Believing the Lie

their pots on the topic of Nick, Lucy, and Alatea. Not to mix too many metaphors, Zed thought, but the truth behind his kind of journalism was that one story always led to another like day to night to day again. First, though, he had to get the story he had thus far onto the front page of the paper. And oh what a story it was: Scotland Yard in Cumbria to investigate a murder only to stumble upon a nefarious plot in which a duplicitous wife meets a scheming young playwright willing to sell off her womb like a room to let. There were shades of prostitution here as well, Zed reckoned. For if Lucy Keverne was selling one part of her body, didn’t it stand to reason that at one time or another she’d been selling other parts of her body as well?

Since Zed’s route took him by the Crow and Eagle, he pulled into its car park. They’d have an Internet connection here, wireless or otherwise, because how likely was it that a hotel hoping to stay in business in this day and age existed sans a connection to the Web? No hotel at all. He put his money on that.

He had no laptop with him, but that wasn’t going to matter. He intended to hand over a wad of cash for the use of the hotel’s computer. At this time of year there weren’t going to be hordes of potential tourists sending enquiries to the place via e-mails needing instantaneous answers. Twenty minutes online was all he required. He’d fine-tune the piece once Rod read it. And Rod would read it. For as soon as Zed was finished with the piece, he’d fire it off to his editor and ring him as well.

Zed zipped into the car park and gathered up his notes. These he always carried with him. They were his stock in trade, his jewels, his little precious. Where he went, they went, for the simple reason that one never knew where a story would appear.

Inside the place, he approached the reception desk with his wallet out and his money ready. He counted out one hundred pounds. He’d put it on his expense account later. Right now, though, there was a story waiting.

He leaned over her desk and put the money onto the keyboard of the young woman’s computer. Its screen was on, but she hadn’t been using it. Instead, she’d been yammering on the phone to someone apparently requiring information about the exact dimensions of every bedroom in the place. She looked at Zed, then at the money, then at Zed. She said, “Moment, please,” into the phone and held the earpiece against her bony shoulder as she waited for Zed’s explanation.

He gave it quickly enough. And she was quick enough to decide. She rang off on whoever had been at the other end of her phone conversation, scooped up the money, and said, “Let voice mail take the calls if any come in. You won’t say …?” and she gestured round to complete her question.

“You’ve gone to see about a room for me,” he assured her. “I’ve just booked in and you’re letting me use this thing to check for crucial messages. Twenty minutes?”

She nodded. She pocketed the ten- and twenty-pound notes and headed for the stairs to play her part. He waited till she’d mounted them and made the turn round the landing before he began to write.

The story led in every direction. Its parts were like tributaries pouring into the Amazon, and all he had to do was paddle up them. He began to do so.

He went first with the Scotland Yard angle and the irony attached to it: A detective sent up to Cumbria to investigate the drowning of Ian Cresswell ends up stumbling upon an illegal surrogacy deal that could — bet on it — lead to an entire illegal surrogacy ring that fed on the desperation of couples struggling to conceive. Then he touched on the artistic angle: The struggling playwright so desperate to support herself that she was willing to sell her body in pursuit of the higher calling of her art. He moved directly from there to the deception angle and was pounding away at the tale of Nick Fairclough’s ignorance in the manner of his wife’s deal with Lucy Keverne when his cell phone rang.

Yaffa! he thought. He needed to tell her that all was well. She would be worrying about him. She would want to encourage him. She would have words of wisdom and he wanted to hear them and more than that he wanted to interrupt her with the news of his impending triumph.

“Got it,” he said. “Darling, it’s hot.”

“I didn’t know you and I were that close,” Rodney Aronson said. “Where the bloody hell are you? Why aren’t you back in London by now?”

Zed stopped typing. “I’m not in London,” he said, “because I’ve got the story. All of it. From bloody alpha to sodding omega. Hold the front page because you’re going to want this plastered across it.”

“What is it?” Rodney didn’t sound like a man experiencing a come-to-Jesus moment.

Zed rattled it all off: the surrogacy deal, the starving artist, the husband in ignorance. He saved the very best for last: the humble reporter — that would be me, he pointed out — working hand-in-glove with the detective from New Scotland Yard.

“She and I cornered the woman in Lancaster,” Zed announced. “And once we had her — ”

“Hang on,” Rodney said. “‘She and I’?”

“Right. The Scotland Yard detective and I. She’s called DS Cotter. Detective sergeant. She’s the one investigating the Cresswell death. Only she got sidetracked onto Nick Fairclough and his wife and as it turned out, that was a dynamite direction. Not for her, of course, but for me.”

Rodney said nothing at his end. Zed waited for the kudos to flow. He waited in vain. For a moment he thought they’d been cut off. He said, “Rod? You there?”

Rodney finally said, “You are one fucking loser, Zedekiah. You know that, don’t you? One fucking class-A loser.”

“Sorry?”

“There is no Detective Cotter, you idiot.”

“But — ”

“Detective Inspector Lynley is up there, the bloke whose wife took a bullet from a twelve-year-old kid last winter. Sound familiar? It was front-page news for two weeks.” He didn’t wait for Zed to make a reply. Instead he went on with, “Jesus, you are pathetic, you know? Get back to town. Collect your wages. You and The Source are through.”

ARNSIDE CUMBRIA

Alatea saw them in the driveway. Their body language told her everything. This was not a conversation between strangers who happen to come upon each other in passing at the same destination. This was an exchange between colleagues, friends, or associates. The exchange was one of information shared. She could tell this much when the woman tilted her head towards Arnside House in the manner of someone speaking about it. Or, more likely, speaking about a person within it. Or, most likely, speaking about her. About Alatea, once Santiago. About her past and what would now be her future.

Alatea didn’t wait to see anything more pass between the woman and the man from Scotland Yard. Her world was collapsing so quickly around her that the only idea she had in her mind was flight. She would have run like a lioness in pursuit of food if she had a single place she could go, but her routes were limited so she was forced to calm herself long enough to think, just to think.

The woman needed confirmation of Alatea’s identity. The detective, obviously, would give it, courtesy of Alatea herself, who could have denied, who should have denied, but who had not thought quickly enough to deny. That much was established, for what else could they have to discuss with each other? The only questions that possibly remained were those that Alatea herself could ask. Had the woman outside with the Scotland Yard detective sent photos of Alatea to Raul Montenegro already? If she had not, was she open to bribery, a payment for maintaining silence, for reporting to Raul that Santiago Vasquez y del Torres, who had become Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, who had married Nicholas Fairclough to escape a past that tied her to a man she had learned to hate, was not in Cumbria, was not in England, was nowhere in the UK to be found? If she was open to bribery, Alatea was safe. Only for now, of course. But now was all she had.

She ran to the stairway. She flew to the bedroom she shared with Nicholas and from beneath the bed, she brought out a locked box. A key from her dressing table gained her access, and within the box she had money. Not a lot, not a fortune, not what Raul was paying to find her, surely. But along with her jewellery, perhaps there was enough to tempt this woman who was closing in now, who was hearing the truth from the detective even as Alatea gathered what she could to keep that truth from spilling out of the hidden corners of her life.