Believing the Lie

and his intended bride.

And there was no one else to tell those people the truth about Kaveh. No one would be motivated to do it, and even if that were not the case, Kaveh’s relations would themselves not be the least motivated to believe what strangers reported to them without a shred of proof. Plus, Kaveh was the consummate liar, wasn’t he. He was the consummate con man and the consummate player in the chess game of life. Tim could speak the truth, he could rant, he could rail. Kaveh would know how to twist his words.

You must excuse young Tim, Kaveh would declare solemnly. You must not worry what he says and does. He goes to a special school, you know, for children who are disturbed in one way or another. There are times when he makes claims, when he does things… He ripped his little sister’s favourite doll to pieces, for example, and just the other day or week or month or whatever I found him trying to kill the ducks in the village stream.

And people would believe him, of course. First, because people always believed what they wanted and needed to believe. Second, because every bloody word he said would be the truth. It was as if Kaveh had planned his whole game from the first, the very moment he locked eyes on Tim’s dad.

Tim reached for the handle of the door. He grabbed up his rucksack and jerked the door open.

“What are you doing?” Kaveh demanded. “Stay in the car. You’re going to school.”

“And you’re going to hell,” Tim said. He leaped out and slammed the car door behind him.

VICTORIA LONDON

Raul Montenegro certainly wasn’t a dead end, Barbara Havers concluded. An hour or more of following various links connected to his name could easily have gleaned her half a ream of paper eaten up with printing stories about the bloke, so she tried to be selective. It was all in Spanish, but there were enough words similar to English for Barbara to be able to make out that Montenegro was a very big nob in industry and the industry in which he operated had something to do with natural gas in Mexico. From this she concluded that somehow Alatea Fairclough, nee Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, had got herself from Argentina to Mexico for reasons that remained unclear. She had moved herself either from a town still unknown to Barbara or, what was more likely considering the reaction of the woman to whom Barbara had attempted to speak in Argentina, she’d disappeared from Santa Maria de la Cruz, de los Angeles, y de los Santos. There, perhaps, she had lived as a member of the mayor’s extended family as a niece or a cousin or, equally perhaps and probably more likely, she had been married to one of his five sons. At least that would explain all the excited quiens and dondes Barbara had heard on the other end of the line when she’d managed to get someone within the mayor’s house to speak to her. Had Alatea done a runner from her marriage to one of the sons of the mayor, that son of the mayor might well like to know where she’d ended up. Especially, Barbara thought, if he and Alatea were still legally married.

All this was supposition, of course. She needed Azhar to get back to her with someone who could translate Spanish, and so far she’d heard not a word from him. So she kept struggling and following leads and vowing to take a tutorial from Winston Nkata on the use and abuse of the World Wide Web.

She also learned that Raul Montenegro was rolling in barrels of lolly. She got this from an online edition of Hola!, that journalistic mother ship from which Hello! had been launched. The two magazines were identical in their dedication to glossy photographs of celebrities of all ilks, all of whom possessed the kind of white teeth one needed to don sunglasses to gaze upon, all of whom dressed in designer gear and posed either at their own palatial estates or — if they lived too modestly for the magazine’s readers — at expensive period hotels. The only difference was in the subjects of the stories, since with the exception of film actors or members of various and sometimes obscure European royal families, Hola! generally appeared to feature individuals from Spanish-speaking countries, Spain itself being the most frequently used. But Mexico had been included more than once, and there was Raul Montenegro with his frightening nose showing off his estate, which appeared to be somewhere along the coast of Mexico where there were many palm trees, lots of other colourful vegetation, and a host of nubile girls and boys willing to lounge at his poolside. There was also a shiny photo of Montenegro at the helm of his yacht, with various members of his youthful male crew striking crewlike poses around him in their very tight white trousers and equally tight blue tee-shirts. What Barbara gathered from all this was that Raul Montenegro liked to be surrounded by youth and beauty since both at his home and on his yacht, there was no one who wasn’t occupying a place somewhere on the scale between beautiful and lightning-struck gorgeous. Where, she wondered as she looked at the pictures, did these amazing-looking people come from? She reckoned one never saw so many tan, lithe, supple, and scrumptious human beings in one place outside of a casting call. Which, of course, made her wonder if all these individuals were indeed auditioning for something. If they were, she also reckoned she knew what that something was. Money always had a way of singing a siren song, didn’t it? And if nothing else, Raul Montenegro appeared to be swimming in money.

What was interesting, though, was that Alatea Fairclough nee all the rest of her names did not appear in any of the Hola! pictures. Barbara compared the dates on the magazine with the date on the article she’d found with the photo of Alatea hanging on to Montenegro’s arm. The Hola! photos predated the other, and Barbara wondered if Montenegro had changed his stripes once he had Alatea on his arm. Alatea had the kind of looks that allowed a woman to lay down the law: You want me? Get rid of the others. Otherwise, believe me, I can easily move on.

Which brought Barbara back to the situation in Santa Maria de la Cruz, de los Angeles, y de los Santos, whatever that situation might be. She had to find out, so she printed out the Hola! article and went back to Mayor Esteban Vega y de Vasquez of Santa Maria di and all the rest of it. Tell me your tales, senor, she thought. At this point, pretty much anything would do.

LAKE WINDERMERE CUMBRIA

“I’ve pulled Barbara Havers from your… Am I to call this ‘your case’ or what, Thomas?”

Lynley had veered to the side of the road to take the call on his mobile. He was on his way back to Ireleth Hall to go over St. James’s conclusions with Bernard Fairclough. He said, “Isabelle,” on a sigh. “You’re angry with me. With very good reason. I’m terribly sorry.”

“Yes. Well. Aren’t we both. Barbara’s brought Winston into things, by the way. Is that down to you as well? I put a stop to it, but I wasn’t happy to find them cheek-to-cheek over a computer terminal on the twelfth floor.”

Lynley lowered his head, looked at his hand on the steering wheel of the Healey Elliott. He was still wearing his wedding ring and had not been able in the months since Helen’s death even to think about removing it. It was a plain gold band, engraved inside: her initials and his and the date of their marriage.

More than anything on earth, he wanted her back. That desire would continue to govern every decision he made until he was able finally and forever to let her go by embracing the fact of her death instead of struggling with its grim reality day after day. Even when he was with Isabelle, Helen was there: both the spirit of her and the delightful essence of who she had been. This was no one’s fault, least of all Isabelle’s. It was simply, ineluctably, how things were.

He said, “No. I didn’t ask Winston’s help. But please, Isabelle, don’t blame Barbara for this. She’s only been trying to track down some information for me.”

“On this matter in Cumbria.”

“On this matter in Cumbria. I’d thought, as she had time off coming — ”

“Yes. I do see what you thought, Tommy.”

He knew Isabelle was both wounded and hating the fact that she was wounded. When people felt like that, they needed to wound in turn, and he recognised that as well as understood it. But all of this was unnecessary at the moment, and he wanted, perhaps futilely, to make her see that. He said, “None of this was meant as a