Believing the Lie

reckoned, was not going to be like pinching candy from a five-year-old.

She was considering her approach when the acting superintendent found her. Dorothea Harriman had, alas, waxed eloquent on the subject of Barbara’s hair, failing to append to her waxing a convenient lie about having seen Barbara at a location that was not New Scotland Yard. Isabelle Ardery thus accosted her on the twelfth floor, where Barbara had hidden herself in the Met’s library, a convenient location from which she could access the Met’s databases in peace and in secrecy.

“Here you are, then.” The acting superintendent had come upon Barbara with the stealth of a hunting cat, and her satisfaction was feline as well. She looked like a cat, decapitated mouse in jaws.

Barbara said, “Guv,” with a nod. She added, “Still on holiday,” on the very slight chance that Isabelle Ardery was there to requisition her for work.

Ardery didn’t go in that direction, nor did she acknowledge Barbara’s status as being off rota for the moment. She said, “I’ll see the hair first, Sergeant.”

Barbara hardly wanted to know what second was going to be, considering the superintendent’s tone. She stood to give Ardery a better look.

Ardery nodded. “Now that,” she said, “is actually a haircut. We could go as far as to call it a style.”

Considering what she’d paid for it, Barbara thought, they ought to be calling it a night at the Ritz. She waited for more.

Ardery walked round her. She nodded. She said, “Hair and teeth. Very good. I’m quite pleased to know you can take direction when your feet are to the fire, Sergeant.”

“I live to please,” Barbara said.

“As to the clothing — ”

Barbara said to remind her, “On holiday, guv?” which she believed adequately explained her ensemble of tracksuit trousers, tee-shirt emblazoned with Finish Your Beer… Children in China Are Sober, red high-top trainers, and donkey jacket.

“Even on holiday,” Ardery said, “Barbara, you’re a representative of the Met. When you walk in the door — ” Abruptly, she brushed aside whatever she’d intended to say as her gaze came to rest on Barbara’s tattered notebook. She said, “What are you doing here?”

“Just needed to get some information.”

“Needing to get it here suggests a police matter.” Isabelle put herself in a position to see the screen of the computer’s monitor. She said, “Argentina?”

“Holidays,” Barbara said airily.

Isabelle looked further. She scrolled back to the previous screen and the one before that. She said, reading the list of Santa Maria di towns, “Developing a fondness for the Virgin Mary? Holidays suggest resorts. Skiing. Seaside visits. Jungle excursions. Adventures. Eco-journeys. Which are you interested in?”

“Oh, just playing with ideas at the moment,” Barbara told her.

Isabelle turned to her. “I’m not a fool, Sergeant. If you wanted to look for holiday possibilities, you wouldn’t be doing it here. That being the case and since you’ve asked for time off, I think it’s safe to conclude you’re doing some work for Inspector Lynley. Am I correct?”

Barbara sighed. “You are.”

“I see.” Isabelle’s eyes narrowed as she thought this one through. It seemed to lead her to a single conclusion. “You’ve been in contact with him, then.”

“Well… more or less. Right.”

“Regularly?”

“Not sure what you mean,” Barbara said. She also wondered where the hell this was going. It was not as if she had a thing with DI Lynley. If Ardery thought that, she was clearly off her nut.

“Where is he, Sergeant?” the superintendent asked directly. “You know, don’t you?”

Barbara considered her answer. Truth was, she did know. Truth also was, Lynley hadn’t told her. His mentioning of Bernard Fairclough had done that. So she said, “He hasn’t told me, guv.”

But Ardery took another meaning from the moments in which Barbara had been considering her options. She said, “I see,” in a way that told Barbara she saw something other than the truth of the matter. “Thank you, Sergeant,” the superintendent added. “Thank you very much indeed.”

Ardery left her then. Barbara knew she could call her back before she got to the door of the library. She knew she could clarify. But she did not do so. Nor did she ask herself why she was allowing the superintendent to believe something that was patently untrue.

Instead, she turned back to her work with Santa Maria di whatever. Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, she thought. Whoever she was, and not Isabelle Ardery, was the crux of the matter in hand.

MILNTHORPE CUMBRIA

The end product St. James had to deal with was that his wife was simply afraid. Afraid, she was projecting them into a future for which she’d come up with half a dozen alternative scenarios, none of which did anything to assuage her fears. What was to St. James a potential solution to their long-thwarted desire for a family was no solution at all to her. There were too many variables that they couldn’t control, she’d argued, and reluctantly he had to admit that there was a great deal of truth in what she said. An open adoption could indeed invite into their lives not only an infant in need of a loving family but also a birth mother, birth father, birth grandparents on both sides, and God only knew who else. It wasn’t a simple matter of scooping up an infant from the arms of a social worker and — it had to be said — hoping that the child and young adult growing out of that infant would not be one who felt the need to develop a second life with a birth family he or she scouted out when of an age to do so. Deborah was completely right in this, but so was he: There would be no guarantees in any route to parenthood, he’d told her.

His brother was pressing him for an answer. This girl in Southampton couldn’t wait forever, David had said. There were other interested couples. “Come along, Simon. It’s either yes or no, and it’s not like you not to make a decision.”

So St. James had spoken to Deborah again. Again, she’d been adamant. They’d gone back and forth for a quarter of an hour, at the end of which he’d set out for a walk. They hadn’t actually parted badly, but they needed a little space for the heat of their discussion to dissipate.

He’d left the Crow and Eagle and walked in the direction of Arnside, along the road that skirted the River Bela and ultimately the mudflats of Milnthorpe Sands. As he walked, he tried not to think but rather merely to breathe in the rain-washed, damp day. He needed to clear his mind of this whole adoption business once and for all. If he didn’t — and if Deborah didn’t — it was going to poison their marriage.

The damn magazine hadn’t helped matters. Deborah had it in hand at this point, and she’d read the bloody thing from cover to cover. From a story in Conception she had concluded decisively that she wanted to go the surrogacy route: her egg, his sperm, a petri dish, and a host mother. She’d read a story of a six-time surrogate and the altruism she extended towards other women. “It would be our child,” was the point she kept making. “Ours and no one else’s.” Well, it would be and it wouldn’t, to his way of thinking. There were dangers here as well as dangers in the other routes of adoption.

The day was a fine one although the night had seen buckets of rain pouring down on Cumbria. But now the air felt clean and crisp, and the sky displayed an ashen wealth of cumulus clouds. Out on the mudflats, the stragglers from various flocks of birds heading to Africa and the Mediterranean still hunted for ragworms, lugworms, and tellins. He recognised the plovers and the dunlans among them but as to the rest, he could not have said. He watched them for a while and admired the simplicity of their life. Then he turned and walked back into Milnthorpe.

In the car park of the inn, he found Lynley just arriving. He walked over to join him as his friend got out of the Healey Elliott. They had a moment of mutual admiration for the saloon’s sleek lines and handsome paint job before St. James said, “But you didn’t come by to prompt further vehicular envy on my part, I expect.”