Believing the Lie

by Elizabeth George

  She remembered the bag in her hand, the scarf and blouse within it. “Bought something in the high street. I reckoned Hadiyyah’s approval is all I need to wear it tomorrow.”

  “Yes, yes!” Hadiyyah cried. “Let’s see, Barbara. Mummy, Barbara has been making herself over. She’s been buying new clothes and everything. She wanted to go to Marks and Spencer at first, but I wouldn’t let her. Well, we bought a skirt there, didn’t we, Barbara, but that was all because I told her only grannies ever go to Marks and Spencer— ”

  “Not exactly true, darling,” Angelina said.

  “Well you always said— ”

  “I say many silly things you’re to take no notice of. Barbara, show us. Put it on, in fact.”

  “Oh yes, will you put it on?” Hadiyyah said. “You must put it on. You c’n use my room— ”

  “Which is chaos unleashed,” Angelina said. “Use Hari’s and mine, Barbara. Meanwhile, we’ll make the tea.”

  Thus Barbara found herself in the last place she actually would have chosen to be: in the bedroom of Angelina Upman and Hadiyyah’s father, Taymullah Azhar. She closed the door behind her with a tiny expulsion of breath. All right, she told herself, she could do this. All she had to do was take the blouse from the bag, unfold it, whip off the pullover she had on… She didn’t have to look at anything but what was directly in front of her.

  Which, naturally, she found impossible to do, and she didn’t want to begin to think why. What she saw was what she expected to see: the signs of a man and woman who were partners to each other and specifically partners in the one way necessary to create a child. Not that they were attempting to create another, since Angelina’s birth control pills were on the bedside table next to a clock radio. But contained within the fact of them was also the fact of what they meant.

  So bloody what? Barbara asked herself. What the dickens had she expected and what business was it of hers anyway? Taymullah Azhar and Angelina Upman were doing the deed. Better said, they had resumed doing the deed at some point after Angelina’s sudden reappearance in Azhar’s life. The fact that she’d left him for another man was now apparently forgiven and forgotten, and there was an end to it. Everyone got to live happily whatever. Barbara told herself it behooved her to do likewise.

  She buttoned the blouse and tried to smooth out its wrinkles. She took out the scarf she’d bought to go with it, and she wound this inexpertly round her neck. She moved to a mirror on the back of the door and gazed at herself. She wanted to retch. She should have gone for the torte, she decided. It would have cost less and been infinitely more satisfying.

  “Are you changed, Barbara?” Hadiyyah asked from behind the closed door. “Mummy wants to know do you need any help.”

  “No. Got it,” Barbara called. “I’m coming out. You ready? Have your sunglasses on? Be prepared to be dazzled.”

  Silence greeted her. Then Hadiyyah and her mother spoke at once: “A striking choice, Barbara,” came from Angelina, while, “Oh no! You forgot about the jawline and the neckline!” came from Hadiyyah, this latter in something of a wail, to which she added, “They’re s’posed to mirror each other, Barbara, and you forgot.”

  Another fashion disaster, Barbara thought. There really was a reason she’d spent the last fifteen years of her life wearing slogan-fronted tee-shirts and drawstring trousers.

  Angelina hastened to say, “Hadiyyah, that’s not true.”

  “But she’s meant to choose rounded and she’s chosen— ”

  “Darling, she’s only failed to use the scarf as it’s meant to be used. One can still create the effect by rounding the scarf. One doesn’t want to be limited by believing that only a single kind of neckline… Here, Barbara, let me show you.”

  “But, Mummy, the colour— ”

  “— is perfect and I’m pleased you see that,” Angelina said firmly. She removed the scarf from around Barbara’s neck and with a few deft and maddening moves, she rearranged it. This put her closer to Barbara than she’d been before, and Barbara caught the scent of her: She was fragrant like a tropical flower. She also had the most flawless skin Barbara had ever seen. “There,” Angelina said. “Look in the mirror now, Barbara. Tell me what you think. It’s very easy to do. I’ll show you.”

  Barbara went back into the bedroom within sight of those pills, which, this time, she refused to look at. She wanted to dislike Angelina— a woman who’d left her daughter and her daughter’s father to have a lengthy fling for which she’d actually been forgiven?— but she found that she couldn’t. This went some distance, she supposed, in explaining how and why Azhar had apparently forgiven her.

  She saw her reflection and she had to admit it: The bloody woman knew how to tie a scarf. And now it was tied, properly, Barbara could see that it wasn’t actually the appropriate concomitant garment to the blouse. Damn it all, she thought. When would she learn?

  She was about to emerge and ask Angelina if she and Hadiyyah would accompany her on her next adventure in Camden High Street since she hadn’t a great deal of money to waste on making the wrong sartorial decisions. But she heard the flat door open and the sounds of Taymullah Azhar arriving home. The last place she wanted to be found was in the bedroom he shared with the mother of his child, so she hastily untied the scarf, removed the blouse, shoved them back into the bag, and donned the pullover she’d worn to work that day.

  When she rejoined them, Azhar was admiring the new paint on the walls, with Hadiyyah clinging onto his hand and Angelina linked to his arm. He turned, and his surprised face told Barbara that neither Hadiyyah nor her mother had mentioned her presence.

  He said, “Barbara! Hullo. And what do you think of their handiwork?”

  “I’m hiring them to do my digs next,” Barbara said, “although I’m demanding purple and orange for my colours. Think that’ll do me right, Hadiyyah?”

  “No no no!” Hadiyyah cried.

  Her parents laughed. Barbara smiled. Aren’t we all a happy family? she thought. Time to exit stage right. She said, “Leave you to your dinner,” and to Angelina specifically, “Thanks for the help with the scarf. I could see the difference. If I can get you to dress me every morning, I’ll be set for life.”

  “Anytime,” Angelina said. “Truly.”

  And the damn thing was, she meant it, Barbara thought. Maddening woman. If she’d merely cooperate and be a sodding cow, things would be so much easier.

  She nodded a good night to them all and let herself out. She was surprised when Azhar followed her, but she understood when he lit a cigarette, something he would not do indoors now that nonsmoking Angelina had returned.

  He said, “Congratulations, Barbara.”

  She stopped, turned, and said, “For what?”

  “Your teeth. I see they’ve been repaired, and they look very good. I expect people have been telling you that all day, so let me count myself among them.”

  “Oh. Right. Ta. The guv— she’s ordered the entire thing. Well, not ordered exactly, ’cause she can’t do that in a personal matter like appearance. So let’s say she suggested it strenuously. She wants the hair fixed next. I don’t know where we go from there but I’ve a feeling it’ll involve liposuction and serious cosmetic surgery. When she’s finished with me, I expect I’ll be beating men off with a broom.”

  “You’re making light of it and you shouldn’t,” Azhar told her. “No doubt Angelina and Hadiyyah have already told you— ”

  “They haven’t actually,” Barbara cut in. “But thank you for the compliment, Azhar.”

  So there was irony in a soap dish, she thought: a compliment from the very last man on earth who should have noticed her teeth and the very last man from whom she should have wanted notice in the first place. Well, it didn’t mean anything either way, she told herself.

  On that set of lies, she walked on to her bungalow, bidding Taymullah Azhar good night.

  30 OCTOBER

  BELGRAVIA

  LONDON

  Forewarned being forearmed
, Lynley had spent the next two days following his meeting with Hillier and Bernard Fairclough doing what research he was able to do on the man, his family, and his situation. He didn’t wish to walk into this covert investigation blind and as things turned out, there was a fair amount of information available on Fairclough, who had not been born Bernard Fairclough at all but rather Bernie Dexter of Barrow-in-Furness. His initial appearance on earth took place at home, in a two-up and two-down terrace house in Blake Street. This turned out to be a short distance from the railway tracks upon the figurative wrong side of which the Dexter domicile lay.

  How he’d morphed from Bernie Dexter into Bernard Fairclough, first Baron of Ireleth, was the kind of tale with by which Sunday newspaper magazines justify their existences. As Bernie Dexter at fifteen years of age, he’d finished with what schooling he was ever to have and had gone to work for Fairclough Industries in a lowly position defined by the mindless job of packing chrome bathroom fixtures into shipping containers for eight hours each day. Although it was a job guaranteed to bleed soul, hope, and ambition from an ordinary worker, Bernie Dexter of Blake Street had been no ordinary worker. Cheeky from the first was how his wife described him in a post-knighthood interview, and she ought to have known for she had been born Valerie Fairclough, the great-granddaughter of the firm’s founder. She’d met the fifteen-year-old when she herself was eighteen and he was performing in the company’s Christmas panto. She was there for duty’s sake; he was there for fun’s sake. They encountered each other in a receiving line: the Fairclough owners doing a yearly bit of noblesse oblige and their employees— among whom was Bernie— moving along the line with an appropriate amount of forelock tugging, downcast eyes, and aye, sir, thank you, sir in best Dickensian manner as Christmas bonuses were handed out. This applied to all except Bernie Dexter, who told Valerie Fairclough straightaway and with a wink that he intended to marry her. “A real beauty, you are,” he said, “so I reckon I’ll set you up for life.” He declared this last with utter confidence, as if Valerie Fairclough were somehow not set up for life already.

  He’d gone on to keep his word, however, for he had no qualms at all about approaching Valerie’s father, telling him, “I could make this firm into something better, you know, you give me half a chance.” And so he had done. Not all at once, of course, but over time, and during that time he also managed to impress Valerie with the persistence of his devotion to her. He also managed to impregnate the young woman when she was twenty-five, which resulted in an elopement. In short order, then, he took her family name as his own, improved the efficiency of Fairclough Industries, modernised its products, one of which was— of all things— an entire line of state-of-the-art lavatories, from which he amassed an impressive fortune.

  His son Nicholas had always been the fly in the ointment of Bernie’s otherwise ideal life. Lynley found volumes of information on the bloke. For when Nicholas Fairclough went periodically bad, he did it in a very public manner. Public drunkenness, brawls, break-ins, football hooliganism, drunk driving, car theft, arson, indecent exposure while under the influence… The man had a past that read like that of the prodigal son on steroids. He’d played out his dissolution before God and everyone and in particular before the eyes of the local press in Cumbria, and the stories generated from his behaviour caught the eyes of the national tabloids always on the prowl for sensation to feature on their cover pages, especially when the sensation is generated by the scion of someone notable.

  Early death was the usual outcome of a life led in the manner Nicholas Fairclough had led his, but in his case love supervened in the person of a young Argentine woman with the impressive name of Alatea Vasquez y del Torres. Fresh out of yet another rehab programme— this one in America, in the state of Utah— Nicholas had taken himself to a former mining town called Park City for what he apparently believed was a well-deserved spate of R & R, financed as usual by his desperate father. The old mining town served this purpose well, for it was nestled in the Wasatch Mountains and into its embrace every year from late November till April came avid skiers from round the world, along with scores of young men and women hired to service their needs.

  Alatea Vasquez y del Torres had been among this latter group, and she and Nicholas Fairclough— according to the more breathless reports Lynley was able to scavenge— locked eyes over the till in one of the ski resort’s many eateries. The rest, as is generally said, was history. What ensued was a whirlwind courtship, a courthouse marriage effected in Salt Lake City, a final descent into a drug-fuelled pyre of dissolution on Nicholas’s part— odd way to celebrate matrimony, but there you have it, Lynley thought— from which the phoenix that was apparently the man’s amazing physical constitution arose. The arising of this phoenix, however, had little to do with Fairclough’s determination to get the better of the beast on his back and everything to do with Alatea Vasquez y del Torres’s decision to walk out on him barely two months into their marriage.

  “I’d do anything for her,” Fairclough had later declared. “I’d die for her. To take the cure for her was child’s play.”

  She’d returned to him, he’d stuck with sobriety, and everyone was happy. So it seemed from all the accounts that Lynley was able to glean in his twenty-four hours of research into the family. Thus if Nicholas Fairclough had been involved some way in his cousin’s death, at this point in his life it seemed wildly out of character, for it was hardly reasonable to assume that his wife would remain loyally at the side of a murderer.

  Lynley went on to read about the rest of the family from whatever sources he could find. But information on them was vague, considering how dull they were in comparison to the son of Lord Fairclough. One sister divorced, one sister a spinster, one cousin— this would be the dead man— the master of the Fairclough money, that cousin’s wife a homemaker and their two children respectable… The Fairclough family were a disparate group but on the surface they all seemed clean.

  At the end of his second day of exploration, Lynley stood at the window of his library in Eaton Terrace and looked out at the street, the gas fire burning brightly behind him in the late afternoon. He didn’t much like the situation he was in, but he wasn’t sure what he could do about it. In his line of work, the objective was to gather evidence in proof of someone’s guilt, not to gather evidence in proof of their innocence. If the coroner had declared the death accidental, there seemed little point delving further into the matter. For coroners knew what they were about, and they had evidence and testimony to bolster their findings. That the coroner had deemed the death of Ian Cresswell an accident— unfortunate and untimely as all accidents were, but still an accident— seemed a conclusion that ought to have satisfied everyone, no matter the grief attendant on the sudden loss of a man from the bosom of his family.

  It was interesting, though, that Bernard Fairclough wasn’t satisfied, Lynley thought. Despite the inquest and its results, Fairclough’s doubts in the matter suggested that he might well know more than he’d mentioned at their meeting at Twins. And this suggested there was more to the death of Ian Cresswell than met the superficial eye.

  Lynley wondered if someone had dropped a word to Fairclough about the local investigation into the drowning. He also wondered if Fairclough had himself had a word with someone inside of it.

  Lynley turned from the window and gazed at his desk, spread out on it were notes, printouts from his computer, the laptop itself. There was, he reckoned, more than one avenue to unearth additional information regarding Ian Cresswell’s death— if, indeed, there was additional information— and he was on his way to the phone to make a call in the service of gathering more details when it rang. He thought about allowing the answer machine to take it— that reaction to the phone had become habitual over recent months— but he decided to pick up, and when he did, it was to hear Isabelle say, “What on earth are you doing, Tommy? Why haven’t you been at work?”

  He’d thought Hillier would handle this detail. Obviously, he’d been wro
ng.

  He said, “It’s a small matter Hillier asked me to deal with. I thought he’d tell you.”

  “Hillier? What sort of matter?” Isabelle sounded surprised, as well she might. He and Hillier didn’t rub congenial elbows very often, and if push came to shove, Lynley was surely the last person at the Met to whom Hillier would turn.

  “It’s confidential,” he told her. “I’m not at liberty— ”

  “What’s going on?”

  He didn’t reply at once. He was trying to think of a way to tell her what he was doing without actually telling her what he was doing, but she apparently took his silence for avoidance because she said tartly, “Ah. I see. Is this to do with what happened?”

  “With what? What happened?”

  “Please. Don’t. You know what I’m saying. With Bob. That night. The fact that we’ve not been together since— ”

  “Lord, no. It’s nothing to do with that,” he cut in, although the truth of the matter, if he had to admit it, was that he wasn’t exactly sure.

  “Then why’ve you been avoiding me?”

  “I’m not aware that I have been avoiding you.”

  There was a silence that greeted this. He found himself wondering where she was. The time of day suggested she might still be at the Yard, perhaps in her office, and he could see her there at her desk with her head lowered to speak into the phone and her smooth hair— rather the colour of amber— tucked behind one ear to show a conservative but fashionable earring. One shoe off, perhaps, and there she was leaning down to rub her calf as she thought what she would say to him next.

  What she said surprised him. “Tommy, I told Bob yesterday. Not who exactly because, as I explained, I do know very well he’d use it against me at some time when he believes I’m out of order. But that. I told him that.”