Believing the Lie

“Who is she, then?”

“She’s Santiago.”

Lynley tried to take this in. Around him, a cleaner was industriously mopping the floor, casting meaningful glances in his direction as if with the hope he’d vacate the premises, giving access to the floor beneath his chair. He said, “Barbara, what on earth do you mean?”

“I mean exactly what I say, sir. Alatea is Santiago. Santiago is Alatea. Either that or they are identical twins, and if I remember my biology correctly, there is no such thing as identical twins of the male-female sort. A biological impossibility.”

“So we’re talking about… What, exactly, are we talking about?”

“Cross-dressing, sir. Impeccable female impersonation. A tasty secret one would hope to keep from the family, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would say, yes. In certain circumstances. But in these circumstances — ”

Havers cut in. “Sir, here’s how it is: The trail on Santiago goes dead when he’s about fifteen years old. That’s when, I daresay, he started passing himself off as someone called Alatea. He ran away from home round then as well. I got that, among other details, from a phone call to the family.”

She began to tell him what she’d learned from her earlier meeting with the graduate student Engracia after that call the young woman had placed to Argentina: the family wanted Alatea to come home; her father and her brothers now understood; Carlos — “He’s the priest,” Havers reminded Lynley — made them understand; everyone was praying for Alatea’s return; they’d been searching for years; she must not continue to run; Elena Maria’s heart was broken-

“Who’s Elena Maria?” Lynley felt as if his head were filling with wet cotton wool.

“Cousin,” Havers said. “Way I figure it, Santiago did a runner because he liked to cross-dress, which — let’s face it — probably didn’t go down a treat with his brothers and his dad. Latin types, you know? Macho and all that, if you’ll pardon the stereotyping. Anyway, somewhere along the line he met up with Raul Montenegro — ”

“Who the dickens — ”

“Rich bloke in Mexico City. Rolling in enough lolly to build a concert hall and name it for his mum. Anyway, Santiago meets him, and Raul likes him, as in Raul likes him, because Raul likes to bat for the same side, if you know what I mean. And he prefers his partners young and nubile. From what I’ve seen in photos, he prefers them well oiled as well, but that’s neither here nor there, eh? Anyway, we’ve got heaven in a basket for these two blokes. On the one hand we have Santiago, who likes dressing up and making himself up like a woman, which, over time, he’s learned to do bloody well. On the other hand, we have Raul, who meets Santiago and has no problem whatsoever with Santiago’s dressing habits since he — Raul — is bent like a twig but would rather not have anyone actually know that. So he takes up with Santiago, who, when he’s fixed himself up, looks like a gorgeous dolly bird, and Raul can even take him out in public. They keep company, so to speak, until something better comes along.”

“That something better being…?”

“Nicholas Fairclough, I expect.”

Lynley shook his head. It was all so wildly improbable. He said, “Havers, tell me: Are you surmising all this, or do you actually have any real facts?”

She was unoffended. “Sir, it all fits. Santiago’s mum knew exactly who we were talking about when Engracia asked her about Alatea. She didn’t know who Engracia was other than someone looking for Alatea, so she also wouldn’t have known that we’d already turned up the fact that there were only sons in the family. Since we knew there were only sons, Engracia and I both thought Alatea was someone else in the extended family — just like you did — but when I followed the trail on Santiago and then went back in time with Alatea’s modeling pictures to find the youngest ones of her… Believe me, sir, she’s Santiago. He ran off to take up life as a woman with no one the wiser because of how he looks, and once he met Raul Montenegro, he was set. Things probably just went swimmingly between them — Alatea and Raul — till Nicholas Fairclough came along.”

Lynley had to admit there were possibilities in this. For Nicholas Fairclough, former drug addict and drunk, was probably not going to want his parents to know that he was now living with a man posing as his wife, with a false marriage certificate the only documentation that would give this person the right to remain in the country anyway.

“Could Ian Cresswell somehow have discovered all this?” Lynley said, more to himself than to Havers.

“Give that barker a bone,” was how Havers put her agreement to this consideration. “’Cause all things considered, sir, when he first saw her, who’d have known what he was looking at better than Ian Cresswell?”

MILNTHORPE CUMBRIA

Deborah was feeling rotten even before the receptionist at the Crow and Eagle handed her Tommy’s message. For everything that she’d been trying to do was falling apart at the seams.

She’d tried to draw the horrible reporter from The Source along the primrose path of there being no story to be got from what they learned from Lucy Keverne in Lancaster. Since Zed Benjamin still thought of Deborah as the Scotland Yard detective he’d assumed her to be from the first, she had hoped that when she said, “Well, my work here is finished,” he’d go along and conclude his own work was finished in Cumbria as well. After all, if the putative detective had decided there was no case to answer, it stood to reason there was also no story.

But that was not how Zed Benjamin looked at matters, as things turned out. He said the story was just beginning.

This had filled Deborah with horror at what she might be exposing Alatea and Nicholas Fairclough to, so she had asked Zed Benjamin what sort of story he thought he had. “Two people want to pay a woman more than they’re supposed to pay her to be a surrogate mother for their child,” she pointed out. “How many people like that are there in the country? How many people don’t have a friend or a relative who’s willing to be a surrogate for free, just for compassion’s sake? It’s a ridiculous law and there’s no story to write.”

But again, that wasn’t how Zed Benjamin saw it. The law itself was the story, he declared. It produced desperate women looking for desperate remedies using desperate means to attain them.

Deborah said, “Pardon me for saying so, Mr. Benjamin, but I hardly think The Source is going to issue a clarion call for women’s reproductive issues upon your recommendation.”

“We’ll see,” he’d promised.

They’d parted ways at the door to her lodgings, and she’d trudged inside, only to be given a sealed envelope with her name written on the outside in a cursive she recognised from years of receiving letters from Tommy while she studied photography in California.

The message was brief: Deb, What can I say? Tommy. And it was true enough. What could he say? She’d lied to him, she’d ignored his phone call on her mobile, and now he was as upset with her as Simon was. What a mess she’d made of things.

She went to her room and began to pack up her belongings. As she did so, she considered the various ways in which she’d utterly bollocksed up everything. First, there was the matter of Simon’s brother, David, whom she’d strung along by refusing to make up her mind about the open adoption he was trying to arrange purely out of a desire to help them. Then there was Simon, whom she’d alienated in any number of ways but particularly by being so bloody minded about remaining in Cumbria when it was clear that their real business in the county — which had been to assist Tommy with his enquiry into Ian Cresswell’s death — was completed. Finally, there was Alatea Fairclough, whose hopes for a surrogacy were now probably dashed by Deborah’s bashing into her private affairs when all she wanted was what Deborah herself wanted: the chance to bring a child into the world.

Deborah stopped packing for a moment and lowered herself to the bed. She thought about how much of her life had been dominated over the last few years by something completely out of her control. It was beyond her power to grant her own wish. She could do nothing to make herself a mother simply because she wanted to be one.