Believing the Lie

30 OCTOBER

BELGRAVIA LONDON

Forewarned being forearmed, Lynley had spent the next two days following his meeting with Hillier and Bernard Fairclough doing what research he was able to do on the man, his family, and his situation. He didn’t wish to walk into this covert investigation blind and as things turned out, there was a fair amount of information available on Fairclough, who had not been born Bernard Fairclough at all but rather Bernie Dexter of Barrow-in-Furness. His initial appearance on earth took place at home, in a two-up and two-down terrace house in Blake Street. This turned out to be a short distance from the railway tracks upon the figurative wrong side of which the Dexter domicile lay.

How he’d morphed from Bernie Dexter into Bernard Fairclough, first Baron of Ireleth, was the kind of tale with by which Sunday newspaper magazines justify their existences. As Bernie Dexter at fifteen years of age, he’d finished with what schooling he was ever to have and had gone to work for Fairclough Industries in a lowly position defined by the mindless job of packing chrome bathroom fixtures into shipping containers for eight hours each day. Although it was a job guaranteed to bleed soul, hope, and ambition from an ordinary worker, Bernie Dexter of Blake Street had been no ordinary worker. Cheeky from the first was how his wife described him in a post-knighthood interview, and she ought to have known for she had been born Valerie Fairclough, the great-granddaughter of the firm’s founder. She’d met the fifteen-year-old when she herself was eighteen and he was performing in the company’s Christmas panto. She was there for duty’s sake; he was there for fun’s sake. They encountered each other in a receiving line: the Fairclough owners doing a yearly bit of noblesse oblige and their employees — among whom was Bernie — moving along the line with an appropriate amount of forelock tugging, downcast eyes, and aye, sir, thank you, sir in best Dickensian manner as Christmas bonuses were handed out. This applied to all except Bernie Dexter, who told Valerie Fairclough straightaway and with a wink that he intended to marry her. “A real beauty, you are,” he said, “so I reckon I’ll set you up for life.” He declared this last with utter confidence, as if Valerie Fairclough were somehow not set up for life already.

He’d gone on to keep his word, however, for he had no qualms at all about approaching Valerie’s father, telling him, “I could make this firm into something better, you know, you give me half a chance.” And so he had done. Not all at once, of course, but over time, and during that time he also managed to impress Valerie with the persistence of his devotion to her. He also managed to impregnate the young woman when she was twenty-five, which resulted in an elopement. In short order, then, he took her family name as his own, improved the efficiency of Fairclough Industries, modernised its products, one of which was — of all things — an entire line of state-of-the-art lavatories, from which he amassed an impressive fortune.

His son Nicholas had always been the fly in the ointment of Bernie’s otherwise ideal life. Lynley found volumes of information on the bloke. For when Nicholas Fairclough went periodically bad, he did it in a very public manner. Public drunkenness, brawls, break-ins, football hooliganism, drunk driving, car theft, arson, indecent exposure while under the influence… The man had a past that read like that of the prodigal son on steroids. He’d played out his dissolution before God and everyone and in particular before the eyes of the local press in Cumbria, and the stories generated from his behaviour caught the eyes of the national tabloids always on the prowl for sensation to feature on their cover pages, especially when the sensation is generated by the scion of someone notable.

Early death was the usual outcome of a life led in the manner Nicholas Fairclough had led his, but in his case love supervened in the person of a young Argentine woman with the impressive name of Alatea Vasquez y del Torres. Fresh out of yet another rehab programme — this one in America, in the state of Utah — Nicholas had taken himself to a former mining town called Park City for what he apparently believed was a well-deserved spate of R amp; R, financed as usual by his desperate father. The old mining town served this purpose well, for it was nestled in the Wasatch Mountains and into its embrace every year from late November till April came avid skiers from round the world, along with scores of young men and women hired to service their needs.

Alatea Vasquez y del Torres had been among this latter group, and she and Nicholas Fairclough — according to the more breathless reports Lynley was able to scavenge — locked eyes over the till in one of the ski resort’s many eateries. The rest, as is generally said, was history. What ensued was a whirlwind courtship, a courthouse marriage effected in Salt Lake City, a final descent into a drug-fuelled pyre of dissolution on Nicholas’s part — odd way to celebrate matrimony, but there you have it, Lynley thought — from which the phoenix that was apparently the man’s amazing physical constitution arose. The arising of this phoenix, however, had little to do with Fairclough’s determination to get the better of the beast on his back and everything to do with Alatea Vasquez y del Torres’s decision to walk out on him barely two months into their marriage.

“I’d do anything for her,” Fairclough had later declared. “I’d die for her. To take the cure for her was child’s play.”

She’d returned to him, he’d stuck with sobriety, and everyone was happy. So it seemed from all the accounts that Lynley was able to glean in his twenty-four hours of research into the family. Thus if Nicholas Fairclough had been involved some way in his cousin’s death, at this point in his life it seemed wildly out of character, for it was hardly reasonable to assume that his wife would remain loyally at the side of a murderer.

Lynley went on to read about the rest of the family from whatever sources he could find. But information on them was vague, considering how dull they were in comparison to the son of Lord Fairclough. One sister divorced, one sister a spinster, one cousin — this would be the dead man — the master of the Fairclough money, that cousin’s wife a homemaker and their two children respectable… The Fairclough family were a disparate group but on the surface they all seemed clean.

At the end of his second day of exploration, Lynley stood at the window of his library in Eaton Terrace and looked out at the street, the gas fire burning brightly behind him in the late afternoon. He didn’t much like the situation he was in, but he wasn’t sure what he could do about it. In his line of work, the objective was to gather evidence in proof of someone’s guilt, not to gather evidence in proof of their innocence. If the coroner had declared the death accidental, there seemed little point delving further into the matter. For coroners knew what they were about, and they had evidence and testimony to bolster their findings. That the coroner had deemed the death of Ian Cresswell an accident — unfortunate and untimely as all accidents were, but still an accident — seemed a conclusion that ought to have satisfied everyone, no matter the grief attendant on the sudden loss of a man from the bosom of his family.

It was interesting, though, that Bernard Fairclough wasn’t satisfied, Lynley thought. Despite the inquest and its results, Fairclough’s doubts in the matter suggested that he might well know more than he’d mentioned at their meeting at Twins. And this suggested there was more to the death of Ian Cresswell than met the superficial eye.

Lynley wondered if someone had dropped a word to Fairclough about the local investigation into the drowning. He also wondered if Fairclough had himself had a word with someone inside of it.

Lynley turned from the window and gazed at his desk, spread out on it were notes, printouts from his computer, the laptop itself. There was, he reckoned, more than one avenue to unearth additional information regarding Ian Cresswell’s death — if, indeed, there was additional information — and he was on his way to the phone to make a call in the service of gathering more details when it rang. He thought about allowing the answer machine to take it — that reaction to the phone had become habitual over recent months — but he decided to pick up, and when he did, it was to hear Isabelle say, “What on earth are you doing, Tommy? Why haven’t you been at work?”

He’d thought Hillier would handle this detail. Obviously, he’d been wrong.

He said, “It’s a small matter Hillier asked me to deal with. I thought he’d tell you.”

“Hillier? What sort of matter?” Isabelle sounded surprised, as well she might. He and Hillier didn’t rub congenial elbows very often, and if push came to shove, Lynley was surely the last person at the Met to whom Hillier would turn.

“It’s confidential,” he told her. “I’m not at liberty — ”

“What’s going on?”