Deborah didn’t bother to tell him that her own roots came from the soil of what in another century would have been called “being in service.” Her father had long been employed by the St. James family, and he’d spent the last seventeen years of his life caring for Simon while pretending not to be caring for Simon. It was a very delicate balancing act that had him referring to his own son-in-law as Mr. St. James. Deborah made a murmur of quasi-agreement and said, “You sound fond of him.”
“Himself? Decent bloke. Bit too trusting, but good to the core.”
“You think he’s being taken advantage of? I mean, with these gentlemen here.”
“Not hardly. Most of them know they’ve got something good going and ’less they’re too far gone with the drink or with drugs, they’re going to hang on here as long as they can.”
“Then who?”
“Taking advantage?” He eyed her directly, a very meaningful look. Deborah saw that he had a cataract forming in his left eye and she wondered how old he was. With ten years of life on the street as part of his C.V., it would be nearly impossible to determine his age from his appearance.
“People come round with promises and he believes ’em. He’s naïve that way.”
“It’s to do with money? Donations?”
“Sometimes. Other times, they want something off him.” Again, that meaningful look.
Deborah realised that he was placing her in the category of people wanting something from Nicholas Fairclough. It wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion, considering who she was supposed to be. Still, she said, “Such as?”
“Well, he’s got a good story to tell, doesn’t he? He thinks if he tells it, it’ll bring in money to help this place. Only it doesn’t always work that way, does it. Most of the time it comes to nothing. We had a newspaper bloke here four times promising a story and Himself saw bags of money coming in to help us out when the story got printed. Bloody nothing came of it and we’re back where we started, scrabbling for funds. That’s what I mean. A bit naïve.”
Deborah said, “Four times?”
“Eh?”
“A reporter was here four times and no story came out of it? That’s unusual, quite an investment of time with no payoff for anyone. It must have been a true disappointment. What sort of reporter invests all that time in preparing a story without writing it?”
“That’s what I want to know. Said he was from The Source in London, but no one was checking his credentials so he could’ve been anyone. What I think is he was here to find dirt on Himself, hoping to make him look bad. Greasing his own career— this bloke— if you know what I mean. But Himself, he doesn’t see it that way. ‘The time wasn’t right’ is how he puts it.”
“But you don’t agree.”
“Way I see it, he needs to be careful. He never is and that’s going to be a problem for him. Not now, then later. A problem.”
WINDERMERE
CUMBRIA
Yaffa Shaw had been the one to suggest to Zed that more might be in order than his merely hanging about the Willow and Well in Bryanbarrow village waiting for a miraculous revelation to drop into his lap, like the appearance of a Scotland Yard detective complete with magnifying glass in hand and meerschaum pipe clenched between his lips, all the better to identify him. They’d had their regular conversation after Zed had written up his notes regarding everything the old farmer George Cowley had alluded to on the green. He’d made note also of the fact that the man’s teenage son had seemed more than uncomfortable with his father’s rant. Could be, he decided, that another chat was in order but this time with Daniel Cowley and not his father.
Yaffa, playing the part of his concerned potential life partner since his mum was in the room— when wasn’t she in the room when it came to his love life? Zed wondered wryly— pointed out that Ian Cresswell’s death and George Cowley’s intentions might be in conflict with each other instead of what Zed had concluded, which was that they were directly related.
At first, Zed bristled at this. He was, after all, the investigative reporter. She, on the other hand, was merely a student at university attempting to accelerate her course so as to get back to Micah, the medical school boyfriend in Tel Aviv. He said, “I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Yaf,” without realising at first that the nickname had risen unbidden to his lips. “Sorry. Yaffa,” he said, correcting himself.
She said, “I like the other. It makes me smile.” And then obviously to his mother in explanation to what had to have been Susanna Benjamin’s breathless question about why Yaffa Shaw was smiling while in conversation with her beloved Zed, “Oh, Zed called me Yaf. I thought it was rather sweet.” And then to Zed, “Your mum says sweet is your middle name. She says that behind that giant exterior of yours, you’re a cream puff.”
“God.” Zed groaned. “Can you get her to leave the room? Or should I just ring off and we can consider the duty done for today?”
“Zed! Stop it!” She laughed. She had, he’d discovered, a most pleasant laugh. She said to his mother, “This man is making kissing noises. Does he always do that when he’s speaking on the phone to a woman?… He doesn’t? Hmmm. I wonder what he’ll say next.”
“Tell her I’m asking you to take off your knickers or something,” Zed said.
“Zedekiah Benjamin! Your mum is standing right here.” And then, “He’s being very naughty.” And then a moment later to Zed and in an altered tone, “She’s gone. Really, though, Zed, she’s very sweet, your mum. She’s started bringing me hot milk and biscuits at night. While I’m studying.”
“She knows what she wants. She’s been working at it for years. So. Everything going all right, then?”
“Fine. Micah did phone, and I brought him into the picture. Now he’s pretending to be brother Ari, phoning from Israel to see how his baby sister is doing with her studies.”
“Right. Well. Good.” And really, that should have been it since their only obligation to each other was a twice-daily phone call taking place somewhere in his mother’s vicinity.
Yaffa, however, took them back to what she’d been saying earlier in their conversation. “What if things aren’t how they look?”
“Like us, you mean?”
“Well, I’m not talking about us, but it’s a case in point, isn’t it? What I mean is what if there’s an inherent irony here that in and of itself could sex up your story about Nicholas Fairclough?”
“The Scotland Yard bloke— ”
“Beyond the Scotland Yard bloke. Because listen to what you’ve told me about it all: one man is dead, another man wants the farm that the dead man occupied. Still another man lives on the farm with the dead man’s children. Now what does that suggest to you?”
The truth was that it suggested nothing, but Zed was suddenly aware that Yaffa was ahead of him on the curve of the story. He hemmed and hawed and cleared his throat.
She said, mercifully, “There’s more here than meets the eye, Zed. Did the dead man leave a will?”
“A will?” What the hell had a will to do with anything? Where was the sex in that?
“Yes. A will. There’s potential conflict there, d’you see? George Cowley assumes the farm is going to be his for the taking now because now it will go on the block. But what if that’s not the case? What if that farm is paid for free and clear and Ian Cresswell left it to someone? Or what if he put a name besides his own on the deed? What irony, hmm? George Cowley is thwarted once again. It’s even more ironic if, perhaps, this man George Cowley had something to do with Ian Cresswell’s death, isn’t it?”
Zed saw she was right. He also saw she was clever and on his side as well. So after they rang off, he set about delving into the matter of Ian Cresswell and a will. It didn’t take long for him to find out that there was indeed a will because wisely Cresswell had registered it online and the information was there for all to see: A copy of this document was at his solicitor’s office in Windermere. Another copy— since the bloke was dead— would be available through the probat
e registry but scoring a look at that would eat up valuable time, not to mention a trip all the way to York, so he knew he had to get either a peek or the information itself in another way.
It would have been nothing short of pure delight for the will to be viewable online, but the lack of privacy in the UK— which was becoming pandemic considering global terrorism, permeable national borders, and the easy access to explosives courtesy of the world’s arms manufacturers— had not extended to the requirement that one’s last will and testament had to be offered up for public consumption. Still, Zed knew that there was a way to get to it and he also knew which single person on the planet was likely to be able to put his fingers on the document that he needed.
“A will,” Rodney Aronson said when he caught up with the editor in his London office. “You’re telling me you want to look at the dead man’s will. I’m in the middle of a meeting here, Zed. We’ve a paper to produce. You do know that, don’t you?”
Zed reckoned that his editor was also in the middle of consuming a chocolate bar, for over the phone he could hear the wrapper being crinkled even as Rodney Aronson spoke.
He said, “The situation is more complicated than it looks, Rod. There’s a bloke up here wanting to put his mitts on that farm owned by Ian Cresswell. Expecting it to go on the block, he is. It seems to me that he’s got one hell of a motive to do the chop on our guy— ”
“Our guy, as you say, is Nick Fairclough. The story you’re writing is about him, no? That’s the story we’re looking for the sex in and the sex is the cops. But it’s only sex in the Fairclough story if they’re investigating Fairclough. Zed my man, do I have to do your job for you, or can you possibly jump on board the moving train?”
“I get it. I know. I’m fully on board. But as no cops have shown a face yet— ”
“That’s what you’re doing up there? Waiting for cops to show their faces? Jesus Christ, Zed. What sort of reporter are you? Let me spell it out, all right? If this bloke Credwell— ”
“Cresswell. Ian Cresswell. And he’s got a farm up here and his kids are living on it with some bloke, far as I can tell. So if the farm was left to this bloke or even to the kids and— ”
“I don’t bloody care who the farm was left to, who it belongs to, or whether it dances the tango when no one’s looking. And I don’t bloody care if this Cresswell was murdered. What I care about is what the cops are doing up there. If they’re not prowling round Nicholas Fairclough, then your story is dead and you’re on your way back to London. D’you understand that or do I have to go at it another way?”
“I understand. But— ”
“Good. Now get back onto Fairclough and stop bothering me. Or come back to London, have done with the whole thing, and get a job writing greeting cards. The kind that rhyme.”
That last was a particularly low blow. Nonetheless, Zed said, “Right.”
But it wasn’t right. Nor was it good journalism. Not that The Source actually practised good journalism but given a story that was virtually dropping into their laps, one might think it actually possible.
Fine, Zed thought. He would get back to Nicholas Fairclough and Scotland Yard. But first he was determined to find out about that farm and about the terms of that bloody will because he had a gut feeling that that information was crucial to more than one person in Cumbria.
MILNTHORPE
CUMBRIA
Lynley met with St. James and Deborah in the public bar of their hotel. Over glasses of a rather indifferent port, they went over the information they’d gathered. St. James was of the same mind, Lynley discovered, as he himself was. They had to bring up the missing stones from the dock and St. James had to look at them. He wouldn’t mind having a look at the boathouse itself as well, he told Lynley, but he didn’t know how an arrangement for this could be made without tipping their hand.
“I daresay it’ll be tipped eventually,” Lynley said. “I’m not sure how long I can carry off the pretence of idle curiosity for the benefit of anyone who happens to be watching. Fairclough’s wife knows, by the way. He did tell her.”
“That makes things a bit easier.”
“Relatively, yes. And I agree with you, Simon. We need you inside that boathouse for more reasons than one.”
“Meaning?” Deborah asked the question. She had her digital camera on the table next to her glass of port, and she’d brought a small notebook out of her shoulder bag as well. She was, Lynley saw, taking seriously her part in this little investigation of theirs. He smiled at her, grateful for the first time in months to be in the presence of longtime friends.
“Ian Cresswell didn’t take the scull out on a regular basis,” Lynley told her. “But Valerie Fairclough takes her boat out several times a week. While the scull was indeed tied at the spot where the stones were loose on the dock, it wasn’t a set position for it. People on the estate seem to tie up the watercraft wherever there’s an opening.”
“But someone seeing the scull in place could have loosened the stones while he was out on the lake that night, yes?” Deborah said.
“That would make it someone on the estate at that moment,” her husband said. “Was Nicholas Fairclough there that night?”
“If he was, no one saw him.” Lynley turned to Deborah. “What sort of reading did you get off Fairclough?”
“He seems perfectly lovely. And his wife’s quite beautiful, Tommy. I can’t exactly gauge the effect she has on men, but I’d guess she could make a Trappist monk give up his vows without much effort on her part.”
“Something between her and Cresswell, then?” St. James offered. “With Nicholas taking issue over it?”
“Hardly, as the man’s homosexual,” said Lynley.
“Or bisexual, Tommy.”
“And there’s something else,” Deborah went on. “Two things, actually. They might not be important at all, but if you want me to look for things intriguing…”
“I do,” Lynley said.
“Then there’s this: Alatea Fairclough has a copy of Conception magazine. It’s got pages torn out of the back, and we might want to put our hands on a copy and have a look at what they are. Nicholas told me they’ve been trying to conceive.”
St. James stirred. His expression said that the magazine meant nothing and would have meant nothing to anyone else save Deborah, whose own concerns about conceiving would probably cloud her judgement.
Lynley saw that Deborah read her husband as well as he himself had done because she said, “This isn’t about me, Simon. Tommy’s looking for anything unusual and what I was thinking… What if his drug use has made Nicholas sterile but Alatea doesn’t want him to know that? A doctor may have told her but not him. Or she might have convinced a doctor to lie to him, for his ego, to keep him on the straight and narrow. So what if, knowing he can’t give her children, she asked Ian to lend a hand in the matter, if you know what I mean?”
“Keeping it in the family?” Lynley asked. “Anything’s possible.”
“And there’s something else,” Deborah said. “A reporter from The Source—”
“Jesus God.”
“— has been there four times, ostensibly doing a story on Nicholas. Four times but nothing’s come of it, Tommy. One of the blokes at the Middlebarrow Pele Project told me.”
“If it’s The Source, there’s dirt on someone’s shoe soles,” St. James pointed out.
Lynley thought about whose shoe soles those might be. He said, “Cresswell’s lover has evidently been on the estate— on the grounds of Ireleth Hall— for some time now, working on a project for Valerie. He’s called Kaveh Mehran.”
“PC Schlicht mentioned him,” St. James said. “Has he got motive?”
“There’s the will and insurance to be looked into.”
“Anyone else?”
“With motive?” Lynley told them about his meeting with Mignon Fairclough: her insinuations about her parents’ marriage followed by her denial of those insinuations. He also told them about the holes in the
background of Nicholas Fairclough that she’d been only too happy to fill in. He ended with, “She’s rather a piece of work and I have the impression she’s got a hold over her parents for some reason. So Fairclough himself might bear looking into.”
“Blackmail? With Cresswell somehow in the know?”
“Emotional or otherwise, I daresay. She lives on the property but not in the house. I suspect Bernard Fairclough built her digs for her and I wouldn’t be surprised if one reason was to get her out of his hair. There’s another sister as well. I’ve yet to meet her.”
He went on to tell them that Bernard Fairclough had put a videotape into his hands. He’d suggested Lynley watch it because if there was indeed someone behind Ian’s death, then he needed to “see something rather telling.”
This turned out to be a video of the funeral, made for the purpose of sending to Ian’s father in Kenya, too frail to make the trip to say farewell to his son. Fairclough had watched it at Lynley’s side, and as things turned out, it was what he didn’t see that he wanted to point out. Niamh Cresswell, Ian’s wife of seventeen years and the mother of his two children, had not attended. Fairclough pointed out that, at least to be of support to those grieving children, she might have turned up.
“He gave me a few details on the end of Ian Cresswell’s marriage.” Lynley told them what he knew, to which St. James and Deborah said simultaneously, “Motive, Tommy.”
“Hell hath no fury. Yes. But it’s not likely that Niamh Cresswell could prowl round the grounds of Ireleth Hall without being seen and so far no one’s mentioned her being there.”
“Still and all,” St. James said, “she’s got to be looked into. Revenge is a powerful motive.”
“So is greed,” Deborah said. “But then, so are all the deadly sins, aren’t they? Why else be deadly?”
Lynley nodded. “So we’ll have to see if she benefits in any way other than vengeance,” he said.
“We’re back to the will. Or an insurance policy,” St. James said. “That information’s not going to be easy to suss out while keeping your head down about why you’re really here in Cumbria, Tommy.”