Believing the Lie

Mother just love hearing that?”

Bernard said, “Do your worst, Mignon. It is, I think, what you’ve always wanted.”

“I hate you,” she said.

“As always,” he replied.

“Did you hear me? I hate you.”

“For my sins,” Bernard said, “believe me, I know. And perhaps I deserve it. Now leave my house.”

There was a moment of impasse during which Manette thought her sister might refuse. Mignon stared at her father as if waiting for something that Manette knew very well was never going to appear. Finally, she shoved her zimmer to one side. She smiled, rose, and strolled easily out of her father’s life.

When the door was closed upon her, Bernard took a linen handkerchief from his pocket. He wiped his glasses with it, then he used it against his face. Manette could see that his hands were shaking. Everything was on the line for him, not the least a marriage of more than forty years.

He finally looked from Manette to Freddie and back to Manette. He said, “I’m so sorry, my dear. There are so many things…”

“I’m not sure they matter any longer.” How odd, Manette thought. She’d waited most of her life for this moment: with herself in a superior position and Bernard made vulnerable, with Bernard looking at her and actually seeing her, not as a daughter, not as a substitute for the kind of son he’d wished for, but as a person in her own right, fully capable of anything he himself could do. She no longer knew why all of that had been so important to her. She only knew that she didn’t feel what she’d expected to feel with his recognition of her washing over her at last.

Bernard nodded. He said, “Freddie…”

Freddie said, “If I’d been told, I would have probably stopped it all from happening. But then, I don’t know, do I? I’m not sure.”

“You’re a good, honest man, Fred. Stay that way.” Bernard excused himself and went to the stairs. He climbed them heavily and Manette and Freddie listened to his footfalls. Eventually, they faded. A door closed quietly somewhere above them.

“We should probably leave, old girl,” Freddie said to Manette. “If you’re able, that is.”

He came to her and she allowed him to help her to her feet, not because she needed it but because it felt good to feel someone solid at her side. They left the great hall and went outdoors. It wasn’t until they were in the car and heading along the drive in the direction of the gate that she began to weep. She tried to do this silently, but Freddie glanced in her direction. He pulled the car over at once and stopped. Gently, he took her into his arms.

He said, “It’s a tough one. Seeing one’s parents like that. Knowing how one has demolished the other. I expect your mother knew something wasn’t quite right, but perhaps it was easier just to ignore it. That’s the way these things are sometimes.”

She cried against his shoulder but she shook her head.

He said, “What? Well, of course, your sister’s mad as a rabid dog, but there’s nothing much new in that, is there? I do wonder, though, how you managed to emerge so… well, so normal, Manette. It’s rather miraculous when you think about it.”

At this, she wept harder. It was all too late: what she now knew, what she should have seen, and what she finally understood.

LAKE WINDERMERE CUMBRIA

Lynley found Valerie Fairclough walking along one of the paths already laid out in the unfinished children’s garden. When he joined her, she began to speak as if they had been interrupted in the midst of a conversation about this very spot. She pointed out where work on the wrecked ship had already begun and told him about the ropes, swings, and sand that would be a feature of it. She indicated the spot designated for monkey bars and a roundabout. She took him past the smaller children’s section, where horses, kangaroos, and large frogs already stood on their heavy spring bases, waiting for riders who would laugh and crow with the simple fun of bouncing upon them. There would be a fort as well, she said, because boys loved forts to play soldiers in, didn’t they? And for the girls there would be a playhouse stocked with everything in miniature that one would find in a real house because wasn’t the truth of the matter — and all sexism aside — that girls liked to play inside houses and make up games in which they were married with children and a husband who came home at night and presided over dinner?

She laughed mirthlessly when she said that last bit. Then she went on to say that the children’s area would be, in short, every child’s dream place to play.

Lynley thought it all quite odd. What she was building was more suitable for a public park than a private home. He wondered what her expectation of its use really was, whether she had a larger picture in mind, one that meant opening Ireleth Hall to the public in the manner of so many great houses across the country. It was quite as if she’d known an enormous change was coming and was preparing for it.

He said to her, “Why did you arrange for me to come to Cumbria?”

Valerie looked at him. At sixty-seven years old, she was a striking woman. In her youth she would have possessed great beauty. Beauty and money: a powerful combination. She could have chosen from a score of men of similar background to her own, but she had not done so.

“Because I’ve suspected for quite some time.”

“What?”

“Bernard. What he was up to. I didn’t know for certain that he was ‘up to’ Vivienne Tully, of course, but I probably should have realised that as well. When he didn’t mention her after the second time she and I met, those trips to London of his that became more frequent, so many things associated with his foundation that needed his attention … There are always signs, Inspector. There are always clues, red flags, whatever you wish to call them. But it’s generally easier to ignore them than to face the unknown that’s going to arise out of the wreckage of a forty-two-year marriage.” She picked up a discarded plastic coffee cup, something left by one of the workers. She frowned at this and crushed it into her pocket. She shaded her eyes and looked out at the lake, at storm clouds that were brewing on the hills to the west. “I am surrounded by liars and knaves. I wanted to smoke them out of their hiding places. You” — and here she cast him a small smile — “you were my fire, Inspector.”

“What of Ian?”

“Poor Ian.”

“Mignon could have killed him. She had motive, a very strong motive if it comes to that. By your own admission, she was in the boathouse. She could have gone in there earlier and loosened the stones somehow, in an undetectable way. She could even have been in there when he returned. She could have pulled him from the scull, pushed him from it…”

“Inspector, that sort of revenge is far beyond Mignon’s ability to plan. Besides, she would have seen no immediate monetary gain in that. And the only thing Mignon has ever been able to see clearly is the monetary gain of the moment.” She turned from the lake, then, and looked at Lynley. She said, “I knew the stones were loose. I’d told Ian as much, more than once. He and I were the only ones who used the boathouse regularly, so I told no one else. There was no need. I warned him to take care getting in and out of his scull. He said not to worry, that he would take care and when he had a moment, he’d fix the dock. But I think that night he had other things on his mind. He must have done. It was quite out of the ordinary that he came to row that late anyway. I think he wasn’t paying close enough attention. It was always an accident, Inspector. I knew that from the first.”

Lynley considered this. “And that filleting knife I found in the water with the stones?”

“I threw it there. Just to keep you here, in case you decided too soon it was an accident.”

“I see,” he said.

“Are you terribly angry?”

“I ought to be.” They turned and headed back towards the house. Above the walls of the topiary garden, the towering mass of shaped shrubbery loomed and behind it Ireleth Hall itself, sand coloured and teeming with history. He said, “Didn’t Bernard think it unusual?”