Believing the Lie

worse.”

“Why?” Hallelujah, Zed thought.

“’Cause one of them’s dead and the other’s going to be on the look for someone new.”

That sounded like a remark coming directly from the horse’s you-know-what. “I see,” Zed said. “Could be the other’ll just move on, though, wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s what Dad’s waiting for,” Daniel said. “He’s buying the farm once it goes up for sale.”

“What, that sheep farm you two live on?”

That was the one, Daniel told him. He brushed his sopping hair from his forehead and settled in for something of a natter. He seemed more comfortable with a subject that didn’t deal with perverts — as he called them — because he adjusted the heat in the car to a tropical level and dug in his rucksack for a banana, which he proceeded to eat. He informed Zed that his dad wanted the farm mostly because he wanted something to pass on to Daniel himself. This, Daniel said, was dead stupid because there was no way in hell that he intended to be a sheep farmer. Daniel wanted out of the Lakes entirely. He wanted to join the RAF. They buzzed the Lake District, did Zed know that? Wicked jets flying about three hundred feet off the ground — okay, maybe five hundred feet — and you’d be walking along when all of a sudden one of them would come roaring down the valley or just above Lake Windermere and it was bloody wicked, it was.

“Told my dad that about a thousand times,” Daniel said. “He thinks he can keep me home, though. All he needs is that farm to do it.”

He loved his dad, Daniel said, but he didn’t want the kind of life his dad had lived. Look at the fact that Daniel’s own mother deserted them. She hadn’t wanted that kind of life either, but still his dad didn’t understand.

“I keep telling him he should do what he’s good at anyway. Everyone should.”

Amen to that, Zed thought. But he said, “What’s that, then?”

Daniel hesitated. Zed glanced at him. The boy looked distinctly uncomfortable. This could be the moment, Zed realised. The kid was about to confess that what George Cowley was good at was offing blokes who lived on the farm he wanted to buy. Silver, gold, platinum, and the rest. Zed was about to be handed the scoop of his life.

“Making dollhouse furniture,” Daniel mumbled.

“Say again?”

“Dollhouse furniture. Furniture that goes into dollhouses. Don’t you know what that is?”

Shit, damn, hell, Zed thought.

Daniel went on. “He’s bloody good at it. Sounds daft, I know, but that’s what he does. Sells it on the Internet as fast as he can make it. I tell him he should be making it full-time instead of walking round in the muck with the bloody sheep. He says it’s a hobby and I should be able to tell the difference between a hobby and someone’s life work.” Daniel shook his head. “For him, it’s that stupid farm or nothing.”

Is it indeed? Zed wondered. And what was Cowley going to do next when he learned the farm legally belonged to Kaveh Mehran via Ian Cresswell’s will?

Daniel pointed to an enormous oak sitting just inside a drystone wall. That was where Zed could set him down, he said. And thanks for the ride, by the way.

Zed pulled over, and Daniel got out. At the same moment, Zed’s mobile rang. He gave it a glance and saw it was London. Rodney Aronson ringing. It was a bit early for Rodney even to be at work, and this didn’t bode well. Good news, though, was that Zed could report progress at last after this conversation with Daniel Cowley.

“Watch your back,” was what Rodney said to him, however, without preamble.

“Why? What’s happened?”

“Scotland Yard knows you’re there. Keep your head down — ”

When it was six feet eight inches in the air? Zed wondered.

“ — and keep your eyes on Nick Fairclough. That’s where you’ll find whoever’s been sent up there to dig into Ian Cresswell’s death.”

BARROW-IN-FURNESS CUMBRIA

Manette didn’t want to face the fact that her former husband hadn’t come home on the previous night. More, she didn’t want to face how she felt about that fact. But it was difficult not to do so.

They’d talked the subject of their broken marriage right into the ground over the years. They’d touched upon every aspect of what had happened to them and what might have happened and what would definitely happen if they didn’t make some sort of change. They’d decided, ultimately, that the lack of romance had done them in, the getting-down-to-business aspect of every part of their lives, and particularly the utter lack of surprise. They’d become a couple who had to check their diaries and make appointments for an interlude of intercourse during which they both had been pretending for ages to feel something that they did not feel for each other. At the end of what had seemed like hundreds of hours of dialogue, they’d decided that friendship was more important than passion anyway. So they’d live as friends and enjoy each other’s company because at the end of the day they’d always enjoyed being together and how many couples could actually say that more than twenty years along the line?

But now Freddie hadn’t come home. And when he was home he’d taken to whistling in the mornings as he got ready for work. Worse, he’d taken to singing while he was in the shower — Freddie, singing, for God’s sake — and he always chose the same damn song, which was driving her bonkers anyway. It was that bloody call to arms from Les Miserables and Manette knew if she had to hear “the blood of the martyrs will water the meadows of France!” one more time, she might water the meadows of the bathroom with Freddie’s blood.

Only, she wouldn’t. Not Freddie. She would never hurt Freddie.

She went to his office at work. He’d removed his jacket and was bent over his desk in his crisp white shirt and his red necktie with the ducklings on it, and he was reviewing a massive set of computer printouts. More investigation into the books, preparatory to stepping into Ian’s job should her father offer it to him. If he had any sense, he would.

She said from the doorway, “So how was Scorpio?”

Freddie looked up. His expression told her he had no idea what she was talking about but he reckoned it was zodiac signs.

She said, “The nightclub? Where you and the latest date were meeting?”

He said, “Oh! Scorpio.” He laid the printout on his neat-as-a-pin desk. “We didn’t go in, actually. We met at the door.”

“Good Lord, Freddie. Was it directly to bed after that? You’re a sly one.”

He blushed. Manette wondered at what point in their marriage she’d stopped noticing how often he blushed and how the colour washed across his cheeks from his ears after making his ears go completely red at the tips. She also wondered when it was she’d stopped admiring how nicely his ears lay against his head like perfect shells.

He laughed. “No, no,” he said. “But everyone going inside the place looked round nineteen years old and most of them were dressed like the cast of Rocky Horror Picture Show. So we went for a meal at a wine bar. Rigatoni puttanesca. It wasn’t very good. Rather heavy on the putta and light on the nesca as things turned out.” He smiled at his own silly joke and added in his usual appealingly honest fashion, “I didn’t come up with that. Sarah did.”

“That’s her name? Sarah?” At least, Manette thought, it wasn’t another shrub. She’d rather been expecting Ivy or June-short-for-Juniper as his second foray into Internet dating. But of course, ivy wasn’t a shrub, was it? More like a vine. So … She shook herself mentally. What was going on inside her head? She said, “And?” although she didn’t actually want to know. “Are there grisly details? I have no life, as you well know, so I’m taking the opportunity for vicarious excitement.” She sauntered into his office and sat in the chair next to his desk.

He blushed, more deeply this time. “I don’t like to kiss and tell,” he said.

“But you did it, didn’t you?”