Believing the Lie

CHALK FARM TO VICTORIA LONDON

Barbara Havers shrieked when she saw herself in the bathroom mirror, having stumbled towards the loo upon rising in the early morning and having forgotten that her appearance was decidedly altered. Her heart leapt in her chest, and she swung round ready to confront the woman she saw in an oblique angle of the mirror. It was a matter of seconds only, but she felt every which way the fool as she came to her senses and all of yesterday came sweeping back in the form of a hot wave of what was not quite shame but not quite anything else, either.

She’d rung Angelina Upman on her mobile after she’d visited the building in which Bernard Fairclough’s associate Vivienne Tully lived. She’d said she was in Kensington and it looked like she was going to have to cancel “the hair thing,” as she called it, being so far from Chalk Farm at the moment. But Angelina enthused on the matter: Heavens, Kensington was just a hop from Knightsbridge. They’d meet there instead of going in each other’s company. Hadiyyah had weighed in, hearing her mother’s end of the conversation. She’d got onto the mobile and said, “You can’t, Barbara. And anyways, you’re under orders, you know. And it’s not going to hurt.” She’d lowered her voice and gone on to say, “And it’s the Dorchester, Barbara. Tea at the Dorchester afterwards. Mummy says they’ve got someone who plays the piano while you have your tea and she says someone’s always walking round with silver trays heaped with sandwiches and she says someone brings fresh scones that’re hot and then there are cakes. Lots of cakes, Barbara.”

Barbara reluctantly agreed. She would meet them in Knightsbridge. Anything to be served tea sandwiches from a silver platter.

The big event at the hair salon had been what Barbara knew a pop psychologist would have called a growth experience. Dusty — Angelina’s stylist — had fully lived up to her description of him. When Barbara was ensconced in the chair of one of his underlings, he’d come over from his own station, taken one look at her, and said, “God. And what century is it that you’re representing?” He was thin, handsome, spiky haired, and so tan for the month of November that only hours in a tanning bed could have possibly effected such a dubious glow of precancerous health. He hadn’t waited for Barbara to come up with a witty reply to this. Instead, he’d turned to the underling and said, “Bob it, foil it with one-eighty-two and sixty-four. And I’m going to want to check your work.” He then said to Barbara, “Really, you’ve gone this long. You could have waited another six weeks and I’d have seen to you myself. What on earth do you use for shampoo?”

“Fairy Liquid. I use it for everything.”

“You’re joking of course. But it’s something from the shampoo aisle in the supermarket, isn’t it?”

“Where else am I supposed to buy shampoo?”

He rolled his eyes in horror. “God.” And then to Angelina, “You’re looking gorgeous as always,” after which he air-kissed her and left Barbara in the hands of the underling. Hadiyyah he ignored altogether.

At the end of what had seemed like a period in Hades to Barbara, she had emerged from the ministrations of Dusty’s underling with sleekly bobbed hair that was highlighted with streaks of shimmering blond and with subtle strands of auburn. The underling — who turned out not to be Cedric after all but rather a young woman from Essex, nice despite her four lip rings and her chest tattooes — gave her instructions about the care and maintenance of her locks, which did not involve the use of Fairy Liquid or anything else save a supremely costly bottle of elixir that apparently was going to “preserve the colour, improve the body, repair the follicles,” and, one assumed, alter one’s social life.

Barbara paid for it all with a shudder. She wondered if women truly poured this much lolly into something that could as easily be seen to in the shower every now and again.

Nonetheless, when she showered that morning, she protected the costly hairstyle from the water by wrapping it in cling film first. She was shrouded in an overlarge pair of flannel drawstring trousers and a hoody and toasting herself a strawberry Pop-Tart when she heard the excited chatter of Hadiyyah at her door, followed by the little girl’s knock upon it.

“Are you there? Are you there?” Hadiyyah cried. “I’ve brought Dad to see your new hair, Barbara.”

“No, no, no,” Barbara whispered. She wasn’t actually ready for anyone to see her yet, least of all Taymullah Azhar, whose voice she could hear but whose words she could not distinguish. She waited in silence, hoping that Hadiyyah would assume she was already off for the day, but really, how could she? It wasn’t eight in the morning and Hadiyyah knew Barbara’s habits, and even if she hadn’t known, Barbara’s Mini was in full view of Azhar’s flat. There was nothing for it but to open the door.

“See?” Hadiyyah cried, grabbing her father’s hand. “See, Dad? Mummy and I took Barbara to Mummy’s own hairdresser yesterday. Doesn’t Barbara look nice? Everyone at the Dorchester noticed her.”

Azhar said, “Ah. Yes. I do see,” which Barbara felt was akin to being damned with very faint praise indeed.

She said, “Bit different, eh? Scared the dickens out of myself when I looked in the mirror this morning.”

“It’s not at all frightening,” Azhar told her gravely.

“Right. Well. I meant that I didn’t recognise myself.”

“I think Barbara looks lovely,” Hadiyyah told her father. “So does Mummy. Mummy said the hair makes Barbara look like light’s coming from her face and it makes her eyes show nicely. Mummy says Barbara’s got beautiful eyes and she must show them off. Dusty told Barbara she’s to let her fringe grow out so that there’s no fringe any longer as well but instead she’ll have — ”

“Khushi,” Azhar cut in, not unkindly, “you and your mother have done very well. And now, as Barbara is eating her breakfast, you and I must be off.” He offered a long and sombre look at Barbara. “It does suit you well,” he said before he gently put his hand on his daughter’s head and directed her to turn so that they could go.

Barbara watched them walk back in the direction of their flat, Hadiyyah taking a skip and a hop and chattering all the while. Azhar had always been a sober sort of bloke in the time she had known him, but she had the feeling there was something here that comprised more than his usual gravitas. She wasn’t sure what it was, although since Angelina wasn’t currently employed, his concerns might have had to do with the fact that he and not his partner was going to be footing the bill for their costly teatime excursion at the Dorchester. Angelina had pulled out the stops on that one, beginning with champagne with which she had toasted Barbara’s burgeoning beauty, as she’d called it.

Barbara shut the door thoughtfully. If she’d put Azhar into a difficult position, she needed to do something about it and she wasn’t quite sure what that was going to be other than from slipping him a few quid on the side, which he was unlikely to take from her.

When she was ready for her day, she began the mental preparation for what lay ahead. Although she was still officially taking her few days off work, part of what comprised her agenda had to be a visit to New Scotland Yard. This was going to put her on the receiving end of some good-natured jibes from her colleagues once they got a look at her hair.

In another situation she might have been able to prolong the inevitable since she was still on holiday. But Lynley needed information that was going to be more easily gleaned at the Yard than anywhere else, so there was nothing for it but to head to Victoria Street and to try to avoid being noticed wherever she could.

She had a name — Vivienne Tully — but not much else. She’d tried to get more as she’d left the building in Rutland Gate and a quick survey of the cubbies for the post had given her a bit. Vivienne Tully resided in flat 6, so her small stack of letters told Barbara, and a quick dash up the stairs allowed her to find this flat on the third floor of the building. It was, indeed, the sole flat on the floor, but when Barbara knocked, she learned only that Vivienne Tully had a house cleaner who also answered the door if someone showed up while she was hoovering and dusting. One polite question about Ms. Tully’s whereabouts revealed that the house cleaner spoke limited En glish. Something Baltic seemed to be her native tongue, but the woman recognised Vivienne Tully’s name well enough and through pantomime, a magazine grabbed up from a cocktail table, and much gesturing at a longcase clock, Barbara was able to ascertain that Vivienne Tully either danced for the Royal Ballet or she’d gone to see the Royal Ballet with someone called Bianca or she and her friend Bianca had gone to a ballet dance class. In any case, it all amounted to the same thing: Vivienne Tully wasn’t at home and was not likely to be home for at least two hours. Barbara’s appointment to be beautified precluded her hanging about to accost the woman, so she had scarpered to Knightsbridge with Vivienne Tully a blank page upon which something needed to be written.

Her visit to the Yard was supposed to take care of this, at the same time as it allowed her to see what there was to see about Ian Cresswell, Bernard Fairclough, and the woman from Argentina whom Lynley had also mentioned: Alatea Vasquez y del Torres. So she fired up her Mini and set off towards Westminster, holding to her heart the hope that she’d see as few of her colleagues as possible as she skulked round the corridors of New Scotland Yard.

She had fairly good luck in this department, at least at the start. The only people she saw were Winston Nkata and the departmental secretary Dorothea Harriman. Dorothea, long the picture of sartorial perfection and possessing an unmatchable degree of excellence in the area of all things related to personal grooming, took one look at Barbara, stopped dead in the tracks of her crippling five-inch stilettos, and said, “Brilliant, Detective Sergeant. Absolutely brilliant. Who did it?” She touched Barbara’s hair with her slender and speculative fingers. Without waiting for an answer, she went on. “And just look at the sheen. Gorgeous, gorgeous. Acting Detective Superintendent Ardery is going to be delighted. You wait and see.”

Waiting and seeing were the last things Barbara wanted to do. She said, “Ta, Dee. Bit different, eh?”

“Different does not do justice,” Dorothea said. “I want the name of the stylist. Will you share it with me?”

“Course,” Barbara said. “Why wouldn’t I share it?”

“Oh, some women won’t, you know. Battle of females on the prowl. That sort of thing.” She took a step away and sighed, her gaze fixed on Barbara’s hair. “I’m green with envy.”

The idea that Dorothea Harriman might be envious of her hairstyle made Barbara want to hoot with laughter, as did the notion that she herself was intent upon capturing a man with this makeover she’d been forced to endure. But she restrained herself and gave the other woman Dusty’s name as well as the name of the Knightsbridge salon. This would be right up Dee’s alley, Barbara reckoned, as she had little doubt that Dorothea spent vast amounts of time and most of her wages in Knightsbridge.

Winston Nkata’s reaction was less extreme, and Barbara thanked her stars for this. He said, “Looks good, Barb. Guv see you yet?” and that was it.

Barbara said, “I was hoping to avoid her. If you see her, I’m not here, okay? I mean I’m here but not here. I just need access to the PNC and some other stuff.”

“DI Lynley?”

“Mum’s the word.”

Nkata said he’d cover for Barbara as best he could but there was no telling when acting superintendent Isabelle Ardery was going to appear in their midst. “Best be prepared with some sort of story,” he advised. “She’s not happy ’bout the inspector going off without letting her know where he’ll be.”

Barbara gave Nkata a closer look when he said this. She wondered what he knew about Lynley and Isabelle Ardery. But Nkata’s expression betrayed nothing and while this was habitual for him, Barbara decided it was safe to conclude that he was merely remarking upon the obvious: Lynley was a member of Ardery’s team; the assistant commissioner had pulled him off to see to some matter unrelated to Ardery’s concerns; she was cheesed off about this.

Barbara found an inconspicuous spot where she could access the Yard’s computer with its myriad sources of information. She started first with Vivienne Tully and she began, with very little difficulty, to amass the pertinent details about her. They ranged from her birth in Wellington, New Zealand, to her education from primary school there to university in Auckland to an impressive, advanced degree at the London School of Economics. She was the managing director of a firm called Precision Gardening, which manufactured gardening tools — hardly a high-glamour job, Barbara thought — and she was also an executive director of the Fairclough Foundation. A bit of delving turned up a further connection with Bernard Fairclough, Barbara found. In her early twenties she’d been the executive assistant to Bernard Fairclough at Fairclough Industries in Barrow-in-Furness. Between her time at Fairclough Industries and Precision Gardening, she’d been an independent business consultant, which Barbara reckoned in the way of the modern world could indicate either an attempt at developing her own business or a period of unemployment that had lasted four years. As of now, she was thirty-three years old, and a photo of her showed a woman with spiky hair, quite a boyish dress sense, and a rather frighteningly intelligent face. Her eyes communicated the fact that Vivienne Tully didn’t suffer fools. In conjunction with her background and her general appearance, they also suggested ferocity of independence.

As far as Lord Fairclough was concerned, Barbara found nothing curious. There was plenty curious about his wayward son, though, as Nicholas Fairclough hadn’t exactly trod the straight and narrow in his teens and twenties and records showed car crashes, arrests for drink driving, bungled burglaries, shoplifting, and sale of stolen goods. He seemed a straight enough arrow now, though. He’d paid all of his debts to society and from the day of his marriage, not a hair of his head had even been ruffled.

That brought Barbara to Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, her of the mouthful name. Aside from that name, Barbara had in her crumpled notes the town from which she’d sprung, communicated to her as Santa Maria di something-or-other, which wasn’t exactly helpful as she quickly found out. Santa Maria di et cetera turned out to be to the towns and villages in a Latin American country what Jones and Smith were to surnames in her own. This, she reckoned, was not going to be like pinching candy from a five-year-old.

She was considering her approach when the acting superintendent found her. Dorothea Harriman had, alas, waxed eloquent on the subject of Barbara’s hair, failing to append to her waxing a convenient lie about having seen Barbara at a location that was not New Scotland Yard. Isabelle Ardery thus accosted her on the twelfth floor, where Barbara had hidden herself in the Met’s library, a convenient location from which she could access the Met’s databases in peace and in secrecy.

“Here you are, then.” The acting superintendent had come upon Barbara with the stealth of a hunting cat, and her satisfaction was feline as well. She looked like a cat, decapitated mouse in jaws.

Barbara said, “Guv,” with a nod. She added, “Still on holiday,” on the very slight chance that Isabelle Ardery was there to requisition her for work.

Ardery didn’t go in that direction, nor did she acknowledge Barbara’s status as being off rota for the moment. She said, “I’ll see the hair first, Sergeant.”

Barbara hardly wanted to know what second was going to be, considering the superintendent’s tone. She stood to give Ardery a better look.

Ardery nodded. “Now that,” she said, “is actually a haircut. We could go as far as to call it a style.”

Considering what she’d paid for it, Barbara thought, they ought to be calling it a night at the Ritz. She waited for more.

Ardery walked round her. She nodded. She said, “Hair and teeth. Very good. I’m quite pleased to know you can take direction when your feet are to the fire, Sergeant.”

“I live to please,” Barbara said.

“As to the clothing — ”

Barbara said to remind her, “On holiday, guv?” which she believed adequately explained her ensemble of tracksuit trousers, tee-shirt emblazoned with Finish Your Beer… Children in China Are Sober, red high-top trainers, and donkey jacket.

“Even on holiday,” Ardery said, “Barbara, you’re a representative of the Met. When you walk in the door — ” Abruptly, she brushed aside whatever she’d intended to say as her gaze came to rest on Barbara’s tattered notebook. She said, “What are you doing here?”

“Just needed to get some information.”

“Needing to get it here suggests a police matter.” Isabelle put herself in a position to see the screen of the computer’s monitor. She said, “Argentina?”

“Holidays,” Barbara said airily.

Isabelle looked further. She scrolled back to the previous screen and the one before that. She said, reading the list of Santa Maria di towns, “Developing a fondness for the Virgin Mary? Holidays suggest resorts. Skiing. Seaside visits. Jungle excursions. Adventures. Eco-journeys. Which are you interested in?”

“Oh, just playing with ideas at the moment,” Barbara told her.

Isabelle turned to her. “I’m not a fool, Sergeant. If you wanted to look for holiday possibilities, you wouldn’t be doing it here. That being the case and since you’ve asked for time off, I think it’s safe to conclude you’re doing some work for Inspector Lynley. Am I correct?”

Barbara sighed. “You are.”

“I see.” Isabelle’s eyes narrowed as she thought this one through. It seemed to lead her to a single conclusion. “You’ve been in contact with him, then.”

“Well… more or less. Right.”

“Regularly?”

“Not sure what you mean,” Barbara said. She also wondered where the hell this was going. It was not as if she had a thing with DI Lynley. If Ardery thought that, she was clearly off her nut.

“Where is he, Sergeant?” the superintendent asked directly. “You know, don’t you?”

Barbara considered her answer. Truth was, she did know. Truth also was, Lynley hadn’t told her. His mentioning of Bernard Fairclough had done that. So she said, “He hasn’t told me, guv.”

But Ardery took another meaning from the moments in which Barbara had been considering her options. She said, “I see,” in a way that told Barbara she saw something other than the truth of the matter. “Thank you, Sergeant,” the superintendent added. “Thank you very much indeed.”

Ardery left her then. Barbara knew she could call her back before she got to the door of the library. She knew she could clarify. But she did not do so. Nor did she ask herself why she was allowing the superintendent to believe something that was patently untrue.

Instead, she turned back to her work with Santa Maria di whatever. Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, she thought. Whoever she was, and not Isabelle Ardery, was the crux of the matter in hand.

MILNTHORPE CUMBRIA

The end product St. James had to deal with was that his wife was simply afraid. Afraid, she was projecting them into a future for which she’d come up with half a dozen alternative scenarios, none of which did anything to assuage her fears. What was to St. James a potential solution to their long-thwarted desire for a family was no solution at all to her. There were too many variables that they couldn’t control, she’d argued, and reluctantly he had to admit that there was a great deal of truth in what she said. An open adoption could indeed invite into their lives not only an infant in need of a loving family but also a birth mother, birth father, birth grandparents on both sides, and God only knew who else. It wasn’t a simple matter of scooping up an infant from the arms of a social worker and — it had to be said — hoping that the child and young adult growing out of that infant would not be one who felt the need to develop a second life with a birth family he or she scouted out when of an age to do so. Deborah was completely right in this, but so was he: There would be no guarantees in any route to parenthood, he’d told her.

His brother was pressing him for an answer. This girl in Southampton couldn’t wait forever, David had said. There were other interested couples. “Come along, Simon. It’s either yes or no, and it’s not like you not to make a decision.”

So St. James had spoken to Deborah again. Again, she’d been adamant. They’d gone back and forth for a quarter of an hour, at the end of which he’d set out for a walk. They hadn’t actually parted badly, but they needed a little space for the heat of their discussion to dissipate.

He’d left the Crow and Eagle and walked in the direction of Arnside, along the road that skirted the River Bela and ultimately the mudflats of Milnthorpe Sands. As he walked, he tried not to think but rather merely to breathe in the rain-washed, damp day. He needed to clear his mind of this whole adoption business once and for all. If he didn’t — and if Deborah didn’t — it was going to poison their marriage.

The damn magazine hadn’t helped matters. Deborah had it in hand at this point, and she’d read the bloody thing from cover to cover. From a story in Conception she had concluded decisively that she wanted to go the surrogacy route: her egg, his sperm, a petri dish, and a host mother. She’d read a story of a six-time surrogate and the altruism she extended towards other women. “It would be our child,” was the point she kept making. “Ours and no one else’s.” Well, it would be and it wouldn’t, to his way of thinking. There were dangers here as well as dangers in the other routes of adoption.

The day was a fine one although the night had seen buckets of rain pouring down on Cumbria. But now the air felt clean and crisp, and the sky displayed an ashen wealth of cumulus clouds. Out on the mudflats, the stragglers from various flocks of birds heading to Africa and the Mediterranean still hunted for ragworms, lugworms, and tellins. He recognised the plovers and the dunlans among them but as to the rest, he could not have said. He watched them for a while and admired the simplicity of their life. Then he turned and walked back into Milnthorpe.

In the car park of the inn, he found Lynley just arriving. He walked over to join him as his friend got out of the Healey Elliott. They had a moment of mutual admiration for the saloon’s sleek lines and handsome paint job before St. James said, “But you didn’t come by to prompt further vehicular envy on my part, I expect.”

“Any chance to lord it over you in the transportation area is a chance I must grab on to. But in this case, you’re right. I wanted to talk to you.”

“A mobile would have done. This was a bit of a drive.”

“Hmm, yes. But part of the gaff is blown. I reckoned a few hours away from the Faircloughs wouldn’t go amiss.” Lynley told him of his evening encounter with Valerie, Bernard, and Mignon Fairclough. “Now that she knows Scotland Yard’s involved, she’ll make short work of letting everyone else know as well.”

“That could be good.”

“It’s actually as I’d have preferred it.”

“But you’re uneasy?”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Because of who Fairclough is. Because of who Hillier is. Because of Hillier’s damnable propensity for using me to serve his own ends.”

St. James waited for more. He knew the history of Lynley’s relationship with the assistant commissioner. It included at least one attempted cover-up of a long-ago crime. He wouldn’t have put it past Hillier to use Lynley another time in a similar capacity in which one of their own — as Hillier would no doubt think of Fairclough, Lynley, and himself — had something serious he wished to bury and Lynley was supposed to wield the shovel. Anything was possible, and both of them knew it.

Lynley said, “It may all be a smoke screen.”

“Which part of it?”

“Fairclough wanting me to look into Ian Cresswell’s death. That’s certainly what Mignon Fairclough indicated last evening. It was a look-no-further-than-the-bloke-who-employed-you kind of remark. It’s something I’d already thought of myself and dismissed, however.”

“Why?”

“Because I just can’t make sense of it, Simon.” Lynley leaned against the side of the Healey Elliott, arms crossed at his chest. “I can see how he’d ask for the Met’s involvement if a murder had occurred and he’d been accused or suspected and wanted to clear his name. Or if one or more of his children had been accused or suspected and he wanted to clear their names. But this was deemed an accident from the first, so why find someone to look into it if he himself is guilty of something or if he suspects one of them is?”

“That rather suggests Mignon herself is throwing up a smoke screen, doesn’t it?”

“It would explain her trying to divert attention onto her father last night. Evidently, Cresswell wanted Bernard to cut her off.” Lynley explained the financial arrangement Mignon apparently had with her father. “She wouldn’t have wanted that. And since Cresswell kept the books and knew every move Bernard made financially, there’s the additional possibility that he wanted someone else cut off as well.”

“The son?”

“He’s the likely choice, isn’t he? With Nicholas’s past, Cresswell would have argued not to trust him with a penny, and who could blame him? Nicholas Fairclough might be a recovering methamphetamine user but that’s the key word: recovering and not recovered. Addicts never recover. They merely cope day-to-day.”

Lynley would know about that, St. James acknowledged, because of his own brother. “And has Fairclough handed money to his son?”

“I want to look into that. The other daughter and her husband are my means to the information.”

St. James looked away. Noise and odours were coming from an open door into the back of the hotel: the crashing and banging of pots along with the smell of frying bacon and burnt toast. He said to Lynley, “What about Valerie Fairclough, Tommy?”

“As killer?”

“Ian Cresswell was no blood to her. He was her husband’s nephew and he had the potential to damage her children. If he wanted to cut off Mignon and he doubted Nicholas’s long-term recovery, he’d steer Fairclough away from helping them financially as Fairclough tended to do. And Valerie Fairclough’s behaviour that day was decidedly strange according to Constable Schlicht: dressed to the nines, perfectly calm, a phone call announcing ‘a dead man floating in my boathouse.’”

“There’s that,” Lynley admitted. “But she could have been the intended victim as well.”

“Motive?”

“Mignon declares her father is hardly ever there. He’s in London repeatedly. Havers is looking into that end of things, but if something’s not right with the Faircloughs’ marriage, Bernard could have hopes to rid himself of his wife.”

“Why not divorce her?”

“Because of Fairclough Industries. He’s run it forever and of course he’d stand to walk away with a great deal of money if it was part of a settlement unless there’s some sort of prenuptial agreement we’re not privy to. But as of now it’s still her company, and I daresay she can throw her weight into whatever decisions are made at the place if she wants to.”

“Another reason for her to want Ian dead, Tommy, if he’d been recommending decisions not to her liking.”

“Possibly. But wouldn’t it make more sense for her to have Ian fired? Why kill him when she had the power to cut him off as easily as he wanted to cut off two of her children?”

“So where do we stand?” St. James pointed out to him that the fillet knife they’d brought up from the water looked perfectly innocent to the naked eye, not a scratch upon it. The stones they’d also brought up bore no recent scratches to indicate they’d been jemmied away from the dock. They could get Constable Schlicht out to the boathouse and the local SOCO boys involved, but they were going to need the coroner to reopen the case and they had virtually nothing to give him in order to encourage him to have another look at Ian Cresswell’s death.

“The answer lies with the people,” Lynley said. “They all bear a closer looking into.”

“Which means, I think, that my usefulness to you has run its course,” St. James said. “Although there’s a final route we might go with the fillet knife. And another conversation that might be had with Mignon.”

Lynley was about to reply to these suggestions when his mobile rang. He looked at the caller and said, “It’s Havers. This could tell us where we need to head next.” He flipped the phone open and said, “Tell me you’ve got something meaningful, Sergeant, because all we’re running into here is one dead end after another.”

ARNSIDE CUMBRIA

Alatea had gone out early to plant bulbs because she wanted to avoid her husband. She’d slept poorly, with her mind racing hour after hour, and at the first sign of dawn, she’d slipped out of bed and faded out of the house.

Nicholas had slept badly as well. Something was very wrong.

The first evidence of this had come over dinner on the previous evening. He toyed with his food, mostly cutting the meat and moving it round the plate, mostly slicing the potatoes neatly and piling them up like poker chips. To her question of what was bothering him, he’d smiled vaguely and said, “Just a bit off my food tonight,” and ultimately he’d pushed away from the table and wandered off into the drawing room, where he’d sat in the fireplace inglenook briefly and then paced the room as if it were a cage and he the imprisoned animal on display.

When they’d gone to bed, things had been worse. With a rising feeling of dread, she’d approached him. A hand on his chest, she’d said, “Nicky, something’s wrong. Tell me,” although the truth was that she feared hearing his answer more than she feared her own restless mind and where it took her when she allowed it free rein. He’d said, “Nothing. Really, darling. Just tired or something. Just a bit on edge,” and when she’d not been able to prevent a look of alarm washing over her features, he’d gone on to say, “You’re not to worry, Allie,” and she knew he was reassuring her that whatever was going on inside him, it bore no relationship to his past with drugs. She hadn’t thought it had, however, but she played along, saying, “You might want to talk to someone, Nicky. You know how it is,” and he nodded. But he looked at her with so much love in his face that she realised whatever was on his mind most likely had to do with her.

They hadn’t made love. This, too, was unlike her husband because she had approached him and not the opposite, and he’d long loved to be approached by her because he was not a fool and he knew very well how disparate was everything about them, at least everything visible to a world that judged people’s equality by external matters. So the fact that she would want him at least as often as he wanted her had always thrilled Nicholas, who had always responded. This too was a sign.

So when Alatea left the house and made her way to the garden, it was in part because she needed to do something to take her mind off the terrifying possibilities that had been assailing her throughout the night. But it was also in part to avoid seeing Nicholas because eventually what was bothering him was going to come out into the open and she didn’t think she’d be able to face it.

There were several thousand bulbs to be planted. She planned the lawn to be filled with early glories of the snow so that a bank of blue upon green would fall from the house down to the seawall, and this was going to take considerable work, for which she was glad. She would not, of course, be able to complete it in this one morning. But she could make a very good start. She set upon it with shovel and spade and the hours passed quickly. When she was sure her husband would have left Arnside House to make the drive to Barrow-in-Furness for his half day at Fairclough Industries prior to his work at the pele project, she finished up what she was doing and stretched and rubbed the sore spots on her back.

It was only when she headed to the house that she saw his car and understood that Nicholas hadn’t gone to work at all. Her gaze then went from the car to the house, and the dread she felt crept up her spine.

He was in the kitchen. He was sitting at the broad oak table, and he appeared to be brooding. There was a cup of coffee in front of him, with a cafetiere and a bowl of sugar nearby. But the cup of coffee appeared undrunk and a ring of sediment round the inside of the cafetiere suggested its contents had long gone cold.

He hadn’t dressed for the day. He wore the trousers of his pyjamas and the dressing gown she’d given him for his birthday. His feet were bare although he didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that the tiles on the floor would be cold against them. There was much about his appearance that wasn’t right. But least right was the fact that Nicholas never missed work.

Alatea wasn’t sure what to say. She went with the lead he had given her during dinner the night before. She said, “Nicky, I didn’t think you were still at home. Are you ill?”

“Just needed to think.” He looked at her then and she saw his eyes were bloodshot. A tingling went up her arms and felt as if it would encircle her heart. He said, “This seemed like the best place to do it.”

She didn’t want to ask the obvious, but not to do so would have been more obvious still, so she said, “Think about what? What’s wrong?”

He said nothing at first. She watched him. He moved his gaze from her, and it seemed he was thinking about her question and all the different answers he might give. At first he said, “Manette came to see me. In the shipping department.”

“Are there problems there?”

“It’s Tim and Gracie. She wanted us to take them.”

“Take them? What do you mean?”

He explained. She heard but didn’t hear because all the time she was busy trying to evaluate his tone. He spoke of his cousin Ian; of Ian’s wife, Niamh; and of Ian’s two children. Alatea, of course, knew all of them, but she had not known of Niamh’s intentions towards her own flesh and blood. It was inconceivable to her that Niamh would use her children in this way, as chess pieces in a game that by all rights should have been over. She wanted to weep for Tim and Gracie and she felt the imperative of doing something for them as much as Nicholas obviously felt it. But for this to have disturbed his sleep, to have made him ill…? He wasn’t telling her everything.

“Manette and Freddie are the best ones to take them,” he concluded. “I’m no match for Tim’s problems, but Manette and Freddie are. She’d get through to Tim. She’d be good at that. She doesn’t give up on anyone.”

“So it seems there’s a solution, yes?” Alatea said hopefully.

“Except that Manette and Freddie have split up so that throws a spanner,” Nicholas said. “Their situation’s odd. It’s also unstable.” He was silent again for a moment, and he used the moment to top up his cold coffee with more cold coffee, into which he stirred a heaped teaspoonful of sugar. “And that’s too bad,” he went on, “because they belong together, those two. I can’t think why they split up in the first place. Except they never had kids and I think perhaps that wrecked them after a time.”

Oh God, this was the crux, Alatea thought. This was where it all headed in the end. She had known it would, if not with Nicholas then with someone else.

She said, “Perhaps they didn’t want children. Some people don’t.”

“Some people, but not Manette.” He glanced at her. His face was drawn. From this, Alatea knew he wasn’t telling her the truth. Tim and Gracie might indeed be in need of a stable place to live, but that was not what was bothering her husband.

She said, “There’s more, though.” She drew out a chair from the table and sat. “I think, Nicky, that you had better tell me.”

It had long been a strong part of their relationship that from the first Nicholas had told her everything. He’d insisted upon it because of how he’d lived in his past, which had been in a world of lies, experiencing a life defined by hiding his drug use in any way he could. If he didn’t tell her everything now — despite what that “everything” might comprise — his withholding of information would be more damaging to their marriage than whatever the information itself was. Both of them knew it.

He finally said, “I believe my father thinks I killed Ian.”

This was so far from what Alatea had been expecting that she was rendered speechless. There were words somewhere inside her, but she couldn’t find them, at least not in English.

Nicholas said, “Scotland Yard’s up here looking into Ian’s death. Considering it was ruled an accident, there’s only one reason that Scotland Yard’s turned up. Dad can pull strings when he wants to. I reckon that’s what he did.”

“That’s impossible.” Alatea’s mouth felt dry. She wanted to reach for Nicholas’s coffee and drink it down, but she stopped herself from even moving, so unsure was she of her ability to keep the sudden trembling of her body under her control. “How do you know this, Nicky?”

“That journalist.”

“What…? Are you talking about that man? That same man? The one who came here…? The story that never was a story at all?”

Nicholas nodded. “He’s back. He told me. Scotland Yard’s here. The rest is clear enough: I’m the person they’re interested in.”

“He said that? The journalist said that?”

“Not in so many words. But from everything that’s gone on, it’s obvious.”

There was something more here that he wasn’t telling her. Alatea could read it in his face. She said, “I don’t believe it. You? Why on earth would you have hurt Ian? And why would your father think you could?”

He shrugged. She saw that he was struggling with a conflict that he couldn’t bear to reveal and she herself struggled to understand what it was and what it could mean to both of them. He was deeply depressed or deeply grieved or deeply — very deeply — something else.

She said, “I think you should speak to your father. You must do this straightaway. This reporter, Nicky, he doesn’t mean you well. And now this woman who says she’s from the film company that doesn’t exist… You must talk to your father at once. You must hear the truth of the matter. It’s the only answer, Nicky.”

He raised his head. His eyes were liquid. Her heart constricted with her love for this man, troubled soul to her own troubled soul. He said, “Well, I’ve definitely decided against being part of that documentary film that she was here about. I’ve told her that, by the way, so there’s one less thing for either of us to deal with.” His lips curved but it was a poor effort at a smile. It was meant to encourage her, to tell her all would be well soon enough.

Both of them knew this was a lie, however. But like everything else, neither one of them would be willing to admit that.

MILNTHORPE CUMBRIA

“I wouldn’t want to have to write it on an envelope, but they probably have some Spanish abbreviation if you’re sending a letter there,” Havers said. She was referring to the town in Argentina that she’d managed to come up with as being the likeliest origin of Alatea Vasquez y del Torres. “Santa Maria de la Cruz, de los Angeles, y de los Santos,” she had just announced to Lynley over his mobile phone. “We’re talking about a burg that’s touching all the spiritual bases. It must be in an earthquake zone and hoping for divine intervention in case of the worst.”

Lynley could hear her smoking on the other end. No surprise. Havers was always smoking. She wouldn’t be at the Met, then. Or if she was, she was phoning from a stairwell where, he knew, she occasionally skulked for an illegal hit of the weed. He said to her, “Why this town, Barbara?” and to St. James, who had joined him to lean against the Healey Elliott, “She’s onto Alatea Fairclough.”

“Who’re you talking to?” Havers enquired irritably. “I bloody well hate three-way conversations.”

“St. James is here. I’ll switch it to the speaker if I can work out how to do that.”

“Oh, that’ll happen on a snowy day in hell,” she said. “Give it to Simon, sir. He can do it for you.”

“Havers, I’m not entirely — ”

“Sir.” It was her patient-as-a-saint voice. There was nothing for it. He handed the mobile over to St. James. One or two buttons and both of them were listening to Havers in the car park of the Crow and Eagle.

“It’s the mayor,” Havers said. “I know this is spitting in the dark, sir, but the mayor’s a bloke called Esteban Vega y de Vasquez and his wife’s called Dominga Padilla y del Torres de Vasquez. I reckoned it could be a put-it-all-together-and-what’ve-you-got situation. Some of the surnames are the same as Alatea’s.”

“That’s a stretch, Barbara.”

“This came from the Internet?” St. James asked.

“Bloody hours on it. And since everything’s in sodding Spanish, I’m only guessing he’s the mayor. He could be the dog catcher but there was a picture of him and I can’t think why the dog catcher’d be handing over the keys to the city to anyone in some picture. Well, except maybe to Barbara Woodhouse.”

“She’s dead,” Lynley said.

“Whatever. So there’s a picture of him and he’s in his mayor kit and there’s his wife and they’re posing with someone and I can’t — of course — read the caption since it’s in Spanish, in which language I can actually say una cerveza por favor but, believe me, nothing else. But the names are in the caption. Esteban and Dominga and all the rest. So far, that’s our best bet, I reckon, because I haven’t been able to find anything else even close.”

“We’ll need someone to translate,” Lynley noted.

“What about you, Simon? Spanish among your many talents?”

“Only French,” St. James said. “Well, there’s Latin as well, but I’m not sure how much use that would be.”

“Well, we got to find someone. And we need someone else to tell us how these people come up with their surnames because I bloody don’t know and can’t work it out.”

“It has to do with forebears,” Lynley said.

“Got that much, I think. But what is it? Do they just keep lining them up back through history? Wouldn’t want to have to write that on my passport application if you know what I mean.”

Lynley was thinking about the language and who would serve their purposes as a translator. There would, of course, be someone in the Met, but he wasn’t sure how many more people he could afford to bring in on this before Isabelle traced the lot of them back to him.

He said, “What about Alatea Fairclough herself? What’ve you come up with on that score when you work her into this town of Santa Maria et cetera? You’re assuming she’s the mayor’s daughter, I take it?”

Havers said, “Can’t go that way at all, sir. They seem to have five sons.” She inhaled on the other end of the line and blew smoke noisily into the mobile phone. Lynley heard the rustling of paper and knew she was leafing through her notebook as well. She went on to say, “Carlos, Miguel, Angel, Santiago, and Diego. At least I reckon there are five sons. Considering the way these people string together their names, it could be one bloke, I s’pose.”

“So where does Alatea fit in?”

“Way I see it, she could be the wife of one of them.”

“A wife on the run?”

“Sounds very good to me.”

“What about a relative?” St. James asked. “A niece, a cousin.”

“I reckon that’s possible as well.”

“Are you working that angle?” Lynley asked her.

“Haven’t been. Can do. But no way can I delve because like I said this stuff’s in Spanish,” she reminded him. “Course, the Yard’ll have a program to translate. You know. Something buried on the computers somewhere, away from the prying eyes of the likes of us who might actually need to use it sometime. I c’n talk to Winston. He’ll know how to do it. Should I ask him?”

Lynley thought about this. He was back to what he’d considered earlier: the impact on Isabelle Ardery if she discovered he’d bled another member of her team away for his own purposes. The results of that manoeuvre wouldn’t be pretty. There had to be another way to get round the problem of the Spanish language. Where he didn’t want to go in his own thoughts at the moment was why it mattered to him how Isabelle would react. It wouldn’t have mattered to him how a superior officer might have reacted before this. The fact that he was worried now put him on the edge of a dangerous escarpment that he didn’t want to be on at this juncture in his life.

He said, “There has to be another way, Barbara. I can’t get Winston into this as well. I’m not authorised.”

Havers didn’t point out to him that he hadn’t been authorised to get her help either. She just said, “Let me… Well, I could ask Azhar.”

“Your neighbor? He speaks Spanish?”

“He does practically everything else,” she said ironically. “But I reckon if he doesn’t speak Spanish, he can get me someone from the university who does. A professor, probably. A graduate student. Worse comes to worse, I c’n walk over to Camden Lock Market and listen to the tourists — if there are any at this time of year — and put my fingers on someone speaking Spanish and drag ’em to the nearest Internet cafe for a look at the information on the Net. I mean, there are ways, sir. I s’pose we don’t need Winston.”

“Ask Azhar,” Lynley said, and he added, “if that doesn’t put you in a difficult position.”

“Why would that put me in a difficult position, sir?” Barbara’s tone was suspicious and with good reason.

Lynley didn’t reply. There were things between them that they didn’t discuss. Her relationship with Taymullah Azhar was one of them. “Anything else?” he asked her.

“Bernard Fairclough. He’s got a set of keys to the flat of a woman called Vivienne Tully. I’ve been there but so far no luck in seeing her. Picture of her that I tracked down makes her youngish, trendy clothes, good skin, good figure, edgy hairstyle. Another woman’s basic nightmare, essentially. All I know about her is that she once worked for him, she now works in London, and she likes ballet because that’s where she was yesterday. Either at a dance class or watching a performance. Her housekeeper didn’t speak English, so we did it with sign language. Lots of moving body parts if you know what I mean. Bloody hell, sir, have you noticed how few people actually do speak English in London these days? Have you noticed, Simon? I feel like I’m living in the bloody lobby of the bloody United Nations.”

“Fairclough has a key to her flat?”

“Sounds cosy, eh? I’ve another trip to Kensington on the agenda. I reckon she bears a little arm twisting. I haven’t got onto the Cresswell will yet — ”

No matter, Lynley told her. She could verify details, but they had that information in hand. They’d learned there was insurance that the ex-wife had come into. And according to the partner, the farm had been left to him in Cresswell’s will. What she could do, though, was confirm these details. The date of the will might be helpful, too. Could she see to that?

Could and would, she told him. “What about the kids?”

“Apparently, Cresswell assumed the insurance money would also benefit them. That doesn’t appear to be the case, however.”

Havers whistled. “Always good to follow the money.”

“Isn’t it just.”

“Which reminds me,” she said, “that bloke from The Source? Have you run into him yet?”

“Not yet,” Lynley said. “Why?”

“Because there’s more to him than meets the eye as well. Turns out he was up there for three days directly before Ian Cresswell drowned. With him needing to beef up his story for the paper, seems like murder’s a good way to do it.”

“We’ll take that on board,” Lynley told her, “but he’d have had to get onto the Fairclough property, get down to the boathouse, fiddle with the dock, and get off the property, all unseen. You mentioned he was a big bloke, didn’t you?”

“Nearly seven feet tall. A non-starter, then?”

“It’s doubtful, but at this point, anything’s possible.” Lynley thought about the likelihood of a seven-foot-tall redheaded reporter managing to escape the notice of Mignon Fairclough. Only in the dead of a very dark night could this have happened, he reckoned.

He said, “We’ve our work cut out, one way or the other.” It signaled an end to their conversation and he knew the sergeant would take it that way. But before she could do so, he had to know, even if he didn’t want to understand why he had to know. He said, “Are you carrying this off without the superintendent’s knowledge? She still thinks you’re on holiday? You’ve not run into her at the Met, have you?”

There was a silence. In it, he knew what the answer was. He avoided St. James’s glance as he said, “Damn. That’s going to make things difficult. For you, I mean. I’m sorry, Barbara.”

She said airily, “Truth to tell, the guv’s a bit tense, Inspector. But you know me. I’m used to tense.”

MILNTHORPE CUMBRIA

Deborah hated being at odds with her husband. This was due in part to the disparity in their ages and due in part to his disability and all the baggage attendant upon that. But most of all, it was due to the differences in their characters, which defined how each of them looked at life. Simon went at things logically and with remarkable disinterest, making it nearly impossible to argue with him because she looked at things through a cloud of emotion. In a battle where the warring armies marched onto the field from either the heart or the head, those battalions from the head won each skirmish. She was often left with that most useless of declarations to put a full stop to any heated conversation between herself and her husband: You don’t understand.

When Simon left her in their room at the inn, she did what she knew had to be done. She phoned his brother David and gave him what she called their decision. “I so much appreciate how you’ve thought of us, David,” she told him, and she meant every word. “But I can’t get my mind round sharing a baby with its birth parents. So we’re saying no.”

She could tell that David was disappointed, and she had little doubt that the rest of Simon’s family would be disappointed as well. But Simon’s family were not being asked to open their lives and their hearts to the virtual unknown. David said, “You know, it’s all a lottery, Deb, any way you go at parenthood,” to which she’d said, “I do know that. But the answer’s the same. The complications involved… I wouldn’t be able to cope.”

So it was over. In a day or two, the pregnant girl in question would move on her way towards another couple eager for a child. Deborah was glad she’d made the decision, but she felt disconsolate all the same. Simon wouldn’t be pleased, but she couldn’t see any answer other than the one she’d given. They simply had to move on.

She could tell her husband was more than ill-at-ease with going down the surrogacy route. She’d actually thought it would appeal to him since he was a scientist. But for him the miracles of modern medicine were turning out to be “dehumanising, Deborah.” Locking himself up in a doctor’s loo and seeing to the appropriate deposit made into the equally appropriate sterile container… And then there was the matter of harvesting her eggs and what that involved and the additional matter of the surrogate and monitoring the surrogate throughout the pregnancy and even finding the surrogate in the first place.

Who is this person? he reasonably asked. And how do you make sure of all the things you need to make sure of?

This person is just a womb we’re hiring, was how Deborah explained it to him.

If that’s what you think the extent of her involvement would be, Simon replied, then you’ve got your head in the clouds. We’re not hiring a vacant room in her house to store furniture, Deborah. This is a life that’s growing inside her body. You seem to think she’ll ignore that.

There’ll be a contract, for heaven’s sake. Look here, in the magazine, there’s a story about-

That magazine, he said, needs to go into the rubbish.

Deborah, however, didn’t toss it away when he left the room. Instead, she phoned David and when she’d done so, she’d sat and looked at the copy of Conception that Barbara Havers had overnighted to her. She gazed at the photos of the six-time surrogate, posing with the happy families she’d helped. She reread the article. Finally, she turned to the back where the advertisements were.

Everything related to reproduction had some sort of listing, she saw, but despite the hopeful article in the magazine itself, nothing referred to surrogacy. Phoning a legal service listed on the page told her why this was the case. Advertising oneself as a surrogate mother was illegal, she learned. The hopeful mother had to find her own surrogate. A relative is best, she was told. Have you a sister, madam? A cousin? Even mothers have carried their own grandchildren for their daughters. How old is your own mother?

God, nothing was easy, Deborah thought. She had no sister, her mother was dead, she was an only child of only children. Simon’s sister was a possibility but she couldn’t imagine the madcap Sidney — currently in the throes of love with a mercenary soldier, for heaven’s sake — allowing her million-pound model’s body to be the launching pad for her brother’s child. There were definite limits to sororial love, and Deborah reckoned she knew what they were.

The law was not her friend in this matter. Advertising everything else related to reproduction appeared to be entirely legal — from clinics offering money to women willing to have their eggs harvested to lesbian couples looking for sperm. There were even adverts for groups who wanted to talk donors out of donating in the first place, along with counseling services for donors, recipients, and everyone in between. There were help lines listed and assistance offered from nurses, doctors, clinics, and midwives. There were so many options heading in so many different directions that Deborah wondered someone didn’t simply advertise in Conception with the single word HELP!

This thought finally took her to the matter of the magazine itself and how it had come to her attention: through Alatea Fairclough, who had torn out these very same pages that were now eating at Deborah’s peace of mind. With herself in turmoil over the matter, Deborah began to see more clearly how Alatea could be viewing her own situation. What if Alatea knew she couldn’t carry a baby to term? Deborah asked herself. What if she hadn’t yet shared that information with her husband? What if she — just as Deborah herself was proposing to do — was searching for a surrogate mother? Here she was in England, away from her native land, away from friends and relatives who might have volunteered for the job… Was there someone she could turn to in their stead? Was there someone she could ask to carry her petri dish child made with Nicholas Fairclough?

Deborah thought about this. She compared Alatea to herself. She had Sidney St. James, unlikely candidate though she was. Whom did Alatea have?

There was a possibility, she realised, one that fitted in with what had happened in the boathouse at Ireleth Hall. She needed to tell Simon about it. She needed to talk to Tommy as well.

She left the room. Simon had been a good while gone on his walk, and she punched in his mobile number as she descended the stairs. Speaking with Tommy in the car park, he told her they were just about to-

She told him to wait. She was coming to meet them both.

Nicholas Fairclough was what stopped her, however. He was the last person she expected to see in the tiny lobby of the Crow and Eagle, but there he was. And he was waiting for her. He rose when he saw her and he said, “I reckoned this is where you’d be.” He spoke as if she’d been making an effort to hide herself from him, and she pointed this out.

His reply of, “No, I get that much. The best place to hide anything is always in plain sight.”

She frowned. He was completely altered. He was very drawn and his cherubic face had gone unshaven. He didn’t seem to have had much sleep, for there were circles under his eyes. There was also nothing friendly or affable about him.

He made no preamble to his remarks. He said, “Look. I know who you really are. And here’s what you need to know: I didn’t touch Ian. I wouldn’t have touched Ian. The fact that my father thinks I might have done something tells you the state our family is in, but it sure as hell doesn’t tell you anything else. You” — and here he jabbed a finger at her although he didn’t touch her — “need to get the hell back to London. There’s sod-all to learn from hanging about. Your bloody investigation is over. And leave my wife alone, all right?”

“Are you — ”

“Stay away.” He backed off and when he was far enough, he turned on his heel and left her.

Deborah remained. She felt her heart pounding hard in her chest and the blood started singing in her ears. There was, she knew, only one explanation when every single statement he’d made was considered. For whatever inconceivable reason, Nicholas Fairclough actually believed that she was the Scotland Yard detective come to Cumbria to look into his cousin’s death.

There was only one way he could have reached that conclusion, and her digital camera had captured that way.

MILNTHORPE CUMBRIA

Zed Benjamin had faded out of the picture on the previous day after his brief encounter with Nicholas Fairclough in the Milnthorpe market square. Luckily, there were enough stalls in the square that he’d been able to get out of view of the cafe in which Fairclough had been meeting with the Scotland Yard woman, so after Fairclough had a few final words with her, all it took was a few more minutes of waiting before she emerged from the cafe as well. And then it was nothing to see where she was going since where she was going turned out to be the Crow and Eagle at the junction of the main road through Milnthorpe and the route to Arnside. So on this day Zed had parked himself there in the early A.M., in the vicinity of a NatWest, and he’d been skulking round the cash point for hours, eyes on the inn, waiting for the woman to emerge. This garnered him many a look of suspicion from people going in and out of the bank, and a few pointed words from other people using the cash point. He was even prodded once in the chest by an old bag telling him to “move away, laddie, or I’ll have the coppers on you… I know your kind, I do,” so he began to hope that something would happen soon on the Scotland Yard end of things or he was going to get hauled into the nick for loitering with intent.

He’d had his morning phone call with Yaffa, and this was on his mind. She hadn’t returned his kissy noises, the reason turning out to be that his mother wasn’t in the room and a show of affection hadn’t been necessary to keep Susanna Benjamin happy. Plus, it also turned out that there were problems developing with Micah out in Tel Aviv, apparently getting a bit weary with playing Yaffa’s brother Ari. In conversation with Micah, she had said attractive in reference to Zed. It was no big thing for goodness sake, she’d told Micah, but he hadn’t been pleased. And while Zed had been dwelling on the fact that Yaffa had used the word attractive to refer to him, she’d gone on to say that there was, sadly enough, a very good chance that she was going to have to move on soon to other lodgings. Quite beside himself was how she put it in reference to Micah. She was afraid his worry over her commitment to him was going to put him off his studies. For a man in medical school, this was out of the question. But you know how it is when a man becomes uneasy about his woman, Zed.

Actually, Zed had no idea how it was when a man became uneasy about his woman since he’d so far spent his adult years avoiding women altogether.

Yaffa said that she thought she could appease her fiance for a while longer, but only for a while. Then she would either have to move on or she would have to return to Tel Aviv.

Zed hadn’t known what to say. He was hardly in a position to beg her to stay. He wasn’t even sure why begging her to stay crossed his mind in the first place. Yet that entreaty was what was on the tip of his tongue at the end of their conversation. What was not on the tip of his tongue was have a nice trip home, then, which was something of a surprise to him.

She’d rung off before he could say anything at all. He wanted to ring her back and tell her that he’d miss her terribly, he hadn’t intended her to think from his silence that he wouldn’t, he’d enjoyed their every conversation, in fact she was just the sort of woman… But he couldn’t go that far. Alas and alack, he thought. They’d have to be Keats and Fanny writing tortured letters to each other and there was an end to the matter.

Zed was so consumed with his thoughts about Yaffa and Micah and the great irony of stumbling across a woman who was — let’s face it — perfect for him, only to find her engaged to another man, that when Nick Fairclough turned up at the Crow and Eagle and went inside, the importance of this didn’t register at first. He merely thought, Ah, there’s old Nick Fairclough, and he’d pulled his cap more firmly down on his head and slouched to reduce his size so as to make himself less noticeable. It was only after Fairclough’s visit to the inn was so brief and only after he strode out with a stony expression on his face that Zed realised what one and one amounted to, which was Fairclough plus the detective equals Something Worthy of Note Happening.

Then the detective herself came out. She was on her mobile. A detective on her mobile meant that Developments were about to develop. Fairclough had left and the detective was following. Zed needed to be following as well.

His car wasn’t far away. He’d parked on the pavement just a short distance down the Arnside Road, so he dashed for this as the red-haired woman went round the corner of the inn, where, no doubt, her own car was parked. He fired his car up and waited for her to emerge. No way was she going anywhere at this point without him on her tail.

He counted the seconds. They turned into minutes. What was it? he wondered. Car trouble? Flat tyre? Where the hell was she…?

Finally, a car did emerge from the car park round back of the Crow and Eagle, but this was no hire car and she wasn’t driving it. It was, instead, a sleek copper-coloured antique thing of the sort costing God only knew what, and it was driven by a bloke who looked perfectly at ease in it, not to mention well-heeled, because how else could he have afforded the thing? Another guest at the inn, Zed concluded. The bloke took off towards the north.

About three minutes later, another car emerged and Zed put his vehicle in gear. But this one was driven by a bloke as well, a serious-looking gent with too much dark hair, and he was looking grim and rubbing his head as if he needed to get rid of a migraine.

Then, at last, he saw the woman. But she was on foot. She wasn’t on her mobile this time, but her face was serious and determined. Zed reckoned at first she was on her way to some location nearby and the logical place was the market square, where the cafes made good meeting spots, as did the restaurants and the Chinese takeaways, if it came down to it. But instead of heading there, she went back into the Crow and Eagle.

Zed made his decision in an instant. He switched off the car’s engine and dashed after her. He could, he reckoned, follow her forever. Or he could take the bull by the horns and do some fancy dancing with it.

He pushed through the door of the inn.

MILNTHORPE CUMBRIA

Deborah was so angry with Simon that she was far beyond seeing red. She was seeing whatever the next colour in the outrage spectrum was supposed to be.

Camera in hand, she’d found her husband with Tommy in the car park. It was, she believed, excellent luck that Tommy was with him. For Tommy was going to be on her side and she knew she was going to need an ally.

She’d given them the information in brief: Nicholas Fairclough waylaying her in the inn, Nicholas Fairclough knowing Scotland Yard was looking into the death of Ian Cresswell, Nicholas Fairclough believing that she — of all people — was the Scotland Yard detective prowling round his life. She said, “There’s only one way he’d’ve reached that conclusion,” at which point she showed them the photo she’d snapped on the previous day. This was of the redheaded man speaking to Fairclough in the market square.

She said, “Right afterwards, Nicholas wanted nothing more to do with me. We were meant to go to Barrow, but that didn’t happen. And then this morning, he was in such a state… You see what this means, don’t you?”

Tommy looked at the picture. Simon did not. Tommy said, “It’s the reporter from The Source, Simon. Barbara described him to me. Huge, red-haired. There can’t be two blokes wandering round Cumbria fitting that description and interested in Fairclough.”

Better and better, Deborah had thought. She’d said, “Tommy, we can use him. Something’s obviously going on with this entire lot of people and he’s onto it or he wouldn’t be up here. Let me make contact with him. He’ll think he’s got an in with the police. We can — ”

“Deborah,” Simon had said. It was that tone, that maddening tone of she-must-be-appeased.

Tommy had added to this, “I don’t know, Deb,” and he looked away for a moment. She couldn’t tell if he was thinking about what she said or thinking about getting out of the car park before she and Simon had the argument he would be anticipating. For Tommy knew Simon better than anyone. He knew what Deborah meant when Simon said it that way. There were reasons for Simon’s concern in some situations — all right, she could admit that — but there was no reason for his concern just now.

She’d said, “This is being handed to us on a platter, Tommy.”

To which Tommy had said, “Barbara told me he was up here three days in advance of Cresswell’s death, Deb. His intent has been to add some interest to a story on Nicholas Fairclough.”

“So?”

“Deborah, it’s obvious enough,” Simon put in. “There’s a chance that this bloke — ”

“Oh you can’t be thinking his idea of adding interest to a story was to arrange the suspicious death of a member of his subject’s own family. That’s completely absurd.” And as both of the men started to speak at once, she said, “No. Wait. Listen to me. I’ve had a think about this and there’re things you don’t know. They have to do with Nicholas’s wife.”

It was to her advantage that neither of the men had met Alatea. Neither had met Nicholas Fairclough either, so that was an additional advantage. Tommy said, “Barbara’s looking into Alatea Fairclough, Deb.”

But Deborah said, “She may be doing, but she doesn’t know everything,” and she proceeded to tell them about those things that Alatea Fairclough had to hide. “There’re photographs somewhere, according to Nicholas. She was a model, but the kind of work she did is the kind she’d prefer to keep hidden. She told Nicholas about it, but no one in his family knows. He called it ‘naughty underwear’ and I think we all know what you can read for that.”

“What, exactly?” Simon was watching her with that look of his, grave and understanding and worried.

Stuff and bloody bother, Deborah thought. She said, “We can read for that everything from catalogue pictures of leather goodies for the sadomasochistic crowd to pornography, Simon. I think we can agree on that, can’t we?”

“You’re right, of course,” Tommy said. “But Barbara’s on this, Deb. She’ll sort it out.”

“But that’s not all, Tommy. That’s not everything.” Deborah knew Simon would not be pleased with her next direction, but she intended to take it anyway because it had to be explored, because it was surely connected to Ian Cresswell. “There’s surrogacy to consider.”

Simon actually went pale at this. Deborah realised he thought she intended to bring up this most personal of matters with Tommy standing there as an arbitrator of their disagreement and their pain. She said to her husband, “Not that. I just think it’s likely Alatea can’t carry a baby to term. Or she’s having difficulty with pregnancy. I think she’s looking for a surrogate and I think that that surrogate might well be Ian Cresswell’s wife Niamh.”

Simon and Tommy exchanged a look. But they hadn’t seen Niamh Cresswell, so they didn’t know. She went over it with them: Nicholas Fairclough’s desire for a baby, Alatea’s possession of a magazine with all of the advertisements in the back removed, Niamh Cresswell’s appearance and the very clear indication that she’d been doing something surgically to improve it — “One doesn’t have breast enhancement on the National Health” was how Deborah put it — and the simple logic of a woman who’s lost her man and believes she has to have a replacement and wants to do something to increase her chances of finding that replacement … “Niamh has to finance all this. Carrying a baby for Alatea is the answer. It’s illegal to profit from surrogacy, but this is a family matter, and who’s going to know if money is exchanged? Nicholas and Alatea certainly aren’t going to tell a soul. So Niamh has their baby, she hands it over, they hand her the money, and it’s done.”

Simon and Tommy greeted this with silence. Tommy looked down at his shoes. This was the moment when they were going to tell her she was off her nut — oh, how well she knew these two men in her life — so she went on. “Or perhaps, even better, Nicholas Fairclough doesn’t even know about the arrangement. Alatea’s going to fake the entire pregnancy. She’s quite tall, and there’s a very good chance she’d never show a pregnancy till very late in term. Niamh takes herself out of the picture for a few months and when she’s ready to deliver, Alatea joins her. They come up with a pretence, they — ”

“God, Deborah.” Simon rubbed his forehead while Tommy shifted his feet on the ground.

Inanely, Deborah thought how Tommy always wore Lobb’s shoes. They must have cost a fortune, she reckoned, but of course they would last forever and the pair he had on he’d probably had since he was twenty-five years old. They weren’t scuffed, of course. Tommy’s man Charlie Denton — valet, butler, man Friday, equerry, whatever in Tommy’s life — would never have allowed scuff marks on Tommy’s shoes. But they were worn and comfortable, rather like friends, and-

Simon was speaking and she realised she’d deliberately plugged her ears to his words. He would think that all this had to do with her, with them, with this stupid open adoption business, which, of course, he had no idea she’d put a stop to, so she decided to tell him then and there.

“I phoned David,” she said. “I told him no. Definitely not. I can’t cope with it, Simon.”

Simon’s jaw moved. That was all.

Hurriedly, Deborah said to Tommy, “So let’s say Ian Cresswell found out about all of this. He protests. He says that their children — his and Niamh’s — are already putting up with just about enough in their lives and they can’t be asked to cope with their mother carrying a baby for his cousin’s wife. There’s too much confusion. He puts his foot down.”

“They’re divorced,” Tommy pointed out gently.

“Since when did divorce mean people stop trying to control each other if they can get away with it? Let’s say he goes to Nicholas. He appeals to him. Nicholas knows what’s going on or he doesn’t know but in either case, the appeal goes nowhere so Ian says he’s going to have to talk to Nicholas’s father about it. The last thing anyone wants is to have Bernard Fairclough drawn into this. He’s already spent most of Nicholas’s life believing he’s a wastrel. And now this, this terrible division in the family — ”

“Enough,” Simon said. “Really. I do mean it. Enough.”

The paternal tone behind his words was an electric shock, thirty thousand volts running through her body. Deborah said, “What did you say to me?”

Simon said, “It doesn’t take a Freudian to know where this is coming from, Deborah.”

The electric shock turned in an instant to fury. Deborah began to speak. Simon cut her off.

“This is a flight of fancy. It’s time for both of us to get back to London. I’ve done what I can here” — this to Tommy — “and unless we want another go at the boathouse, I daresay what appears to be the case about Ian Cresswell’s death is indeed the case.”

That he would actually dismiss her like this … Deborah had never wanted to strike her husband, but she wanted it badly in that moment. Temper, Deb, temper, her father would have said, but never had her father been taken so lightly by this man who stood implacably before her. God, he was insufferable, she thought. He was pompous. He was so bloody self-righteous. He was always so sure, so certain, so 100 percent full of his sodding scientific knowledge, but some things had nothing to do with science, some things had to do with the heart, some things weren’t about forensics, microscopes, bloodstains, computer analyses, graphs, charts, amazing machinery that would take a single thread and connect it to a manufacturer, a skein of wool, the sheep it had come from, and the farm on the Hebrides where that sheep had been born …She wanted to scream. She wanted to scratch out his eyes. She wanted-

“She does have a point, Simon,” Tommy said.

Simon looked at him and his expression asked his old friend if he’d entirely lost his mind.

Tommy said, “I don’t doubt there was bad blood between Nicholas and his cousin. Something’s not right with Bernard as well.”

“Granted,” Simon said, “but a scenario in which Ian’s former wife…” He waved off the entire idea.

Tommy then said, “But it’s too dangerous, Deb, if what you’re saying is true.”

“But — ”

“You’ve done good work up here, but Simon’s right about going back to London. I’ll take it from here. I can’t let you put yourself in harm’s way. You know that.”

He meant more than one thing. All of them knew it. She shared a history with Tommy and even if she hadn’t done, he would never allow her to come close to a danger that could take her from Simon as Tommy’s own wife had been taken from him.

She said numbly, “There’s no danger here. You know that, Tommy.”

“If murder’s involved, there’s always danger.”

He’d said all he would say on the topic. He left them, then, and left her with Simon there in the car park.

Simon had said to her, “I’m sorry, Deborah. I know that you want to help.”

She’d said bitterly, “Oh you know that, do you? Let’s not pretend this isn’t about punishing me.”

“For what?” He sounded so bloody surprised.

“For saying no to David. For not solving our problem with one little word: yes. That’s what you wanted, an instant solution. Without once considering how it would feel to me with an entire second family hovering out there, watching my every move, evaluating what sort of mummy I’d be…” She was close to tears. This infuriated her.

Simon said, “This has nothing to do with your phoning David. If you’ve made up your mind, I accept it. What else can I do? I might have other wishes, but — ”

“And that’s what counts. That’s what always counts. Your wishes. Not mine. Because should my wishes be granted in any matter, the power shifts, doesn’t it, and you don’t want that.”

He reached towards her, but she backed away. She said, “Just go about your business. We’ve said enough at this point.”

He waited for a moment. He was watching her, but she couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t look at his eyes and see the pain and know how far back into his past it reached.

He finally said, “We’ll talk later,” and he went to his car. Another moment and he’d driven away, out of the car park and about his business. Whatever it was. It didn’t matter to Deborah.

She left the car park herself. She went towards the front door of the inn. She’d got just inside when she heard someone say, “Hang on. You and I need to talk,” and she turned to see that, of all people, the red-headed giant was coming in the entrance. Before she had a chance to say anything, he continued. “Your cover’s been blown. It can be on the front page of The Source tomorrow or you and I can strike a deal.”

“What sort of deal?” Deborah asked him.

“The kind that gets us both what we want.”

GREAT URSWICK CUMBRIA

Lynley knew that Simon was right about Deborah: She needed to stay clear of things from this point forward. They didn’t know exactly what they were dealing with and anything that might put her into danger was unacceptable on so many levels that most of them didn’t bear talking about.

He’d been wrong to bring them into this. It had seemed a simple enough job that he could sort through with their help in a day or so. That wasn’t turning out to be the case, and he needed to finish things before Deborah did something that he, she, and Simon would regret.

When he left them in Milnthorpe, he headed north, then east. Then he took the road that coursed down the spatulate landmass at whose tip sat Barrow-in-Furness. Barrow wasn’t his destination, however. He wanted to speak to Manette Fairclough privately, and that meant a trip to Great Urswick.

The route he followed took him through the hilly Victorian sea town of Grange-over-Sands, along the estuary where wintering birds formed a living landscape across the mudflats, establishing hierarchies in the search for food. It was abundant here, replenished daily by the tides from Morecambe Bay.

After Grange-over-Sands, the road opened to grey water, deceptive in its calm, along one side of the car and pastures on the other side, broken by the occasional line of cottages where seaside holiday makers came in better weather. This was far south in Cumbria, not the land of the lakes so treasured by John Ruskin and William Wordsworth and his daffodils. Here most people got down to the serious hand-to-mouth of daily living, which comprised generations of fishermen out on the shifting sands of the bay, first with horses and carts and now with tractors and always within inches of losing their lives to the quicksand if they made a wrong decision. And then there was no saving them if the tide came in. There was only waiting for their bodies to turn up. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they did not.

At Bardsea, he turned inland. Great Urswick was landlocked, one of those villages that seemed to exist merely because it was at a crossroads and contained a pub. To get to it, one traveled through a countryside completely unlike the dramatic fells, slate-studded screes, and sudden eruptions of limestone of the upper lakes. This part of Cumbria looked more like the Broads. One climbed briefly through a village and then out onto a landscape flat and windswept, suitable for grazing.

Buildings in Great Urswick didn’t look like part of Cumbria, either. They were prettily painted, but they were not done up in the vernacular of the Lakes. No neatly stacked slate fronted them for a consistency of appearance. Here, they were roughcast. Some even were clad in wood, a strange building material for this part of the world.

Lynley found Manette’s home alongside a large pond, which appeared to be the centrepiece of the village. Swans floated on it, and it was thick with reeds here and there to protect them, their nests and their young. There were two cars parked in front of the house, so he reckoned he could kill two birds by speaking to both Manette and her former husband, with whom, Bernard Fairclough had revealed, his daughter still lived. He went to the door.

A man answered. This, Lynley reckoned, would be Freddie McGhie. He was a decent-looking bloke, neat as a pin, dark hair, dark eyes. Helen would have declared how squeaky clean he is, darling, but she would have meant it in the best possible sense because everything about him was perfectly groomed. He wasn’t dressed for work, but he still managed to look like someone who’d stepped out of an advertisement for Country Life.

Lynley introduced himself. McGhie said, “Ah yes. Bernard’s guest from London. Manette said she’d met you.” He sounded affable, but there was a sense of questioning in his tone. There was, after all, no reason that Bernard Fairclough’s guest from London would come a-wandering into Great Urswick and knock on Freddie McGhie’s front door.

Lynley said he was hoping to speak to Manette if she was at home.

McGhie glanced towards the street as if for answer to a question he didn’t ask. Then he said as if remembering his manners, “Oh yes. Well, of course. It’s just that she didn’t mention…”

What? Lynley wondered. He waited politely for elucidation.

“No matter,” McGhie said. “Do come in. I’ll fetch her.”

He ushered Lynley into a sitting room that overlooked the back garden and the pond beyond it. The dominant indoor feature was a treadmill. It was state of the art with a screen that featured readouts, buttons, and assorted gee-gaws. To accommodate it and a rubber mat for preliminary stretching, much of the other furniture in the room had been stacked and lined against a far wall. McGhie said, “Oh, sorry. Not thinking. The kitchen’s better. It’s just this way,” and he walked on.

He left Lynley there in the kitchen for a moment and went off, calling Manette’s name. As his footsteps sounded against rising stairs, however, the kitchen’s exterior door opened, and Manette herself came inside. Lynley reflected — as he hadn’t done before — that she looked nothing like her sister. She had her mother’s height and her mother’s rangy build but, unfortunately, she’d inherited her father’s hair. This was sparse enough to see to her skull, although she kept the cut of it short and curly as if to hide its scarcity. She was dressed for running, obviously the person who used the treadmill in the district’s often inclement weather. She saw Lynley at once and said, “Goodness. Well, hello,” and her glance went to the door through which he’d come because she obviously heard her former husband calling her name.

She said, “Excuse me,” and went in the same direction as McGhie. Lynley heard her call out, “Down here, Freddie. I was out for a run,” and then his reply of, “Oh, I say, Manette,” which was all Lynley heard because at that point their voices became hushed. He caught McGhie’s “Should I…?” and his “Happy to, you know,” without knowing the what or the why of each. Still, when Manette returned, she had Freddie McGhie in tow. Her choice of words was apparently deliberate when she said to Lynley, “A nice surprise for us, this. Did Dad want you to pop in to see us for some reason?”

“I did want to speak to you both,” Lynley said.

They exchanged a look. He realised it was more than time to drop the pretence, which hadn’t worked with Mignon and which certainly wasn’t going to work with anyone else.

He took out his police identification and handed it to Manette. Her eyes narrowed. She pushed it to McGhie and while he was examining it, she asked the obvious question, “What’s this about? I can’t think it likely Scotland Yard’s on the trail of replacing their lavatories and they’ve sent you up here to evaluate our line of loos. What’s your guess, Freddie?”

McGhie was blushing faintly, and Lynley didn’t think his growing colour had anything to do with lavatories. He said to her, “I’d thought…” He shrugged, one of those you know movements in which a couple’s history allows them to communicate in a truncated fashion.

Manette barked a laugh. “I appreciate the vote of confidence,” she said. “But I have a feeling the inspector here likes them a little less long in the tooth.”

“Don’t be stupid. You’re only forty-two,” Freddie said to her.

“Female years are like dog years, Freddie. When it comes to men, I’m closer to eighty. What can I do for you, Inspector?”

He said, “Your father’s asked me to look into Ian Cresswell’s death.”

Manette’s response was to McGhie. “I rest my case.” There was a kitchen table at which she then sat. A bowl of fruit was in the centre of it, and she took a banana and began to peel it. She said, “Well, this must put a real pin in poor Mignon’s balloon.” She used her foot to push one of the other chairs out. “Sit,” she told Lynley. She said the same to McGhie.

Lynley thought at first that the gesture indicated her full cooperation, but she disabused him of that notion straightaway. She said, “If Dad thinks I’m about to finger anyone for anything, I’d appreciate your telling him that kite won’t fly. As a matter of fact, no kite’s launching from this house at all. Honest to God, I can’t believe he’d do this to his own family.”

“It’s more a matter that he wants to be sure of the local police,” Lynley told her. “That happens, actually, more often than people think.”

“What’s that exactly?” Manette enquired. “Someone pops down to London and asks for a second investigation into a matter already settled by the coroner so Scotland Yard takes up the case? Just like that? Please, Inspector. You can’t think I’m that stupid.”

McGhie said to Lynley, “What’s prompted this? It was a straightforward matter according to the coroner.”

“Dad’s throwing his weight,” Manette said to him. “God only knows how, but I reckon he knows someone who knows someone who’s willing to pull a few strings or make a donation to the widows and orphans. That’s how these things happen. My guess is he wants to see if Nick’s involved, no matter what the coroner said. God knows how Nick would have managed things, but with his history I daresay anything’s possible.” She looked at Lynley. “I’m right, am I not? You’re here to see if I can assist in putting the screws on my brother.”

“Not at all,” Lynley said. “It’s only a matter of getting a clear understanding of where everyone fits.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that sometimes a death is placed too conveniently in time. A coroner wouldn’t be looking at that. There’d be no reason to if the circumstances are straightforward enough.”

“So that’s why you’re here? You’re determining the convenience, as you say, of my cousin’s drowning? And whom did Ian’s death convenience? Because I must tell you it didn’t convenience me. What about you, Freddie? Were you convenienced?”

McGhie said, “Manette, if Scotland Yard’s here — ”

“Oh bother,” she cut in. “If Scotland Yard’s here, my father probably handed over some cash. A new wing on their offices. Who the hell knows what else? You’ve been looking at the books, Freddie. You’ll find it if you look hard enough. There’ll be a payout that you can’t understand. Beyond the others you can’t understand.”

Lynley said to McGhie, “Are there irregularities with the books, then, in your father-in-law’s business?”

“I was joking,” Manette said, and then to McGhie, “Wasn’t I, Freddie?” in a tone whose meaning was don’t say a word.

What Freddie did say was, “Former.”

“What?”

“Former father-in-law.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Current. Former. It doesn’t matter,” Manette said. “What matters is that Ian drowned, it was an accident, and if it wasn’t an accident, you need to be looking at who was convenienced by his death, which wasn’t me. That being the case, it seems to me, if I’m remembering this right, the big convenience is the one that fell into Kaveh Mehran’s lap.”

McGhie said to her, “What’s going on there?”

She said to him, “I haven’t told you. Kaveh’s now sole owner of the farm.”

“You’re joking.”

“Hardly. Ian left it to him. Or so he claims. I expect he’s telling the truth as it wouldn’t take a big effort to check out the paperwork.”

“Everything’s being looked into, Mrs. McGhie,” Lynley said.

“But you don’t think Kaveh killed Ian, do you?” Freddie McGhie asked.

“No one killed him at all,” Manette said. “His death might have been opportune for someone, but it was an accident, Freddie. That entire boathouse ought to be pulled down before it collapses of its own accord. I’m surprised Mother wasn’t the one to fall, smash her head, and drown. She’s in there more often than Ian anyway.”

McGhie said nothing, but his face altered, a subtle change in which his jaw lowered but his lips didn’t part. Something had struck him with his former wife’s words, something he was, perhaps, inclined to speak of if the prod was gentle enough.

Lynley said, “Mr. McGhie?”

McGhie’s hand was on the table, and his fingers curled till they made a light fist. He was watching Manette, but he was also deciding: what it would mean, Lynley reckoned, if he told what he knew.

There was always tremendous value in silence. It acted upon people in much the same way that time alone in a police interview room acted. Tension was the great equaliser among men. Most couldn’t handle it, especially when they themselves could so easily defuse the ticking bomb it comprised. Lynley waited. Manette’s gaze met her former husband’s eyes. She read there, apparently, what she didn’t want to know because she said, “We don’t know what anything means, Freddie.”

To which he replied, “True enough, old girl. But we can easily guess, can’t we?” And then without ceremony, he began to speak. She protested, but he made his position clear: If someone had set up the boathouse to hurt Ian Cresswell or, indeed, to hurt Manette’s own mother, then everything currently in the shadows had to come out.

The way Freddie McGhie saw it, Bernard Fairclough had been running through money for a number of years. Payments to various clinics to turn Nicholas around, the wealth put into the Ireleth Hall gardens, the purchase of Arnside House at a high point in the property market, the renovation of that building to make it suitably habitable for Nicholas Fairclough and his bride, the folly built to house Mignon, her subsequent operations to allow her finally to shed the weight she’d been piling on since childhood, the follow-up surgery for the excess skin she then carted round …

“Ian might have been writing the cheques, but he also would’ve been telling Bernard to stop, stop, stop,” was how McGhie put it. “Because some of this nonsense had been going on for years. There was no sense to it, as far as I can see. It was as if he couldn’t stop himself. Or he felt he had to for some reason. Had to lay out money, I mean.”

“For years?” Lynley clarified.

“Well, Nick’s been a problem for a very long time, and then there was — ”

“Freddie. That’s enough.” Manette’s voice was sharp.

Freddie said, “He’s got to know it all. I’m sorry, darling, but if Vivienne’s somehow at the bottom of this she’s got to be mentioned.”

“Vivienne Tully?” Lynley said.

“You know about her?”

“I’m learning.”

“D’you know where she is?” Manette asked. “Does Dad know?”

“Well, he has to, hasn’t he?” McGhie said to her reasonably. “Unless Ian was paying her every month without your father’s knowledge. But why in God’s name would he do that?”

“The obvious reason: because she knew about him, what he was hiding from Niamh and from everyone else. She held his feet to the fire. Blackmail, Freddie.”

“Come on, old girl, you don’t believe that. There’s only one good reason for payouts to Vivienne Tully, and we both know what it probably is.”

They’d almost forgotten he was in the room, Lynley realised, so intent were they upon believing whatever it was each of them wished to believe: about Ian Cresswell, about Vivienne Tully, about the money Cresswell had paid out left, right, and centre, either on behalf of Bernard Fairclough or without his knowledge.

Aside from everyone else taking handouts from Bernard Fairclough’s funds, Freddie McGhie told Lynley that Vivienne Tully — a long-ago employee, as Lynley already knew — had been receiving monthly sums for years, despite not having been employed by Fairclough Industries during that time period. This money wouldn’t have anything to do with profit sharing or a pension scheme, Freddie added.

“So the payout could mean any number of things,” he concluded. “A sexual harassment lawsuit Bernard was trying to avoid, an unlawful dismissal…” He glanced at his former wife as if for confirmation of this.

“Or Dad didn’t know,” was what she said. “You’ve said yourself: Ian might have been cooking the books all along.”

To Lynley, all of the information indicated a death that was no accident. What it still did not clarify, however, was who the intended victim had actually been.

He thanked Manette and her former husband. He left them to what he reckoned was going to be a full discussion of the family situation. He could tell from Manette’s reaction to the information McGhie had been giving that she was not going to let these dogs lie.

He was getting into the Healey Elliott, when his mobile rang. Havers, he thought. Clarity on its way. But he saw by the incoming number that it was Isabelle ringing.

He said to her, “Hullo, you. This is a pleasant diversion.”

She said, “I’m afraid we need to talk, Thomas.”

Even if she hadn’t said Thomas, Isabelle’s tone would have told him this wasn’t the woman whose soft curves and warm body his hands knew and enjoyed. This was his guv, and she wasn’t pleased. On the other hand, she was stone-cold sober, and he could tell that as well.

He said, “Of course. Where are you?”

“Where you should be. I’m at work.”

“As am I, Isabelle.”

“After a fashion. But that’s not my point.”

He waited for more. It was quick in coming.

“Why is it Barbara Havers can be entrusted with information and I can’t? What d’you expect I’d have done with the knowledge? What could I have done? Marched into Hillier’s office crowing, ‘I know, I know, I bloody well know’?”

“Barbara’s doing some digging for me, Isabelle. That’s all it is.”

“You lied to me, didn’t you?”

“About what?”

“The entire need for secrecy. It can hardly be a hush-hush matter if Sergeant Havers is sledgehammering her way through it.”

“Barbara knows no more than some names. There were matters I couldn’t deal with at my end, but I knew she could. She’s doing research.”

“Oh, please. I’m hardly stupid, Tommy. I know how tight you are with Barbara. She’d gladly step into the iron maiden if you asked her. You say mum’s the word on this one, Barb, and she’d cut out her tongue. This has to do with Bob, hasn’t it?”

Lynley was flummoxed. Bob? For a moment, he had no idea what she was talking about. Then she added, “Bob, his wife, the twins. You’re punishing me because unlike you I have entanglements and sometimes they get in our way.”

“Are you talking about that night?” he asked. “When I turned up? When they were all there? Isabelle, good God. That happened and it’s done with. I carry no — ”

“Grudge? No, you wouldn’t, would you? You’re far too well bred for that.”

“Really, Isabelle darling, you’re upset about nothing. It’s everything that I said it was. Hillier wants this unknown at the Met and I’ve kept it that way.”

“It’s about trust, you know. And I’m not just talking about this situation. I’m talking about the other as well. You could ruin me, Tommy. One word and I’m finished. Gone. It’s done. If you don’t trust me, how can I trust you? God in heaven, what’ve I done to myself?”

“What you’ve done is work yourself into a state over nothing. What do you expect I’d do to you?”

“I step out of line, I don’t cooperate, I’m not quite the woman you think I should be…”

“And what? I march into Hillier’s office and say I’ve been my guv’s lover on the sly for the past four months, six months, two years, whatever? Is that what you think?”

“You could destroy me. I don’t have that equal power over you. You don’t need the job, you don’t even bloody want the job. We’re not equals in so many ways and this is the biggest one. Add to that the fact that there’s no trust now and what have we got?”

“What do you mean that there’s no trust now? That’s ridiculous. It’s completely absurd.” And then the question, because he suddenly knew — was sure of it — that he’d been wrong at first about her condition. “Have you been drinking?”

Silence. It was the worst thing to ask. He wished he could unsay it. But he couldn’t and her reply was soft.

“Thank you, Tommy,” she said. She cut off the call. She left him looking out at Great Urswick’s pond and a family of swans peacefully afloat upon the placid water.

LAKE WINDERMERE CUMBRIA

After the detective left, Manette drove directly to Ireleth Hall. She parked on the drive and strode to the folly. She’d left with Freddie telling her that he’d had no choice but to speak, that if indeed Ian’s death was no accident, they had to get to the bottom of the matter. Anyway, he’d said, it was becoming clear that there were other matters they needed to get to the bottom of, also. Well and good, had been Manette’s reply. Getting to the bottom of things was exactly what she intended to do.

Mignon was at home. When was Mignon not at home? But she was not alone as she usually was, so Manette was forced to sit through the last part of her sister’s thrice-weekly head-and-foot massage. This was administered by a grave Chinese man who drove out from Windermere for this purpose, which was an hour on the head and an hour on the feet. Which, of course, their father would pay for.

Mignon was in a reclining chair, eyes closed, as her feet were seen to: pressure, massage, whatever the hell else it all was. Manette didn’t know and she hardly cared. But she understood her twin well enough to throw herself into a seat and wait because this was the only way she was going to be able to garner her sister’s cooperation. Interrupt her pleasure and there would be hell to pay.

It all took a tedious half hour. Occasionally, Mignon murmured, “So lovely,” or “Yes,” or “A bit more pressure to the left, darling.” The solemn Chinese man obliged as instructed. Manette wondered what he’d do if her sister asked him to suck on her toes.

At the end, the masseur gently wrapped Mignon’s feet in a warm towel. She moaned and said, “So soon? It seemed like five minutes.” Slowly, she opened her eyes and cast a radiant smile upon the man. “You are a miracle incarnate, Mr. Zhao,” she murmured. “You know where to send the bill, of course.”

Of course, Manette thought.

Mr. Zhao nodded and packed up his things. Oils and unguents and whatevers. Then he was gone, as silent as an embarrassing thought.

Mignon stretched in her chair. Arms raised high over her head, toes pointed, all of it like a luxuriating cat. Then she unwrapped her feet, got up, and strolled to the window, where she stretched a bit more. She bent to touch her toes, and she worked her body to loosen her waist and her hips. Manette half expected her to start doing jumping jacks. Anything to rub in the obvious joke that Mignon was continuing to play on their parents.

“I don’t know how the hell you live with yourself,” Manette said.

“It’s one eternal circle of excruciating pain,” Mignon told her, casting a sly look in her direction. If one could project gleeful misery, Manette decided, that would come close to describing her sister’s expression. “You cannot possibly know what I suffer.” She strolled from the sitting room into the area set up to house her computer, careful to take her zimmer along should either of their parents make an unexpected call upon her. She tapped a few keys and spent a few moments reading something that was likely an e-mail message. She said, “Oh dear. This one’s becoming something of a bore. We’ve got to the great-impossibility-of-our-love-darling stage, and when they get there, all the anguish and teeth gnashing put such a bloody damper on things.” She sighed. “I did have such hopes for him. He seemed good for a year’s go, at least, especially once he started with the genitalia photos. But what can I say? When they fall, they do fall so hard.” She punched a few keys and murmured, “Bye-bye, darling. Alas, alack, and all the rest. Love springs eternal. Whatever.”

“I want to talk to you,” Manette said to her twin.

“I did conclude that, Manette, mere casual calls upon your siblings not being exactly your style. At least casual calls upon this sibling. That troubles me, you know. We used to be so close, you and I.”

“Odd,” Manette said, “I don’t recall that part of our history.”

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Once Freddie came into the picture, it was all about him and how you intended to snare the poor man. He was second-best, of course, but he didn’t know that. Unless, of course, you moaned the wrong name at an inopportune moment. Did you, by the way? Is that how it ended between you and Freddie?”

Manette refused to bite. She said, “Dad’s haemorrhaging money. I know about the increased payments to you. We must talk about that.”

“Ah, the economy,” Mignon said piously. “Always such a fragile thing, isn’t it?”

“Let’s not play games. What’s happening to the business and to Dad has nothing to do with a sudden and surprising decline in the need for lavatories, basins, and tubs since the beauty of that business is simple enough: There’s always a need. But you might want to know that Freddie’s been dealing with the books since Ian’s death. These payouts to you must stop.”

“Must they? Why? Worried I’ll run through all the money? Till there’s nothing left for you?”

“I think I’ve made myself clear: I know Dad’s increased his payments to you, Mignon. It’s right there in the books. It’s ridiculous. You don’t need the money. You’re entirely taken care of. You’ve got to cut him loose.”

“And are you having this same conversation with Nick, beloved apple of our father’s eye for his entire wasteland of a life?”

“Oh, stop it. You weren’t the son Dad wanted and neither was I. Is that always going to be at the centre of your thoughts? Your entire existence on earth defined straight into eternity by Daddy-didn’t-love-me-enough? You’ve been jealous of Nick since the day he was born.”

“While you haven’t a jealous bone in your body?” Mignon returned to the sitting room, making her way past the boxes and the crates and the endless array of items she’d seen and fancied and bought online. “At least I know what to do with my ‘jealousy,’ as you call it.”

“Referring to what?” Manette saw the trap too late.

Mignon smiled, the successful black widow awaiting her mate. “To Ian, of course. You always wanted Ian. Everyone knew it. Everyone tut-tutted behind your back for years. You took Freddie as second-best, and everyone knew that as well, poor Freddie included. That man’s a saint. Or something.”

“Rubbish.”

“Which part? The saint? The something? The wanting Ian or the Freddie knowing? It can’t be the wanting-Ian part of things, Manette. Lord, it must have slain you in your trainers when Niamh came along. I expect you think even now that Niamh, being the piece of work she is, drove Ian to try it on with men instead.”

“If you think back carefully,” Manette said calmly, although she was burning, “you’ll come up with a small problem in your scenario.”

“Which is?”

“That I was married to Freddie when Ian chose Niamh. Now, that doesn’t quite make things fit, does it?”

“Details,” Mignon said. “Utterly insignificant. You didn’t want to marry Ian, anyway. You just wanted to… well, you know. Some poking and thrusting on the sly.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Whatever you say.” She yawned. “Are we finished here? I’d like to have a lie-down. Massages take it out of one, don’t they? So if there’s nothing else…”

“Stop this nonsense with Dad. I swear to you, Mignon, if you don’t — ”

“Please. Don’t be ridiculous. I’m taking what I’m owed. Everyone’s doing that. I can’t think why you aren’t.”

“Everyone? Like Vivienne Tully, for example?”

Mignon’s face became shuttered, but only for the instant it took her to come up with a nonchalant reply. “You’ll have to ask Dad about Vivver.”

“What do you know about her?”

“What I know isn’t important. It’s what Ian knew, darling. And it’s like I said: People take what they’re owed at the end of the day. Ian knew this better than anyone. He probably took some of the dosh himself. I wouldn’t be surprised. It would have been child’s play. He held the purse strings, after all. How difficult would it have been for him to do some skimming, only to have Dad find out about it? Get into that kind of chicanery and you’re not going to be able to do it forever. Someone’s going to get wise. Someone’s going to stop you.”

“That sounds like a cautionary tale you ought to heed yourself,” Manette told her sister.

Mignon smiled. “Oh, I’m the exception to every rule there is,” was her airy reply.

LAKE WINDERMERE CUMBRIA

There was at least some truth in what Mignon had said. Manette had loved Ian once romantically, but it had been a young adolescent’s love, insubstantial and unsustainable albeit as obvious as the longing looks she’d cast in his direction over family dinners and the desperate letters she’d written and pressed into his hand at the end of holidays when he left for school.

Ian, alas, had not shared her passion. He’d been fond enough of Manette but there had finally come that one dreadful and never forgotten moment when he’d taken her aside during a half-term holiday, had handed her a shoe box of every one of her letters unopened, and had said to her, “Listen. Burn these, Manette. I know what they are, but it’s just not on.” He’d spoken not unkindly because unkindness had never been his way. But firmness had, and he’d been firm.

Well, we all survive these things, Manette had thought eventually. But now she wondered if some women weren’t constituted in a way to do so.

She went in search of her father. She found him on the west side of Ireleth Hall, far down on the lawn and quite near the lake. He was speaking to someone on his mobile phone, his head down as if with concentration. She considered coming upon him stealthily, but before she could do so, he concluded his call. He turned from the water to move towards the house, but when he saw her heading in his direction, he remained where he was and waited for her.

Manette tried to assess the look on his face. It was strange that he’d come out of the hall to make a phone call. He could, of course, have been having a walk and received a call in the midst of it. But somehow she doubted this. There was a furtiveness to the manner in which he slid the mobile into his pocket.

“Why’ve you let all this go on?” she asked her father as she came to his side. She was taller than he, just as her mother was.

Fairclough said, “Which part of ‘all this’ are you referring to?”

“Freddie’s got Ian’s books. He’s printed the spreadsheets. He’s got the programmes. You must have known he’d be putting things in order after Ian.”

“He’s demonstrating his competency, is Freddie. He’d like control of the firm.”

“That’s not his style, Dad. He’d take control of the firm if that’s what you asked of him, but that’s the extent of it. Freddie doesn’t scheme.”

“Are you certain?”

“I know Freddie.”

“We always think we know our spouses. But we never quite know them well enough.”

“I hope you’re not accusing Freddie of anything. That’s not on.”

Bernard smiled thinly. “As it happens, I’m not. He’s a very good man.”

“As it happens, he is.”

“Your divorce … It always puzzled me. Nick and Mignon” — Fairclough fluttered his fingers in the general direction of the folly — “they had their demons, but you didn’t seem to. I was pleased when you and Freddie married. She’s chosen well, I thought. To see it end, to have it dissolve as it has… You’ve made very few mistakes in your life, Manette, but letting Freddie go was one of them.”

“These things happen,” Manette said shortly.

“If we allow them,” was her father’s reply.

Now those were truly infuriating words, Manette thought, all things considered. “Like you allowed Vivienne Tully to happen?” she asked.

Bernard’s gaze didn’t leave her face. Manette knew what was going on in his head. It was that rapid assessment of all the potential sources from which had sprung his daughter’s question. It was also a wondering of what, exactly, Manette did know.

He said, “Vivienne Tully is in the past. She’s been gone a very long time.”

He was casting his line most delicately. Two could fish in these waters, though, so Manette cast hers. “The past is never as gone as we would like it to be. It has a way of coming back to us. Rather like Vivienne’s coming back to you.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I mean Ian’s been paying her off for years. Monthly, it seems. Years and years of monthly. You’ll know that, of course.”

He frowned. “Actually, I know nothing of the sort.”

Manette tried to read him. His skin wore a glittering of sweat and she wanted that to mean something significant about who he was and what he might have done. She said at last, “I don’t believe you. There was always something about you and Vivienne Tully.”

He said, “Vivienne was part of a past that I allowed to happen.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That I failed myself in a human moment.”

“I see,” Manette said.

“Not everything,” her father countered. “I wanted Vivienne, and she agreed to my wanting. But neither of us ever intended — ”

“Oh, people never do, do they?” Manette heard the edge of bitterness in her words. Its presence surprised her. What, after all, was her father saying that in her heart she’d not suspected for years: a long-ago affair with a very young woman. What was this to her, his daughter? It was nothing at all, yet everything at once, and the hell in the moment was that Manette did not know why.

“People don’t intend,” Fairclough said. “They get caught up. They start to think rather stupidly that life owes them something beyond what they have, and when they go in that direction in their heads, the result is — ”

“You and Vivienne Tully. I have to be honest. I don’t mean to hurt you but I can’t see why Vivienne would have wanted to sleep with you.”

“She didn’t.”

“Sleep with you? Oh, please.”

“No. That’s not what I mean.” Fairclough looked towards the hall and then away. There was a path along Lake Windermere, rising towards a woodland that marked the far north edge of the property. He said, “Walk with me. I’ll try to explain.”

“I don’t want an explanation.”

“No. But you’re troubled. I’m part of what troubles you. Walk with me, Manette.” He took her arm and Manette felt the pressure of his fingers through the wool sweater she was wearing. She wanted to loosen his grip and walk away from him and make that departure a permanent one, but she was as trapped as was her sister by the fact that Bernard had wanted a son so badly. Unlike Mignon, who’d spent her life punishing him for this desire, Manette had tried to be that for him, adopting his ways, his postures, his habits, his manner of speaking and standing and gazing intently at someone with whom he was conversing and even working in his business from the time she was able, all to show him she was a worthy son. Which, of course, she could never be. Then the son he’d had was unworthy from the start, no matter how he’d redeemed himself recently, and even that had not been enough to turn her father’s eyes upon her so he could see her merit. Thus, she didn’t want to walk with the bastard and she didn’t want to hear his lies about Vivienne Tully, whatever they were going to be.

He said, “Children don’t like to hear about their parents’ sexuality. It’s unseemly.”

“If this is going to be about Mother… some rejection of you…”

“God no. Your mother never once… No matter. It’s about me. I wanted Vivienne for no reason other than I wanted Vivienne. Her youth, her freshness.”

“I don’t want — ”

“You brought her up, my dear. You must hear it through. There was no seduction involved. Had you thought there was?” He glanced at her. Manette saw his look but she kept her eyes fixed ahead, on the path, the way it followed the shore, the way it climbed a rise to the woods that seemed to keep receding no matter how she and her father pressed onward. He went on. “I’m not a base seducer, Manette. I approached her. She’d worked for me perhaps two months at that point. I was frank, as frank as I’d been with your mother the night I met her. Marriage between us wasn’t possible, it wasn’t even a thought. So I told Vivienne I wanted her for my lover, a discreet arrangement that no one would know of, something that would never stand in the way of her career, which I knew was important to her. She had a brilliant mind and an excellent future. I didn’t expect her to waste that mind for a lifetime in Barrow-in-Furness or to give up that future because I wanted to be in her bed for however long she remained in Cumbria.”

“I don’t want to know this,” Manette told her father. Her throat aching so badly that she found speaking difficult.

“But you brought her up, so now you’ll hear. She asked to have time to think about it, to consider all the ramifications of what I was proposing. For two weeks she thought. Then she came to me with her own proposal. She would try me as a lover, she said. She’d never thought of herself as anyone’s mistress and she’d certainly never thought of herself as a woman attached in some way to a man older than her own father. This, she said frankly, was rather distasteful because she was not the sort of woman who found a man’s money an aphrodisiac. She liked young men, men her own age, and she didn’t know if she could manage even once putting up with me in her bed. She couldn’t see me exciting her, she said. But if I pleased her as a lover, which she frankly did not expect, she’d agree to the arrangement. If I didn’t please her, there would be — as she put it — no bad feeling between us.”

“God. She could have taken you to court. It could have cost you hundreds of thousands. Sexual — ”

“I knew that. But it’s the madness of wanting that I was speaking of earlier. It can’t be explained if you haven’t felt it. It makes everything seem so reasonable, even propositioning one’s employee and accepting her proposition in return.” They walked on, their pace slow and the wind beginning to come off the lake. Manette shivered, and her father put his arm round her waist, pulling her closer, saying, “There’s likely to be rain soon.” And then he said, “So for a time, we played two different roles, Vivienne and I. At work we were the employer and his executive assistant with never the slightest indication that there was something more between us; at other times we were a man and his mistress with those daylight hours of fierce propriety providing the stimulus for what happened at night. Then, at last, she’d had enough. Her career called out to her, and I wasn’t so much a fool as to stop her. I had to let her go, and as I’d promised to do so from the first, there was nothing for it but to wish her well.”

“Where is she now?”

“I’ve no idea. The job she was offered was in London, but that was some time ago. I’d think she would have gone on from there.”

“What about Mother? How could you — ”

“Your mother never knew, Manette.”

“But Mignon knows, doesn’t she?”

Fairclough looked away. A moment passed during which a V of ducks flew overhead, swooped down towards the lake, rose above them again. He finally said, “She does. I don’t know how she found out, but how does Mignon find out anything?”

“So that’s why she’s been able to — ”

“Yes.”

“But what about Ian? These payments he was making to Vivienne?”

Fairclough shook his head, then looked back at her. He said, “As God is my witness, I don’t know, Manette. If Ian was paying Vivienne, it can only be that he was doing it to protect me from something. She had to have contacted him, threatened something…? I just don’t know.”

“Perhaps she threatened to tell Mother. Like Mignon. And that’s what she’s doing, isn’t it? Mignon’s threatening to tell Mother if you don’t continue to give her what she wants? What would Mother do if she knew?”

Fairclough turned to her then and it came to Manette that for the first time her father looked old. Indeed, he looked fragile, capable of breaking within someone’s hands. “Your mother would be completely devastated, my dear,” he said. “After all these years, I’d like to spare her that.”

BRYANBARROW CUMBRIA

Tim could see Gracie from the window. She was on her trampoline. She’d been out there for a good hour now, jumping and jumping, with her face a picture of concentration. Sometimes, she fell on her bum and rolled round on the matting. But she always got back up and resumed her jumping.

Earlier, Tim had seen her out in the garden, at the back of the house. She was digging, and he noted next to her on the ground a small cardboard box tied up with a red ribbon. When the hole she was digging got deep enough and wide enough, she put the box inside and buried it. She used a pail for the excess earth, which she spread around neatly throughout the garden, although at this time of year the garden was such a wreck that this nicety was entirely unnecessary. Before she did that spreading, though, she knelt and crossed her arms over her chest: right fist to left shoulder, left fist to right shoulder, her head tilted to one side. It came to Tim that she looked a bit like one of those angels one saw in old Victorian cemeteries, which clued him in to what she was doing. She was burying Bella, giving the doll a proper funeral.

Bella could have been repaired. Tim had done a fairly good job of destroying her, but her arms and legs might have been reattached and where she’d been scratched up from his attack upon her, the scratches might have been smoothed away. But Gracie would have none of that, just as she would have none of Tim once he’d returned from the soaking he’d given himself in Bryan Beck. When he’d changed his clothes, he went to Gracie and he’d offered to brush her hair and French-braid it, but she didn’t want him near her. “Don’t touch me and don’t touch Bella, Timmy,” was how she put it. She didn’t sound sad, merely resigned.

After the doll’s funeral, she went to the trampoline. There she’d been ever since. Tim wanted to stop her, but he didn’t know how. He thought about ringing their mother, but he dismissed that notion as soon as it came into his head. He knew what she’d say: “She’ll stop jumping when she gets tired. I’m not going to drive all the way to Bryanbarrow to pull your sister off that trampoline. If you’re so bothered by it, ask Kaveh to get her off. He should enjoy the opportunity to be paternal.” She’d say that last bit with a snarl in her voice. Then off she’d go to that wanker Wilcox to get herself seen to by a proper man. And that was how she’d think of it. Charlie Wilcox wanted to do her, so he was the real goods. While anyone not wanting to do her — like Tim’s father, for example — was shite on oatmeal. Well, that was the truth anyway, wasn’t it? Tim asked himself. His dad was shite and so was Kaveh and Tim was learning that everyone else was shite as well.

He’d come back to the house after going after the ducks in the beck. Kaveh had followed and tried to talk to him, but Tim wasn’t having anything off that bloke. Bad enough that the wanker had put his greasy mitts on Tim. To have to talk to him on top of that …It just wasn’t on.

Tim thought, though, that Kaveh might be able to get Gracie off the trampoline. He might also get Gracie to let Tim dig up the doll and take her off to Windermere to be repaired. Gracie liked Kaveh because that was Gracie. She liked everyone. So she’d listen to him, wouldn’t she? Besides, Kaveh hadn’t done anything to hurt her, aside from wrecking her entire family, of course.

Tim himself would have to talk to Kaveh, though. He’d have to go downstairs and find him and tell him that Gracie was outside jumping. But if he did that, Kaveh would probably just point out that there was nothing wrong with jumping on a trampoline, that’s what trampolines were for, weren’t they, and wasn’t that why they’d got one for Gracie in the first place, because she liked to jump? Then Tim would have to explain that when she jumped for an hour as she’d done so far, it was because she was hurting inside. Then Kaveh would say the obvious thing: Well, we both know why she’s hurting, Tim, don’t we?

Tim hadn’t intended. That was the problem. He hadn’t intended to make Gracie cry. Gracie was the only person who actually mattered to him, and the truth was she’d just been there, in his way. He hadn’t thought of what came after the moment when he snatched Bella up and pulled her arms and legs off. He’d only wanted to do something to make the boiling inside of him go away. But how could Gracie understand that when she had no boiling inside of her? She could only see the meanness within him that had snatched up Bella and dismembered her.

Gracie stopped for a moment outside. Tim saw that she was breathing hard. He also noticed something new about Gracie, which brought him up short. She was growing breasts and he could see the buds of them poking at the jersey that she was wearing.

This brought a searing sadness upon him. It clouded his vision, and when the cloud passed, Gracie had gone back to jumping again. And this time, he watched her little breasts as she jumped. Something, he knew, had to be done about her.

How useless would it be to pick up the phone and ring their mother? he asked himself a second time. Gracie growing breasts meant Gracie needing her mum to do something like take her to town and purchase her a baby brassiere or whatever it was that little girls wore when they started growing breasts. This went beyond just getting Gracie off the bloody trampoline, didn’t it? Yes, it did, but wasn’t the truth that Niamh would see this the same way she saw everything? Tell Kaveh about it, she would say. Kaveh can handle this little problem.

That was everything tied up with a bow: Whatever Gracie was going to face in her growing-up years, she was going to have to face without a mum to help her, because the one thing in life that was an absolute certainty was that Niamh Cresswell had plans for herself that didn’t include the children she’d had with her louse of a husband. Thus Tim knew it was down to him or it was down to Kaveh to help Gracie as she grew up. Or it was down to them both.

Tim left his room. Kaveh was somewhere in the house, and Tim supposed now was as good a time as any to tell him that they needed to take Gracie into Windermere to get whatever she needed. If they didn’t do it, the boys in her school would start to tease her. Ultimately the girls would tease her as well. Teasing her would turn into bullying her soon enough, and Tim wasn’t about to have his sister bullied.

He heard Kaveh’s voice as he descended the stairs. It seemed to be coming from the fire house. The door to the room was partially closed, but a shaft of light fell on the floor from inside and he heard the sound of a poker stirring coals in the grate.

“…not actually in my plans,” Kaveh was saying politely to someone.

“But you can’t be thinking of staying on now Cresswell’s dead.” Tim recognised George Cowley’s voice. He also recognised the subject. Staying on meant they were talking about Bryan Beck farm. George Cowley would be seeing the death of Tim’s father as his chance to sweep in and buy the place. Obviously, Kaveh wasn’t having that.

“I am,” Kaveh said.

“Thinking of raising sheep, are you?” Cowley sounded amused by the entire idea. He probably pictured Kaveh mincing round the farmyard in pink Wellies and a lavender waxed jacket or something like.

“I’d actually hoped you’d continue renting the land as you’ve been doing,” Kaveh said. “It’s worked out so far. I don’t see why it can’t continue to do so. Besides the land’s quite valuable if it ever came to a sale of it.”

“And you reckon I’d never have the funds to make it mine,” Cowley concluded. “Well, d’you have the funds to buy it up yourself, laddie? I reckon not. This whole place’ll go on the block in a few months’ time and I’ll be there with the money.”

“I’m afraid it won’t be going on the block at all,” Kaveh said.

“Why’s that, then? You’re not claiming he left it to you?”

“As it happens, he did.”

George Cowley was silent, digesting this unexpected bit of news. He finally said, “You’re taking the piss.”

“As it happens, I’m not.”

“No? So where d’you plan to come up with the death duties, eh? That’ll take a real pile of dosh.”

“Death duties aren’t actually going to be a problem, Mr. Cowley,” Kaveh said.

There was another silence. Tim wondered what George Cowley was making of all this. For the first time, he also wondered how Kaveh Mehran fit into the picture of his father’s death. It had been an accident, plain and simple, hadn’t it? Everyone had said so, including the coroner. But now it didn’t seem so simple at all. And the next thing that came out of Kaveh’s mouth made the matter complicated beyond Tim’s imagining.

“My family will be joining me here as well, you see. Our combined resources will see to it that death duties — ”

“Family?” Cowley scoffed. “What’s the meaning of family in the light of day to your sort, eh?”

Kaveh didn’t reply for a moment. When he spoke, then, his tone was deathly formal. “Family means my parents, for one. They’ll be coming up from Manchester to live with me. Along with my wife.”

The walls seemed to shimmer around Tim. The earth itself seemed to tilt. Everything he’d thought he’d known was suddenly thrown into a vortex where words meant something far beyond what they’d meant for all of his fourteen years and what he thought he’d actually understood was obliterated by the uttering of one declaration.

“Your wife.” Cowley said it flatly.

“My wife. Yes.” The sound of movement, Kaveh crossing to the window perhaps, or to the desk at one side of the room. Or even standing at the hearth of the fireplace, one arm on the mantel, looking like someone who knew he was holding all the good cards in the deck. “I’ll be marrying next month.”

“Oh, too right.” Cowley snorted. “She know about your little ‘situation’ here, this next-month wife of yours?”

“Situation? What on earth do you mean?”

“You little pixie. You know ’xactly what I mean. You two arse bandits, you an’ Cresswell. Wha’s this, eh? Think the whole village didn’t know the truth?”

“If you mean that the village knew Ian Cresswell and I shared this house, of course they knew. Beyond that, what else is there?”

“Why, you little bum fucker. You trying to say — ”

“I’m trying to say that I’ll be marrying, my wife will live here along with my parents, and then our children. If there’s something not clear to you in that, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“What about them kids? You think one’f them won’t tell this next-month wife of yours what’s up with you?”

“Are you talking about Tim and Gracie, Mr. Cowley?”

“You goddamn bloody well know I am.”

“Aside from the fact that my fiancee doesn’t speak English and wouldn’t understand a word they said to her, there’s nothing for them to tell anyone. And Tim and Gracie are going back to their mother. That’s already in the works.”

“That’s that, then?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“You’re a real deep one, then, aren’t you, lad? Had this planned from the first, I expect.”

What Kaveh said in answer, Tim did not catch. He’d heard all that he needed to hear. He stumbled from the passageway into the kitchen and from there out of the house.

LAKE WINDERMERE CUMBRIA

St. James had decided there was a final possibility in this matter of Ian Cresswell’s drowning. It was a tenuous one at best, but as it existed, he knew he had to set out to see about it. He required a single sporting implement to do so.

There was no angling shop in either Milnthorpe or Arnside, so he drove the distance to Grange-over-Sands and made his purchase in a concern called Lancasters. Lancasters sold everything from baby clothes to gardening tools and it was strung along the sloping high street as a series of shops that had obviously been snapped up by the eponymous and enterprising Lancaster family over the last hundred years in a remarkable and successful project of expansion, one shop now tumbling into the next. The governing philosophy behind them all seemed to be that what wasn’t sold within the place didn’t need to be bought. This being a part of the world given to fishing, what they did have was a fillet knife exactly like the one that Lynley had brought up from the water inside the Ireleth Hall boathouse.

St. James made his purchase of this, rang Lynley on his mobile, and told him he was heading to Ireleth Hall. He also phoned Deborah, but she wasn’t answering. He wasn’t surprised, as she would have seen he was the caller and she wasn’t happy with him at the moment.

Nor, particularly, was he happy with her. He loved his wife deeply, but there were moments when the fact that they couldn’t see eye-to-eye on something made him despair of their entire marriage. This despair was always a fleeting thing, a feeling that he generally reflected upon later and chuckled over when both his temper and Deborah’s had cooled. Why were we so caught up in that? he would wonder. Matters so crucial one day were mere bagatelles the next. This one didn’t seem so insignificant, however.

He took the most direct route to Lake Windermere although at another time he would have quite enjoyed taking a diversion and cruising up through the Lyth Valley. Instead, he sped along the northeastern route and ended up at the very tip of Lake Windermere, where the mass of end moraines at Newby Bridge spoke of glaciers, an ice age, and a time long ago when the village had stood at the southernmost point of the lake itself, which now lay some distance away. Then he sped north. Within moments, Lake Windermere came into view: a broad unwrinkled sheet of grey-blue reflecting the autumn-hued trees that formed woodlands along its shores.

Ireleth Hall was not far from this point, a few miles beyond the area where the Victorian beauties of Fell Foot Park offered walks and vistas that at this time of year were growing cold and forbidding but in spring would be a palette of nodding daffodils and colourful rhododendrons that grew to the height of buildings. He passed by this place and entered one of dozens of arboreal tunnels along the road: auburn and ochre where still there were leaves on the trees, skeletal branches where there were now none.

The gates were closed at Ireleth Hall, but there was a bell buried within the ivy that climbed the stone plinth forming part of its boundary wall. St. James clambered out of his hired car and rang it. As he did so, Lynley pulled up behind him in the Healey Elliott.

This made entry easy. A moment of disembodied conversation with someone who answered the bell, Lynley saying over St. James’s shoulder, “It’s Thomas Lynley,” and that was that. They were inside, the gates creaking open like something from an old horror film, then creaking closed behind them.

They went directly to the boathouse. This was, St. James told his friend, the only other possibility in what went for his part of the investigation. While no one would ever be able to proclaim that all the circumstances surrounding Ian Cresswell’s death had been completely straightforward, if there was anything to persuade the coroner to reopen the matter, this was how they would find it. And even this guaranteed nothing, he said.

For his part, Lynley declared he’d be more than happy to close matters up here and return to London as soon as possible. St. James shot him a querying look at this remark. Lynley said, “The guv’s not happy with me.”

“Hillier hoping for something different from what you’re coming up with?”

“No. Isabelle. She’s not happy Hillier’s roped me into this situation.”

“Ah. Not good.”

“Decidedly not good.”

They said nothing more on the matter, but St. James wondered about Lynley’s relationship with Isabelle Ardery. Together they’d come to see him on matters concerning an earlier case they’d worked on, and St. James was not so oblivious of the world around him that he could not see the spark that existed between them. But involvement with a superior officer was a dangerous proposition. Indeed, Lynley’s involvement with anyone at the Met was a dangerous proposition.

As they walked to the boathouse, Lynley told St. James of his meeting with Bernard Fairclough’s daughter Manette and her husband, explaining what they had revealed about the money that Ian Cresswell had been paying out. Either Bernard Fairclough had been a party to all of this or he had not, Lynley said. But whatever the case, Cresswell seemed to have known things that could have spelled danger for him. Had Fairclough not known about these payouts or at least some of these payouts, then in Fairclough lay the danger once he’d discovered them. Had Ian tried to put a stop to some of the payments he was making, then in the recipients of those payments lay the danger.

“It all seems to come down to money in the end,” Lynley said.

“That’s the case more often than not, isn’t it?” St. James noted.

Inside the boathouse, there was no need for additional light. What St. James intended did not require it, and the ambient light reflecting off the lake from the bright day outside was sufficient. St. James was there to examine the condition of the rest of the stones comprising the dock. If more of them were loose than just the two that had become dislodged, then he was of the opinion that what had happened to Ian had been mere chance.

The scull was there, but the rowingboat was not. Valerie, it seemed, was out on the water. St. James went to the area where her boat had been tied. Sensible, he thought, to check here first.

He used his hands and his feet, working his way along. He knelt awkwardly, saying, “I can manage,” to Lynley when the other man made a move to help him. Things seemed quite solid until he got to the fifth large stone along his way, which felt as loose as a seven-year-old’s baby incisor. The sixth and seventh wobbled as well. Then the next four were fine while the twelfth was barely hanging on. It was on this twelfth one that St. James applied the fillet knife he’d bought in Grange-over-Sands. Using this on what remained of the grout in order to get the stone into a position from which it would easily tumble into the water upon the slightest touch was simple. The blade slid in, St. James did a bit of jemmying with it, and the job was done. One foot placed on it — here Lynley did the honours — and into the water it went. It was not difficult to see how someone getting out of a scull and placing all his weight upon a stone similarly jemmied would have produced what had happened to Ian Cresswell. The real question was whether the other loose stones — weighted by Lynley but unassisted by St. James’s fillet knife — would fall into the water as well. One of them did. Three of them didn’t. Lynley sighed, shook his head, and said, “At this point, I’m quite open to suggestions. I won’t argue if going home to London is one of them.”

“We need direct light.”

“For what, at this point?”

“Nothing in here. Come with me.”

They left the boathouse. St. James brought the fillet knife up between them. They both had a look at it and the conclusion required no microscopic examination in a forensic lab. From its use on the grout, it was deeply scratched and scored. But the one that Lynley had earlier brought up from the water had been completely unmarked.

Lynley said, “Ah. I do see.”

“This clarifies matters, I think, Tommy. It’s time Deborah and I went back to London. I’m not saying at this point that those stones couldn’t have been loosened in another way. But the fact that the knife you brought up from the water was unmarked suggests the drowning was indeed an accident or something else was used to dislodge one of those stones. And unless you intend to cart everything from the property off to forensics for some kind of match-up with the stones that went into the water — ”

“I’ll need another route,” Lynley finished for him. “Or I can close this up and head back myself.”

“Unless Barbara Havers gives you something, I daresay that’s the case. It’s not a bad result, though, is it? It’s just a result.”

“It is.”

They stood silently looking out at the lake. A rowingboat was approaching them with a woman skillfully at the oars. Valerie Fairclough was dressed for fishing but she’d evidently had no luck. When she neared them, she showed her empty bucket and called out cheerfully, “It’s good we’re not starving round here. I’ve become rather hopeless in the last few days.”

“There are more loose stones on the dock inside,” Lynley called back. “We’ve made several a bit worse. Have a care. We’ll help you.”

They went back inside. She glided in silently and docked the rowingboat in the exact spot where the stones were loose. Lynley said, “You’ve managed to choose the very worst spot. Was this where you set out?”

“It was,” Valerie said. “I hadn’t noticed. Are they bad?”

“Over time they’ll give way.”

“Like the others?”

“Like the others.”

Her face relaxed. She didn’t smile but her relief was palpable. St. James took note of this and he knew Lynley did likewise as Valerie Fairclough handed her fishing gear over to him. Lynley set this to one side, then extended his hand and helped Valerie Fairclough from the boat. He made the introductions between the woman and St. James.

St. James said, “You found Ian Cresswell’s body, as I understand.”

“I did, yes.” Valerie removed the hat she’d been wearing, a baseball cap that covered her fine grey hair. This was youthfully styled and she ran her fingers through it.

“You phoned for the police as well,” St. James said.

“That’s correct.”

“I’m rather wondering about that,” St. James said. “Are you heading to the house? May we walk with you?”

Valerie glanced at Lynley. She didn’t look wary. She had far too much control for that. But she’d be wondering why Lynley’s friend the expert witness from London wanted to have a chat, and she’d know quite well the topic wasn’t going to be her momentary lack of success as an angler. She said graciously, “Of course you may,” but that quick movement at the corners of her blue eyes told a different story about how she actually felt.

They set off up the path. St. James said to her, “Had you been fishing that day?”

“When I found him? No.”

“What took you out to the boathouse?”

“I was having a walk. I do that in the afternoons, generally. Once the weather gets bad with the winter, I’m rather more confined than I like to be, as we all are, so I try to get out as much as I can while the days are still fine.”

“Around the property? Into the woods? On the fells?”

“I’ve lived here all my life, Mr. St. James. I walk wherever my fancy takes me.”

“On that day?”

Valerie Fairclough glanced at Lynley. She said to him, “Would you like to clarify?” which was, naturally, a well-bred way of asking why she was being grilled by his friend.

St. James said, “This is my interest, rather than Tommy’s. I’ve spoken to Constable Schlicht about the day Ian Cresswell was found. He told me two curious things about the phone call to nine-nine-nine, and I’ve been trying to understand them ever since. Well, actually, only one of the things he told me was about the phone call. The other was about you.”

Now the wariness was plain to see. Valerie Fairclough stopped on the path. She ran her hands down the sides of her trousers, a movement that St. James could tell was meant to settle her nerves. He knew Lynley was aware of this from the look Lynley cast him, which was one that told him to go on in order to get what he could from her.

“And what did the constable tell you?” Valerie said.

“He’d had a conversation with the bloke at dispatch. This would be the person who took the nine-nine-nine call about Ian Cresswell’s drowning. He learned that whoever made that call was remarkably calm, considering the circumstances.”

“I see.” Valerie spoke pleasantly enough, but the fact that she’d stopped moving along the path suggested there were elements of Ian Cresswell’s death that she didn’t want St. James and Lynley to uncover. One of them, St. James knew, was now out of their sight line. The folly built for their daughter Mignon was no longer in view.

“‘There appears to be a dead man floating in my boathouse,’ is roughly what was said,” St. James told Valerie.

She glanced away. A ripple on the surface of her face was not unlike a ripple on the surface of the lake behind them. Something swimming beneath the water or a gust of wind across it but in either case, the moment comprised an instant in which her placidity failed her. She raised a hand to her forehead and brushed an errant hair away. She’d not put her baseball cap back on her head. The sunlight struck her face, showing the fine lines of an ageing that she seemed intent upon keeping at bay.

She said, “No one knows exactly how they’ll react in that kind of situation.”

“I entirely agree. But the second odd thing about that day was how you were dressed when you met the police and the ambulance on the drive. You weren’t dressed for walking, certainly not for an autumn walk and certainly not for anything other than a walk through the rooms of your house, I expect.”

Realising the direction St. James had been heading, Lynley said, “So you see, there are several possibilities that want exploring.” He gave her a moment to think about this before going on with, “You weren’t at the boathouse at all, were you? You weren’t the one to find the body and you weren’t the one to call nine-nine-nine.”

“I believe I gave my name when I phoned.” Valerie spoke stiffly, but she wasn’t stupid. She would know that at least this part of the game was over.

“Anyone can give any name,” St. James said.

“Perhaps it’s time you told the truth,” Lynley added. “It’s about your daughter, isn’t it? I daresay Mignon found the body, and Mignon placed the call. From the folly, she can see the boathouse. If she goes upstairs to the top floor of the tower, I should guess she can see everything from the door of the building to the boats leaving it to go out on the lake. The real question, then, is whether she had a reason to arrange Ian Cresswell’s death as well. Because she would have known he was out there on the lake that evening, wouldn’t she?”

Valerie raised her eyes to the sky. St. James was reminded unaccountably of a suffering Madonna and what motherhood brought and did not bring to a woman brave enough to engage in everything that it comprised. It never ended with the child’s entry into adulthood. It went on till death, either the mother’s or the child’s. Valerie said, “None of them…” She faltered. She looked at both of them, St. James and Lynley, before she spoke again. “My children are innocent in all matters.”

St. James said, “We found a filleting knife in the water.” He showed her the knife he’d used on the stones. “Not this one, of course, but one very similar.”

“That would be the one I lost a few weeks ago,” she said. “An accident, actually. I was cleaning a good-size trout, but I dropped the knife and it slid into the water.”

“Indeed?” Lynley said.

“Indeed,” she replied. “Clumsy of me but there you have it.”

Lynley and St. James glanced at each other. What they had, actually, was a lie, since the workbench for cleaning fish was on the other side of the boathouse from the spot where the filleting knife had fallen into the water. Unless St. James was very much mistaken about the nature of the tool, the knife would have had to swim in order to end up lying beneath Ian Cresswell’s scull.

KENSINGTON LONDON

In person Vivienne Tully looked exactly like the photographs Barbara had seen of her on the Internet. They were of an age — she and Vivienne — but they couldn’t have been more dissimilar. Vivienne, Barbara reckoned, was exactly what acting Detective Superintendent Ardery would have her become: svelte of body, sveltely clothed with all the suitable accessories, and ultra-sveltely put together when it came to hair and makeup. Indeed, if there were degrees of svelte — and Barbara reckoned there were — then Vivienne Tully had somehow managed to claw her way to the top level. On principle alone, Barbara hated her on sight.

She’d made the decision to turn up at Rutland Gate as who she was and not as who she had earlier pretended to be: someone in search of a piece of pricey Kensington property. She rang the bell for flat 6, and without asking who’d come calling upon her, Vivienne Tully — or whoever was inside her flat — had released the door’s lock. At that, Barbara reckoned she was expecting someone. Very few people were foolish enough to allow callers into their buildings without giving them a proper grilling. People ended up burgled that way. People also ended up dead.

It turned out that the expected visitor was an estate agent. Barbara learned this within three seconds of Vivienne Tully’s giving her a once-over. Head to toe and a look of this-can’t-possibly-be, and Vivienne was saying, “You’re from Foxtons?” Barbara might have taken offence at this, but she wasn’t there for a beauty contest. She also wasn’t there to seize the moment and run with it since there was no way on earth that Vivienne Tully was going to believe an estate agent hot to sell her property would show up at her door wearing high-top red trainers, orange corduroys, and a navy donkey jacket.

So she said, “DS Havers, New Scotland Yard. I need a word.”

Vivienne didn’t exactly fall back in shock, which Barbara found worthy of note. She said, “Come in. I don’t have a great deal of time, I’m afraid. I’ve an appointment.”

“With Foxtons. Got it. Selling up, are you?” Barbara looked round as Vivienne closed the door behind them. It was a gorgeous flat by anyone’s standards: high ceilings, elaborate crown mouldings, hardwood floors covered by Persian carpets, a few tasteful antiques, a marble fireplace surround. It would have cost buckets in the first place and it would take barrels to purchase it now. The odd thing was, however, that there was nothing of a personal nature anywhere. One could call a few pieces of carefully chosen German porcelain personal, Barbara supposed, but the collection of antique books on a bookshelf didn’t exactly look like something one browsed through on rainy days.

“I’m moving to New Zealand,” Vivienne said. “Time to go home.”

“Born there?” Barbara asked, although she already knew the answer. The other woman had no evident accent; she’d be able to lie if she wished.

She didn’t. “In Wellington,” she said. “My parents are there. They’re getting older and they’d like me back in the area.”

“Been in the UK a while, then?”

“May I ask what this call is about, Sergeant Havers? How may I help you?”

“By telling me about your relationship with Bernard Fairclough. That’d be a start.”

Vivienne’s expression remained preternaturally pleasant. “I don’t think that’s any of your business. Exactly what is this about?”

“The death of Ian Cresswell. It’s being investigated. I expect you knew him since you worked for Fairclough Industries for a time and so did he.”

“Then wouldn’t the logical question be what my relationship with Ian Cresswell was?”

“I reckoned we’d get to that next. Right now it’s the Fairclough angle of things that interests me.” Barbara looked round the room with an appreciative nod. She said, “Very nice digs. Mind if I park myself somewhere?” She didn’t wait for an answer. Instead she went to an armchair, dumped her shoulder bag next to it, and sank down into its comfortable depths. She ran a hand along the fine upholstery. Bloody hell, is this silk? she wondered. Obviously, Vivienne Tully didn’t do her shopping at IKEA.

Vivienne said, “I think I told you I’m expecting — ”

“Someone from Foxtons. Got it. I’m good that way. Memory like the proverbial elephant if you know what I mean. Or is it the metaphorical elephant? I never know which. Well, never mind. You’d probably like things better if I scarpered before Foxtons shows up, eh?”

Vivienne wasn’t a fool. She knew it was going to be information in exchange for Barbara’s departure. She went to a small sofa and sat. She said, “I worked for a time for Fairclough Industries, as you’ve noted. I was Bernard Fairclough’s executive assistant. It was my first job straight after the London School of Economics. After several years, I went on to other employment.”

“Your type generally move round in the employment game,” Barbara acknowledged. “I get that. But in your case, it was Fairclough Industries, a spate of private consulting, and then this current gig you have with the gardening concern and there you’ve stayed.”

“What of it? I wanted more job security than private consultancy offers, and once I went to Precision Gardening, I had it. I climbed the ladder there, the right person in the right place during a period of time when it was important to demonstrate equity in employment between men and women. I hardly started as managing director, Sergeant.”

“But you didn’t cut your ties with Fairclough.”

“I don’t burn bridges. I find it wise to maintain contacts. Bernard asked me to serve on the board of the Fairclough Foundation. I was happy to do so.”

“How’d that come about?”

“What do you mean? Are you looking for something sinister? He asked me and I said yes. I believe in the cause.”

“And he asked you because…”

“I assume he thought my work for him in Barrow was competent and reflective of a willingness to be useful in other ways as well. When I left Fairclough Industries — ”

“Why?”

“Why did I leave?”

“Seems to me you could’ve climbed the career ladder there as well as anywhere else.”

“Have you spent much time in Barrow, Sergeant Havers? No? Well, it didn’t appeal. I had the opportunity to come to London and I took it. That’s what people do. I had the kind of offer of employment that might have taken years to get in Barrow, even if I’d wanted to stay there, which, believe me, I did not.”

“And here you are, then, in Lord Fairclough’s flat.”

Vivienne altered her position slightly, her posture — which had seemed perfect in the first place — managing to become even more so. “Whatever you’re thinking, you’re misinformed.”

“Fairclough doesn’t own this flat? Why’s he got his own key, then? I reckoned he was showing up to check you weren’t rubbishing the place. Doing the landlord bit, if you know what I mean.”

“What does any of this have to do with Ian Cresswell, the ostensible reason for your call?”

“Not sure yet,” Barbara said cheerfully. “Want to explain the situation with the keys? Especially since Fairclough doesn’t, as I’d thought, own this place. Which’s quite nice, by the way. Must’ve cost you a pile of dosh. You’d want to keep it all safe and secure, I’d think. So I’m wondering if you hand out keys willy-nilly or if you only give them to special sorts of people.”

“I’m afraid that’s none of your business.”

“Where’s our Bernard stay when he comes to London, Miss Tully? Or I s’pose I should say Ms. eh? I checked at Twins, but they don’t have overnighters there, it seems. Also, they don’t allow women past the threshold aside from the old bag on door duty — believe me, I found that out straightaway — unless they’re in the company of a member. Turns out you’re in and out all the time on Fairclough’s arm, the way I heard it. Lunch, dinner, drinks, whatever, and off the two of you go by taxi and the taxi always brings you here. Sometimes you unlock the front door. Sometimes he does, with his own key. Then up you come to this… well let me say it’s a bloody gorgeous place… and after that… Where does Fairclough stow his ageing body when he’s in London? That’s the real question.”

Vivienne rose. She would need to, Barbara reckoned. It was close to the point where the other woman would do the ceremonious tossing of her rotund body out of the front door. Meantime, Barbara meant to push things as far as she could. She saw that Vivienne’s entire composure was heading in a southerly direction, and this gratified her enormously. There was, after all, a certain selfish thrill in discommoding someone so ostensibly perfect.

“No, it isn’t the real question,” Vivienne Tully said. “The real question is how long it will take you to walk to the door, where I shall open it for you, and then close it upon your timely departure. Our discussion is over.”

“Thing is,” Barbara said, “I do have to walk there, don’t I? To the door, that is.”

“Or you can be dragged, of course.”

“Kicking, screaming, and howling for the neighbours to hear? Raising a ruckus the likes of which gets you noticed rather more than you’d probably like to be noticed?”

“I want you out of here, Sergeant. There’s not a single thing illegal in any part of my life. I don’t see what my having lunch, dinner, drinks, or anything else with Bernard Fairclough has to do with Ian Cresswell unless Bernard handed the receipts to Ian and Ian didn’t want to pay the bills. But he’d hardly lose his life over that, would he?”

“Would that’ve been like Ian? Tight with the baron’s money, was he?”

“I don’t know. I had no contact with Ian once I left the firm, which was years ago. Is that all you want to know? Because, as I told you, I have an appointment.”

“There’s still the matter of the keys to be cleared up.”

Vivienne smiled mirthlessly. “Let me wish you luck in that matter.” She walked to the front door of the flat, then, and she opened it. She said, “If you don’t mind…?” and really, there was nothing for it but for Barbara to cooperate. She’d got what she could from Vivienne, and the fact that Vivienne had been unsurprised to have Scotland Yard come calling in the first place — not to mention the fact that she’d managed the nearly impossible feat of not putting a foot wrong during their entire conversation — told Barbara that this was a case in which forewarned had led effortlessly to forearmed. There was nothing for it but to try another route. Nothing, after all, was impossible.

She took the stairs down, rather than the lift. They deposited her opposite the table on which the postal cubbies stood. The porter was there. He’d gathered up the post from where it had been dropped into the mail slot at the front of the building, and he was in the process of distributing it. He heard her and turned.

“Back again, are you?” he said in greeting. “Still hoping for a flat?”

Barbara joined him at the table, the better to have a look at what he was putting into the cubbies. A signed declaration of She’s guilty of something would have gone down a treat, shoved into Vivienne Tully’s cubby or, better yet, handed over to Barbara to be sent along to Lynley. But everything seemed to be straightforward enough from what she could see from the return addresses of BT, Thames Water, Television Licensing, and the like.

She said, “Got an in at Foxtons. As things turn out in the world of property sales, flat six will be going on offer soon. I thought I’d have a quick look.”

“Miss Tully’s flat?” the porter said. “I heard naught about that. Odd, as people gen’rally tell me since there’ll be some coming and going once it hits the market.”

“Could be it’s a sudden thing,” Barbara said.

“S’pose. Never thought she’d sell, though. Not with the situation she’s got. ’Tisn’t easy to find nice digs where a good school’s just round the corner, eh?”

Barbara felt a frisson of excitement shoot through her. “School?” she said carefully. “Exactly what school are we talking about?”