Believing the Lie

Then over Manette’s shoulder, Niamh said, “Come in, Charlie. Manette is just leaving.”

Charlie. He looked vaguely familiar. Manette couldn’t place him, however, till he nodded at her nervously and passed her in the doorway. His proximity brought his scent quite close, and the scent was cooking oils and something else. At first Manette thought of fish and chips, but then she realised he was the owner of one of the three Chinese takeaways in the market square in Milnthorpe. She’d been in there more than once on her way home from Arnside and Nicholas’s house, scoring a meal for Freddie. She’d never seen this man out of his kitchen uniform spattered with grease and copious amounts of soy sauce. But here he was, eager to do a job that didn’t at all involve slopping chop suey into takeaway cartons.

As he entered the house, he said, “You look good enough to eat,” to Niamh.

She giggled. “Hope so. Have you brought your appetite?”

Both of them laughed. The door closed on them, allowing them to get down to business.

Manette felt white heat wash over her. Something, she decided, would have to be done about her cousin Ian’s wife. She was wise enough to understand, however, that it might well be a leave-her-to-God situation completely beyond her powers to effect. But what she could effect was a change in Tim and Gracie’s lives. And that was something she could see to herself.

WINDERMERE CUMBRIA

Getting possession of the forensic reports had not been a difficult matter, and this ease of acquisition had been largely due to St. James’s reputation as an expert witness. There was, of course, no actual need for his expertise in this matter because the ruling had already been made by the coroner, but a phone call and a spurious tale about a university presentation on basic forensics had been enough to put all the relevant documents into his hands. These confirmed what Lynley had told him about the death of Ian Cresswell, with a few additional salient details. The man had suffered a severe blow to the head — in the near region of the left temple — which had been enough to render him unconscious and fracture his skull. The apparent source of the blow was the stone dock and although his body had been in the water for approximately nineteen hours when it had been found, it had — at least according to the forensic report — still been possible to make a comparison between the wound on his head and the shape of the stone that he had ostensibly hit on the dock before tumbling into the water.

St. James frowned. He wondered how this was possible. Nineteen hours in the water would do much to alter the inflicted wound, making information about it useless unless some sort of reconstruction had been managed. He looked for this, but he didn’t see one. He made a note and continued reading.

Death had been by drowning as an examination of the lungs had confirmed. Bruising on the right leg suggested that Cresswell’s foot may have become caught in the scull’s stretcher as he lost his balance, capsizing the craft and holding the victim beneath the water for a time until — perhaps due to the gentle action of the lake over the hours — his foot had ultimately become dislodged and his body had floated freely next to the dock.

Toxicology showed nothing unusual. Blood alcohol indicated that he’d been drinking but he was not drunk. Everything else in the report indicated that he was a fine specimen of a man in the range of forty to forty-five years, in perfect health and superb physical condition.

Since it had been an unwitnessed drowning, a coroner’s ruling had been required. This had necessitated an inquest, preceded by an investigation by the coroner’s officers. They had testified at the inquest, as had Valerie Fairclough, the forensic pathologist, the first policeman on the scene, and the subsequent officer called in to confirm the first policeman’s conclusion that no SOCO were needed as no crime had occurred. The end product of all this was the ruling of death by accidental drowning.

As far as St. James could see, there was nothing untoward in any of this. However, if mistakes had been made, they’d been made at the initial stage of the process and that was with the first policeman on the scene. A conversation with this police constable was in order. This demanded a trip to Windermere, from where the officer had originally come.

The man’s name was PC William Schlicht, and from the look of him when he came into Reception at the Windermere station to meet St. James, he was fresh out of the nearest training facility. This would explain why he’d called in another officer to confirm what he’d concluded. It had likely been the first death scene PC Schlicht had encountered and he wouldn’t have wanted to start his career off with a gross error. Aside from that, the death had occurred on the estate of a well-known and semi-public figure. The newspapers in the area would have found this of interest, and the PC would know that eyes were upon him.

Schlicht was a slight man. But he was also wiry and athletic in appearance, and his uniform looked as if he starched and ironed it every morning, as well as polished its buttons. He seemed to be in his early twenties, and his expression was one of a man extremely eager to please. Not the best attitude in a policeman, St. James thought. It put one in the position of being easily manipulated by outside forces.

“A course you’re teaching?” PC Schlicht said after their exchange of greetings. He’d taken St. James beyond Reception, into the station itself, and he led him to a coffee room/lunch room where a refrigerator bore a sign reading Put your *#%*# name on your lunch bag! and an old coffeemaker circa 1980 was sending forth an odour reminiscent of coal mines in the nineteenth century. Schlicht had been in the midst of eating what looked like leftover chicken pie from a plastic container. A smaller pot of raspberry fool sat next to this, awaiting consumption as his dessert.

St. James made the appropriate noises of agreement upon the mention of the putative course. He lectured frequently at University College London. Should PC Schlicht wish to do some checking up on him, everything he was claiming about his visit to Cumbria was verifiable. St. James told the PC to go on with his lunch, please, as he merely wished to confirm a few details.

“I reckon someone like you would look for a fancier case to pre sent in a lecture, if you know what I mean.” Schlicht lifted a leg over the seat of his chair to sit. He scooped up his cutlery and tucked back into his meal. “The Cresswell situation was a straightforward business from the start.”

“You must have had one or two doubts, though,” St. James said, “since you called in another officer.”

“Oh, that.” Schlicht waved his fork in acknowledgement. He then confirmed what St. James had suspected: It had been his first death scene, he didn’t want a blot on his copy book, and the family was quite well-known in the area. He added, “Not to mention rich as the dickens, if you know what I mean,” and he grinned as if the wealth of the Faircloughs demanded that a certain conclusion was in order from the local police. St. James said nothing, merely looking questioning. Schlicht said, “The rich have their ways, you know? Not like you and me, they are. You take my wife: She finds a body in our boathouse — not that we have a boathouse in the first place, mind you — and let me tell you, she’d be screaming down the walls and running in circles and no phone call to nine-nine-nine she made would even be understandable, if you get my meaning. That one” — by whom St. James concluded he was referring to Valerie Fairclough — “is cool as cream. ‘There appears to be a dead man floating in my boathouse’ is how she puts it, ’cording to the dispatch bloke who phoned up the station, and she goes right on to give the address without being asked, which is a bit odd ’cause you’d think under the circumstances she’d need to be asked or reminded or something. And when I get there, she’s not waiting on the drive or pacing in the garden or tapping her toe on the front steps or anything you’d expect in such a situation, is she? No. She’s inside the house and she comes out dressed like she’s going to some posh afternoon tea or something and I wonder, I do, what she went down to the boathouse for in the first place dressed like that. She tells me straightaway and without my asking that she was down there to go out on the lake and do a bit of fishing. Dressed like that, mind you. She says she does it all the time: two, three, perhaps four times a week. All hours, it doesn’t matter to her. She likes to be out on the water, she says. She says she didn’t expect to find a body floating there and she knows who it is: her husband’s nephew. She takes me down there to have a look. We’re walking on our way when the ambulance shows up and she waits for them to join us.”

“She knew then, for a certainty, that the man in the water was dead.”

Schlicht paused, fork midflight to his lips. “She did, that. ’Course, he was floating facedown and he’d been in the water a good long while. Those clothes of hers, though. They do say something, don’t they?”

Still, Schlicht said, it was cut-and-dried as far as he could tell when they got to the boathouse, despite any oddity in Valerie Fairclough’s attire and behaviour. The scull was capsized, the body was floating next to it, and the