lowered herself onto it.
Lynley shut the door behind him. There was little light. What there was came from four small windows in the entrance, all of them stained glass in a stylised pattern of red tulips surrounded by greenery, which cast a subtle glow against the skin of the woman — or, he thought, whatever she was — who sat slumped on the bench.
He still wasn’t certain of his facts, but he chose to take a stab at being direct and waiting for the consequences. So he said, “We must speak. I’ve reason to believe you’re Santiago Vasquez y del Torres from Santa Maria de la Cruz, del los Angeles, y de los Santos in Argentina.”
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Is that your true name?”
“Not since Mexico City.”
“Raul Montenegro?”
She reared up at that, her back against the wall. “Has he sent you? Is he here?”
“I’ve not been sent by anyone.”
“I don’t believe you.” She rose then. She hurried past him, nearly losing her footing on the step that gave access through a doorway into a dark corridor panelled, like the entrance, in oak.
He followed her. A short distance along the corridor, she slid open two pocket doors with stained glass panes of lilies surrounded by drooping fronds, and she passed through them and into a hall. It was half restored and half in tatters, an odd mixture of medieval revival and Arts and Crafts, and there she made for an inglenook fireplace, where she sat in the most sheltered corner, drawing her knees up to her face.
“Please leave me,” she said, although she seemed to be speaking more to herself than to him. “Please leave.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
“You must leave. Don’t you see? No one here knows. You must leave at once.”
Lynley thought it unlikely that no one knew. Indeed, he thought it wildly improbable. He said, “I daresay Ian Cresswell knew.”
At that she raised her head. Her eyes were luminous, but her expression was shifting from distraught to confused. “Ian?” she said. “There’s no possible way. How could he ever have known?”
“As a homosexual man, still in the closet, his was a double life. He would have come into contact with people like you. It would have been easier for him than for other people to recognise — ”
“Is that what you think I am?” she asked. “A homosexual man? A transvestite? A cross-dresser?” A dawning knowledge came over her face. She added, “You’re thinking that I killed Ian, aren’t you? Because he… what? He discovered something? Because then he threatened to betray me if I didn’t… what? Pay him money that I didn’t have? Oh my God, had that only been the case.”
Lynley found himself quite down the rabbit hole. The nature of her initial response to the name Santiago Vasquez y del Torres had indicated she was indeed the long-ago adolescent boy who’d run off from the town of his birth and somehow ended up on the arm of one Raul Montenegro. But her reaction to the suggestion that Ian Cresswell had come to know who and what she was was beginning to alter Lynley’s thoughts on the subject.
She said, “Ian didn’t know. No one here knew. Not a single person.”
“Are you telling me that Nicholas doesn’t know?” Lynley stared at her. He tried to take her in. Making sense of what she was telling him demanded he take a leap into an area that was completely unknown to him. He was like a blind man trying to get himself to a hidden doorway in a room cluttered with furniture whose misshapen nature only confused him. He said, “If that’s the case, I don’t quite understand.
“Because,” she said, “I never told him.”
“But I daresay his own eyes…” And then Lynley began to understand what she was actually revealing about herself. If she’d never told Nicholas Fairclough about Santiago Vasquez y del Torres, and if Nicholas Fairclough’s own eyes hadn’t told him, there was only one reason for this.
“Yes,” she said, apparently reading the dawning knowledge on his features. “Only my immediate family in Argentina know, along with one cousin, Elena Maria. And Elena Maria, she always knew. Right from the first, even when we were children.” Alatea pushed her hair from her face, a distinctly feminine gesture that was discommoding to Lynley, putting him off balance, as perhaps she intended. “She shared with me: her dolls when we were children, her clothes and her makeup when we grew older.” Alatea looked away for a moment, then back at him directly, her expression earnest as she said, “Can you understand this? It was a way for me just to be. It was the
“A woman.” Lynley finally put it into words. “Trapped in a man’s body. But still a woman.”
“Yes,” Alatea agreed.
Lynley took this in. He could see that she was waiting for his reaction, perhaps steeling herself to whatever it would be: revulsion, confusion, curiosity, disgust, pity, abhorrence, interest, acceptance. She’d been one of five brothers in a world where being male equated with being accorded privileges that women had had to fight for and were still fighting for. She would know that most men would never comprehend why any man from that world would wish to change the gender into which he’d been born. Yet this, apparently, was what she had done, as she went on to clarify, saying:
“Even when I was Santiago, I was a woman. I had the body of a male. But I was not male. To live like that… belonging nowhere… having a body that is not your own body… so that you look upon it with loathing and would do anything to alter it in order to be who you are…”
“So you became a woman,” Lynley said.
“I transitioned,” she said. “This is what it’s called. I left Santa Maria because I wished to live as a woman and could not do it there. Because of my father, his position, our family. Many things. And then came Raul. He had the money I needed to become a woman and he had his own needs. So we made a deal, he and I. No one else was involved and no one else knew.” She looked at him, then. Over the years, he’d seen the various expressions that flitted across the faces of desperate, crafty, or sly people when they attempted to play with the truth. They always thought they could hide who they were, but only the sociopath ever succeeded. Because the reality was that eyes were indeed windows into the soul, and only the sociopath was soulless.
There was a bench seat opposite Alatea’s position in the inglenook. Lynley went to it and sat. He said, “The death of Ian Cresswell — ”
“I had nothing to do with that. If I were to kill anyone, it would be Raul Montenegro, but I don’t want to kill him. I never wanted to kill him. I just wanted to flee him, and even then it wasn’t because Raul’s intention was to betray who I am. He wouldn’t have done that because he needed to have a woman on his arm. Not a real woman, you see, but a man who could pass as a woman, to safeguard his reputation in his world. What he didn’t understand and what I didn’t tell him was that I didn’t want to pass as a woman because I already was one. I only needed surgery to make it so.”
“He paid for it?”
“In exchange, he thought, for the perfect relationship between two men, one of whom looks to all of the world like a woman.”
“A homosexual relationship.”
“A form of one. Which really cannot exist when one of the partners is not of the same sex, you see. Our problem — mine and Raul’s — was that we did not clearly understand each other before we began this… this venture. Or perhaps I deliberately misunderstood what he wanted from me because I was desperate and he was my only way out.”
“Why do you think he’s pursuing you now?”
She said without irony or self-congratulation, “Wouldn’t you, Thomas Lynley? He spent a great deal of money to make me, and he’s had little enough return on his investment.”
“What does Nicholas know?”
“Nothing.”
“How can that be?”
“I had the final surgery many years ago in Mexico City. When I knew I could not be what Raul wanted me to be, I left him. And Mexico. I was here and there, never remaining any place long. Finally, I was in Utah. And so was Nicky.”
