Believing the Lie

“Any chance to lord it over you in the transportation area is a chance I must grab on to. But in this case, you’re right. I wanted to talk to you.”

“A mobile would have done. This was a bit of a drive.”

“Hmm, yes. But part of the gaff is blown. I reckoned a few hours away from the Faircloughs wouldn’t go amiss.” Lynley told him of his evening encounter with Valerie, Bernard, and Mignon Fairclough. “Now that she knows Scotland Yard’s involved, she’ll make short work of letting everyone else know as well.”

“That could be good.”

“It’s actually as I’d have preferred it.”

“But you’re uneasy?”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Because of who Fairclough is. Because of who Hillier is. Because of Hillier’s damnable propensity for using me to serve his own ends.”

St. James waited for more. He knew the history of Lynley’s relationship with the assistant commissioner. It included at least one attempted cover-up of a long-ago crime. He wouldn’t have put it past Hillier to use Lynley another time in a similar capacity in which one of their own — as Hillier would no doubt think of Fairclough, Lynley, and himself — had something serious he wished to bury and Lynley was supposed to wield the shovel. Anything was possible, and both of them knew it.

Lynley said, “It may all be a smoke screen.”

“Which part of it?”

“Fairclough wanting me to look into Ian Cresswell’s death. That’s certainly what Mignon Fairclough indicated last evening. It was a look-no-further-than-the-bloke-who-employed-you kind of remark. It’s something I’d already thought of myself and dismissed, however.”

“Why?”

“Because I just can’t make sense of it, Simon.” Lynley leaned against the side of the Healey Elliott, arms crossed at his chest. “I can see how he’d ask for the Met’s involvement if a murder had occurred and he’d been accused or suspected and wanted to clear his name. Or if one or more of his children had been accused or suspected and he wanted to clear their names. But this was deemed an accident from the first, so why find someone to look into it if he himself is guilty of something or if he suspects one of them is?”

“That rather suggests Mignon herself is throwing up a smoke screen, doesn’t it?”

“It would explain her trying to divert attention onto her father last night. Evidently, Cresswell wanted Bernard to cut her off.” Lynley explained the financial arrangement Mignon apparently had with her father. “She wouldn’t have wanted that. And since Cresswell kept the books and knew every move Bernard made financially, there’s the additional possibility that he wanted someone else cut off as well.”

“The son?”

“He’s the likely choice, isn’t he? With Nicholas’s past, Cresswell would have argued not to trust him with a penny, and who could blame him? Nicholas Fairclough might be a recovering methamphetamine user but that’s the key word: recovering and not recovered. Addicts never recover. They merely cope day-to-day.”

Lynley would know about that, St. James acknowledged, because of his own brother. “And has Fairclough handed money to his son?”

“I want to look into that. The other daughter and her husband are my means to the information.”

St. James looked away. Noise and odours were coming from an open door into the back of the hotel: the crashing and banging of pots along with the smell of frying bacon and burnt toast. He said to Lynley, “What about Valerie Fairclough, Tommy?”

“As killer?”

“Ian Cresswell was no blood to her. He was her husband’s nephew and he had the potential to damage her children. If he wanted to cut off Mignon and he doubted Nicholas’s long-term recovery, he’d steer Fairclough away from helping them financially as Fairclough tended to do. And Valerie Fairclough’s behaviour that day was decidedly strange according to Constable Schlicht: dressed to the nines, perfectly calm, a phone call announcing ‘a dead man floating in my boathouse.’”

“There’s that,” Lynley admitted. “But she could have been the intended victim as well.”

“Motive?”

“Mignon declares her father is hardly ever there. He’s in London repeatedly. Havers is looking into that end of things, but if something’s not right with the Faircloughs’ marriage, Bernard could have hopes to rid himself of his wife.”

“Why not divorce her?”

“Because of Fairclough Industries. He’s run it forever and of course he’d stand to walk away with a great deal of money if it was part of a settlement unless there’s some sort of prenuptial agreement we’re not privy to. But as of now it’s still her company, and I daresay she can throw her weight into whatever decisions are made at the place if she wants to.”

“Another reason for her to want Ian dead, Tommy, if he’d been recommending decisions not to her liking.”

“Possibly. But wouldn’t it make more sense for her to have Ian fired? Why kill him when she had the power to cut him off as easily as he wanted to cut off two of her children?”

“So where do we stand?” St. James pointed out to him that the fillet knife they’d brought up from the water looked perfectly innocent to the naked eye, not a scratch upon it. The stones they’d also brought up bore no recent scratches to indicate they’d been jemmied away from the dock. They could get Constable Schlicht out to the boathouse and the local SOCO boys involved, but they were going to need the coroner to reopen the case and they had virtually nothing to give him in order to encourage him to have another look at Ian Cresswell’s death.

“The answer lies with the people,” Lynley said. “They all bear a closer looking into.”

“Which means, I think, that my usefulness to you has run its course,” St. James said. “Although there’s a final route we might go with the fillet knife. And another conversation that might be had with Mignon.”

Lynley was about to reply to these suggestions when his mobile rang. He looked at the caller and said, “It’s Havers. This could tell us where we need to head next.” He flipped the phone open and said, “Tell me you’ve got something meaningful, Sergeant, because all we’re running into here is one dead end after another.”

ARNSIDE CUMBRIA

Alatea had gone out early to plant bulbs because she wanted to avoid her husband. She’d slept poorly, with her mind racing hour after hour, and at the first sign of dawn, she’d slipped out of bed and faded out of the house.

Nicholas had slept badly as well. Something was very wrong.

The first evidence of this had come over dinner on the previous evening. He toyed with his food, mostly cutting the meat and moving it round the plate, mostly slicing the potatoes neatly and piling them up like poker chips. To her question of what was bothering him, he’d smiled vaguely and said, “Just a bit off my food tonight,” and ultimately he’d pushed away from the table and wandered off into the drawing room, where he’d sat in the fireplace inglenook briefly and then paced the room as if it were a cage and he the imprisoned animal on display.

When they’d gone to bed, things had been worse. With a rising feeling of dread, she’d approached him. A hand on his chest, she’d said, “Nicky, something’s wrong. Tell me,” although the truth was that she feared hearing his answer more than she feared her own restless mind and where it took her when she allowed it free rein. He’d said, “Nothing. Really, darling. Just tired or something. Just a bit on edge,” and when she’d not been able to prevent a look of alarm washing over her features, he’d gone on to say, “You’re not to worry, Allie,” and she knew he was reassuring her that whatever was going on inside him, it bore no relationship to his