To her surprise, he said rather sharply, “What magazine?”
Odd reaction, she thought. “Conception,” she said. What she wanted to add was, Is there another magazine I should be looking into? but of course she did not. She thought feverishly back to the other periodicals that had been on the table along with Conception. She couldn’t remember what they were, so interested had she been in that single one.
He said, “Oh. That. Conception. No, no. That’s not… Never mind.”
Which she could hardly do. She opted for a direct approach and said, “Mr. Fairclough, is something wrong? Is there something you’d like to tell me? Something you’d like to ask me? Is there some kind of reassurance I can give you…?”
He fingered the handle of his coffee cup. He sighed and said, “There are things Alatea doesn’t want to talk about, and her past is one of them. I know you’re not here to delve into her background or anything but that’s what she’s afraid of: that you might start delving.”
“I see,” Deborah said. “Well, this isn’t an investigative documentary, other than as it relates to the pele project. Certain issues about you yourself might come up… Are you certain she’s not just worried about how the film might affect you? Your reputation? Your standing in the community?”
He laughed self-derisively. “I did enough damage to myself when I was using. No film could damage me further. No, it’s to do with what Alatea did to get by before she and I met. It’s stupid, frankly, for her to be so upset about it. It’s nothing. I mean, it’s not like she made porn films or something.”
Deborah nodded gravely. She kept her face sympathetic but said nothing. Surely, she thought, he was on the verge… the cusp… the cliff’s edge… Just the tiniest nudge might push him over.
She finally said thoughtfully, “You two met in Utah, didn’t you? I went to college for a while in America. In Santa Barbara. Do you know the town? It’s expensive there and I… Well, funds were low and there are always easy ways to make money…” She let him fill in the blanks for himself, with whatever his imagination might provide. The truth was she’d done nothing but go to photography school, but there was no way on earth he would know that.
He pursed his lips, perhaps considering an admission of some sort. He took a sip of coffee, set his cup back down, and said, “Well, it’s underwear, actually.”
“Underwear?”
“Alatea was an underwear model. She did catalogue pictures. Advertisements in magazines as well.”
Deborah smiled. “And that’s what she doesn’t want me to know? That’s hardly disgraceful, Mr. Fairclough. And let’s be honest. She has the body for it. She’s attractive as well. One can easily see— ”
“Naughty underwear,” he said. He let that sit there for a moment so that Deborah could, perhaps, absorb the information and its implications. “Catalogues for certain types of people, you understand. Adverts in certain types of magazines. It wasn’t… they weren’t… I mean, the underwear wasn’t exactly high-class stuff. She’s dead embarrassed about it all now and she’s worried that someone will uncover this about her and humiliate her in some way.”
“I see. Well, you can reassure her on that score. I’m not interested in her underwear past.” She glanced out of the window of the café, which looked onto the market square. It was busy out there, and a queue had formed at a takeaway food stall operating from a dark green caravan with Sue’s Hot Food Bar scrolled in white across the front of it. People sat at a few picnic tables in front of the caravan, tucking into whatever the eponymous owner was shoveling, steaming, onto paper plates.
Deborah said, “I did think it was that magazine— Conception— but I suppose that’s more to do with me than with her. I shouldn’t have brought the subject up. Do let her know I apologise.”
“It wasn’t that,” Nicholas said. “She wants to get pregnant, certainly, but truth is I want it more than she does just now and that’s making her touchy. But the real problem is this damn modeling part of her life and those pictures, which she keeps expecting to pop up in some tabloid.”
As he made these final remarks, his gaze— like Deborah’s— went out-of-doors. But instead of the same casual glance Deborah had given the food stall and its accompanying picnic tables, his fixed on something and his expression altered. His pleasant face hardened. He said, “Excuse me for a moment,” and before Deborah could reply, he strode outside.
There he walked up to one of the individuals enjoying a Sue’s Hot Food Bar meal. It was a man, who ducked his head as Nicholas approached, in an obvious effort to go unnoticed. This didn’t work, and when Nicholas clutched the man’s shoulder, he rose.
He was enormous, Deborah saw. He looked nearly seven feet tall. Rising quickly as he did, he knocked his cap against the furled umbrella in the centre of the table, and the cap dislodged, revealing fiery red hair.
She reached into her bag as the man stepped away from the table and listened to whatever Nicholas was saying, which appeared to be as hot as the food the man was eating. The man shrugged. Further words were exchanged.
Deborah took out her camera and began to photograph the man and his encounter with Nicholas Fairclough.
KENSINGTON
LONDON
Barbara Havers considered herself one lucky bird when the cab drove only from Portland Place to Rutland Gate, south of Hyde Park. It just as easily could have been Wapping or regions beyond and while she knew Lynley would have been good for the cab fare ultimately, she’d not brought sufficient funds to cover a lengthy journey and she doubted the driver would have been willing to take a quarter of an hour’s snog in exchange for the ride. She hadn’t thought of this when she hopped blithely into the vehicle, but she breathed a sigh of relief when the bloke headed west instead of east and finally turned left a short distance beyond the brick expanse of Hyde Park Barracks.
He pointed out the building in question, an imposing white structure with a panel of doorbells indicating that it was a conversion. Barbara got out, paid for the ride, and considered her options as the cab rumbled away. But not before the driver told Barbara with a wink that this was where the couple debarked, they always went inside the place together, and both of them had keys since one or the other of them would do the unlocking when they reached the door.
Conversions meant flats, Barbara knew, which in turn meant occupants, which in turn meant winkling out the identity of the occupant in question. She fished for a cigarette and paced while she smoked it. The nicotine, she reckoned, would sharpen her wits. The sharpening didn’t take long.
She went to the door and saw the line of bells. Flats were marked but there were no names, as was typical in London. There was, however, one bell marked Porter, and this turned out to be a piece of good luck. Not every residential building in London had a porter. It upped the value of the flats within but it also cost the residents a bundle.
A disembodied voice asked her business. She said she’d come to make an enquiry about one of the flats that she’d learned would soon be coming on the market and could she possibly speak to him about the building?
The porter didn’t embrace this idea with wild enthusiasm, but he did decide to cooperate. He buzzed her in and told her to come along the corridor to the back, where she’d find his office.
It was perfectly quiet inside, aside from the well-muted sound of traffic on Kensington Road, just beyond Rutland Gate. She passed along a marble floor, treading silently on a faded Turkey carpet. The doors to two ground-floor flats faced each other here, and a table upon which sat cubbies for the day’s post was positioned beneath a heavy gilt mirror. She gave a quick glance to the cubbies, but like the bells outside next to the door, they offered flat numbers only and not names.
Just beyond the stairway and a lift, she found a door marked Porter. The porter in question opened it to her knock. He looked like a pensioner and he wore a uniform too tight in the collar and too loose in the stomach. He gave Barbara the once-over and his expression said that if she was
intending to make a purchase of a flat in the building, she had better prepare herself for an accepting-offers-beginning-at situation that was going to knock her out of her high-top trainers.
He said, “Don’t know about any flat on offer, do I,” without any introduction.
She said, “This is a bit of a preemptive strike, if you know what I mean. C’n I…?” She indicated his office and smiled pleasantly. “I’ll just take a minute of your time,” she added.
He stepped back and tilted his head towards a desk situated in a corner of the room. He had a nice little setup here, Barbara thought, with part of the place made into a snug sitting room complete with television currently tuned in to an ancient film in which Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue were locked in a timeless, adolescent, agonizing embrace as music swelled with a familiar theme. She thought for a moment before she came up with the title. A Summer Place, that was it. All about young, tormented love. Nothing quite like it, she thought. Shoot me first.
The porter saw the direction of her gaze and, perhaps determining his choice of film was some sort of revelation about him, went to the television and hastily switched it off. That done, he moved to his desk and sat behind it. This left Barbara standing, but that apparently was his intention.
Barbara expressed what she felt was a suitable amount of gratitude for the porter’s willingness to talk to her. She asked some questions about the building, the sorts of queries she expected a potential buyer might have before plunking down hard-earned cash on a piece of outrageously priced Kensington property. Age, condition, problems with heating and plumbing and ventilation, difficulties encountered with other residents, presence of undesirables, the neighbourhood, noise, pubs, restaurants, markets, corner shops, and on and on. When she’d run the gamut of everything she could possibly think of— jotting his answers in her small spiral notebook— she said, laying out her bait and hoping he’d go for it, “Brilliant. Can’t thank you enough. Most of this matches up with what Bernard told me about the place.”
He bit. “Bernard? That your estate agent? ’Cause like I said, I don’t know of a place that’s going up for sale.”
“No, no. Bernard Fairclough. He told me an associate of his lives here and she apparently told him about a flat. I can’t remember her name…”
“Oh. That’d be Vivienne Tully, that would,” he said. “Don’t think it’s her place going up for sale, though. Situation’s too convenient for that.”
“Oh, right,” Barbara said. “It’s not Vivienne’s. I thought it might be and got a bit excited about the possibility but Bernie”— she especially liked the touch of Bernie— “said she’s quite established here.”
“That’d be the case,” he said. “Nice woman, as well. Remembers me at Christmas, she does, which is more than I can say for some of ’em.” He shot a look at the television, then, and cleared his throat. Barbara saw that on a squat table next to a reclining chair, a plate of beans on toast was waiting. Doubtless, he wanted to get back to that as well as back to Sandra, Troy, and more of their passionate, forbidden love. Well, she couldn’t exactly blame him. Passionate and forbidden love made life more interesting, didn’t it?
LAKE WINDERMERE
CUMBRIA
Lynley was having a preprandial sherry with Valerie and Bernard Fairclough when Mignon showed up. They were in what Valerie had referred to as the small drawing room, where a fire was doing a fine job of cutting the chill. None of them heard Mignon enter the house— the front door being some distance from the room in which they sat— so she was able to make something of a surprise entrance.
The door swung open and she shoved her zimmer frame in ahead of her. It had begun to rain again, quite heavily, and she’d come from the folly without raingear. This omission— which Lynley reckoned had to be deliberate— had caused her to become wet enough to provoke a reaction from both of her parents. Her hair was flattened, her Alice-in-Wonderland hairband dripped water onto her forehead and into her eyes, and her shoes and clothing were soaked. It was not a far enough walk from the folly to the main house to have become so wet. Lynley concluded that she’d stood for a while in the downpour for the drama a thorough soaking might provide. Seeing her, her mother jumped to her feet and Lynley— who couldn’t have stopped himself if he’d tried— politely rose to his.
“Mignon!” Valerie cried. “Why’ve you come from the folly without an umbrella?”
Mignon said, “I can hardly hold an umbrella while using this, can I?” in reference to the zimmer.
“A mac and a hat might have solved that problem,” her father said guilelessly. Notably, he hadn’t risen and his expression indicated he was fully aware of her ploy.
“I forgot it,” Mignon said.
Valerie said, “Here. Sit by the fire, darling. I’ll fetch some towels for your hair.”
“Don’t bother,” Mignon said. “I’ll be walking back in a moment. You’re dining soon, aren’t you? As I had no invitation to join you this evening, I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”
“You don’t need an invitation,” Valerie said. “You’re always welcome. But since you’ve preferred… because of…” Clearly, she didn’t want to say more in front of Lynley.
Just as clearly, Mignon did. She said, “I’ve had a gastric band, Thomas. Big as an ox, I was. You wouldn’t believe how big. Destroyed my knees heaving my fat round the planet for a good twenty years, so they’ll be replaced next. The knees, I mean. Then I’ll be as good as new and some bloke’ll come along and take me off my parents’ hands. Or so they hope.”
She made her way across the room and lowered herself into the chair her mother had vacated. She said to her father, “I could do with a sherry myself,” and to Lynley, “I thought at first that’s why you’d come. Stupid of me, I know, but you’ve got to consider who my father is. Always has a scheme, my dad. I knew you were part of one as soon as I saw you. I just misjudged what the scheme actually was, thinking you’d come to have a look at me, if you know what I mean.”
“Mignon, really,” her mother said.
“I think I’ll take those towels after all.” Mignon seemed to like the idea of ordering Valerie about. She looked quite gratified when her mother went off to do her bidding. Her father in the meantime hadn’t moved, so she said to him, “That sherry, Dad?”
Bernard, Lynley thought, looked like a man who was about to say something he’d regret. In any other circumstances, Lynley would have waited to see what that something was, but his natural inclination towards civility got the better of him. He set his own glass of sherry on the table next to his chair. He said, “Let me,” and Bernard cut him off with, “I’ll get it, Tommy.”
“Make it a big one,” Mignon told her father. “I’ve just had a successful romantic interlude with Mr. Seychelles and while normally one has a fag for afters, I’d prefer to get sloshed.”
Fairclough observed his daughter. His expression was so obviously one of distaste that Mignon chuckled.
“Have I offended you?” she asked. “So sorry.”
Her father poured sherry into a tumbler, a great deal of sherry. That, Lynley thought, was certainly going to do the job if the woman tossed it back. He had a feeling she fully intended to do so.
Fairclough was handing the drink over to his daughter when Valerie returned, towels in hand. She went to Mignon and set about drying her hair, gently. Lynley expected Mignon to show a burst of irritation and to brush the ministration aside. She didn’t. Instead, she allowed her hair to be seen to, along with her neck and her face.
She said, “Mother never comes for a friendly visit. Did you know that, Thomas? What I mean is that she brings me food— rather like giving alms to the poor like the lady of the manor she is— but just to drop in for a chat? That hasn’t happened in years. So when it did occur today, I was all amazement. What can the old dear want, I thought.”
Valerie dropped her hands and the towel from her daughter’s hair. She looked at her husband. He said nothing. They both seeme
d to gird themselves for some kind of onslaught, and Lynley found himself wondering how on earth they’d got themselves into this sort of position with their own daughter.
Mignon took a healthy gulp of her sherry. She held the glass with both hands, like a priest with a chalice. “Mother and I have nothing to talk about, you see. She has no interest in hearing about my life, and believe me, I have no interest in hers. This rather limits one’s conversation. After the weather, what’s there to talk about? I mean, aside from her dreary topiary garden and her even drearier children’s playground or whatever it is.”
Her father finally said, “Mignon, are you joining us for dinner or have you another purpose for your call?”
“Do not,” Mignon said, “back me into a corner. You do not want that.”
“Darling,” her mother began.
“Please. If there’s a darling in the family, we both know I’m not it.”
“That’s not true.”
“God.” Mignon rolled her eyes at Lynley. “It’s been Nicholas, Nicholas since the day he was born, Thomas. A son at last and all the attendant hallelujahs. But that’s not what I’ve come here about. I want to talk about that pathetic little cripple.”
For a moment, Lynley had no idea whom she actually meant. He was, of course, acutely aware that St. James was disabled since he himself had been the cause of the accident that had injured him. But to apply either pathetic or little to the man he’d known since their school days was so inapposite a description that for a moment he thought Mignon was speaking of someone else entirely. She disabused him of that notion when she went on.
“Mother didn’t last as long as she was evidently supposed to last in my company. Once she left, I wondered why she’d come at all, and it wasn’t difficult to suss that out. There you all were, Dad, coming up from the boathouse. You, Thomas here, and the cripple. And Thomas looked like he’d had a wetting if the towels and his hair were anything to go by. But not the cripple. He was quite dry. As you were, Dad.” Another hefty gulp of sherry followed before she continued. “Now the towels suggest our Thomas went down to the boathouse prepared. He didn’t just slip and fall into the water and since his clothes weren’t wet, I think we’ve got corroboration for that assumption. Which means he went into the water intentionally. This not being the season for taking a dip in the lake, he had to have had another reason. I’m thinking that reason has to do with Ian. How am I doing?”