m sure Nicky felt the same. But even deserting his family didn’t do it. And now Kaveh’s working for my mother and who orchestrated that if not Ian, hmm? No, nothing poor Nicky’s done in his life has been enough to shine a light on him that was brighter than the light shone on Ian. And nothing Ian did dimmed his own light in my father’s eyes. It does make one wonder.”

“About?”

“All sorts of delicious things.” Her face wore an I’ll-say-no-more expression: saintly and pleased simultaneously.

“So Nicholas killed him?” Lynley enquired. “I assume he stood to gain somehow.”

“As to the killing part, personally, I wouldn’t be the least surprised. As to the gaining…Lord knows.” She also seemed to be saying she wouldn’t much blame Nicholas for anything that might have happened to Ian Cresswell, and this, along with her remarks about the man himself, was something that bore looking into. As did, Lynley thought, the terms of Cresswell’s will.

He said, “It does seem a risky way to go about killing him, though, wouldn’t you say?”

“Why?”

“I understand your mother uses the boathouse nearly every day.”

Mignon straightened in her chair, receiving this news. She said, “And you’re implying…?”

“That your mother might have been a target for murder, assuming in the first place that someone was targeted for murder at all.”

“
No
one would be the least interested in seeing my mother die,”
Mignon declared. She felt the need, apparently, to tick off on her fingers every person devoted to her mother, and topping the list was her father again, and all those claims of his devotion to Valerie.

Lynley thought of
Hamlet
and ladies protesting too much. He also thought of rich people and what they did with their money and how money bought everything from unwilling silence to reluctant cooperation. But all of this begged the question of what Bernard Fairclough had then intended by coming to London and requesting someone to look into the death of his nephew.

Too clever by half
came to mind. Lynley just wasn’t certain where the expression ought to be applied.

GRANGE-OVER-SANDS
CUMBRIA

Manette Fairclough McGhie had long believed there was no one on earth more manipulative than her own sister, but now she had other ideas. Mignon had used a simple accident at Launchy Gill to control their parents for more than thirty years: slip on the boulders too near the waterfall, knock your head, sustain a skull fracture, and my God, you’d think the world had ended. But really, Mignon was nothing at all in comparison to Niamh Cresswell. Mignon used people’s guilt, fear, and anxiety to get what she wanted. But Niamh used her own children. And this, Manette decided, was going to stop.

So she took the day off from work. She had a good reason, being bruised and sore from Tim’s attack on her on the previous afternoon. But even had he not kicked her kidneys and her spine so savagely, she would have come up with something. Fourteen-year-old boys did not behave as Tim was behaving without good reason. She’d known, of course, that something more serious than confusion over his father’s life choices was behind Tim’s attack on her as well as his placement in Margaret Fox School. She just hadn’t known the reason was his own miserable excuse for a mother.

Niamh’s home was just outside of Grange-over-Sands, some distance
from Great Urswick. It was part of a neat and newish housing estate that curled down a hillside overlooking an estuary in Morecambe Bay. The houses here reflected someone’s taste for things Mediterranean: They were uniformly a blinding white, uniformly trimmed in dark blue, with uniformly simple front gardens heavily given to gravel and shrubbery. They were of various sizes and, true to form, Niamh possessed the largest of them with the best view of the estuary and the wintering birds who domiciled there. This was the home to which Niamh had decamped upon Ian’s desertion of his family. Manette knew from talking to Ian after the divorce that Niamh had been adamant about moving house. Well, who could blame her, really? Manette had thought at the time. The memories within the former home would have been painful, and the woman had two children to care for in the aftermath of the nuclear explosion that had occurred in the centre of her family. She’d have wanted something nice, at least, to help cushion the blow of such a transition in Tim and Gracie’s lives.

That conclusion of Manette’s, however, existed before she had learned that Tim and Gracie weren’t living with their mother at all but rather with their father and his lover. She’d adjusted her thinking to What the hell is going on?, ultimately letting the question go when Ian had told her it was what he wanted as well: having his children with him. Upon Ian’s death, Manette had thought that Niamh would naturally have taken the children home with her. That she had evidently not done so brought up What the hell is going on? once again. This time, she intended to have the question answered.

Niamh’s estate car was in front of the house, and she came at once to the door when Manette knocked. Her expression was expectant, but this expression altered when she saw that her caller was Manette. Had Niamh not been wearing enough scent to knock over a pony as well as a hot-pink cocktail dress showing a copious amount of cleavage, that altered expression alone would have told Manette someone else was due to arrive quite soon.

Niamh said, “Manette,” as a means of greeting. She did not step back from the doorway in unspoken welcome.

No matter, Manette thought. She stepped forward, giving Niamh
no choice but to go chest-to-chest with her or to move out of the way. Niamh chose the latter option, although she did not close the door behind them as she followed Manette into the body of the house.

Manette made for the sitting room with its broad windows overlooking the estuary. She gave a passing glance to the mass of Arnside Knot far across the bay and passing thought to the fact that with a powerful enough telescope one would have been able to see not only where the trees of the knot opened up to the crown of bare land and a few wind-scarred conifers at its summit but also lower down the hill and into her brother Nicholas’s sitting room.

She turned and faced Niamh. The other woman was watching her but, oddly, her glance shifted several times from Manette to the doorway leading into the kitchen. It was as if someone was hiding in there, which hardly made sense considering Niamh’s previous look of expectation. So Manette said, “I could do with a coffee. Mind if I…” and strode in that direction.

Niamh said, “Manette, what do you want? I would have appreciated a phone call to tell me—”

But Manette was in the kitchen at that point, putting on the kettle as if she lived here. On the worktop she saw the reason for Niamh’s shifty eyes. A bright red tin bucket stood upon it, filled with a variety of items. A black sticker with white letters formed a flag on the bucket and
Bucket of Love
was printed across this. That this intriguing object had just arrived by post was indicated by an open box on the worktop as well. It took no advanced degree in human sexuality to understand that the bucket’s contents constituted a variety of suggestive toys meant to be used by a couple looking for spice to add to their sex life.
Very
interesting, Manette thought.

Niamh pushed past her, snatched up the Bucket of Love, and replaced it in the box. She said, “Fine. Now what do you want? And
I’ll
make the coffee if it’s quite all right with you.” She fetched a cafetiere, which she slammed onto the worktop. She did the same with a small bag of coffee and a mug with
I’ve been to Blackpool!
fading round its middle.

“I’ve come about the children,” Manette said. There was no point
in preliminaries that she could see. “Why aren’t they back with you yet, Niamh?”

“I don’t see that it’s any of your business. Did Timothy tell you something yesterday?”

“Tim attacked me yesterday. I think you and I can agree that’s hardly normal behaviour for a fourteen-year-old boy.”