Believing the Lie

person who actually mattered to him, and the truth was she’d just been there, in his way. He hadn’t thought of what came after the moment when he snatched Bella up and pulled her arms and legs off. He’d only wanted to do something to make the boiling inside of him go away. But how could Gracie understand that when she had no boiling inside of her? She could only see the meanness within him that had snatched up Bella and dismembered her.

Gracie stopped for a moment outside. Tim saw that she was breathing hard. He also noticed something new about Gracie, which brought him up short. She was growing breasts and he could see the buds of them poking at the jersey that she was wearing.

This brought a searing sadness upon him. It clouded his vision, and when the cloud passed, Gracie had gone back to jumping again. And this time, he watched her little breasts as she jumped. Something, he knew, had to be done about her.

How useless would it be to pick up the phone and ring their mother? he asked himself a second time. Gracie growing breasts meant Gracie needing her mum to do something like take her to town and purchase her a baby brassiere or whatever it was that little girls wore when they started growing breasts. This went beyond just getting Gracie off the bloody trampoline, didn’t it? Yes, it did, but wasn’t the truth that Niamh would see this the same way she saw everything? Tell Kaveh about it, she would say. Kaveh can handle this little problem.

That was everything tied up with a bow: Whatever Gracie was going to face in her growing-up years, she was going to have to face without a mum to help her, because the one thing in life that was an absolute certainty was that Niamh Cresswell had plans for herself that didn’t include the children she’d had with her louse of a husband. Thus Tim knew it was down to him or it was down to Kaveh to help Gracie as she grew up. Or it was down to them both.

Tim left his room. Kaveh was somewhere in the house, and Tim supposed now was as good a time as any to tell him that they needed to take Gracie into Windermere to get whatever she needed. If they didn’t do it, the boys in her school would start to tease her. Ultimately the girls would tease her as well. Teasing her would turn into bullying her soon enough, and Tim wasn’t about to have his sister bullied.

He heard Kaveh’s voice as he descended the stairs. It seemed to be coming from the fire house. The door to the room was partially closed, but a shaft of light fell on the floor from inside and he heard the sound of a poker stirring coals in the grate.

“…not actually in my plans,” Kaveh was saying politely to someone.

“But you can’t be thinking of staying on now Cresswell’s dead.” Tim recognised George Cowley’s voice. He also recognised the subject. Staying on meant they were talking about Bryan Beck farm. George Cowley would be seeing the death of Tim’s father as his chance to sweep in and buy the place. Obviously, Kaveh wasn’t having that.

“I am,” Kaveh said.

“Thinking of raising sheep, are you?” Cowley sounded amused by the entire idea. He probably pictured Kaveh mincing round the farmyard in pink Wellies and a lavender waxed jacket or something like.

“I’d actually hoped you’d continue renting the land as you’ve been doing,” Kaveh said. “It’s worked out so far. I don’t see why it can’t continue to do so. Besides the land’s quite valuable if it ever came to a sale of it.”

“And you reckon I’d never have the funds to make it mine,” Cowley concluded. “Well, d’you have the funds to buy it up yourself, laddie? I reckon not. This whole place’ll go on the block in a few months’ time and I’ll be there with the money.”

“I’m afraid it won’t be going on the block at all,” Kaveh said.

“Why’s that, then? You’re not claiming he left it to you?”

“As it happens, he did.”

George Cowley was silent, digesting this unexpected bit of news. He finally said, “You’re taking the piss.”

“As it happens, I’m not.”

“No? So where d’you plan to come up with the death duties, eh? That’ll take a real pile of dosh.”

“Death duties aren’t actually going to be a problem, Mr. Cowley,” Kaveh said.

There was another silence. Tim wondered what George Cowley was making of all this. For the first time, he also wondered how Kaveh Mehran fit into the picture of his father’s death. It had been an accident, plain and simple, hadn’t it? Everyone had said so, including the coroner. But now it didn’t seem so simple at all. And the next thing that came out of Kaveh’s mouth made the matter complicated beyond Tim’s imagining.

“My family will be joining me here as well, you see. Our combined resources will see to it that death duties — ”

“Family?” Cowley scoffed. “What’s the meaning of family in the light of day to your sort, eh?”

Kaveh didn’t reply for a moment. When he spoke, then, his tone was deathly formal. “Family means my parents, for one. They’ll be coming up from Manchester to live with me. Along with my wife.”

The walls seemed to shimmer around Tim. The earth itself seemed to tilt. Everything he’d thought he’d known was suddenly thrown into a vortex where words meant something far beyond what they’d meant for all of his fourteen years and what he thought he’d actually understood was obliterated by the uttering of one declaration.

“Your wife.” Cowley said it flatly.

“My wife. Yes.” The sound of movement, Kaveh crossing to the window perhaps, or to the desk at one side of the room. Or even standing at the hearth of the fireplace, one arm on the mantel, looking like someone who knew he was holding all the good cards in the deck. “I’ll be marrying next month.”

“Oh, too right.” Cowley snorted. “She know about your little ‘situation’ here, this next-month wife of yours?”

“Situation? What on earth do you mean?”

“You little pixie. You know ’xactly what I mean. You two arse bandits, you an’ Cresswell. Wha’s this, eh? Think the whole village didn’t know the truth?”

“If you mean that the village knew Ian Cresswell and I shared this house, of course they knew. Beyond that, what else is there?”

“Why, you little bum fucker. You trying to say — ”

“I’m trying to say that I’ll be marrying, my wife will live here along with my parents, and then our children. If there’s something not clear to you in that, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“What about them kids? You think one’f them won’t tell this next-month wife of yours what’s up with you?”

“Are you talking about Tim and Gracie, Mr. Cowley?”

“You goddamn bloody well know I am.”

“Aside from the fact that my fiancee doesn’t speak English and wouldn’t understand a word they said to her, there’s nothing for them to tell anyone. And Tim and Gracie are going back to their mother. That’s already in the works.”

“That’s that, then?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“You’re a real deep one, then, aren’t you, lad? Had this planned from the first, I expect.”

What Kaveh said in answer, Tim did not catch. He’d heard all that he needed to hear. He stumbled from the passageway into the kitchen and from there out of the house.

LAKE WINDERMERE CUMBRIA

St. James had decided there was a final possibility in this matter of Ian Cresswell’s drowning. It was a tenuous one at best, but as it existed, he knew he had to set out to see about it. He required a single sporting implement to do so.