Believing the Lie

He thought about it. It seemed the best solution. Still he said, “If you change your mind, ring me this time, all right?”

“I promise,” she said. “And I won’t change my mind.”

MILNTHORPE

CUMBRIA

Zed didn’t go back to his B & B in Windermere. All things considered, it was too far to drive with what he had simmering on the back burner of his brain. And what he had was a stop-the-presses story, one that he had to get written in order to stop those presses as soon as possible. He felt more alive than he had in months.

Nick Fairclough had tried to hide everything from him, but he succeeded just about as well as a fat man trying to remain unseen by hiding behind a sapling. From start to finish, the poor dumb bloke had been completely in the dark about what his wife had been cooking up with Lucy Keverne. The way Zed reckoned it, the two women had planned to go the turkey baster route and spring the situation on poor Nick when Lucy was too far up the duff for Nick to cry foul and demand they do something about it. Zed didn’t quite have all the finer points of the tale since so far Nick had been as mute as a lump of coal on the topic of his semen and what Alatea had been doing with it or whether, even, she’d got her hands on it, but the way he saw it, that was a minor detail. The crux of the story was a husband being duped by two women for a delicious reason that was bound to emerge once the first part of the tale appeared on the front page of The Source. Within twenty-four hours of that occurring, the usual suspects would crawl out from beneath their rocks to spill whatever beans they were holding in their pots on the topic of Nick, Lucy, and Alatea. Not to mix too many metaphors, Zed thought, but the truth behind his kind of journalism was that one story always led to another like day to night to day again. First, though, he had to get the story he had thus far onto the front page of the paper. And oh what a story it was: Scotland Yard in Cumbria to investigate a murder only to stumble upon a nefarious plot in which a duplicitous wife meets a scheming young playwright willing to sell off her womb like a room to let. There were shades of prostitution here as well, Zed reckoned. For if Lucy Keverne was selling one part of her body, didn’t it stand to reason that at one time or another she’d been selling other parts of her body as well?

Since Zed’s route took him by the Crow and Eagle, he pulled into its car park. They’d have an Internet connection here, wireless or otherwise, because how likely was it that a hotel hoping to stay in business in this day and age existed sans a connection to the Web? No hotel at all. He put his money on that.

He had no laptop with him, but that wasn’t going to matter. He intended to hand over a wad of cash for the use of the hotel’s computer. At this time of year there weren’t going to be hordes of potential tourists sending enquiries to the place via e-mails needing instantaneous answers. Twenty minutes online was all he required. He’d fine-tune the piece once Rod read it. And Rod would read it. For as soon as Zed was finished with the piece, he’d fire it off to his editor and ring him as well.

Zed zipped into the car park and gathered up his notes. These he always carried with him. They were his stock in trade, his jewels, his little precious. Where he went, they went, for the simple reason that one never knew where a story would appear.

Inside the place, he approached the reception desk with his wallet out and his money ready. He counted out one hundred pounds. He’d put it on his expense account later. Right now, though, there was a story waiting.

He leaned over her desk and put the money onto the keyboard of the young woman’s computer. Its screen was on, but she hadn’t been using it. Instead, she’d been yammering on the phone to someone apparently requiring information about the exact dimensions of every bedroom in the place. She looked at Zed, then at the money, then at Zed. She said, “Moment, please,” into the phone and held the earpiece against her bony shoulder as she waited for Zed’s explanation.

He gave it quickly enough. And she was quick enough to decide. She rang off on whoever had been at the other end of her phone conversation, scooped up the money, and said, “Let voice mail take the calls if any come in. You won’t say …?” and she gestured round to complete her question.

“You’ve gone to see about a room for me,” he assured her. “I’ve just booked in and you’re letting me use this thing to check for crucial messages. Twenty minutes?”

She nodded. She pocketed the ten- and twenty-pound notes and headed for the stairs to play her part. He waited till she’d mounted them and made the turn round the landing before he began to write.

The story led in every direction. Its parts were like tributaries pouring into the Amazon, and all he had to do was paddle up them. He began to do so.

He went first with the Scotland Yard angle and the irony attached to it: A detective sent up to Cumbria to investigate the drowning of Ian Cresswell ends up stumbling upon an illegal surrogacy deal that could— bet on it— lead to an entire illegal surrogacy ring that fed on the desperation of couples struggling to conceive. Then he touched on the artistic angle: The struggling playwright so desperate to support herself that she was willing to sell her body in pursuit of the higher calling of her art. He moved directly from there to the deception angle and was pounding away at the tale of Nick Fairclough’s ignorance in the manner of his wife’s deal with Lucy Keverne when his cell phone rang.

Yaffa! he thought. He needed to tell her that all was well. She would be worrying about him. She would want to encourage him. She would have words of wisdom and he wanted to hear them and more than that he wanted to interrupt her with the news of his impending triumph.

“Got it,” he said. “Darling, it’s hot.”

“I didn’t know you and I were that close,” Rodney Aronson said. “Where the bloody hell are you? Why aren’t you back in London by now?”

Zed stopped typing. “I’m not in London,” he said, “because I’ve got the story. All of it. From bloody alpha to sodding omega. Hold the front page because you’re going to want this plastered across it.”

“What is it?” Rodney didn’t sound like a man experiencing a come-to-Jesus moment.

Zed rattled it all off: the surrogacy deal, the starving artist, the husband in ignorance. He saved the very best for last: the humble reporter— that would be me, he pointed out— working hand-in-glove with the detective from New Scotland Yard.

“She and I cornered the woman in Lancaster,” Zed announced. “And once we had her— ”

“Hang on,” Rodney said. “‘She and I’?”

“Right. The Scotland Yard detective and I. She’s called DS Cotter. Detective sergeant. She’s the one investigating the Cresswell death. Only she got sidetracked onto Nick Fairclough and his wife and as it turned out, that was a dynamite direction. Not for her, of course, but for me.”

Rodney said nothing at his end. Zed waited for the kudos to flow. He waited in vain. For a moment he thought they’d been cut off. He said, “Rod? You there?”

Rodney finally said, “You are one fucking loser, Zedekiah. You know that, don’t you? One fucking class-A loser.”

“Sorry?”

“There is no Detective Cotter, you idiot.”

“But— ”

“Detective Inspector Lynley is up there, the bloke whose wife took a bullet from a twelve-year-old kid last winter. Sound familiar? It was front-page news for two weeks.” He didn’t wait for Zed to make a reply. Instead he went on with, “Jesus, you are pathetic, you know? Get back to town. Collect your wages. You and The Source are through.”

ARNSIDE

CUMBRIA

Alatea saw them in the driveway. Their body language told her everything. This was not a conversation between strangers who happen to come upon each other in passing at the same destination. This was an exchange between colleagues, friends, or associates. The exchange was one of information shared. She could tell this much when the woman tilted her head towards Arnside House in the manner of someone speaking about it. Or, more likely, speaking about a person within it. Or, most likely, speaking about her. About Alatea, once Santiago. About her past and what would now be her future.

Alatea didn’t wait to see anything more pass between the woman and the man from Scotland Yard. Her world was collapsing so quickly around her that the only idea she had in her mind was flight. She would have run like a lioness in pursuit of food if she had a single place she could go, but her routes were limited so she was forced to calm herself long enough to think, just to think.

The woman needed confirmation of Alatea’s identity. The detective, obviously, would give it, courtesy of Alatea herself, who could have denied, who should have denied, but who had not thought quickly enough to deny. That much was established, for what else could they have to discuss with each other? The only questions that possibly remained were those that Alatea herself could ask. Had the woman outside with the Scotland Yard detective sent photos of Alatea to Raul Montenegro already? If she had not, was she open to bribery, a payment for maintaining silence, for reporting to Raul that Santiago Vasquez y del Torres, who had become Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, who had married Nicholas Fairclough to escape a past that tied her to a man she had learned to hate, was not in Cumbria, was not in England, was nowhere in the UK to be found? If she was open to bribery, Alatea was safe. Only for now, of course. But now was all she had.

She ran to the stairway. She flew to the bedroom she shared with Nicholas and from beneath the bed, she brought out a locked box. A key from her dressing table gained her access, and within the box she had money. Not a lot, not a fortune, not what Raul was paying to find her, surely. But along with her jewellery, perhaps there was enough to tempt this woman who was closing in now, who was hearing the truth from the detective even as Alatea gathered what she could to keep that truth from spilling out of the hidden corners of her life.

She was back down stairs when the expected knock sounded against the front door. The woman would not know Alatea had seen her in conversation with Inspector Lynley. For a moment this gave Alatea the upper hand, and she intended to use it.

She pressed her slick hands against her trouser legs. She closed her eyes briefly and said, “Dios mio por favor,” and then she opened the door with as much assurance as she could muster.

The red-haired woman spoke first, saying, “Mrs. Fairclough, I’ve not been truthful with you. May I come in and explain?”

“What do you want from me?” For her part, Alatea was stiff and formal. There was nothing to shame her, she told herself. She had already paid the price of Raul’s help in altering her body. She would not pay more.

“I’ve been following you and watching you,” the woman said. “You must know that— ”

“What is he paying you?” Alatea asked.

“There’s no money involved.”

“There’s always money involved. I can’t afford to pay what he’s paying, but I ask you… No, I beg you…” Alatea turned from the woman to where she’d placed the strongbox and her jewellery. “I have this,” she said as she scooped up these things. “I can give you this.”

The woman took a step backwards. She said, “I don’t want these things. I’m here only to— ”

“You must take them. And then you must leave. You don’t know him. You cannot know what people like him are capable of.”

The woman thought, her brows drawn together and her eyes on Alatea as she weighed the words she’d heard. Alatea thrust the money and the jewellery at her once again, but the woman nodded and she said, “Ah. I do see. I’m afraid it might be too late, Mrs. Fairclough. Some things are unstoppable and I think he could be one of them. There’s a desperation to him… He doesn’t say exactly but I get the impression there’s a lot on the line for him just now.”

“He’d make you believe that. That’s how he is. It was clever of him to use a woman. For reassurance, he thinks. To calm my fears. While all the while his intention is to destroy me. He has the power to do this and he intends to use it.”

“There’s no story, though. No real story. Not a story that a paper like The Source would care about.”

“And this is supposed to reassure me?” Alatea demanded. “What does a story in The Source have to do with anything? What does it have to do with what he’s asking of you? You’ve photographed me, haven’t you? You’ve followed me and you’ve photographed me and that’s the proof he wants.”

“You don’t understand,” the other woman said. “He doesn’t need proof. These types never do. Proof is nothing to them. They start their business just this side of the law and if they slip over onto the other side, they have a score of solicitors to take care of the problem.”

“Then let me buy your photos,” Alatea said. “If he sees them, if he sees me in them…” She took off her wedding rings, the diamond and the band. She took off a large emerald that Valerie Fairclough had given her as a wedding gift. She said, “Here. Please. Take these as well. In exchange for your photos.”

“But photos are nothing. They’re meaningless without words. It’s the words that count. It’s what’s written that counts. And anyway, I don’t want your money and I don’t want your jewellery. I just want to apologise for… well, for everything but especially for how I might have ruined things for you. We’re much the same, you and I. With different cause, I daresay, but otherwise the same.”

Alatea clung to what an apology from this woman might mean. She said, “So you won’t tell him?”

The woman looked regretful. “I’m afraid he knows. That’s the point. That’s why I’ve come. I want you to be ready for what might come next and to know it’s my fault and to know how terribly sorry I am. I tried to keep things from him, but these people have ways of finding things out and once he came to Cumbria… I’m so sorry, Mrs. Fairclough.”

Alatea took this in fully and realised what it meant, not only to her but to Nicky and to their life together. She said, “He’s here, in Cumbria?”

“He’s been here for days. I thought you would have known. Didn’t he— ”

“Where is he now? Tell me.”

“Windermere, I think. Other than that, I don’t know.”

Nothing else remained to be said, but many things remained to be done. Alatea said good-bye to the woman and like someone in a dream, she gathered everything she’d brought down from the bedroom in the hope of bribing her. It was just as well, she thought, that the woman had refused her offerings. She would need them now herself in the coming days, for she’d run out of options.

She went back up the stairs to the bedroom and threw the jewellery and money onto the bed. From the box room at the end of the corridor, she brought out a small valise. There was little enough time to gather the things she would need.

Back in the bedroom, she went to the chest of drawers. It stood between two windows and the sound of a car door slamming outside drew her attention to the front of the house again. She saw that, on the worst possible day, Nicky had come home from the pele project early. He was now in conversation with the red-haired woman. He was violent faced. His voice grew loud although through the glass of the window, Alatea could not understand his words.

But understanding the words didn’t matter. Only the fact that they were speaking to each other mattered. That in conjunction with Nicky’s expression gave testimony to the topic between them. Seeing this, Alatea saw also that even when it came to escape, she was out of options. She could not leave in her car, for Nicky and the woman stood on the fan of gravel across which she would need to drive. She could not go by foot to the railway station at the far end of Arnside village, for the only route there went directly between her husband and the woman where they stood talking. So she prayed for some kind of answer to come to her and she paced the room until she saw it. It was through the window, just as the vision of Nicky and the red-haired woman had been. But it was the window on a wall perpendicular to that which overlooked the driveway. This window offered a view of the lawn and beyond it the seawall sketched a stony line of demarcation between the lawn and the sea walk along the bay, beyond which was the bay itself.

Today was one of the days during which the tide had ebbed for miles. This meant the remaining sands were hers. She could cross them and make for Grange-over-Sands a few miles away. Another railway station awaited her there. All she needed to do was to reach it.

Just a few miles, then. That was all she needed, and she would be free.

WINDERMERE

CUMBRIA

Tim had spent the night beneath a caravan at Fallbarrow Park, at the edge of the lake. On his way there from Shots!, he’d pinched a blanket from the Windermere fire station, where a smoke-scented stack of them just inside an open door seemed like a message telling him that here were his means of passing the time until Toy4You was ready for him. He himself was ready for Toy4You. He felt the need for escape like a weight on his chest. Soon, he told himself, he’d have the only answer he’d wanted to the question that his life had become since Kaveh Mehran had sauntered into it.

The caravan provided him shelter from the night’s rain, and against a tyre and huddled into his stolen blanket, he escaped the worst of the cold. Thus he’d slept rough and when he returned to the business centre towards the end of an afternoon the day of which he’d spent sulking round the town, he looked as bad as he felt, most of his bones aching and every inch of him reeking.

Toy4You directed one glance at him and had one whiff of him and said, in brief, “No way in hell.” He pointed him in the direction of the loo, told him to do what he could to make himself less malodorous, and when Tim emerged he handed him three twenty-pound notes. “Go into town and get something decent to wear,” he told him. “If you think you’re going to meet your fellow actors looking like that, think again. They won’t want anything to do with you.”

Tim said, “What’s the problem? It’s not like we’ll have our clothes on, is it?”

Toy4You made a thin line of his lips. “Get something to eat, as well. I don’t want you complaining in the middle of things that you’ve missed your dinner.”

“I’m not going to complain.”

“That’s where they all begin.”

“Fuck,” Tim said as he took the money. “Whatever.”

“Exactly right,” Toy4You said sardonically. “That’s the spirit, mate. Fuck whatever.”

When he left Shots!, Tim headed back for the shops. He found, oddly enough, that he was hungry. He’d thought it unlikely he’d ever be eating again, but a hunger came on him as he passed the fire station again and the scent of bacon on the grill formed a cloud through which he passed. The smell made his mouth water unexpectedly. It put him in mind of breakfasts in his childhood: hot bacon rolls and scrambled eggs. His stomach rumbled accordingly. Okay, he thought, so he would find something to eat. He’d get the clothing first, though. He knew where an Oxfam was in the centre of town, and that would do when it came to trousers and some kind of jersey. No way in hell was he about to purchase something new from one of the other shops. Waste of money, that. He wouldn’t need new clothes after today.

At Oxfam he found a pair of old corduroy trousers, worn in the arse, but they were in his size and that was good enough for Tim. To this he added a polo-neck sweater and as he already had shoes, socks, and an anorak, he needed nothing else. The purchase left him with plenty of money to buy a meal, but he reckoned he’d just get a sandwich from the grocery, perhaps a bag of Kettle Chips and a drink as well. The rest he’d post to Gracie inside a card. He’d write a message about taking care of herself first and worrying about the rest of the world later because no one, he would tell her, was about to take care of her no matter how nice she tried to be to them. Then he’d apologise about Bella. He still felt dead awful that he’d damaged Bella. He hoped the woman at the electronics repair shop could fix her properly.

It was funny, though, Tim thought as he left Oxfam with his purchases and made for the grocery. He was actually feeling a bit lighter. He’d made a decision and relief came with it. It was odd to consider that for so very long he’d felt so terribly wretched when all he ever had had to do was simply decide.

WINDERMERE

CUMBRIA

They had to wait nearly a half hour at the police station in Windermere, which was where Freddie drove them. They had Tim’s laptop with them as well as the map the boy had printed out. Both of them had thought that simply walking into the police station and announcing they had information about a child pornography ring was going to light a serious conflagration under someone’s office chair, but that had not been the case. Like a doctor’s surgery, they had to wait their turn and as each moment passed, Manette’s anxiety climbed roofward.

“It’s all right, old girl,” Freddie had murmured more than once. He’d taken to holding her hand as well, and he made gentle finger circles upon it, just as he’d done in the early days of their marriage. “We’ll manage it all in time.”

“Whatever it is,” Manette said. “Freddie, you and I both know it could already have happened. It could be going on while we’re waiting here. He could be… they could be… I blame Niamh for this.”

“No point in blaming,” Freddie said quietly. “That’s not going to get us the boy.”

When at last they were ushered into an office, Freddie quickly logged on to Tim’s e-mail and brought up the exchanges the boy had had with Toy4You as well as the photos and videos that had been sent to him. Once again and ever the gentleman, Freddie made sure that Manette couldn’t see what the films were, but she could tell from the expression on the constable’s face that they were indeed as bad as Freddie had indicated.

The constable picked up a phone and punched in three numbers. He said to whoever answered, “Connie, you’re going to want to look at a laptop I’ve got my paws on… Will do.” He rang off and said to Freddie and Manette, “Five minutes.”

“Who’s Connie?” Manette asked.

“Superintendent Connie Calva,” he said. “Head of Vice. Have anything else?”

Manette remembered the map. She fished it out of her bag and handed it over. She said, “Tim had this amongst the things on his desk. Freddie thought it best to bring it. I don’t know how useful… I mean, we don’t know the streets involved. They could be anywhere.”

Freddie said, “I reckoned you’d have someone who could go back and find the map Tim began with. This is an enlargement he printed. The full map should be easy enough to find for someone better versed than I am in Internet maps.”

The constable took it from Freddie, reaching into his desk simultaneously and bringing out a magnifying glass. It was the oddest thing for him to have, Manette thought, harking back to Sherlock Holmes. But he made a reasonable use of it, applying it to the map in order to read the names of the streets more clearly. He was saying as he did all this, “This sort of thing’s usually done in Barrow, at the constabulary. We’ve a forensic computer specialist there and… Ah. Hang on. This is easy enough.”

He looked up at them as a woman in jeans, knee-high leather boots, and a tartan plaid waistcoat stepped into the room, presumably Superintendent Calva. She said, “What’ve we got, Ewan?” and nodded to Manette and Freddie.

Ewan handed over the laptop and waved the map at her as well. “Enough of the bad nasty on that to make you fear lightning strikes from God,” he said in reference to the computer. “And this is a printout map of the area round the business centre.”

“You know where these streets are?” Manette asked. It seemed too much to hope for.

“Oh, aye,” Ewan said. “They’re right here in town. Not ten minutes away.”

Manette grabbed Freddie’s arm but spoke to the constable. “We must go there at once. They intend to film him. They’ll be doing it there. We must stop them.”

The constable held up his hand. “Bit of trouble with that route,” he said.

Connie Calva had gone to a desk nearby and had begun to study the laptop as she removed a piece of gum from its silver wrapper and folded it into her mouth. She wore the weary expression of a woman who’d already seen it all, but that expression altered as she moved from image to image. Manette could tell when she’d reached the videos. She stopped chewing. Her face altered to a careful blank.

“What sort of trouble?” Freddie was asking in the meantime.

“These streets are lined with private homes and B & B’s. There’s a fire station there and, like I said, a business centre as well. We can’t go barging in left and right without something to go on. The laptop’s filled with it, aye, but how d’you make the connection between the laptop and this map aside from the user having found the map online? D’you see what I mean? Now you’ve brought us some excellent information, and Superintendent Calva will get onto it directly. And when we know more— ”

“But the boy is missing,” Manette cried. “He’s been gone for over twenty-four hours. And with this on his computer and a blatant invitation to be part of a film in which God only knows what is about to happen… He’s fourteen years old.”

The constable said, “Got that. But we’ve the rule of law— ”

“Bugger the law!” Manette cried. “Do something.”

She felt Freddie, then. His arm went round her waist. “Ah yes,” he said. “We see.”

She cried, “Are you mad?”

“They’ve got to follow their procedure.”

“But, Freddie— ”

“Manette…” His gaze shifted to the door, and his eyebrows rose. “Let’s let them get on with it, eh?”

She knew that he was asking for her trust, but in that moment she trusted no one. Still, she couldn’t take her eyes off Freddie, who was on her side in all things. She haltingly said, “Yes, yes, all right,” and once they’d given every possible piece of information they could to the constable and to Superintendent Calva, they went out to the street.

“What?” Manette said to Freddie in anguish. “What?”

“We need a map of the town,” Freddie told her, “which we should be able to find in a bookshop easily enough.”

“And then?” she asked him.

“Then we need a plan,” he said. “Either that or one monumental, excellent piece of luck.”

WINDERMERE

CUMBRIA

They had the latter. The police station was on the outskirts of town, straddling Bowness-on-Windermere and Windermere itself. When they left the station, Freddie drove further into Windermere, and they were traveling up Lake Road just coming upon New Road when Manette spotted Tim. He was leaving a small grocery, a striped blue and white plastic bag in his hands. He was inspecting its contents, and he fished inside to bring out a bag of crisps, which he proceeded to tear open with his teeth.

Manette cried, “There he is! Pull over, Freddie.”

“Hang on, old girl.” Freddie drove on.

She cried, “But what are you— ” and she squirmed in her seat. “We’ll lose him!”

A short distance along, Freddie pulled to the kerb, once Tim was safely behind them and walking in the opposite direction. He said to Manette, “You’ve got your mobile?”

“Of course. But, Freddie— ”

“Listen, darling. There’s more involved here than just scooping up Tim.”

“But he’s in danger.”

“As are a lot of other children. You have your mobile. Set it to vibrate and follow him. I’ll park and ring you. All right? He should lead us to wherever they’re going to film, if that’s what he’s here for.”

She saw logic in this, cool and clear-headed Freddie logic. She said, “Yes, yes, of course. You’re right,” and grabbed her bag and made certain of her mobile. She started to get out of the car but then she stopped and turned to him.

“What?” he said.

“You’re the most wonderful man, Freddie McGhie,” she told him. “Nothing that’s happened before this moment matters as much.”

“As much as what?”

“As my loving you.” She shut the car door smartly before he replied.

ARNSIDE

CUMBRIA

Nicholas Fairclough made very short order of letting Deborah feel his wrath. He jerked his car to a halt in the driveway and leapt out onto the gravel. He strode towards her saying, “Who the hell are you, then? What are you doing here?” For a man whose previous meetings with her had been conducted in such a mild-mannered fashion, Fairclough was completely transformed. If eyes could be said to blaze, his were doing just that. “Where is he? How much time do we have?”

Deborah felt pinned by the ferocity of the questions and only able to express herself inarticulately. She stammered, “I don’t know… How long do these things take? I’m not sure. Mr. Fairclough, I tried… You see, I did tell him there was no story to be had because that’s the truth of the matter. There is no story.”

Fairclough drew himself up at that, as if Deborah had placed her hand on his chest to stop him. He said, “Story? What? Who the hell are you? Christ, d’you work for The Source as well? Montenegro didn’t send you?”

Deborah frowned. “The Source? No. That’s something entirely… Who on earth’s Montenegro?”

Nicholas looked from her to Arnside House and back to her. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

“Deborah St. James, as I always was. As I said I was.”

“But there’s no film. There’s no documentary. We’ve worked that out. There’s bloody nothing you’ve told us that’s true. So what do you want? What do you know? You’ve been to Lancaster with that bloke from The Source. He’s told me as much. Or can I not believe him, either?”

Deborah licked her lips. It was cold and damp and miserable out of doors and the fog was becoming thicker as they spoke. She wanted a coal fire and something hot to drink if only to hold the cup in her hands, but she couldn’t leave with Fairclough blocking her way, and her only option left was the truth.

She was there to help the Scotland Yard detective, she informed Nicholas Fairclough. She’d come with her husband, a forensic specialist who evaluated evidence during investigations. The newsman from The Source had, for some reason, concluded that she was the detective from the Met and she’d let him think that in order to give the real detective and her husband time to do the work they’d come to do regarding the death of Ian Cresswell undisturbed by a tabloid.

“I don’t know anyone called Montenegro,” she concluded. “I’ve never heard of him. If it is a him, and I daresay it is? Who is he?”

“Raul Montenegro. Someone trying to find my wife.”

“So that’s what she meant,” Deborah murmured.

“You’ve talked to her?”

“At cross purposes, I expect,” Deborah said. “She must have thought we were speaking of this Raul Montenegro while I thought we were speaking of the reporter from The Source. I’m afraid I told her he’s in Windermere, but I meant the reporter.”

“Oh my God.” Fairclough headed towards the house, saying over his shoulder. “Where is she now?”

“Inside,” and as he began to jog towards the door, “Mr. Fairclough? One thing more?”

He stopped, turned. She said, “I tried to tell her this. I tried to apologise. What I mean is… The surrogacy situation? You’ve absolutely nothing to fear. I told Mr. Benjamin there was no story in it and there isn’t. And besides, I completely and utterly understand. We’re rather… Your wife and I … We’re rather sisters in this matter.”

He stared at her. He was pasty faced anyway, but Deborah saw that now all colour had left his lips as well, rendering him ghostlike in appearance, aided by the fog that curled at his feet. “Sisters,” he said.

“Yes indeed. I, too, so much want a baby and I haven’t been able to— ”

But he was gone before she was able to conclude.

WINDERMERE

CUMBRIA

When Tim returned to Shots!, Toy4You was behind the counter chatting with an Anglican priest. They both turned as Tim entered the shop, and the priest gave him the kind of once-over that spoke of an evaluation being made. Tim concluded he was there as a fellow actor for Toy4You’s film, and he registered this with a lurch of his gut that rapidly formed itself into a hot ball of anger. A fucking vicar, he thought. Just another bleeding hypocrite like the rest of the world. This pathetic excuse for a human being stood up in front of a congregation every Sunday and did his bit with the Word of God and handed out communion wafers and then on the side when no one was the wiser off he went to do his filthy business with—

“Daddy! Daddy!” Into the shop burst two children— a boy and a girl— in neat school uniforms and behind them a woman looking rather harried and studying her watch and saying, “Darling, I am so terribly sorry. Are we too late?” She went to the priest and kissed his cheek and linked her arm through his.

The priest said, “Mags, ninety minutes. Really,” and sighed. “Well, William and I have examined Abraham and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, Ruth and Naomi and the alien corn, and the brothers of Joseph from every angle, and it’s been most illuminating and— I think that William will agree— entertaining as well. But, alas, you are too late now. We’ll have to rearrange. William’s got something on, and I’ve an appointment as well.”

Murmurs of apology, profuse, from the wife. Children hanging upon the priest’s either hand. A rescheduling of the family’s annual Christmas picture to be sent to all the relatives and off they went.

Tim was hanging back, lurking in a corner of the shop with the pretence of examining the digital cameras all locked to their display shelves and rather in need of dusting. When the priest and his family made their noisy, happy exit, Tim came forward. William Concord was on Toy4You’s name tag. Tim wondered what it meant that the bloke kept it on as he approached. He reckoned it had nothing to do with having forgotten to remove it. Toy4You wasn’t a forgetful kind of man.

He came round the counter and locked the door of the shop. He reversed the Open sign to Closed. He turned off the overhead lights and jerked his head to indicate that Tim was to follow him into the back.

Tim saw that the back of the shop had been altered, and it was little wonder that Toy4You wasn’t able to accommodate the priest and his family for their yearly photo. A man and a woman were in the process of setting up an entirely different design from what had been in the studio, and now a rough replica of a Victorian children’s nursery stood in place of the dramatic columns and background sky. As Tim watched them at work, they brought in three narrow beds, one of them occupied by a child-size department store mannequin wearing Shrek pyjamas and, oddly, a schoolboy cap. The other two were empty and at the foot of one the woman laid an enormous stuffed dog, a St. Bernard by the look of it. The man rolled into position a faux background window that opened onto a starry night sky, and in the distance, a crude representation of Big Ben shone with the hour midnight.

Tim didn’t know what to make of all this until another individual materialised from the storage area. Like Tim, he was a young adolescent. Unlike Tim, he was very sure of himself and moved with purpose onto the set, where he leaned against the mock window and lit a cigarette. He was outfitted head to foot in green, with slippers that curled up at the toes and a cocked hat set at a jaunty angle on his head. He jerked his chin in a hello to Toy4You as the other two individuals faded through the storage area, from which Tim could hear the murmur of conversation and the sound of shoes and clothes dropping to the floor. As Toy4You did some business with a rolling tripod and a rather impressive video camera, the man and the woman returned to the set. She was now in a white nightdress with a high ruffled neck. He was outfitted as a pirate captain. Unlike the other two, he was the only one wearing a mask, although the hook that emerged from his right sleeve was enough of a clue to the permanently clueless as to the bloke’s supposed identity. Of course, the permanently clueless would never wonder what he was meant to be doing in Victorian London instead of where he should have been which was, naturally, on a sailing ship in Never Never Land.

Tim looked from these characters to Toy4You. He felt momentarily queasy as he wondered what his part was supposed to entail. Then he spied a nightshirt lying at the foot of one of the beds with a pair of round-framed spectacles folded on top, and from this he understood that he was the older of the two brothers and at some point meant to put on the costume provided.

It all seemed the height of stupid to Tim, but there was a modicum of relief in the setup. When he’d seen the Last Supper film and the Jesus-in-the-garden piece, he’d reckoned they’d be engaged in something equally blasphemous here, although he hadn’t liked to think what it would be. And while he truly didn’t much care at this point whether the subject of their film was going to be blasphemous or not, he’d rather worried over the possibility that his upbringing would out at the very last moment, and he’d find himself unable to perform according to whatever directions would be recited to him from the other side of the camera.

He needn’t have worried as things turned out. As Wendy moved onto the nursery set and Captain Hook took up a position off-camera, Toy4You approached Tim with a small glass of water, which he handed over. From his pocket, he took a vial and from the vial, he shook out two different pills. He gave them to Tim with a nod that indicated he was meant to swallow them.

“What’re…?”

“Something to help with authentic close-ups,” Toy4You said. “Among other things.”

“What d’they do?”

A smile flicked at the corners of his mouth. Whiskers grew there. He hadn’t shaved well that day. “They aid with the performance we require of you. Go ahead. Take them. You’ll see soon enough how they work, and I expect you’ll enjoy their effect.”

“But— ”

Toy4You’s voice altered. He whispered fiercely. “Take them, goddamn it. This is what you wanted so bloody do it. We’ve not got all night.”

Tim swallowed them. He felt nothing and wondered if they were something to make him relax or to make him unconscious. Were they the date-rape drug? Was that a pill? He wasn’t sure. He said, “Do I put on that nightshirt? I’m John Darling, aren’t I?”

“You’re only half-stupid then,” Toy4You said. “Just stand by the camera till you get the call.”

“What call?”

“Christ. Shut up and see.” And to Peter Pan and Wendy, he said, “You two ready?” And without waiting for an answer, he moved behind the camera and the other young boy and the nightgowned woman took up position: the boy on the edge of the windowsill and the woman kneeling upright on the bed.

Tim saw from the lighting that her nightgown was so sheer that all of her was visible through it. He swallowed and wanted to look away, but he found he couldn’t for she was lifting the nightgown slowly and sensually over her head as Peter Pan advanced upon her. She presented her breasts to him and Toy4You said, “Now,” to Tim.

“But what’m I s’posed to do?” he asked desperately, even as he felt the stirring within him as all of his organs began doing what they were meant by nature to do.

“Getting to bed a bit late, you are,” Toy4You murmured as he filmed the action on Wendy’s bed, where she was lowering Peter’s tights and Peter was presenting himself to the camera. She began to minister to him. “Up to the wee hours reading in the library, you were. Into the nursery you go, only to find your sister and Peter Pan in the midst of tut tut tut. But you fancy Peter yourself once you see what he’s got on him, you do.”

“So I…? What do I do?”

“Fuck it, just go onto the set. Follow your inclinations, for God’s sake. I know you have them. We both know you have them.”

And the worst was he did. He did. Because even as they were holding their whispered conversation, Tim couldn’t tear his eyes away from what was being filmed. And he didn’t know what it meant that Peter unveiled himself engorged with blood and Tim kept watching and his body kept reacting and he wanted to watch and he wanted something else only he didn’t know what it was.

“Go. Bloody go,” Toy4You said. “Peter and Wendy will show you what to do.” He looked away from the camera for a moment, directing his gaze to Tim’s crotch. He smiled. “Ah. The miracles of modern medicine. Don’t worry about a thing.”

“What about him?” Tim asked as Toy4You turned back to the camera.

“Who?”

“The… Captain… You know…”

“Don’t worry about him either. He fancies Peter. Always has done. Fancies all the Lost Boys. Fancies you as well. He’ll show up and sort you out for consorting with Peter once Wendy exits stage right. Okay? You got it? Now get bloody in there because we’re wasting time.”

“How’s he going to sort me?”

Toy4You shot him a look. “Exactly the way you’ve wanted to be sorted from the first. All right? Got it?”

“But you said you would— ”

“Fuck it, you idiot. What did you really expect? Death on a biscuit? Now go. Go.”

MILNTHORPE

CUMBRIA

Deborah drove back to the Crow and Eagle in Milnthorpe as the fog began to billow across the road in a great grey mass like the effluent of a thousand smokestacks somewhere out in the bay. The railway viaduct that took trains into the Arnside station was only a shadowy form that she passed beneath on her way out of the village, and Milnthorpe Sands was entirely lost to view with only the wading birds closest to shore punctuating the grey with a darkness that huddled and shifted in a solid mass as if the ground itself were sighing.

The headlamps of cars did little to pierce the gloom, merely reflecting the light back onto the driver. When, occasionally, a pedestrian was present— foolhardy enough to be walking along the verge in such weather— he emerged without warning as if popping out of the ground like a Halloween ghoul. It was an unnerving experience to be on the road. Deborah was grateful when she reached the car park of the inn without incident.

Tommy was waiting for her as he’d promised. He was in the bar with a coffee service in front of him and his mobile pressed to his ear. His head was bent and he didn’t see her, but she caught the remainder of his conversation.

“Quite late,” he was saying. “Shall I come to you anyway? I’ve no idea of the time and perhaps you’d rather… Yes. All right… Quite anxious as well. Isabelle, I’m terribly sorry how this has… Indeed. Very well. Later, then. Right…” He listened for a moment and evidently felt Deborah’s presence for he turned in his chair and saw her approaching. He said, “She’s just arrived so I daresay we’ll be off in a few moments,” with a raised eyebrow in Deborah’s direction, to which she nodded. “Very good,” he said. “Yes. I have the key with me.”

He rang off. Deborah wasn’t sure what to say. Two months earlier, she’d concluded that Tommy was sleeping with his superior officer. What she hadn’t worked out was how she felt about the fact. It was a given that Tommy had to move on with his life, but the how of his moving on was something that made her unsure of her footing with him.

She settled for, “Could I have a coffee before we leave, Tommy? I promise to swill it like a priest going after the altar wine.”

“Swilling won’t be necessary,” he replied. “I’ll have another. I’d prefer both of us wide awake for the drive. It’s going to be a long one.”

She sat as he went to place the order. He’d been doodling on a paper napkin, she saw, as he’d spoken to Isabelle Ardery in London. He’d sketched a rough cottage in a wide meadow somewhere, with two smaller buildings and a stream nearby and hillsides rising on either side. Not bad by the look of it, she thought. She’d never considered Tommy as an artist.

“A second calling,” she said to him, indicating the sketch when he turned to the table.

“One of a thousand similar places in Cornwall.”

“Thinking of going home?”

“Not quite yet.” He sat, smiled at her fondly, and said, “Someday, I suppose.” He reached for the napkin, folded it, and put it into the breast pocket of his jacket. “I’ve rung Simon,” he told her. “He knows we’ll be coming home.”

“And?”

“Well, of course, he finds you the most maddening sort of woman. But, then, don’t we all?”

She sighed, saying, “Yes. Well. I think I’ve made things worse, Tommy.”

“Between you and Simon?”

“No, no. I’ll put that right. It does help to be married to the most tolerant man on the planet. But I’m talking about Nicholas Fairclough and his wife. I’ve had an awkward conversation with her, followed by an awkward conversation with her husband.”

She told him about both conversations, sketching in all the details as she remembered them, including the reactions of both Alatea and her husband. She explained Alatea’s offer of jewellery and money and she included the revelation about the man Montenegro. Tommy listened as he always had done, his brown eyes fixed on hers. Their coffee service came as she was talking. He poured them both a cup as she was concluding.

Her final words were, “So all along, Alatea apparently thought I was talking about this Raul Montenegro while I thought we were talking about the reporter from The Source. I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered much, except for the fact that I told her he was in Windermere— at least I think that’s where he went when he dropped me here after Lancaster— and when I told her that, she simply panicked, obviously thinking I meant Montenegro. Nicholas panicked as well.”

Lynley added a packet of sugar to his coffee. He stirred it, looking thoughtful all the while. Indeed, he looked so thoughtful that Deborah understood something she should have recognised earlier.

She said to him, “You know what’s actually going on with these people, don’t you, Tommy? I expect you’ve known from the first. Whatever it is, I wish you’d told me. At least I could have refrained from blundering in and doing whatever it is I’ve now managed to do to them.”

Lynley shook his head. “Actually, no. I think I’ve known less than you since I’d not met Alatea before today.”

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

“She’s quite…” He seemed to search for a better word, perhaps a more accurate one. He lifted his fingers as if to say that any choice he made would not do her justice. He settled on, “Rather amazing, actually. Had I not known about her before going to see her, I would never have believed she began life as a man.”

Deborah felt her jaw loosen with the surprise that swept through her. She said, “What?”

“Santiago Vasquez y del Torres. That’s who she was.”

“What do you mean was? Is she impersonating…?”

“No. She had surgery, financed by this bloke Montenegro. His intention, apparently, was to have her play his female lover in public to maintain his reputation and social position but, in private, to make love to her as a male to a male.”

Deborah swallowed. “Dear God.” She thought about Lancaster, about Lucy Keverne, about what she and Alatea Fairclough could have and must have actually planned between them. She said, “But Nicholas… Surely he knows?”

“She hasn’t told him.”

“Oh surely, Tommy, he’d be able to tell. I mean… Good heavens… There’d be signs, wouldn’t there? There’d be marks of incisions, scars, whatever.”

“In the hands of a world-class surgeon? With all the tools at hand? With lasers to deal with potential scarring? Deborah, everything would be altered. Even the Adam’s apple can go. If the man’s appearance was feminine to begin with— because of an extra X chromosome perhaps— then the shift to female would be even simpler.”

“But not to tell Nicholas? Why wouldn’t she have told him?”

“Desperation? Worry? Fear of his reaction? Fear of rejection? With Montenegro looking for her and apparently having the funds to go on looking indefinitely, she would need a safe place. To achieve it, she allowed Nicholas to believe what he wanted to believe about her. She married, giving her the right to remain in England once she came here.”

Deborah saw how this fitted in with what Tommy and Simon had come to Cumbria to do. She said, “Ian Cresswell? Did she murder him? Did he know?”

Lynley shook his head. “Consider her, Deborah. She’s something of a masterpiece. No one would know unless there was a reason to delve back into her past, and there was no reason. For all intents and purposes, she’s Nicholas Fairclough’s wife. If anyone bore looking into with regard to Ian’s death, it would have been Nicholas. As things happened, we didn’t need to go that far because Simon was right from the first and so was the coroner. There’s not a single sign of Ian Cresswell’s death being anything other than an accident. Someone may have wanted him to die. His death might have been a convenience to more than one person. But no one orchestrated it.”

Deborah said, “And now that terrible reporter’s going to write his story about this surrogacy situation and Alatea’s photo will be in the paper and I’m responsible. What can I do?”

“Appeal to his better angels?”

“He works for The Source, Tommy.”

“There is that,” he admitted.

Her mobile rang. Deborah hoped it was Zed Benjamin, reporting on a change of heart. Or perhaps Simon, telling her he understood the passions that had driven her to make such a mess of things at Arnside House. But it turned out to be Nicholas Fairclough, and he was in a panic. “What’ve you done to her?”

Deborah’s first horrified thought was that Alatea Fairclough had harmed herself. She said, “What’s happened, Mr. Fairclough?” and she looked at Tommy.

“She’s gone. I’ve searched the house and the grounds. Her car is still here and she couldn’t have passed us in the driveway without being seen. I’ve walked the length of the seawall as well. She’s gone.”

“She’ll be back. She won’t have gone far. How could she have done, with the weather so bad?”

“She’s gone onto the sands.”

“Surely not.”

“I tell you, she’s gone onto the sands. She has to have done. It’s the only place.”

“She’s taken a walk then. To have a think. She’ll be back soon and when she comes back, you can tell her I was talking about the reporter from The Source, not Raul Montenegro.”

“You don’t understand,” he cried. “God in heaven, you don’t understand! She’s not coming back. She can’t come back.”

“Whyever not?”

“Because of the fog. Because of the quicksands.”

“But we can— ”

“We can’t! Don’t you see what you’ve done?”

“Please, Mr. Fairclough. We can find her. We can phone… There’s going to be someone— ”

“There’s no one. Not for this, not for this.”

“This? What’s this?”

“The tidal bore, you stupid woman. The floodwaters are coming. The siren’s just gone off. Today’s a tidal bore.”

WINDERMERE

CUMBRIA

When her mobile phone finally vibrated, Manette was in a welter of nerves. She was lurking in the car park of the business centre, close to a wheelie bin. Tim had gone inside a business called Shots!— a photographic studio by the look of the front window, which displayed enormous enlargements of the village of Ambleside in autumn— and he’d been followed some minutes later by a harried-looking woman with two children in tow. That woman had left moments later on the arm of an Anglican priest, and they’d all climbed into a Saab estate car and vanished, upon which time someone within Shots! had switched the Open sign to Closed and Manette had given up on Freddie and phoned the police.

Her conversation with Superintendent Connie Calva was as unproductive as it was brief, and Manette ended it by wanting to hurl her mobile onto the tarmac of the car park. She told the head of Vice about the business centre and what was going on and how the Open sign had been turned to Closed and they both knew what that meant, didn’t they, because Tim Cresswell, aged fourteen, was here to film one of those horrible, soul-destroying pieces of filth and the police had to come and they had to come now.

But Connie Calva said they had to get Tim’s laptop to Barrow, where the forensic computer specialist would go through it and discover the exact location from which Toy4You had been sending his e-mails, whereupon they would apply for a search warrant and—

“Bugger that for a lark!” Manette whispered fiercely. “I’m telling you exactly where he is, exactly where this Toy4You monster is, exactly where they’re going to film, and you bloody goddamn better get someone over here to deal with this. Now.”

To this Superintendent Calva had replied in the nicest possible voice, which indicated she was used to speaking with people on the edge, which was something they probably taught in training college. It was a case of Mrs. McGhie, I know you’re upset and worried but the only way to bring down something like this so that the entire thing doesn’t get thrown out of court on its ear is to do it within the confines of the law. I know you don’t like this and I certainly don’t like it. But we have no choice.

Manette said, “Bugger the confines of the bloody law!” and she ended the call.

Then she rang Freddie because God only knew where he was. He answered at once, saying, “Damn it, Manette. I rang you. You were supposed to— ”

“Talking to the police,” she cut in. “I had to. Freddie, he’s in a photo studio. Where are you?”

“Walking back from the railway station. Where are you?”

“The business centre.” She told him the route, surprising herself with her own memory.

He repeated it back to her and she said, “Hurry. Please do hurry. Freddie, the police won’t come. When I rang them, they said they need a search warrant, they need to take that computer to Barrow, they need to… God, I don’t know what. And he’s in there and they’re going to film him. I just know it, but I couldn’t make her see.”

“Darling, I’m on my way,” he said.

“I’ll try to get inside the shop,” she told him. “I’ll bang on the door. They’ll stop what they’re doing, won’t they? Surely?”

“Manette, do nothing. Do you understand me? These are dangerous people. I’m on my way. Wait.”

Manette didn’t know how she could. But she rang off after promising him that until he arrived … There was no way she could do that, although she tried. Three minutes of waiting did her in.

She ran to the front door. It was locked, as she knew it would be, but that was of no account. She banged upon it. She rattled it. It was mostly glass, but the glass was thick and the door was unmoving, even in its jamb. And as for the noise possibly disturbing the action inside Shots!— whatever that action was— she could see how unlikely the case was that she was achieving that. For a door behind the shop counter was also closed, and if they were filming within the building, noise would also be associated with that.

She bit her nails. She looked around. She thought of the possibilities and came up with the back of the business centre. For the shops in the centre would have more than one door, surely? In case of fire, only one means of egress from a place of business had to be illegal, didn’t it?

She dashed round the back, only to encounter a line of doors and all of them unmarked. She hadn’t thought to count up the shops in front in order to do the same in the rear, so she went back round the front at a run to do so, just as Freddie came tearing into the car park.

She flung herself towards him. He was breathing like a mountaineer without oxygen. He gulped out, “Treadmill. Starting tomorrow,” and then, “Which one? Where?” as she clung to his arm.

She told him that the door was locked, that there was an inner door, that there were also doors round the back. She said that she could bang on the back door and Freddie could wait at the front door for all of them to come pounding out of the place to make a run for it. When they did that—

“Absolutely not,” he said. “We’re not about to set these people off. They’ve a lot vested in not getting caught. We need the police.”

“But they won’t come!” she wailed. “I told you that. They won’t come unless they get a bloody warrant.”

Freddie looked round the car park. He spied the heavy wheelie bin. He said to Manette, “Oh, I think we can give them a reason to come.”

He trotted over to the wheelie bin and put his shoulder to it. She saw what he intended and joined him in the effort. They began to roll the bin towards the shops, picking up speed on a slope of the car park. As they approached the front of Shots!, Freddie murmured, “Give it your best now, darling. And hope he set the burglar alarm.”

He had done. So they discovered when the wheelie bin crashed through the front door of the photo shop and the alarm began to howl.

Freddie winked at Manette and rested his hands on his thighs to catch his breath. “Voilà,” he said.

“Bob’s your uncle,” she replied.

MORECAMBE BAY

CUMBRIA

Alatea was motionless, a statue more than two miles from where she’d leapt off the seawall and into the empty channel of the River Kent. When she’d set off from Arnside, she’d seen the fog but at that point she could still make out in the distance the peninsula that was Holme Island, and she knew that round the tip of it lay Grange-over-Sands and escape.

She’d thought to put on her hiking boots, deciding she had just time for that and an anorak as Nicky and the red-haired woman had their conversation out on the driveway. She’d grabbed her bag, faded out of the house via the drawing room doors, and made for the seawall. She’d swung herself over it and out onto the sands, where she’d begun to run as best she could.

The channel and the bay it fed into both were virtually waterless. The River Kent was a mere leapable creek at that point. The water of the bay was nonexistent. She had sufficient time to make the crossing, she reckoned, as long as she took care. She knew how to do that. She had a walking stick to help her and even if she hit a patch of the quicksand for which the bay and its surrounds were notorious, she knew what to do should she become caught in it.

What she hadn’t counted on was the fog. While she’d seen it far to the northwest of Arnside, and while she knew the likelihood of its advancing towards shore, what she hadn’t understood was how quickly it was going to roll in. And roll it did, like a diaphanous barrel of immense proportions that silently rumbled forward, inexorably, swallowing everything in its path. When it reached her, Alatea knew in an instant that this was more a pestilential miasma than was it mere fog because she understood that this substance brought with it a deadly danger. What began as a vapour— nothing more than a hoary veil that was cold and damp but still not impossible to navigate— within moments became a grey drapery so thick that it felt to Alatea as though her eyes were playing tricks upon her for the simple reason that she could not see and this seemed impossible because it was daylight, but other than the fact that the sun was out somewhere rendering visible the colours of her boots, her anorak, and the fog itself, she could see nothing at all. There was no depth to her vision. No width. No height. There was only fog.

She’d had no choice but to turn back for Arnside, which was closer than Grange-over-Sands. But in less than five minutes she’d stopped moving forward because she no longer knew if it was forward that she was moving.

There were sounds that should have helped her negotiate the route back to her home, but she couldn’t tell where they were coming from. The first she heard was the train crossing the railway viaduct, which spanned the Kent Channel from Arnside and ultimately carried passengers onward to Grange-over-Sands. But she couldn’t make out whether the train was going to or coming from Grange-over-Sands, and further, she couldn’t even tell in what direction the railway track lay. According to her reckoning, it should have been to her left if she was on the route back to Arnside, but it sounded as if it was coming from behind her, which would mean she was heading out to sea.

She turned to correct her course, then, and began to walk again. She hit a puddle, sank up to her calf, and quickly pulled back. Someone shouted in the distance somewhere. She couldn’t tell where the shout was coming from, but it sounded close, and this was good. She turned towards it and resumed her progress.

A tractor roared. At least it sounded like a tractor. But it was directly behind her— or so it seemed— so that would be the best route to shore. She turned towards it. She called out— “Hello? Hello? I’m here. Over here,” but she heard nothing in reply, only the tractor’s engine, and it seemed to groan and strain, as if the machine was pulling an inconceivably heavy load.

And then a horn honked. Yes, she thought, that way was the road. Only, the road seemed to be where the sea was supposed to be and if she went in that direction, she’d be lost, surely. She would wander among the little hillocks of sand, through the puddles, and ultimately she’d stumble into a scour, where the waters of the bay did exactly that: scoured out the sand to form a trough upon which sand resettled in a new form that was too much liquid to bear the weight of anything other than the smallest bird. And then she would sink.

She stopped again. She turned. She listened. She called out. In reply came the cry of a gull. A moment later the air seemed to part for an instant with the sound of a gunshot or the backfire from a car. Then silence, utter and complete.

That was the moment Alatea knew there was no escape. That there never had been any real escape. From this instant out in the far east part of Morecambe Bay there might be some form of either flight or rescue. But from her life and the lies she’d constructed so that she might dwell safely within it, there was not. It was time she faced up to that, she decided. For every occasion of her life had led her to a moment of revelation she’d foolishly thought she could avoid forever. But there simply was no avoiding it any longer. That was the only truth that remained.

All right. So be it. She would take what was coming to her because she surely deserved it. She opened her bag. It was only when she found her purse, her chequebook, her makeup case, and not her mobile phone inside that she saw in her mind’s eye where she had left the device, sitting on the kitchen worktop plugged into a socket, recharging itself. She stared mutely into her bag then and understood that speaking the truth to Nicholas was not the final challenge remaining for her.

Hers would be to take the leap into accepting the icy embrace of what was inevitable. How could she have thought it would ever have been otherwise? she wondered. For hadn’t each step she’d taken since she’d run away from her family brought her to this single spot on earth in this one perilous moment of time?

There had never really been an escape— only a postponement— and she finally understood this. While science and surgery had provided her a way to shed the terrible carapace that had been her prison, rendering her the strangest of strangers in a very strange land, there was no taking flight from what had gone into her making and this was the stuff of her memories, which could not be shed no matter how she tried.

The worst part, she thought, had been the boxing lessons that followed the declaration that her brothers couldn’t be expected to fight the battles of Santiago Vasquez y del Torres forever. It was time Santiago learned to defend himself against bullies, his father insisted. But the fear was bright like a silver coin in his eyes as he spoke, and he frowned with more than concern and displeasure when Santiago didn’t want horseplay with his brothers, when Santiago wasn’t interested in building fortresses or playing soldiers, in wrestling, in trying to direct his pee as far as Carlos could. And the fear was bright in his mother’s eyes when she came upon her Santiago playing dressing-up, cradling a doll, or planning a tea party with cousin Elena Maria.

The faces of Santiago’s parents said the same thing without speaking: What have we borne into this world? His father’s worry was an obvious one for a man of his culture, his age, his religion, and his upbringing. He worried he had foisted upon the world another depraved homosexual. His mother’s worry was more subtle and more in keeping with her nurturing disposition in general. How would her Santiago cope in a world ill equipped to understand him?

Escape at the time meant Elena Maria. To her Santiago had told it all. She’d heard his explanation of being a soul inside a body that he did not even recognise as his own. He looked out of this body, he told her, and looked down upon it and saw it was male and knew it as male, but it did not function as the body of a male and he did not wish it to function so. He couldn’t even stand to touch it, he said. It was like touching someone else.

I don’t know what it is, he told her, I don’t know what it means, I just don’t want it, I can’t live with it, I have to be rid of it, and if I can’t be rid of it then I will die I swear I will die.

With Elena Maria, then, there was relief. For those few hours, for a day trip to one of the larger towns, for a weekend once in which they were adolescent girls on their own at a beach… This allowed the young Santiago to see what he truly wanted, what he had to be. But this could not happen in a world in which his father believed that toughening him up was the only answer. In order to live as he had been born to live, Santiago had run, and he’d continued running until he’d run into the arms of Raul Montenegro.

So was the worst really those boxing lessons? Alatea asked herself now. Or was the worst the promise that Raul Montenegro had held out to her and the reality of how she’d been intended to keep up her end of the bargain they’d struck with each other? She wasn’t sure. But what she did know was that Raul Montenegro was a driven man. Just as he’d been unwavering in his promise to fulfill the feminine dreams of his young lover Santiago Vasquez y del Torres, so was he equally unwavering in his decision to find Alatea Vasquez y del Torres so that she could repay him in coin he’d long ago determined.

And now here she was, as lost as ever, with no choice left but to move or to die. So she moved in the direction she hoped against hope was Arnside, although she no longer knew. Within ten yards she hit the quicksand, a scour she had feared she’d stumble upon. In an instant she was up to her thighs. And cold, cold. So horribly cold.

No panic was necessary, she told herself. She knew what to do. Nicholas had told her. A long-ago walk across the expanse of the empty bay and she remembered his words. It’s completely counterintuitive, darling, but you’ve got to do it, he had said.

She knew that. She prepared herself.

That was when the siren began to blare.

ARNSIDE

CUMBRIA

“Are you certain, sir?” the voice asked Lynley. The man at the Coast Guard station on Walney Island spoke with the kind of calm authority meant to soothe whoever was phoning in an emergency of the sort that Lynley was reporting. He spoke with cool-headed reason, which could lead to a decision, because he and he alone had the authority to put the wheels in motion. “I don’t want to launch a boat out into the bay unless we know for a fact that the woman’s out there. Conditions are deadly. Has she rung on her mobile? Was there a note?”

“Neither. But we’re certain.” Lynley described for the officer the position of the house, the lack of an escape route, and what they’d done to attempt to find Alatea Vasquez y del Torres. The only possibility besides the bay had been the walk along the seawall: a public footpath that branched into half a dozen other public footpaths leading to Arnside Knot, to the village of Silverdale, and ultimately onto the Lancaster Coastal Way. But Alatea didn’t know those footpaths other than the footpath to Arnside Knot and she had no reason to climb to the knot in the fog while she had every reason to try to make a run for it across the bay.

“What reason would this be, sir?” the officer had asked, not unreasonably.

Lynley told him he was in the midst of an enquiry into a drowning, which could have been a murder, and all the et ceteras. He was not only stretching the truth of the matter. He was actually lying to the man. But there seemed no choice available other than setting out themselves for Arnside Knot to search for her there, which he’d managed to persuade Nicholas Fairclough to do, hopeless task though it was.

Fairclough had agreed to do this, although he’d built a bonfire first on the seawall path. This Deborah was keeping at a roar, feeding into it armfuls of whatever was flammable: logs, branches, newspapers, magazines, old pieces of furniture. The fire had attracted the attention of the fire brigade as well as the good citizens of Arnside, who joined in the effort to make from these combustibles a beacon that might glow through the fog and signal to Alatea the route she needed to take in order to return.

It was more something to do than was it useful, and Lynley knew this. For if Alatea was indeed out there in Morecambe Bay and if the tide was coming in, it was hardly likely that she’d be able to outrun it. Hence his call to the Coast Guard.

The officer on Walney Island said to him, “Sir, I can put out a boat, but let’s not deal in fantasy here. Visibility just now is less than twenty yards. The bay is over one hundred square miles. With the combination of fog and the tidal bore… I’m not putting a crew out there on a whim.”

“I assure you, this is not a whim,” Lynley told him. “Surely if you set a course for Arnside— ”

“We’ll chance it, all right,” the officer cut in. “But she’s a dead woman, sir, and we both know that. Meanwhile, ring the lifeboat service to see what they can do to assist. You might want to phone the Guide to the Sands for his opinion as well.”

The Guide to the Sands was established across the water to the south of Grange-over-Sands, near a little enclave called Berry Bank. He sounded a kindhearted soul when Lynley rang him. But in over fifty years of walking curious day-trippers across Morecambe Bay and after a lifetime spent between cockling from the fishing village of Flookburgh to trawling for shrimp in the River Leven, he bloody well knew how to read the sands, sir, and if a lady was out there in the fog for any reason on God’s good earth— and he didn’t much care to know the reason— she was well on her way to being a corpse and “that’s the unfortunate truth of the matter, I’m sorry to tell you.”

Was there nothing to be done? Lynley asked. For the Coast Guard was setting out from Walney Island and he was about to ring the RNLI for a lifeboat as well.

Depends on how many corpses you want to look for when the fog lifts, was how the Guide to the Sands put it. But he made one thing clear: After all his years of reading the sands and knowing the safe routes from those fraught with danger, he wasn’t about to join the foolhardy who went out now in search of anyone.

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 trespasssers.

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.