Believing the Lie

of this place. For Bryan Beck farm sat across the small triangular green that served as the centre of the village, its ancient manor house visible behind a low stone wall and a tenant cottage making a crumbling statement at right angles to it.

As he watched, into the second hour of nursing his pint and maintaining his vigil, there was finally a sign of life at the farm. It didn’t emanate from the manor house, though, but rather from the tenant cottage. From this emerged a man and a teenage boy. They left the property side by side and walked onto the green, where the man placed a step stool that he positioned in the centre of the lawn among the fallen leaves blown from the oak trees that bordered it. He plopped himself on this stool and gestured to the boy, who was carrying what looked like an old bedsheet, along with a shoe box tucked under his arm. The bedsheet he draped round the older man’s shoulders, and from the box he took scissors, a comb, and a hand mirror. The older man removed the tweed cap he wore and jerked his head at the boy: the sign to begin. The boy set about cutting his hair.

This, Zed knew, had to be George Cowley and his teenage son Daniel. They could be no one else. He knew that the dead man Ian Cresswell had a son, but as Cresswell was dead, he didn’t reckon the son was hanging about the farm and he reckoned even less that that son would be cutting the hair of the tenant farmer. Why they were doing this in the middle of the village green was an interesting question, but cutting it there made cleaning-up simple, Zed supposed, although it wasn’t likely to endear George Cowley to the other residents of Bryanbarrow, some of whom lived in the terrace of cottages that comprised one side of the green.

Zed downed the rest of his pint, which at this point had long gone both warm and flat. He lumbered out of the pub and he approached the haircutting on the green. It was chilly outside, with a breeze, and the combined scent of wood smoke and cow dung hung on the air. Sheep were sounding off from beyond Bryan Beck farm and as if in response ducks were quacking with undue volume from Bryan Beck itself, which gushed along the west side of the village out of Zed’s view.

“Afternoon.” Zed nodded at the man and the boy. “You’re Mr. Cowley, I understand.” He understood because he’d spoken to the publican at some length during his first hour’s deployment within the Willow and Well. As far as the publican knew, Zed was one of the myriad walkers who came to the Lakes either to discover what Wordsworth had spent his creative energies extolling or to see what the profits from Peter Rabbit had managed to save from mankind’s tendency to build hideous structures upon it. He’d been more than willing to increase Zed’s knowledge of the “real Lakes” with a good period of gossip about its denizens, many of whom were “gen-u-ine Cumbrian characters,” one of whom was, ultimately and conveniently, George Cowley. “A real piece o’ work, is George,” the publican had said. “One of those blokes never lets go of a grievance. Love to feud, they do, that sort of bloke. I feel dead sorry for that boy of his ’cause the only thing George has any fondness for is feuding and his bloody dog.” His bloody dog was a border collie who’d come as far as the hedge when George Cowley and his son crossed over to the green. A word from George and the dog had dropped to its belly obediently. There it remained, a watchful eye on the proceedings, throughout Zed’s conversation with its master.

Cowley eyed Zed with no small degree of suspicion. His son held his scissors poised, but he’d stopped cutting his father’s hair. George said over his shoulder to him, “Get on with it, Dan,” and looked away from Zed. So much for friendly conversation, Zed thought.

“Lovely farm you’ve got,” Zed said. “Unusual to have it actually part of the village.”

“Not mine,” George remarked sourly.

“You run it, though, don’t you? Doesn’t that make it as good as yours?”

George cast him a look indicative of scorn. “Not hardly. And what’s it to you anyway?”

Zed glanced at the man’s son. Daniel’s face flushed. Zed said, “Nothing, actually. It merely looks an interesting place. The big house and all that. I’ve a curiosity about old buildings. It’s an old manor house, isn’t it? The bigger building?”

Cowley scowled. “Could be. Dan, are you cutting or not? I’m not ’bout to sit here all day in the cold. We’ve things to see to.”

Daniel said quietly to Zed, “Elizabethan, it is. We used to live there.”

“Dan!”

“Sorry.” He resumed his cutting. It looked like something he’d been doing for years, as he used both the comb and the scissors efficiently.

Cowley said to Zed, “So who bloody wants to know and why?”

“Eh?”

“The house. The farm. Why’re you asking about ’em? What’s your interest? You’ve some sort o’ business in the village?”

“Oh.” Zed thought of the approach that would glean him the most information with the least revelation on his part. “Just interested in the history of the places I visit. In the Willow and Well, the barman was saying that’s the oldest building in the village, that manor house.”

“Wrong, he is. Cottage’s older by a hundert years.”

“Is it really? I expect a place like that could be haunted or something.”

“That why you’re here? You looking for ghosts? Or” — sharply — “for something else?”

God, the man was suspicious, Zed thought. He wondered idly if the bloke had pieces of silver shoved up the chimney or something very like, with Zed there to case the joint, as the saying went. He said affably to Cowley, “Sorry. No. I’m only here visiting. I don’t mean to unnerve you.”

“Not unnerved. I c’n take care of m’self and Dan, I can.”

“Right. Of course. I expect you can.” Zed went for a jolly tone. “I don’t expect you get many people asking questions about the farm, eh? Or actually many people here at all, especially this time of year. Asking questions or doing anything else.” He winced inwardly. He was going to have to do something about developing a subtlety of approach.

Cowley said, “’F you like history, I c’n give you history,” but he crossed his arms beneath the sheet that was keeping the hair from his clothing, and his posture suggested nothing was forthcoming, in spite of his words.

Daniel said, “Dad,” in a tone that took a position between advising and warning.

“Didn’t say nothing, did I,” Cowley said.

“It’s only that — ”

“Just cut the bloody hair and have done.” Cowley looked away, this time to the manor house behind the wall. It was all of stone, neatly whitewashed right to the top of its chimneys, and its roof looked as if it had been recently replaced. “That,” he said, “was meant to be mine. Got bought out from under my nose, it did, with no one the wiser till the job was done. And look what happened: what needed to happen. That’s how it is. ’N am I surprised? Not bloody likely. You pay the wages in the end, you do.”

Zed looked at the man in utter confusion. He reckoned “what happened” was the death of Ian Cresswell, who, he knew, had lived in the manor house. But, “Wages?” he asked, while what he was thinking was, What the hell is the man going on about?

“Of sin,” Daniel said in a low voice. “The wages of sin.”

“That’s right, that is,” George Cowley said. “He paid the wages of sin right and proper. Well, there he is and here we are and when affairs get settled and the farm goes up for sale again, we’ll be there this time and make no mistake. Bryan Beck farm is meant to be ours, ’n we’ve not been scrimping from day one in our lives to have it go to someone else a second time.”

From this it seemed to Zed that Ian Cresswell’s sin had been purchasing Bryan Beck farm before George Cowley had been able to do so. Which meant — and this was useful, wasn’t it? — that Cowley had a motive to murder Cresswell. And that meant it was only a matter of time before New Scotland Yard came calling, which also meant that all he himself had to do was wait for their arrival. Confirm they’re here, use their presence to sex up his story, and get the hell back to London, where he could resume his life. Yes. Things were looking up.

He said, “You’re talking about Mr. Cresswell’s purchase of the farm, I take it.”

Cowley looked at him as if he were mad. “Purchase of the farm?”

“You said ‘the wages of sin.’ I reckoned purchasing the farm was his sin.”

“Bah! That was bloody wrong, that was. That put us where it did, me and Dan. But no one pays wages ’cause of property.” He loaded the final two words with derision, and he seemed to feel Zed was dim enough to require further elucidation. “Indecent, it was, him and that Arab lodger of his. And what’re those kids of his still doing there? That’s the question I ask, but no one’s answering, are they. Well, that’s