Believing the Lie

that this woman’s appearance in my life meant nothing.”

“How will we know that?”

“As I said. We’ll know it if I don’t see her again.”

Lucy Keverne rang off then, amid urgings and murmurings that Alatea was not to worry, was to remain calm, was to have a care. She — Lucy — would be in touch. They would be in touch. Everything would go according to plan.

Alatea sat in the inglenook for several minutes, trying to understand what her options were or whether, at this point, she had any options left. She’d known from the first that the red-haired woman had spelled danger, no matter what Nicholas had said about her. Now that Lucy had seen her in the presence of a man, Alatea finally saw what the danger was. Certain people had no right to live as they wished to live, and she’d had the misfortune of having been born as one of those wretched people. She had great beauty, but it meant nothing. It was, indeed, what had doomed her from the first.

At the far end of the house, she heard a door slam. She frowned, rose quickly, and looked at her watch. Nicky should have gone to work. From there he should have gone to the pele project. But when he called her name and sounded panicked in the calling of it, she knew he’d gone elsewhere.

She hurried to find him. She called out, “Here, Nicky. I’m here.”

They met in the long oaken corridor, where the light was dimmest. She couldn’t read his face. But his voice frightened her, so intense was it. “It’s down to me,” he said. “I’ve ruined everything, Allie.”

Alatea thought of the previous day: Nicholas’s distress and the fact that Scotland Yard was in Cumbria looking into the circumstances of Ian Cresswell’s death. For a terrible moment, her conclusion was that her husband was confessing to his cousin’s murder, and she felt light-headed as she was struck with the knowledge of where this terrible admission could take them should they not be able to hide the truth. If terror had a presence, it was there in the darkened corridor with them.

She took her husband’s arm and said, “Nicky, please. You must tell me very clearly what’s wrong. Then we can decide what to do.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Why? What’s happened? What can be so terrible?”

He leaned against the wall. She held on to his arm, and she said to him, “Is it this Scotland Yard matter? Have you been to speak to your father? Does he actually think…?”

“None of that matters,” Nicholas said. “We’re surrounded by liars, you and I. My mother, my father, probably my sisters, that damn reporter from The Source, that filmmaking woman. Only I didn’t see it because I was so intent on proving myself.” He spat the penultimate word. “Ego, ego, ego,” he said, and with each repetition, he hit his forehead with his fist. “All I cared about was proving to everyone — but especially to them — that I’m not the person they used to know. The drugs are gone, the alcohol is gone, and they’re gone forever. And they were meant to see that. Not only my family but the whole bloody world. So I took every opportunity to show myself off and because of that and nothing else, we’re where we are just now.”

His mention of the filmmaking woman sent fear coursing down Alatea’s spine. More and more, everything was coming down to that woman whom they had blindly admitted into their home with her camera, her questions, and her apocryphal concern. From the first, Alatea had known there was something very wrong about her presence. And now she’d been to Lancaster to see Lucy Keverne. So quick she was to follow the clues. Alatea wouldn’t have thought it was possible. She said, “Where are we, then, ‘just now,’ Nicky?”

He told her and she tried to follow. He spoke of the reporter from The Source and of that man’s belief that the red-haired woman had come from New Scotland Yard. He spoke of his parents and a confrontation he’d had with them that day over this very matter in the presence of his sister Manette and Freddie McGhie. He spoke of his mother and her admission to having brought Scotland Yard into the mix. And he spoke of the surprise of all of them when he railed about the detective who’d been sent into his house, the woman who’d upset Alatea so very much… And that was where he stopped.

Alatea said carefully, “What then, Nicky? Did they say something? Did something more occur?”

His words sounded hollow. “She’s not the Scotland Yard detective at all. I don’t know who she is. But because she’s been hired to come up to Cumbria… to take those photographs… Oh, she claimed she needed none of you, that you weren’t going to be part of that bloody film, but someone had to hire her because there is no filmmaker and she’s not Scotland Yard and do you see why it’s down to me, now, Allie? What’s going to happen is down to me. I thought it was bad enough that my parents wanted a detective to investigate Ian’s death because of me. But then to know that nothing that’s happened here in this house, with that woman, has anything to do with Ian’s death but rather has happened because I agreed, because of my ego… because a stupid story in a stupid magazine gave someone a licence, a clue, a way in…”

She knew, then, where this was heading. She supposed she’d known where it had been heading all along. She murmured the name: “Montenegro. You think she was hired by Raul?”

“Who the hell else could it possibly be? And I did this to you, Allie. How am I supposed to live with that?”

He pushed past her. He made his way along the corridor and into the drawing room. There, she could see him more clearly in what remained of the daylight. He looked ghastly, and for a completely mad moment she felt herself responsible for this although he and not she had been the one to allow the putative documentary scout into their lives. But she couldn’t help herself. It was the role she played in their relationship, just as his role was to need her so desperately that from the first he had questioned nothing about her as long as he’d been assured of her love. Which was what she herself had been looking for: a place of permanence where she could abide, where no one would ask the kind of dangerous questions that grew from a moment’s wonder.

Outside, Alatea could see that the afternoon was bringing on mid-autumn’s dusk. The sky and the bay beneath were identical in colour, with grey clouds encroaching on apricot streaks cast across both water and air by the setting sun.

Nicholas went to the bay window. He sank into one of the two seats there, and he dropped his head into his hands.

“I’ve failed you,” he said. “I’ve failed myself.”

Alatea wanted to shake her husband. She wanted to tell him that this was not the time for him to feel himself the sun round which all the brewing troubles revolved. She wanted to shout that he could not possibly begin to understand how bad things were about to become for both of them. But to do any of that was to waste what little ability she had left to come up with a way to forestall an inevitable conclusion of which he was still entirely ignorant.

Nicholas thought that Raul Montenegro’s reintroduction into her life meant the end of things. He could not possibly have known the truth of the matter: Raul Montenegro was only the beginning.

BLOOMSBURY LONDON

Barbara took herself to Bloomsbury in order to be in his vicinity when she finally heard from Taymullah Azhar. Faced with her need to get more information on the topic of Raul Montenegro — not to mention sorting out everything that there was to sort out about Santa Maria de la Cruz, de los Angeles, y de los Santos — she reckoned an Internet cafe was in order. She’d kill two birds while she waited for Azhar to produce a Spanish translator for her.

Before Nkata had left the Met’s library, he’d said softly, “Look for key words and follow the trail. It’s not brain surgery, Barb. You’ll get better as you go on.” From this, Barbara reckoned that she was to do searches on the names she came across in the articles she had, regardless of what language the articles were in. When she found an Internet cafe not far from the British Museum, then, that was what she did.

It was not the most pleasant environment in which to conduct her Web search. She had stopped to purchase an English/Spanish dictionary on the way to the spot, and now she was sandwiched between an overweight