Believing the Lie

him. Passionate and forbidden love made life more interesting, didn’t it?

LAKE WINDERMERE CUMBRIA

Lynley was having a preprandial sherry with Valerie and Bernard Fairclough when Mignon showed up. They were in what Valerie had referred to as the small drawing room, where a fire was doing a fine job of cutting the chill. None of them heard Mignon enter the house — the front door being some distance from the room in which they sat — so she was able to make something of a surprise entrance.

The door swung open and she shoved her zimmer frame in ahead of her. It had begun to rain again, quite heavily, and she’d come from the folly without raingear. This omission — which Lynley reckoned had to be deliberate — had caused her to become wet enough to provoke a reaction from both of her parents. Her hair was flattened, her Alice-in-Wonderland hairband dripped water onto her forehead and into her eyes, and her shoes and clothing were soaked. It was not a far enough walk from the folly to the main house to have become so wet. Lynley concluded that she’d stood for a while in the downpour for the drama a thorough soaking might provide. Seeing her, her mother jumped to her feet and Lynley — who couldn’t have stopped himself if he’d tried — politely rose to his.

“Mignon!” Valerie cried. “Why’ve you come from the folly without an umbrella?”

Mignon said, “I can hardly hold an umbrella while using this, can I?” in reference to the zimmer.

“A mac and a hat might have solved that problem,” her father said guilelessly. Notably, he hadn’t risen and his expression indicated he was fully aware of her ploy.

“I forgot it,” Mignon said.

Valerie said, “Here. Sit by the fire, darling. I’ll fetch some towels for your hair.”

“Don’t bother,” Mignon said. “I’ll be walking back in a moment. You’re dining soon, aren’t you? As I had no invitation to join you this evening, I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”

“You don’t need an invitation,” Valerie said. “You’re always welcome. But since you’ve preferred… because of…” Clearly, she didn’t want to say more in front of Lynley.

Just as clearly, Mignon did. She said, “I’ve had a gastric band, Thomas. Big as an ox, I was. You wouldn’t believe how big. Destroyed my knees heaving my fat round the planet for a good twenty years, so they’ll be replaced next. The knees, I mean. Then I’ll be as good as new and some bloke’ll come along and take me off my parents’ hands. Or so they hope.”

She made her way across the room and lowered herself into the chair her mother had vacated. She said to her father, “I could do with a sherry myself,” and to Lynley, “I thought at first that’s why you’d come. Stupid of me, I know, but you’ve got to consider who my father is. Always has a scheme, my dad. I knew you were part of one as soon as I saw you. I just misjudged what the scheme actually was, thinking you’d come to have a look at me, if you know what I mean.”

“Mignon, really,” her mother said.

“I think I’ll take those towels after all.” Mignon seemed to like the idea of ordering Valerie about. She looked quite gratified when her mother went off to do her bidding. Her father in the meantime hadn’t moved, so she said to him, “That sherry, Dad?”

Bernard, Lynley thought, looked like a man who was about to say something he’d regret. In any other circumstances, Lynley would have waited to see what that something was, but his natural inclination towards civility got the better of him. He set his own glass of sherry on the table next to his chair. He said, “Let me,” and Bernard cut him off with, “I’ll get it, Tommy.”

“Make it a big one,” Mignon told her father. “I’ve just had a successful romantic interlude with Mr. Seychelles and while normally one has a fag for afters, I’d prefer to get sloshed.”

Fairclough observed his daughter. His expression was so obviously one of distaste that Mignon chuckled.

“Have I offended you?” she asked. “So sorry.”

Her father poured sherry into a tumbler, a great deal of sherry. That, Lynley thought, was certainly going to do the job if the woman tossed it back. He had a feeling she fully intended to do so.

Fairclough was handing the drink over to his daughter when Valerie returned, towels in hand. She went to Mignon and set about drying her hair, gently. Lynley expected Mignon to show a burst of irritation and to brush the ministration aside. She didn’t. Instead, she allowed her hair to be seen to, along with her neck and her face.

She said, “Mother never comes for a friendly visit. Did you know that, Thomas? What I mean is that she brings me food — rather like giving alms to the poor like the lady of the manor she is — but just to drop in for a chat? That hasn’t happened in years. So when it did occur today, I was all amazement. What can the old dear want, I thought.”

Valerie dropped her hands and the towel from her daughter’s hair. She looked at her husband. He said nothing. They both seemed to gird themselves for some kind of onslaught, and Lynley found himself wondering how on earth they’d got themselves into this sort of position with their own daughter.

Mignon took a healthy gulp of her sherry. She held the glass with both hands, like a priest with a chalice. “Mother and I have nothing to talk about, you see. She has no interest in hearing about my life, and believe me, I have no interest in hers. This rather limits one’s conversation. After the weather, what’s there to talk about? I mean, aside from her dreary topiary garden and her even drearier children’s playground or whatever it is.”

Her father finally said, “Mignon, are you joining us for dinner or have you another purpose for your call?”

“Do not,” Mignon said, “back me into a corner. You do not want that.”

“Darling,” her mother began.

“Please. If there’s a darling in the family, we both know I’m not it.”

“That’s not true.”

“God.” Mignon rolled her eyes at Lynley. “It’s been Nicholas, Nicholas since the day he was born, Thomas. A son at last and all the attendant hallelujahs. But that’s not what I’ve come here about. I want to talk about that pathetic little cripple.”

For a moment, Lynley had no idea whom she actually meant. He was, of course, acutely aware that St. James was disabled since he himself had been the cause of the accident that had injured him. But to apply either pathetic or little to the man he’d known since their school days was so inapposite a description that for a moment he thought Mignon was speaking of someone else entirely. She disabused him of that notion when she went on.

“Mother didn’t last as long as she was evidently supposed to last in my company. Once she left, I wondered why she’d come at all, and it wasn’t difficult to suss that out. There you all were, Dad, coming up from the boathouse. You, Thomas here, and the cripple. And Thomas looked like he’d had a wetting if the towels and his hair were anything to go by. But not the cripple. He was quite dry. As you were, Dad.” Another hefty gulp of sherry followed before she continued. “Now the towels suggest our Thomas went down to the boathouse prepared. He didn’t just slip and fall into the water and since his clothes weren’t wet, I think we’ve got corroboration for that assumption. Which means he went into the water intentionally. This not being the season for taking a dip in the lake, he had to have had another reason. I’m thinking that reason has to do with Ian. How am I doing?”

Lynley felt Fairclough glance his way. Valerie looked nervously from her daughter to her husband. Lynley said nothing. It was, he reckoned, up to Fairclough to confirm or deny what was going on. As far as he was concerned, being open with his reasons for his visit to Ireleth Hall was wiser than attempting to maintain a pretence for his presence.

Fairclough, however, said nothing to his daughter. She took this for assent, it seemed. She said, “So that means you believe Ian’s death was no accident, Dad. At least that’s what I reckoned when I saw the three of you coming up from the lake. A few seconds on the Net was actually all it took to learn who our visitor here really is, by the way. Had you wanted to keep the information from me, you needed to come up with a pseudonym.”

“No one was keeping anything from you, Mignon,” her father informed her. “Tommy’s here at my invitation. The fact that he’s also a policeman has no bearing — ”

“A detective,” Mignon corrected. “A Scotland Yard detective, Dad, and I assume you know that. And since