Believing the Lie

will might be helpful, too. Could she see to that?

Could and would, she told him. “What about the kids?”

“Apparently, Cresswell assumed the insurance money would also benefit them. That doesn’t appear to be the case, however.”

Havers whistled. “Always good to follow the money.”

“Isn’t it just.”

“Which reminds me,” she said, “that bloke from The Source? Have you run into him yet?”

“Not yet,” Lynley said. “Why?”

“Because there’s more to him than meets the eye as well. Turns out he was up there for three days directly before Ian Cresswell drowned. With him needing to beef up his story for the paper, seems like murder’s a good way to do it.”

“We’ll take that on board,” Lynley told her, “but he’d have had to get onto the Fairclough property, get down to the boathouse, fiddle with the dock, and get off the property, all unseen. You mentioned he was a big bloke, didn’t you?”

“Nearly seven feet tall. A non-starter, then?”

“It’s doubtful, but at this point, anything’s possible.” Lynley thought about the likelihood of a seven-foot-tall redheaded reporter managing to escape the notice of Mignon Fairclough. Only in the dead of a very dark night could this have happened, he reckoned.

He said, “We’ve our work cut out, one way or the other.” It signaled an end to their conversation and he knew the sergeant would take it that way. But before she could do so, he had to know, even if he didn’t want to understand why he had to know. He said, “Are you carrying this off without the superintendent’s knowledge? She still thinks you’re on holiday? You’ve not run into her at the Met, have you?”

There was a silence. In it, he knew what the answer was. He avoided St. James’s glance as he said, “Damn. That’s going to make things difficult. For you, I mean. I’m sorry, Barbara.”

She said airily, “Truth to tell, the guv’s a bit tense, Inspector. But you know me. I’m used to tense.”

MILNTHORPE CUMBRIA

Deborah hated being at odds with her husband. This was due in part to the disparity in their ages and due in part to his disability and all the baggage attendant upon that. But most of all, it was due to the differences in their characters, which defined how each of them looked at life. Simon went at things logically and with remarkable disinterest, making it nearly impossible to argue with him because she looked at things through a cloud of emotion. In a battle where the warring armies marched onto the field from either the heart or the head, those battalions from the head won each skirmish. She was often left with that most useless of declarations to put a full stop to any heated conversation between herself and her husband: You don’t understand.

When Simon left her in their room at the inn, she did what she knew had to be done. She phoned his brother David and gave him what she called their decision. “I so much appreciate how you’ve thought of us, David,” she told him, and she meant every word. “But I can’t get my mind round sharing a baby with its birth parents. So we’re saying no.”

She could tell that David was disappointed, and she had little doubt that the rest of Simon’s family would be disappointed as well. But Simon’s family were not being asked to open their lives and their hearts to the virtual unknown. David said, “You know, it’s all a lottery, Deb, any way you go at parenthood,” to which she’d said, “I do know that. But the answer’s the same. The complications involved… I wouldn’t be able to cope.”

So it was over. In a day or two, the pregnant girl in question would move on her way towards another couple eager for a child. Deborah was glad she’d made the decision, but she felt disconsolate all the same. Simon wouldn’t be pleased, but she couldn’t see any answer other than the one she’d given. They simply had to move on.

She could tell her husband was more than ill-at-ease with going down the surrogacy route. She’d actually thought it would appeal to him since he was a scientist. But for him the miracles of modern medicine were turning out to be “dehumanising, Deborah.” Locking himself up in a doctor’s loo and seeing to the appropriate deposit made into the equally appropriate sterile container… And then there was the matter of harvesting her eggs and what that involved and the additional matter of the surrogate and monitoring the surrogate throughout the pregnancy and even finding the surrogate in the first place.

Who is this person? he reasonably asked. And how do you make sure of all the things you need to make sure of?

This person is just a womb we’re hiring, was how Deborah explained it to him.

If that’s what you think the extent of her involvement would be, Simon replied, then you’ve got your head in the clouds. We’re not hiring a vacant room in her house to store furniture, Deborah. This is a life that’s growing inside her body. You seem to think she’ll ignore that.

There’ll be a contract, for heaven’s sake. Look here, in the magazine, there’s a story about-

That magazine, he said, needs to go into the rubbish.

Deborah, however, didn’t toss it away when he left the room. Instead, she phoned David and when she’d done so, she’d sat and looked at the copy of Conception that Barbara Havers had overnighted to her. She gazed at the photos of the six-time surrogate, posing with the happy families she’d helped. She reread the article. Finally, she turned to the back where the advertisements were.

Everything related to reproduction had some sort of listing, she saw, but despite the hopeful article in the magazine itself, nothing referred to surrogacy. Phoning a legal service listed on the page told her why this was the case. Advertising oneself as a surrogate mother was illegal, she learned. The hopeful mother had to find her own surrogate. A relative is best, she was told. Have you a sister, madam? A cousin? Even mothers have carried their own grandchildren for their daughters. How old is your own mother?

God, nothing was easy, Deborah thought. She had no sister, her mother was dead, she was an only child of only children. Simon’s sister was a possibility but she couldn’t imagine the madcap Sidney — currently in the throes of love with a mercenary soldier, for heaven’s sake — allowing her million-pound model’s body to be the launching pad for her brother’s child. There were definite limits to sororial love, and Deborah reckoned she knew what they were.

The law was not her friend in this matter. Advertising everything else related to reproduction appeared to be entirely legal — from clinics offering money to women willing to have their eggs harvested to lesbian couples looking for sperm. There were even adverts for groups who wanted to talk donors out of donating in the first place, along with counseling services for donors, recipients, and everyone in between. There were help lines listed and assistance offered from nurses, doctors, clinics, and midwives. There were so many options heading in so many different directions that Deborah wondered someone didn’t simply advertise in Conception with the single word HELP!

This thought finally took her to the matter of the magazine itself and how it had come to her attention: through Alatea Fairclough, who had torn out these very same pages that were now eating at Deborah’s peace of mind. With herself in turmoil over the matter, Deborah began to see more clearly how Alatea could be viewing her own situation. What if Alatea knew she couldn’t carry a baby to term? Deborah asked herself. What if she hadn’t yet shared that information with her husband? What if she — just as Deborah herself was proposing to do — was searching for a surrogate mother? Here she was in England, away from her native land, away from friends and relatives who might have volunteered for the job… Was there someone she could turn to in their stead? Was there someone she could ask to carry her petri dish child made with Nicholas Fairclough?

Deborah thought about this. She compared Alatea to herself. She had Sidney St. James, unlikely candidate though she was. Whom did Alatea have?

There was a possibility, she realised, one that fitted in with what had happened in the boathouse at Ireleth Hall. She needed to tell Simon about it. She needed to talk to Tommy as well.

She left the room. Simon had been a good while gone on his walk, and she punched in his mobile number as she descended the stairs. Speaking with Tommy in the car park, he told her they were just about to-