Believing the Lie (78 page)

Nor, it turned out, was the RNLI. They were volunteers, after all. They were trained to help and they wanted to help. But they needed water to launch their boats, sir, and the bay was at present empty. While it was true that it wasn’t going to be empty for long, when the water rushed in, it was going to take that woman quickly because if she didn’t drown, hypothermia would get her. They’d set off with the tide as soon as they were able, but it was useless. We’re so sorry, sir.

So the fire roared and someone thought to bring a loud-hailer from which Alatea’s name was shouted continuously. In the meantime, out in the distance somewhere, the phenomenon that was the tidal bore was coming. Awesome to witness, Lynley heard someone murmur. But deadlier to encounter.

WINDERMERE
CUMBRIA

The burglar alarm was loud enough to raise skeletons from tombs. They had to shout to each other to be heard above it. They used all their force to wedge the wheelie bin into the shop in order to give themselves a means of access, and once inside, Freddie turned to Manette and yelled, “You wait here,” which, naturally, she was not about to do.

He went for the inner door and rattled its handle. It was locked, and although he yelled, “Open this! Police!” and then “Tim! Tim Cresswell!” it was clear to them both that whoever was within the other room wasn’t about to cooperate.

“I’ll have to break it.”

Manette read his lips rather than heard him. She said, “How?” because of all the things Freddie was, he was hardly a man in possession of the brute force that was needed to break in a door. And this door wasn’t like a telly door or a film door, substantial in appearance but in reality flimsy enough to be kicked in with a single thrust of a manly foot powered by an even manlier thigh. This was a door with intentions, and those intentions were to keep out trespassers.

Nonetheless, Freddie went at it. First with his foot. Then with his shoulder. Then they took turns and all the time the burglar alarm kept howling. It was a good five minutes—perhaps more—when they finally broke the lock through the doorjamb. Freddie stumbled inside the inner room, shouting over his shoulder, “Manette, you must wait.”

Again, she ignored him. If he was walking into danger, she wasn’t about to let him walk into danger alone.

They were in a digital printing room that gave onto a storeroom. Two aisles comprised this, at the end of which strong lights were shining, although the rest of the place was in darkness. The alarm’s noise continued unabated, so they watched for movement from the shadows. But a cold breeze wafting towards them spoke of an escape
having been effected out of the back door. They could only hope someone had been left behind. They could only hope that someone was Tim.

At the far end where the light was brightest, they saw the crude film set. Manette took it all in in an instant—beds, window, Big Ben in the distance, dog at the foot of a bed—before she saw him. He was a figure lying on his side in what looked like a nightshirt. But the nightshirt was pulled above his head, green tights were tied round the top of it like a sack, and the boy himself lay on his side with his hands bound in front of him and his genitals on display. He was fully erect. An X on the floor not far from the bed on which he lay indicated where the camera had been positioned and what its primary focus had been.

Manette said, “Oh God.”

Freddie turned to her. She read his lips because there was no way to hear him, not while the alarm kept shrieking like a banshee come to claim a soul.
You stay here. You stay
here
.

Because she was frightened at that point, she remained where she was. If Tim was dead, the truth of the matter was that she simply did not want to see.

Freddie went to the bed. Manette saw his lips form
he’s bleeding
and then
Tim old man I say old man
as he reached for the tights that bound the nightshirt closed above Tim’s head.

Tim’s body jerked. Freddie’s lips said
Easy there. It’s Freddie my man let me get you out you’re all right old man
and then he had the nightshirt released from its binding and he was lowering it gently to cover Tim’s body and Manette saw from the boy’s eyes and his face that he was drugged which in that moment she thanked God for because if he was drugged there was a small chance that he would not remember what had happened to him here.

Phone the police,
Freddie said.

But she knew there was no need for that. Even as she approached Ian’s son where he lay on the bed, even as she reached to untie his hands, the alarm ceased howling and she heard the voices.

“Bloody damn mess,” someone called out from the shop itself.

How true, she thought.

MORECAMBE BAY
CUMBRIA

Everything you do in quicksand is counterintuitive, Nicky had told her. When you hit it, your inclination is to freeze in place. It seems that struggling will make you sink faster. Any movement at all will presage more danger and an inconceivable end. But you must remember several things, darling. The first is that you have no idea how deep the sand really is. You’re only in a scour and while it
might
be deep enough to swallow a horse or a tractor or an entire tour coach, it’s more likely that you’re in one of the shallower scours, which will suck you in only to your knees or, at worst, your thighs, leaving you otherwise free until rescue comes.
But
you don’t want to discover that—especially if you’re going to go in up to your chest—because if you sink that far there’s no getting out because of the suction involved. At that point only more water can get you out, water from a fire hose blasting into the sand to free you or water from the incoming tide driving sand from the scour again. So you must move quickly once you’re in the sand. If you’re very lucky, it’s not deep and before it can suck upon your boots and entrap them, you can move across it or back away from it. If you can’t do that, then you must lie on the surface of the quicksand. Lie down upon it as soon as you’re able. You’ll see that you’ll sink no deeper and you’ll be able to roll away from it.

But no matter the words of her husband, who had lived his life in this strange part of the world, to Alatea the thought was madness. She was in the sand up to her thighs, so no quick movement out of the scour was possible. This meant lying on the top of the sand. And she could not bring herself to do it. She told herself to. She said aloud, “You must, you
must
,” but all she could think of as she settled more slowly downward was the insidious movement of the sand inching up her supine body, crawling into her ears, touching her cheeks, slithering like menace incarnate towards her nose.

She wanted to pray but her mind would not produce the appropriate words that could effect a miracle. Instead, what it produced were images,
and central to them was Santiago Vasquez y del Torres, thirteen years old, a runaway only as far as the closest city to Santa Maria de la Cruz, de los Angeles, y de los Santos. There in a church he had stowed himself for refuge, dressed in Elena Maria’s clothing, face painted with Elena Maria’s cosmetics, a shoulder bag containing some little money and a change of clothing and three tubes of lipstick, and a scarf covering hair that was too long for a boy and too short for a girl.

When the priest found her, he called her
my child
and
daughter of our Heavenly Father
and he asked her if she was there to confess. And confession seemed like the path she should take—“Go, Santiago. Go where God points,” Elena Maria had whispered—so Santiago Vasquez y del Torres had confessed. Not to sin but to his need for help because if he could not be what he needed to be, he knew he would end his life.

The priest listened. He spoke gently of the grave sin of despair. He said that God did not create mistakes. Then he said, “Come with me, child,” and together they walked to the rectory, where Santiago was given absolution for whatever sin he had committed in running from his home and a meal of beef and boiled potatoes, which he ate slowly as he looked round the simple kitchen, where the priest’s housekeeper eyed him with thick black eyebrows drawn together and a furrowed brow. When he was finished with his meal, he was led to a parlour to rest, my dear child, for your journey has been a long and difficult one, has it not? And yes it had, oh it had. So he lay on a sofa covered in corduroy and he fell asleep.

His father awakened him. Face like a stone mask, he’d said, “Thank you, Padre,” and he’d taken his wayward son by the arm. “Thank you for everything,” and he’d made a hefty donation to the church or perhaps to the betraying priest himself, and home they had gone.

A beating would change him, his father decided. So would being locked into a room until he saw clearly the crime he had committed not only against God’s law but also against his family and their good name. And nothing would change about his situation—“Do you understand me, Santiago?”—until he agreed to stop this mad behaviour.

So Santiago had tried on manhood, for all the ill-fitting suit of clothes it was. But pictures of naked ladies shared in secret with his
brothers only made him want to be like the ladies, not to have them, and when his brothers touched themselves in guilty pleasure at the sight of these women, the thought of touching himself in a similar way made him both nauseous and faint.

He did not develop as a boy: hairy of arm and leg and chest, bearded and needing to shave. It was so clear that something was wrong with him, but the only answer seemed to be toughening him up with contact sports, with hunting, with rock climbing, with daredevil skiing, with anything, in short, that his father could think of to make him into the man he was intended by God to be.

For two long years Santiago made the attempt. For two long years Santiago saved every bit of money he could. At fifteen, then, he ran for the final time, and he made it by train to Buenos Aires, where no one knew he was not a female unless he wished to make the fact known to them.

Alatea recalled the train ride: the sound of the engine and the scenery passing. She recalled her head against the cool glass of the window. She recalled her feet upon her suitcase. She remembered her ticket being punched and the man saying,
Gracias, señorita
, and being
señorita
from that time forward as the train carried her away from her home.

She could almost hear the train at this moment, so vivid was the memory of that time and that place. It rumbled and roared. It gushed and it thundered. It took her relentlessly into her future and even now she was on it, escaping her past.

When the first of the water hit her, she understood that what she’d been hearing was the tide. She realised then what that siren had meant. This was the tidal bore coming, coming as fast as a horse could gallop. And while the water meant that she would soon be free of the scour that held her fast, she understood that there were things from which she would never be free.

She thought of how thankful she was that she would not suffocate in the sand, as she had feared she might. As the first of the water crashed against her body, she understood also that she would not drown. For one did not drown in water such as this. One merely lay back and fell asleep.

ARNSIDE
CUMBRIA

T
here had been nothing, really, that could be done. All of them had known it. All of them had pretended otherwise. The Coast Guard went out into the fog, taking the route from Walney Island into Lancaster Sound. But it was miles from there into Morecambe Bay and miles farther into the channel of the River Kent. She could have been anywhere, and this was something that everyone had known as well. If it had been the tidal bore alone, there might have been a chance—slight though it was—that she could be found. But with the tidal bore conjoining the fog, the situation had been without hope from the very first. They did not find her.

The RNLI had attempted to help as well, once there was enough water for them to set out. But they hadn’t got far before they knew that it was a body they would be looking for. With this the case, for them to remain out in the fog ran the risk of there being more bodies to find at the end of the day, and to compound the tragedy was foolish. Only the Guide to the Sands could assist, they reported to Lynley upon their return to land, for the Guide’s job in a situation
such as this was to speculate on the probable places that a body would wash up. His job was to help them find the body as quickly as possible because if they did not find it when the fog lifted, there was a very good chance they would not find it at all. The water would wash it away, and the sand would bury it. Some things out in Morecambe Bay were never found and some things lay buried for one hundred years. It was the nature of the place, the Guide to the Sands told them.

Lynley and Deborah had gone into Arnside House at last, after hours upon hours of stoking the bonfire, even after the point when the tidal bore had surged into and then filled the channel and all of them knew there was not a single hope left. But Nicholas wouldn’t leave the fire, so they continued to feed it with him, even as they cast worried looks upon his devastated face. He wasn’t ready to stop until evening, when exhaustion had combined with knowledge and the dawning of grief to rob him of the desire to continue. Then he’d stumbled towards the house, and Lynley and Deborah had followed him as the people of Arnside village parted to let them pass and their words of sympathy had matched the looks of sorrow on their faces.

Inside the house, Lynley had phoned Bernard Fairclough. He reported only the barest of facts: that his son’s wife was missing and probably drowned out in Morecambe Bay. Apparently out for a walk, Lynley told them, and caught up in the tidal bore.

“We’ll be there at once,” Bernard Fairclough had said. “Tell Nicholas we’re on our way.”

“They’ll want to know if I’m going to use now,” Nicholas said numbly when Lynley relayed his father’s message. “Well, who wouldn’t worry that I might, with my history, eh?” He went on to say that he would not see them. Or anyone else, if it came to that.

So Lynley had waited and when Nicholas’s parents arrived, he gave them the information. And he himself decided that his part in all this was not to betray Alatea. He would hold her secrets in his heart. He would take her secrets to his grave. He knew that Deborah would do the same.