Believing the Lie

She was back down stairs when the expected knock sounded against the front door. The woman would not know Alatea had seen her in conversation with Inspector Lynley. For a moment this gave Alatea the upper hand, and she intended to use it.

She pressed her slick hands against her trouser legs. She closed her eyes briefly and said, “Dios mio por favor,” and then she opened the door with as much assurance as she could muster.

The red-haired woman spoke first, saying, “Mrs. Fairclough, I’ve not been truthful with you. May I come in and explain?”

“What do you want from me?” For her part, Alatea was stiff and formal. There was nothing to shame her, she told herself. She had already paid the price of Raul’s help in altering her body. She would not pay more.

“I’ve been following you and watching you,” the woman said. “You must know that — ”

“What is he paying you?” Alatea asked.

“There’s no money involved.”

“There’s always money involved. I can’t afford to pay what he’s paying, but I ask you… No, I beg you…” Alatea turned from the woman to where she’d placed the strongbox and her jewellery. “I have this,” she said as she scooped up these things. “I can give you this.”

The woman took a step backwards. She said, “I don’t want these things. I’m here only to — ”

“You must take them. And then you must leave. You don’t know him. You cannot know what people like him are capable of.”

The woman thought, her brows drawn together and her eyes on Alatea as she weighed the words she’d heard. Alatea thrust the money and the jewellery at her once again, but the woman nodded and she said, “Ah. I do see. I’m afraid it might be too late, Mrs. Fairclough. Some things are unstoppable and I think he could be one of them. There’s a desperation to him… He doesn’t say exactly but I get the impression there’s a lot on the line for him just now.”

“He’d make you believe that. That’s how he is. It was clever of him to use a woman. For reassurance, he thinks. To calm my fears. While all the while his intention is to destroy me. He has the power to do this and he intends to use it.”

“There’s no story, though. No real story. Not a story that a paper like The Source would care about.”

“And this is supposed to reassure me?” Alatea demanded. “What does a story in The Source have to do with anything? What does it have to do with what he’s asking of you? You’ve photographed me, haven’t you? You’ve followed me and you’ve photographed me and that’s the proof he wants.”

“You don’t understand,” the other woman said. “He doesn’t need proof. These types never do. Proof is nothing to them. They start their business just this side of the law and if they slip over onto the other side, they have a score of solicitors to take care of the problem.”

“Then let me buy your photos,” Alatea said. “If he sees them, if he sees me in them…” She took off her wedding rings, the diamond and the band. She took off a large emerald that Valerie Fairclough had given her as a wedding gift. She said, “Here. Please. Take these as well. In exchange for your photos.”

“But photos are nothing. They’re meaningless without words. It’s the words that count. It’s what’s written that counts. And anyway, I don’t want your money and I don’t want your jewellery. I just want to apologise for… well, for everything but especially for how I might have ruined things for you. We’re much the same, you and I. With different cause, I daresay, but otherwise the same.”

Alatea clung to what an apology from this woman might mean. She said, “So you won’t tell him?”

The woman looked regretful. “I’m afraid he knows. That’s the point. That’s why I’ve come. I want you to be ready for what might come next and to know it’s my fault and to know how terribly sorry I am. I tried to keep things from him, but these people have ways of finding things out and once he came to Cumbria… I’m so sorry, Mrs. Fairclough.”

Alatea took this in fully and realised what it meant, not only to her but to Nicky and to their life together. She said, “He’s here, in Cumbria?”

“He’s been here for days. I thought you would have known. Didn’t he — ”

“Where is he now? Tell me.”

“Windermere, I think. Other than that, I don’t know.”

Nothing else remained to be said, but many things remained to be done. Alatea said good-bye to the woman and like someone in a dream, she gathered everything she’d brought down from the bedroom in the hope of bribing her. It was just as well, she thought, that the woman had refused her offerings. She would need them now herself in the coming days, for she’d run out of options.

She went back up the stairs to the bedroom and threw the jewellery and money onto the bed. From the box room at the end of the corridor, she brought out a small valise. There was little enough time to gather the things she would need.

Back in the bedroom, she went to the chest of drawers. It stood between two windows and the sound of a car door slamming outside drew her attention to the front of the house again. She saw that, on the worst possible day, Nicky had come home from the pele project early. He was now in conversation with the red-haired woman. He was violent faced. His voice grew loud although through the glass of the window, Alatea could not understand his words.

But understanding the words didn’t matter. Only the fact that they were speaking to each other mattered. That in conjunction with Nicky’s expression gave testimony to the topic between them. Seeing this, Alatea saw also that even when it came to escape, she was out of options. She could not leave in her car, for Nicky and the woman stood on the fan of gravel across which she would need to drive. She could not go by foot to the railway station at the far end of Arnside village, for the only route there went directly between her husband and the woman where they stood talking. So she prayed for some kind of answer to come to her and she paced the room until she saw it. It was through the window, just as the vision of Nicky and the red-haired woman had been. But it was the window on a wall perpendicular to that which overlooked the driveway. This window offered a view of the lawn and beyond it the seawall sketched a stony line of demarcation between the lawn and the sea walk along the bay, beyond which was the bay itself.

Today was one of the days during which the tide had ebbed for miles. This meant the remaining sands were hers. She could cross them and make for Grange-over-Sands a few miles away. Another railway station awaited her there. All she needed to do was to reach it.

Just a few miles, then. That was all she needed, and she would be free.

WINDERMERE CUMBRIA

Tim had spent the night beneath a caravan at Fallbarrow Park, at the edge of the lake. On his way there from Shots! he’d pinched a blanket from the Windermere fire station, where a smoke-scented stack of them just inside an open door seemed like a message telling him that here were his means of passing the time until Toy4You was ready for him. He himself was ready for Toy4You. He felt the need for escape like a weight on his chest. Soon, he told himself, he’d have the only answer he’d wanted to the question that his life had become since Kaveh Mehran had sauntered into it.

The caravan provided him shelter from the night’s rain, and against a tyre and huddled into his stolen blanket, he escaped the worst of the cold. Thus he’d slept rough and when he returned to the business centre towards the end of an afternoon the day of which he’d spent sulking round the town, he looked as bad as he felt, most of his bones aching and every inch of him reeking.

Toy4You directed one glance at him and had one whiff of him and said, in brief, “No way in hell.” He pointed him in the direction of the loo, told him to do what he could to make himself less malodorous, and when Tim emerged he handed him three twenty-pound notes. “Go into town and get something decent to wear,” he told him. “If you think you’re going to meet your fellow actors looking like that, think again. They won’t want anything to do