Believing the Lie

his confusion about his father and Kaveh, he’s not been searching at all.”

“Then…?” She twigged. “He’s been sent this stuff?”

“There’s a trail of e-mails from someone calling himself Toy4You. They lead all the way back to a chat room for photography. I should guess that various routes through that chat room lead on to types of photography or photographic models or quirky photography or nude photography or any number of potential subjects from which users can then go into more-private chat rooms for more-private chats. The Web is called the Web for a reason. Threads lead everywhere. You just have to follow them.”

“What does this Toy4You have to say?”

“What you’d expect of a slow seduction. ‘Bit of harmless fun,’ ‘shows affection,’ ‘between consenting adults, of course,’ ‘must be of age,’ and then the switch to ‘Have a look at this and tell me what you think,’ ‘would you ever consider,’ et cetera.”

“Freddie, what’s Tim saying in reply?”

Freddie tapped his fingers on the desk. He appeared to be trying to formulate an answer. Either that or he was attempting to put together the pieces. Manette prompted him by saying his name again. He finally said, “Tim actually appears to be striking a bargain with this person.”

“With Toy4You?”

“Hmm. Yes. The bloke — I assume it’s a bloke — says in the last one, ‘You do something like this and I’ll do whatever you want.’”

“What’s ‘this’?” Manette asked, although she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

“He’s referring to another video attached.”

“Do I want to know?”

“Garden of Gethsemane,” Freddie said. “But the Roman soldiers don’t make any arrest.”

Manette said, “My God.” And then with her eyes widening and her hand lifted to cover her mouth, “‘I’ll do anything you want’? Freddie, oh my God, do you think Tim arranged for this person to kill Ian?”

Freddie rose quickly, the chair scraping the floor. He came to her and said, “No, no,” and touched her cheek briefly. “That last one… It postdates Ian’s drowning. Whatever Tim wants, it’s something besides his father’s death. And it looks to me like he’s going to receive it in exchange for being part of a pornographic film.”

“But what could he want? And where is he? Freddie, we have to find him.”

“We do indeed.”

“But how…?” Then she recalled the map she’d seen and she rustled for it again among the items that had been on Tim’s desk. She said, “Wait, wait,” and then she found it. But a glance told her the map was going to be of little use. For it was an enlarged section of some unnamed town and unless Freddie knew where Lake, Oldfield, Alexandra, Woodland, and Holly Roads were, they were going to have to waste time trying to rustle up a street atlas, sort out how to use this information on the Internet, or perform some magical feat to discover what town in Cumbria contained these places.

She said, “It’s nothing, nothing. It’s just streets, Freddie,” and she shoved the map at him. She said, “What next? We must find him. We must.”

He gave the map a glance and folded it quickly. He unplugged the laptop and said, “Let’s be off.”

“Where?” she asked. “Where on earth… Do you know?” God, she thought, why had she ever divorced this man?

“No idea,” he said. “But I’ve a notion who will.”

ARNSIDE CUMBRIA

Lynley made excellent time. The Healey Elliott had been designed originally as a racing car, and despite its age it did not disappoint. He had no flashing lights to use, but the time of day and year did not make them necessary. He was coursing off the motorway in an hour’s time, at which point the slickness of the streets and the heaviness of the mist encouraged him to have care with regard to his speed.

The difficult bit was getting from the motorway over to Milnthorpe and from Milnthorpe to Arnside. Off the motorway, the roads were narrow, not one of them was straight, there were few lay-bys into which slow drivers could pull to allow him to pass, and every farmer in Cumbria appeared to have chosen this day to move his tractor like a lumbering pachyderm from one spot to another.

Lynley felt a sense of rising urgency. It had to do with Deborah. God only knew what she would stumble into at this point, but she was obstinate enough to do something mad that would put her straight into the path of danger. How, he wondered, did Simon manage not to wring her neck?

Along the route from Milnthorpe to Arnside, at last, he saw the fog. Unlike the little cats’ feet of the poem, this bank of grey was moving across the empty plain of Morecambe Bay’s ebbed tide with startling swiftness, as if pulled along by unseen horses dragging a mantle of coal smoke behind them.

He slowed at Arnside village. He’d not been to Arnside House, but he knew where it was from Deborah’s description. He passed a pier jutting into the wide and waterless channel of the estuarial River Kent and he braked to allow a woman with a pushchair to cross the street, a child hanging on to her trousers with a mittened hand and otherwise bundled against the chill. As they crossed — taking their bloody time about it, he thought, and why was it that when one was in a hurry, all occasions conspired against one? — he read the sign warning all the dangers of this place. Fast Rising Tides! it shouted, Quicksands! Hidden Channels! Danger! Beware! Why on earth, he wondered futilely, would someone want to bring up children here when one wrong move at one wrong time of day would snatch them towards a watery end?

The woman and child crossed safely to the pavement on the other side of the road. He went on. Through the village, down the Promenade with its display of Victorian mansions lined up on a rise of land overlooking the water, and then he was on the drive into Arnside House, where the Promenade ended. The building was set at an angle that made the most of its view, across an expanse of lawn from the water. That view was obscured today as the fog became more and more like wet cotton wool, once singed by fire.

Arnside House itself looked deserted, with no lights burning in the windows despite the gloom of the day. He couldn’t decide if this was bad or good. No car meant, at least, there was a very good chance that Deborah had not bulldogged her way into a bad situation. The best scenario of all would be no one at home, but he couldn’t rely on that.

He braked the Healey Elliott at the top of the driveway, where the gravel shaped into a winnow for parking. When he got out of the car, he found that the air had altered in the few hours he’d been gone. It felt nearly tubercular in his lungs. He moved through it like someone separating curtains, along the path to the heavy front door.

He heard the bell ring somewhere inside the place. He expected no answer, but this was not the case. He heard footsteps against a stone entry, and the door swung open. Then he faced the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

He was unprepared for the shock of Alatea Fairclough: the tawny skin, the wealth of wild, curly hair captured in tortoiseshell slides, the large dark eyes and sensuous mouth, the shape of a woman who was entirely woman. Only her hands betrayed her, and even then it was only by their size.

He had no trouble at all seeing how Alatea and Nicholas Fairclough had duped everyone around them. Had Barbara Havers not sworn this woman was, in fact, Santiago Vasquez y del Torres, Lynley would not have believed it. Truth to tell, he still couldn’t. So he was careful with his words.

“Mrs. Fairclough?” he said. When she nodded, he took out his identification. He said, “DI Thomas Lynley, New Scotland Yard. I’ve come to talk to you about Santiago Vasquez y del Torres.”

She went white so quickly that Lynley thought she would faint. She took a step away from the door.

He repeated the name. “Santiago Vasquez y del Torres. It seems the name’s familiar to you.”

She felt behind her for the oak bench that ran the length of one of the panelled walls of the entrance. She