Believing the Lie

“About?”

“Where you are, why you are, who sent you, and all the trimmings. Common thought is you’re investigating a monumental cock-up somewhere. Police corruption, with you on tiptoe fading into the woodwork to catch someone taking a payoff or someone else putting electrodes to a suspect’s cobblers. You know what I mean.”

“And you?”

“What do I think? Hillier’s got you up to your eyeballs in something he himself doesn’t want to touch with a ten-foot plastic one. You put a step wrong, you take the fall, he still smells like dewdrops on roses. Am I close?”

“On the Hillier part. But it’s just a favour.”

“And that’s all you can say.”

“For the moment. Are you willing?”

“What? To lend a hand?”

“No one can know. You have to fly beneath the radar. Everyone’s but particularly — ”

“The superintendent’s.”

“It could get you into trouble with her. Not in the long run, but in the short term.”

“Why else do I breathe in our native land?” Barbara said. “Tell me what you need.”

CHALK FARM LONDON

As soon as Lynley said Fairclough, Barbara knew. This wasn’t due to the fact that she had her fingers on the pulse of the life of everyone possessing a title in the UK. Far be that from the fact. Rather it was due to her being a devout albeit closet reader of The Source. She was addicted and had been so for years, an absolute victim to four-inch headlines and deliciously compromising photographs. Whenever she passed an advertising placard set up on the pavement and screaming a front-page story on sale inside this tobacconist or that corner shop, her feet went into the place of their own accord, she handed over her money, and she had a good wallow, generally over an afternoon cuppa and a toasted tea cake. Thus, Fairclough was a familiar name to her, not only as it referenced the Baron of Ireleth and his business — which had garnered many journalistic guffaws over the years — but also as it attached itself to his loose-living scion, Nicholas.

She also knew at once where Lynley was: in Cumbria, where the Faircloughs and Fairclough Industries were based. What she didn’t know was how Hillier knew the Faircloughs and what he’d asked Lynley to do regarding the family. In other words, she wasn’t sure if it was a case of we’re-for-’em or we’re-against-’em, but she reckoned that, if there was a title involved, Hillier was cosying up to the for-’em side. Hillier had a thing about titles, especially those that were above his own rank, which was all of them.

So this probably had to do with Lord Fairclough and not his wastrel son, long the subject of tabloid exposes along with other rich young things throwing their lives away. But the list of Lynley’s interests suggested that he was casting a very wide net indeed since they involved a will, an insurance policy, The Source, Bernard Fairclough, and the most recent edition of Conception magazine. They also involved someone called Ian Cresswell, identified as Fairclough’s nephew. And for good measure — if she had time to pursue the matter — someone called Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, hailing from somewhere in Argentina called Santa Maria di whatever, might bear looking into. But only if she had the time, Lynley stressed, because at the moment the real digging needed to be about Fairclough. Fairclough the father, not the son, he emphasised.

LAKE WINDERMERE CUMBRIA

Freddie’s next Internet date had spent the night and while Manette always tried to think of herself as a with-it sort of woman, this did seem a bit much to her. Her ex-husband was no schoolboy, to be sure, and he certainly wasn’t asking for her opinion on the matter. But for the love of God, it had been their first date and where was the world going to — or more to the point, where was Freddie going to? — if men and women tried each other out in bed as a modern-day form of singing “Getting to Know You”? But that’s exactly what had happened, according to Freddie, and it had been her idea. The woman’s! According to Freddie, she’d said, “Really, there’d be no point in carrying on further if we’re not sexually compatible, Freddie, don’t you agree?”

Well, Freddie was a man, after all. Presented with the opportunity, what was he going to do, ask for six months of chastity to give them time to suss each other out on matters from politics to prestidigitation? Plus, it seemed reasonable enough to him. Times were changing, after all. So two glasses of wine at the local and home they came to take the plunge. Evidently, they’d found all their parts in working order and the experience pleasurable, so they’d done it two more times — again, this was according to Freddie — and she’d spent the rest of the night. There she’d been, having coffee with him in the kitchen when Manette came downstairs in the morning. She’d been wearing Freddie’s shirt and nothing else, which left her showing a lot of leg and not a small part of where the leg came from. And like a cat with canary feathers hanging from her mouth, she said to Manette, “Hello. You must be Freddie’s ex. I’m Holly.”

Holly? Holly! What sort of name was that? Her former husband was going for a shrub? Manette looked at Freddie — who at least had the grace to turn puce — and then poured herself a hasty cup of coffee, after which she retreated to her bathroom. There, Freddie came to apologise for the uneasiness of the situation — not, Manette noted, for having had the woman stay the night — and he said in best Freddie fashion that in the future he’d spend the night at their places instead of the reverse. “It all just happened between us rather quickly,” he told her. “I’d not intended it.”

But Manette homed in on their places, and this was how she learned that times had changed and that instantaneous copulation had become the new form of shaking hands. She’d sputtered, “You mean, you intend to try out every one of them?”

“Well, it does seem to be the way things are done these days.”

She’d tried to tell him that this was lunacy. She’d lectured him about STDs, unplanned pregnancies, entrapment, and everything else she could think of. What she didn’t say was that they had a very good situation, she and Freddie, living as roommates, because she didn’t want to hear him say that it was time they both moved on. At the end of it all, though, he’d kissed her forehead, told her not to worry about him, revealed he had another date that night, declared he might therefore not be home afterwards, and said he’d see her at work. He’d take his own car today, he told her, because this date lived in Barrow-in-Furness, and they were meeting at Scorpio nightclub so if she wanted to hook up seriously — Freddie actually said “hook up seriously” — they’d go to her place as it was apparently too far to drive to Great Urswick if their knickers were on fire.

Manette wailed, “But, Freddie …!” yet realised there was nothing else she could say. She could hardly accuse him of being unfaithful or destroying what she and he had or acting hastily. They weren’t married, they “had” next to nothing, and they’d been divorced long enough that Freddie’s decision to get back into the world of dating — as bizarre as that world now apparently was — had not been made on the fly. He wasn’t that sort of man, anyway. And one only had to look at him to understand why women would be happy to try him out as a mate: He was fresh and sweet and not half-bad looking.

No, she had no rights here, and Manette knew it. But she mourned something lost all the same.

Nonetheless, there were things to be seen to that went beyond her situation with Freddie, and she found that she was grateful for them, although she wouldn’t have thought so on the previous day after her confrontation with Niamh Cresswell. Something had to be done about Niamh, and while Manette herself was powerless when it came to the woman, she was not powerless when it came to Tim and Gracie. If she had to move a mountain to help those children, then that was what she intended to do.