Believing the Lie (79 page)

It was too late by then to begin the journey back to London, so he and Deborah had returned to the Crow and Eagle, booked two
rooms, had a largely silent dinner, and had gone to bed. In the morning, when he could bear to talk, he phoned New Scotland Yard. There were, he saw, seven messages on his mobile phone. He didn’t listen to any of them. He rang Barbara Havers instead.

He told her briefly what had happened. She was silent except for the occasional, “Oh damn” and “Oh hell, sir.” He told her that they would need to get word to Alatea’s family in Argentina. Could Barbara find the graduate student once again and make the necessary phone call? Yes, she could, she told him. She was that bloody sorry about the way things had worked out, as well.

Havers said, “How are you, sir? You don’t sound good. Anything else I c’n do at this end?”

“Tell the superintendent that I was detained in Cumbria,” he said. “I’ll be on my way in an hour or two.”

“Anything else I should tell her?” Havers asked. “Want me to let her know what’s happened?”

Lynley considered this only briefly before he made his decision. “Best to let things lie as they are,” he said.

She said, “Right,” and rang off.

Lynley knew he could trust her to do as he’d asked, and it occurred to him, then, that he’d not thought at all about ringing Isabelle. Either on the previous night or this morning upon waking from a very bad sleep, he’d not considered her.

Deborah was waiting for him when he descended the stairs into reception at the Crow and Eagle. She was very ill looking. Her eyes grew bright with tears when she saw him, and she cleared her throat roughly to keep them from falling.

She was sitting on a wooden bench opposite the reception desk. He sat next to her and put his arm round her shoulders. She sagged into him, and he kissed the side of her head. She reached for his other hand and held it, and he felt the change in both of their bodies as they began to breathe as one.

He said, “Don’t think what you’re thinking.”

“How can I not?”

“I’m not sure. But I know that you mustn’t.”

“Tommy, she would never have gone out into the bay if I hadn’t
been pursuing this whole mad surrogate mother business. And that had nothing to do with Ian Cresswell’s death, which you and Simon knew all along. I’m at fault.”

“Deb darling, secrets and silence caused all of this. Lies caused this. Not you.”

“You’re being very kind.”

“I’m being truthful. It was what Alatea couldn’t bear to tell him about herself that took her onto the sands. It was that information that took her to Lancaster in the first place. You can’t make her secrets and her death your fault because they’re not, and that’s how it is.”

Deborah said nothing for a moment. Her head was bent and she seemed to be studying the toes of her black leather boots. She finally murmured, “But there’re things one
must
be silent about, aren’t there?”

He thought about this, about everything that remained and would remain forever unspoken between them. He replied with, “And who knows that better than we two?” and when he loosened his arm from her shoulders, she looked at him. He smiled at her fondly. “London?” he said.

“London,” she replied.

ARNSIDE
CUMBRIA

No matter Nicholas’s desire for solitude, Valerie had insisted to her husband that they would remain in Arnside House the rest of that night. She’d phoned Manette to give her the news, telling her to stay away. She’d phoned Mignon as well but with little worry that Mignon would bring herself all the way to Arnside since she’d been holed up in her tower from the moment she’d understood that her parents had no intention of continuing to be at her monetary, emotional, and physical beck and call. Mignon hardly mattered to Valerie
at this point, anyway. Her concern was Nicholas. Her worry was what he might do in the wake of this disaster.

His message to them via the detective from New Scotland Yard had been terse but forthright. He wanted to see no one. That had been all.

Valerie had said to Lynley, “She’ll have people in Argentina. We’ll need to let them know. There will be arrangements…”

Lynley had told her that the Met would handle informing Alatea’s people since he had an officer who had tracked them down. As for arrangements, perhaps they all ought to wait to see if a body could be found.

She hadn’t thought of that: that there might not be a body. There had been a death so there
would
be a body, she wanted to insist. After all, a body was a form of finality. Without one, how would grief ever be navigated?

When Lynley had left with the woman he’d introduced as Deborah St. James—unknown to Valerie and, frankly, unimportant at this point save the knowledge that she’d been present during the time of Alatea’s disappearance—Valerie climbed the stairs and made her way to Nicholas’s room. She’d said to the panels of his door, “We’re here, darling. Your father and I. We’ll be downstairs,” and she’d left him alone.

Throughout the long night, she and Bernard had sat in the drawing room, a fire burning in the grate. Near three in the morning, she’d thought she heard movement above them on the first floor of the house, but it turned out to be only the wind. The wind blew away the fog and brought with it the rain. The rain beat against the windows in steady waves and Valerie thought aimlessly about heaviness enduring for a night but joy coming in the morning. Something that came from the Book of Common Prayer, she recalled. But the words did not apply in this terrible case.

She and Bernard did not speak. He attempted to draw her into conversation four times, but she shook her head and held up her hand to make him stop. When he finally said, “For the love of God, Valerie, you must talk to me sometime,” she understood that in spite of
everything that had passed in the last twelve or more hours, Bernard actually wanted to talk about
them
. What was wrong with the man? she asked herself wearily. But then, hadn’t she always known the answer to that?

It was just after dawn when Nicholas came into the drawing room. He’d moved so quietly, she hadn’t heard him and he was standing in front of her before she realised it was not Bernard who’d entered the room. For Bernard had never left the room, although that, too, was something she hadn’t taken note of.

She started to get to her feet. Nicholas said, “Don’t.”

She said, “Darling,” but she stopped when he shook his head. He had one eye closed as if the lights in the room were painful to him, and he cocked his head as if this would help bring her into focus.

He said, “Just this. It’s not my intention.”

Bernard said, “What? Nick, I say…”

“It’s not my intention to use again,” he said.

“That’s not why we’re here,” Valerie said.

“So you stayed because…?” His lips were so dry they seemed to stick together. There were hollows beneath his eyes. His cherub hair was flat and matted. His spectacles were smudged.

“We stayed because we’re your parents,” Bernard said. “For the love of God, Nick—”

“It’s my fault,” Valerie said. “If I hadn’t brought the Scotland Yard people up here to investigate, upsetting you, upsetting her—”

“If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine,” Bernard said. “Your mother is blameless. If I hadn’t given her cause to want an investigation, no matter the bloody reason—”

“Stop.” Nicholas raised his hand and dropped it in an exhausted movement. He said, “Yes. It’s your fault. Both of you. But that doesn’t really make a difference now.”

He turned and left them in the drawing room. They heard him shuffle along the corridor. In a moment they heard him trudging up the stairs.

They went home in silence. As if knowing they were coming down the long drive from the road—perhaps she’d been watching for them from the roof of the tower, where, Valerie now knew, she’d
doubtless been skipping up the stairs to spy upon everyone for years—Mignon stood waiting for them. She’d wisely discarded the zimmer frame, no doubt understanding that her jig was decidedly up, and she was wrapped up in a wool coat against the cold. The morning was fine as it sometimes is after a good rain, and the sun was as bright as an undashed hope, casting gold autumn light on the lawns and the deer grazing upon them in the distance.

Mignon advanced on the car as Valerie got out. She said, “Mother, what happened? Why did you not come home last night? I was sick with worry. I couldn’t sleep. I nearly phoned the police.”

Valerie said, “Alatea…”

“Well, of course Alatea,” Mignon declared. “But why on earth did you and Dad not come
home
?”

Valerie gazed at her daughter, but she couldn’t quite seem to make her out. Yet hadn’t that always been the case? Mignon was a stranger and the workings of her mind were the foreign country in which she dwelt.

“I’m far too tired to speak to you now,” Valerie told her, and headed for the door.

“Mother!”

“Mignon, that’s enough,” her father said.

Valerie heard Bernard following. She heard Mignon’s wail of protest. She paused for a moment then turned back to her. “You heard your father,” she said. “Enough.”

She went into the house. She was monumentally exhausted. Bernard said her name as she made for the stairs. He sounded tentative, unsure in ways that Bernard Fairclough had never been unsure.

She said, “I’m going to bed, Bernard,” and she climbed the stairs to do so.

She was acutely aware of the need for a decision of some sort. Life as she’d known it was something of a shambles now, and she was going to have to work out how to repair it: which pieces to keep, which pieces to replace, which pieces to send to the rubbish tip. She was also aware of how much the burden of responsibility fell upon her shoulders. For she had known all along about Bernard and his life in London, and that knowledge and what she’d done with that
knowledge were the sins that would weigh on her conscience till the end of her days.

Ian had told her, of course. Although it was his own uncle whose use of the firm’s money he was reporting upon, Ian had always recognised where the true power in Fairclough Industries lay. Oh, Bernard ran the day-to-day business and, indeed, made many of the decisions. Bernard, Manette, Freddie, and Ian had together kept the concern moving forward, modernising it in a way that Valerie would never have considered. But when the board met two times a year, it was Valerie who took the position at the head of the table, and not one of them ever questioned this because that was how it had always been. You could climb the ranks, but there was a ceiling and breaking through it was a matter of blood, not strength.

“Something curious and rather unsettling,” was how Ian had reported it to her. “Frankly, Aunt Val, I’d thought not to tell you at all because…Well, you’ve been good to me and so has Uncle Bernie, of course, and for a while I thought I might be able to move funds around and cover the expenditures, but it’s got to the point where I can’t quite see how to do it.”

A nice boy Ian Cresswell had been when he’d come to live with them to attend school after his mother’s death in Kenya. A nice man Ian Cresswell had become. It was unfortunate that he’d hurt his wife and children so badly when he’d decided to live the life he’d been intended to live from birth, but sometimes these things happened to people and when they did, you had to muddle on. So Valerie had seen his concern, she’d respected the battle of loyalities he was fighting, and she was grateful that he’d come to her with the printouts that showed where the money was going.

She’d felt ghastly when he’d died. Accident though it was, she couldn’t help thinking that she hadn’t stressed enough the perilous condition of that dock in the boathouse. But his death had given her the opening she’d been looking for. The only suitable manner in which Bernard could be dealt with, she’d decided, was humiliation in front of his entire family. His children needed to know exactly what sort of man their father was. They’d abandon him, then, to his London mistress and his bastard child, and they’d
circle the wagons of their devotion around their mother, and that would be how Bernard would pay for his sins. For the children were Faircloughs by blood, the three of them, and they would not brook the obscenity of their father’s double life for an instant. Then, after a suitable amount of time had passed, she would forgive him. Indeed, after nearly forty-three years, what else was Valerie Fairclough to do?

She went to her bedroom window. It looked out upon Lake Windermere. Thankfully, she thought, it did not look out on the children’s garden that now probably would not be. Instead, what she gazed upon was the great wide platter of the lake itself, still as a mirror flung onto the earth, reflecting—as a mirror would do—the fir trees along the shore, the fell rising opposite the land of Ireleth Hall, and the great cumulous clouds, which were the usual aftermath of a stormy night. It was a perfect autumn day, appearing clean and polished. Valerie looked upon it and knew she didn’t belong in it. She was old and used up. Her spirit was dirty.

She heard Bernard come into the room. She didn’t turn. She heard his approach and she saw from the corner of her eye that he’d brought a tray with him and was placing it on the demi-lune table between the room’s two lakeside windows. Above this table, a large mirror hung, and reflected in it Valerie saw the tray held an offering of tea, toast, and boiled eggs. She also saw reflected her husband’s face.

He was the one to speak first. “I did it because I could. My life’s been like that. I’ve done what I’ve done because I could do it. I suppose it was a challenge to myself, much like winning you. Much like making more of the firm than your father and grandfather had been able to do. I don’t even know what it means that I’ve done what I’ve done, and that’s the worst of it because that tells me I might well do it all again.”

“Isn’t that a comforting thought,” she said dryly.

“I’m trying to be honest with you.”

“Another highly comforting thought.”

“Listen to me. The devil of it is that I can’t say it meant nothing to me because it did mean something. I just don’t quite know what.”

“Sex,” she said. “Virility, Bernard. Not being such a little man, after all.”