Believing the Lie

  “She knew then, for a certainty, that the man in the water was dead.”

  Schlicht paused, fork midflight to his lips. “She did, that. ’Course, he was floating facedown and he’d been in the water a good long while. Those clothes of hers, though. They do say something, don’t they?”

  Still, Schlicht said, it was cut-and-dried as far as he could tell when they got to the boathouse, despite any oddity in Valerie Fairclough’s attire and behaviour. The scull was capsized, the body was floating next to it, and the condition of the dock with its missing stones told the tale of what had happened. Nonetheless, he put in a call for a DI to have a look just to be on the safe side of things, and the DI in question— a woman called Dankanics— came along, had a look, and agreed with how all evidence seemed to Schlicht. The rest had been more or less routine: filling out paperwork, making reports, showing up at the inquest, et cetera.

  “Did DI Dankanics go over the scene with you?”

  “Right. She had a look. We all did.”

  “All?”

  “Ambulance crew. Mrs. Fairclough. The daughter.”

  “Daughter? Where was she?” This was odd. The scene should have been secured. That it had not been was highly irregular, and St. James wondered if this irregularity was the result of Schlicht’s inexperience, DI Dankanics’s possible indifference, or something else.

  “Don’t know exactly where she was when she saw the commotion,” Schlicht replied, “but what brought her down to the boathouse was the noise. The ambulance had its siren going all the way to the house— those blokes like their siren like I like my dog, let me tell you— and she heard it and came along with her zimmer.”

  “Disabled, is she?”

  “Looks that way. So that was that. The body got carted off for autopsy, DI Dankanics and I took statements, and…” He frowned.

  “Yes?”

  “Sorry. I’d forgotten the boyfriend.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Turns out the dead bloke was a poofter. His partner was working on the property. Not at that exact moment, mind you, but he came driving in as the ambulance was driving out. ’Course he wanted to know what was going on— who wouldn’t, human nature, eh?— and Mrs. Fairclough told him. Took him to one side and had a word and down he goes.”

  “He fainted?”

  “Face-flat onto the gravel. We didn’t know who he was at first and the fainting bit seemed off-kilter for some bloke just driving up to the house and hearing there’s been a drowning. So we asked who he was and she told us— this is Valerie— that this bloke did landscapes and the like and the other bloke, the dead one in the boathouse, was his partner. Partner as in partner, if you take my meaning. Anyway, he came round soon enough and he starts blubbing. He says it’s his fault the other bloke drowned, which we take up with some interest— this is me and Dankanics— but it turns out they’d had words on the previous evening about tying the knot. The dead bloke had wanted a civil ceremony with everything front and centre and all aboveboard while the living bloke liked things as they were. And Christ, if that bloke wasn’t howling his head off. Makes you wonder, if you know what I mean.”

  St. James didn’t, exactly, although like Alice he was finding the information curiouser and curiouser. He said, “As to the boathouse itself…”

  “Hmm?”

  “Was everything in order? Aside from the missing stones on the dock, of course.”

  “Far as Mrs. Fairclough could tell.”

  “What about the boats themselves?”

  “They were all inside.”

  “As usual?”

  Schlicht knotted his eyebrows. He’d finished with his chicken pie and was prising the lid from the raspberry fool. “Not sure I receive your meaning.”

  “Were the boats always kept in the order they were in when you saw the body? Or was that order arbitrary?”

  Schlicht’s lips rounded into a whistle, but he made no sound. He also gave no reply for a moment, but St. James could tell that in spite of his informal manner of address, he was not a fool. “That’s something,” he said, “that we didn’t ask. Bloody hell, Mr. St. James. I hope it doesn’t mean what I think it means.”

  For an arbitrary order suggested a likely accident. Anything else suggested murder.

  MIDDLEBARROW FARM

  CUMBRIA

  The Middlebarrow Pele Project was situated to the east of the hill that comprised Arnside Wood, which gave entrance to a protected area called Arnside Knot. Deborah St. James and Nicholas Fairclough skirted this hill on the way to the project, curving through the upper part of Arnside village and then down again, following signs that directed them towards a place called Silverdale. As they drove, Nicholas Fairclough chatted in what seemed to Deborah to be a habitually friendly manner. He appeared open and forthright, the least likely individual to have planned the murder of his own cousin, had it actually been a murder. He made no mention of Ian Cresswell’s death, of course. The drowning of the man— as unfortunate as it was— bore no relationship to the ostensible reasons for Deborah’s visit to this place. She wasn’t sure she was meant to keep it this way, however. It seemed to her that one way or another she had to bring Cresswell into the picture.

  This wasn’t her forte. Chatting up people in general was difficult for her, although she’d improved over the years since she’d learned the value of having her photographic subjects relax while she snapped their pictures. But that kind of chatting up was, at least, honest in its own way. This brand of chatting up— when she was pretending to be someone she utterly was not— left her in a quandary.

  Luckily, Nicholas didn’t appear to notice. He was too intent upon reassuring her of his wife’s support of the work he was doing.

  “She’ll be standoffish till you get to know her,” he told Deborah as they zipped along the narrow road. “It’s her nature. You’re not to take it personally. Allie doesn’t trust people much as a rule. It’s to do with her family.” He cast her a smile. He had an oddly youthful face— like a boy’s when he hasn’t come into his manhood yet— and Deborah reckoned he’d remain young looking right to the grave. Some people were lucky that way. “Her dad’s the mayor of the town she was born in. In Argentina. He’s been mayor for years, so she grew up in the spotlight there and she had to learn to monitor everything she did. So she always thinks someone’s watching her, to catch her out doing… I don’t know what. Anyway, it makes her skittish at first. Everyone has to earn her trust.”

  “She’s quite attractive, isn’t she,” Deborah said. “I expect that could be a problem for someone in the limelight, even in a small town. All eyes on her, if you know what I mean. Where in Argentina is she from?”

  “Santa Maria di something. I always forget. It’s about ten words long. It’s in the foothills of wherever. Sorry. All the Spanish names flummox me. I’m completely hopeless with languages. I can barely speak English. Anyway, she doesn’t like the place. She says it felt like an outpost on the moon. I expect it’s not that big, eh? She ran off from home when she was something like fifteen years old. She made it up with her family after a bit, but she never went back.”

  “Her family must miss her.”

  “That,” he said, “I wouldn’t know. Although I expect they would do, wouldn’t they?”

  “You’ve not met them, then? They didn’t attend your wedding?”

  “Actually, there wasn’t much of a wedding. Just Allie and me and city hall in Salt Lake City. Someone to do the ceremony and two women we carted in off the street to be witnesses. Afterwards, Allie wrote to tell her parents we’d done the deed, but they didn’t write back. They’re cheesed off about it, I expect. But they’ll come round. People always do. Especially”— he grinned— “when there’s a grandchild on the way.”

  That explained the magazine she’d seen. Conception with its countless stories on antenatal this and postnatal that. “You’re expecting? Congrat— ”

  “Not yet. But any day now.” He tapped his fingers a bit on the st
eering wheel. “I’m very lucky,” he said. Then he pointed out an autumnal woodland to the east of the road on which they were driving, a rich panoply of umber and gold deciduous trees contrasting against the green of conifers. “Middlebarrow Wood,” he told her. “You can see the pele tower from here.” He pulled into a lay-by to give her a view.

  The tower, Deborah saw, was on a rise of land that looked rather like the prehistoric barrows one found all round the countryside in England. Behind this rise, the woods began, although the tower itself was out in the open. This would have given it a superior position should any border reivers have come calling, a regular occurrence during the centuries when the border between England and Scotland continually shifted. The intent of the reivers was always the same. They were marauders who had taken advantage of the lawlessness of that period of time, perfecting the art of stealing cattle and oxen, invading homes, and stripping their victims of everything they owned. Their objective was always plunder and getting back to their own homes without being killed in the process. If they themselves had to kill to accomplish this, they did so. But that hadn’t been their first priority.

  The pele towers had been an answer to the question of protection from the reivers. The best of them were indestructible, with stone walls far too thick to be harmed and windows just wide enough for an archer to fire from, and separate floors for animals, their owners, their household activities, and their defence. But the towers had fallen out of use as time went on, after the border was finally firmly established, along with laws and the advent of lawmen willing to make those laws more than someone’s passing fancy. Once the towers fell out of use, their materials were employed for other buildings. Or the towers themselves were subsumed into larger structures, becoming part of a great house, a vicarage, or a school.

  Middlebarrow Tower was of the first type. It stood tall, with most of its windows intact. A short distance from it and across a field, a group of old farm buildings gave testimony to what some of the tower’s original stones had been used for. Between the tower and these farm buildings, a camp had been set up. It was equipped with small tents, honey pots, and several makeshift sheds with a larger tent to accommodate the twelve-step programme, Nicholas Fairclough said. This was also the dining tent. Meals and twelve-stepping went hand in hand.

  Nicholas pulled back into the road, which descended to a lane leading off towards the tower. The tower, he said, was on the private land of Middlebarrow farm. He’d got the farmer to consent to the project— not to mention to consent to the presence of the recovering addicts who were currently living and working there— once he saw the benefits of a restored tower that could be used as anything from a holiday rental to a tourist attraction.

  “He’s settled on turning the place into a camping site,” Nicholas told her. “It’ll bring him some extra money during the season, and he’s happy enough to put up with us if that’s the end product. That was Allie’s idea, by the way, approaching the farmer with the possibilities for the tower if he’d let us renovate it. She was involved with the pele project in its initial stages.”

  “But not now?”

  “She likes to be in the background. Plus… well, I daresay when the addicts began to arrive, she was a bit more comfortable being at home than hanging about here.” They pulled onto the site where work was in progress, and Nicholas added, “No need to be wary, though. These blokes are far too used up— and far too ready for a change in their lives— to be harmful to anyone.”

  But they were not, Deborah found, far too used up to work. A team leader had been assigned to the project, and when Nicholas introduced him as Dave K— “It’s traditional not to use surnames,” he told her— it was clear that work leading to hunger leading to meals leading to twelve-stepping and then to sleep was the order of the day. Dave K had a roll of plans with him, and he unscrolled them on the bonnet of Nicholas Fairclough’s car. With a nod at Deborah meant, she assumed, to convey acknowledgement of the introduction, he lit a cigarette and used it as a pointer as he spoke to Nicholas about the project.

  Deborah wandered from the car. The tower, she saw, was huge, a bulky mass of a building that looked like the makings of a Norman castle, complete with crenellation. Upon a casual glance, it didn’t appear in need of a great deal of restoration, but when Deborah walked round the other side of the structure, she saw what had become of it during the centuries it had lain available for anyone to maraud upon it.

  The project was going to be enormous. Deborah couldn’t think how they were going to manage the scope of work needing to be done. There were no floors to the building, one of the four external walls was missing, and another wall was partially collapsed. Removing debris alone was going to take ages and then there was the not small matter of obtaining materials to replace those that had long ago been carted off to become part of other buildings in the district.

  She gazed upon it with a photographer’s eye. In the same fashion, she examined the men who were working there, most of whom seemed to be the age of pensioners. She didn’t have any of her cameras with her aside from a small digital one to keep her position as a filmmaker’s research scout on the up-and-up. She took this from her bag and applied herself to recording what was round her.

  “It’s really the act of creation that heals. The process not product, I mean. Of course, at first they focus on the product. That’s human nature. But in the end they’ll come to see that the real product is self-belief, self-esteem, self-knowledge. Whatever you want to call it.”

  Deborah turned. Nicholas Fairclough had come up beside her. She said, “To be honest, your workers don’t look strong enough to do much, Mr. Fairclough. Why are there no younger men to help them?”

  “Because these are the blokes who need saving the most. Here and now. If someone doesn’t reach out to them, they’re going to die on the streets in the next couple of years. My thinking is that no one deserves to die like that. There’re programmes all over the country— all over the world— for young people, and believe me I know, because I spent time in a lot of them. But for blokes like this? Shelters for the night, sandwiches, hot soup, Bibles, blankets, whatever. But not belief. They’re not so far gone that they can’t read pity at fifty yards. Feel that way towards them and they’ll take your money, use it to get high, and spit on your charity. ’Scuse me for a moment, okay? Have a look round if you like. I need to talk to one of them.”

  Deborah watched as he picked his way through the rubble. He yelled, “Hey, Joe! What d’we hear from that stone mason?”

  Deborah wandered in the direction of the large tent, identified by a sign in front of it reading Eat and Meet. Inside, a bearded man in a knitted cap and heavy coat— too heavy for the weather, but he seemed to have no body fat at all to insulate his bones— was setting up for a meal. He had positioned large pots over spirit warmers, and a fragrance came from them, redolent of red meat and potatoes. He saw Deborah, and his eyes lit on the camera in her hands.

  Deborah said pleasantly, “Hello. Not to worry. I’m just having a look round.”

  “Th’ always are,” he muttered.

  “Lots of visitors?”

  “Always someone comin’ hereabouts. Himself needs the funds.”

  “Oh. I see. Well, I’m not a potential donor, I’m afraid.”

  “Nor was the last. Doesn’t matter to me. I get food and the meetings and ’f someone wants to ask me do I think this’ll work, I say it will.”

  Deborah approached him. “But you don’t believe in this process?”

  “Didn’t say that. And doesn’t matter what I believe. Like I say, I get food and the meetings and that’s enough for me. Don’t mind the meetings as much as I reckoned I would, so that’s not half-bad. Dry place to sleep as well.”

  “During the meetings?” Deborah asked him.

  He looked up sharply. He saw her smile and he chuckled. “Anyway, like I said, they’re not half-bad. Bit much with the God bit, bit more with the acceptance bit, but I can cope. Maybe it’ll
sink in. Willing to try it. Ten years sleeping rough… it’s enough.”

  Deborah joined him then at the serving table. He had a large box on a chair next to it, and from this he began taking out cutlery, tin plates, plastic drinking glasses, cups, and a mound of paper napkins. He began to arrange these on the table, and Deborah helped him.

  “Teacher,” he said quietly.

  She said, “What?”

  “That’s what I was. Secondary comprehensive in Lancaster. Chemistry. I bet you didn’t reckon that, did you?”

  “No. I didn’t.” Her words were equally quiet.

  He gestured towards the outdoors. “All shapes and sizes,” he said. “We got a surgeon, a physicist, two bankers, and an estate agent out there. And those’re just the ones willing to say what they left behind. The others…? They’re not ready yet. Takes time to admit how far you’ve fallen. You don’t have to make those table napkins so neat. We’re not the Ritz.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Force of habit.”

  “Like Himself,” he said. “Can’t hide your roots.”