Believing the Lie

Alatea Fairclough had probably gone through exactly what she herself was going through.

Deborah could see at last why the South American woman had been so fearful of her presence and so reluctant to talk to her. She and her husband were set to pay someone to carry a baby for them and for all she knew, Deborah had been sent there to Cumbria by Lancaster University’s reproduction scientists to sniff out the truth behind her arrangement with Lucy Keverne before they went forward with all the procedures required for a surrogate pregnancy. And there’d be a handful of them, no doubt about it. None of which would begin until the scientists and the doctors were certain about Alatea Fairclough and the surrogate.

So Deborah had been dogging the poor woman since the moment she herself had set foot in Cumbria when all along, she and Alatea Fairclough had in common the most agonising of desires, something granted so easily to other women, something often even deemed a “mistake” in the lives of other women as well.

Deborah realised she owed apologies everywhere for how she’d conducted herself over the past few days. She had to begin those apologies with one to Alatea Fairclough. Before leaving Cumbria for the south, she resolved, that was what she was going to do.

MILNTHORPE CUMBRIA

So much of what Zed had said to the Scotland Yard detective was bluster, and he knew it. After he dropped her off at her hotel, he didn’t return to Windermere. Instead, he went across the main road through Milnthorpe and made his way to the street that ran east to west along the market square. There was a Spar shop at a junction where another street led off to a grim-looking housing estate of unremittingly grey roughcast, and he parked nearby and went inside. It was cluttered and hot and it suited both his mood and his thoughts.

He browsed aimlessly for a few minutes before caving in and buying a copy of The Source. This he carried the short distance to Milnthorpe Chippy, which stood not far from an impressive butcher shop in whose front window an array of venison pies was displayed.

Inside the chippy, Zed bought a double order of haddock and chips and a Fanta Orange. Once he had his food arranged on the table in front of him, he unfolded The Source, and he girded himself to look at the day’s lead story and, worse, at its byline.

That louse Mitchell Corsico had both. It was a nothing story, a real piece of rubbish: A very minor member of the royal family had been outed with a bastard child who was mixed-race, photos included. She was a girl. She was five years old. She was also pretty in that way that mixed-race people often are, having received the best of every chromosome from her progenitors. Her royal father could not accede to the throne unless the present monarch and family and extended family were all partying on a ship in the Atlantic the moment that it hit an iceberg, and that detail robbed the story not only of legs but also toes. However, this fact clearly was of no matter to Mitchell Corsico or, obviously, to Rodney Aronson, who would have made the decision to give the tale the front page, no matter how minor the minor member of the royal family was.

The front page suggested this could well be the explosive revelation of the year, the decade, or even the century, and The Source was squeezing it like the udders of a dying cow. Rodney had given it the full treatment: three-inch headline, photos grainy and otherwise, the byline for Mitch, and a jump to page 8 — now that said volumes about what Rodney really thought he was offering for public consumption, didn’t it? — where the story went into the uninspiring background of the child’s mother and the even less inspiring background of the minor royal, who, unlike a lot of the monarchical family, at least had been born with a chin.

Of course, the tabloid had to take care, political correctness being all the rage. But really, it was a who- bloody-gives-a-toss piece to offer to the public anyway. Zed’s conclusion was that it had to have been a very slow day in the sewers for this to be what Rodney had come up with.

Zed reckoned this might actually put him in a good position to snag the front page when he lined up his Cumbria facts and worked them into a story. So he pushed The Source to one side, doused his haddock and chips with malt vinegar, popped open his Fanta Orange, and began to sort through what he’d gathered on Nick Fairclough and the delectable Alatea.

Big was not a word that could be used to describe the story he had. The Scotland Yard detective had been right in that. Nick Fairclough and his wife were going to pay a woman more than just her expenses to have a baby for them, and while this wasn’t legal, it also wasn’t a story. The question was how to make it into one, a sensational one, or at least a member-of-the-royal-family-has-a-bastard-child one.

Zed considered his options, which were all those details he had to work with. Essentially, he had eggs, sperm, man, woman, another woman, and money. Whose eggs, whose sperm, which man, which woman, and whose money? were the various topics to be massaged into an epic piece of journalism.

Here, too, there were possibilities. Perhaps poor Alatea’s eggs were not good enough (was there such a thing? he wondered) to do what they needed to do, such as to drop (did they drop?) into her wherever to meet up with Nick’s you-know-what. Since they weren’t good enough, someone else’s eggs had to be used. But Nick and Alatea didn’t want the family wise to this for reasons of …what? Inheritance? What were the laws on inheritance these days? Was there an inheritance involved, anyway, beyond a firm manufacturing toilets and other unappealing products, the mention of which could turn the story into a real boffola with Zed the butt of every joke in Fleet Street? Or perhaps Nick’s swimmers weren’t up to the job? Years of drug use had rendered them too weak to make the journey or to do much poking when they reached the destination? So someone else’s swimmers were being used with the resulting baby being passed off as a bona fide Fairclough? That would be nice.

Or perhaps it was all about the money that was going to be paid to Lucy Keverne? With Nick’s history, wasn’t it possible that he was selling a little something on the side — other than toilets — to collect enough money to pay the woman? Could the doctors be on the take as well? That was another possibility.

By the time Zed had finished his double order of haddock and chips, he’d reached the conclusion that the best angle from which to write the tawdry tale of buying a baby-making machine — which was how he was going to sell it to Rodney — was to begin with Nick Fairclough. His reasoning behind this was simple enough. He knew human nature, perhaps not perfectly but well enough. And what he knew about human nature told him that the moment he and the Scotland Yard detective had left Lucy Keverne, she’d picked up the phone to ring Alatea Fairclough and to let her know the worst.

That left him with Nick and putting a little pressure on him for the real tale behind the deal with the woman in Lancaster.

He gathered up his copy of The Source and returned to his car. He glanced at his watch and saw from the time of day that Nicholas Fairclough would probably be at the Middlebarrow Pele Project. So to the pele project Zed would go.

His route took him past the Crow and Eagle and onto the route that led to Arnside. He zipped alongside Milnthorpe Sands, which were indeed sands at the moment — albeit soupy ones — because the tide was gone as if it had never been, leaving the River Kent a narrow gleam of water at the edge of which curlews, plovers, and redshanks high-stepped in their endless search for food. Beyond, from the direction of Humphrey Head, the fog was beginning to creep towards the shore. The mist was heavy, and the air was laden. Moisture clung to cottage windows and dripped from trees. The road was wet and slick.

At the pele project, Zed parked not far from the tower itself. He saw no one working at present. But when he got out of the car into the damp air, he heard at once a burst of raucous male laughter, and he followed this to its source, which turned out to be the dining tent. Within, all of the men were gathered. They sat at the tables, but they were not eating. Their attention was fixed on an older bloke who stood before them in a posture of ease, with one foot up on a chair and his elbow resting on his knee. He appeared to be telling the others some sort of tale. The others appeared to be enjoying it mightily. They were also enjoying cups of coffee and tea, and their cigarette smoke made the atmosphere eye stinging.

Zed clocked Nick Fairclough at the same instant that Nick Fairclough clocked him. He’d been sitting at the far side of the tent, his chair tipped back and his feet on the tabletop, but he dropped the chair legs to the ground as his eyes met Zed’s. He came rapidly over to the tent’s entrance.

He took Zed by the arm and directed him outside. He said, “It’s not an open meeting,” and he didn’t sound