Believing the Lie (71 page)

“I’d like a word,” Zed said to him.

Fairclough tilted his head towards the tent, replying, “I’ve a meeting, as you saw. It’ll have to wait.”

“Don’t think that’s possible, actually.” Zed took out his notebook to underscore the declaration.

Fairclough’s eyes narrowed. “What’s this about?”

“Lucy Keverne.”

“Who?”

“Lucy Keverne. Or perhaps you know her by another name? She’s the surrogate you and your wife are employing.”

Fairclough stared at him and Zed recognised immediately what the look on the other man’s face was telling him. The expression itself said,
Are you mad?
The reason for the question, however, had nothing whatsoever to do with madness.

“Surrogate?” Fairclough said. “Surrogate for what?”

“What do you think?” Zed said. “A surrogate mother. I’d like to talk to you about the deal you and your wife have struck with Lucy Keverne to carry your child.”

“Deal?” Nicholas Fairclough said. “There is no deal. What the hell are you talking about?”

Zed felt the pleasure of the moment wash through him at the same time as
bingo
chimed in his mind. He had his story.

“Let’s take a little walk,” he said.

BRYANBARROW
CUMBRIA

Manette was still trying to take in the information as she climbed the stairs, having settled Kaveh’s parents and his fiancée in the fire house and having assembled for them tea and biscuits, which she’d
delivered on a tray she’d rustled out of a kitchen cupboard. God alone could explain why she’d done the bit with the tea, she thought, but at the end of the day she reckoned good manners, in conjunction with habit, would always out.

They’d cleared up the confusion about who, exactly, Ian Cresswell had been in Kaveh’s life, at least as far as his parents had known. A few moments’ discussion of this matter had produced the revelation that, in his parents’ minds, Kaveh merely lodged chastely with the owner of a farm and the Christian name of said owner had never yet been mentioned in any phone calls, notes, cards, or letters from their son. Miracle of miracles, the farm owner had supposedly left the farm to Kaveh in his will when he himself had—as they say in the vernacular—unexpectedly bought the farm. More miracle of miracles, this at last freed Kaveh to marry, since he now had a home into which he could welcome his wife. Of course, he’d not
needed
a home, as Mum and Dad had tried to point out to him time and again, year after year, since he and his wife could live with his parents in a manner traditional to their people in Iran, where extended families dwelt together for generations. But Kaveh had been a modern young man with the ideas of a modern
British
young man, and British young men did not bring wives home to live with their parents. It was not the done thing. Although, truth to tell, the opposite was going to happen: Kaveh was insisting that his parents join him and his soon-to-be-wife on the farm. It was, they said, a successful conclusion to a decade of badgering him to give them grandkids.

The amount that these good people did not know about their son was staggering, and Manette made the quick decision not to be the person to burst their bubble. She felt a tug of guilt about poor Iman and the future that lay before her marrying a man who would most likely set out to lead a double life not unlike the one Ian himself had led. But what could she do about it? And if she did something—such as saying, “Excuse me, don’t you know Kaveh’s been having it off with blokes for years?”—where would that take them aside from into an imbroglio that was not her concern? Kaveh could do what he liked, she decided. His family would discover the truth eventually. Or they would remain blissfully or purposefully ignorant of the
matter. Her job at the moment was to find Tim Cresswell. But at least she knew why Tim had run off. Doubtless, Kaveh had filled him in on his upcoming nuptials. That would have pushed the poor lad over the edge.

But into
what
? was the question. She returned to Tim’s bedroom to see if Freddie was making any headway into answering it.

He was, apparently. He was still at Tim’s laptop, but he’d turned it away from the door, so someone entering the room couldn’t see its screen. That someone being her, Manette reckoned. His face was grave.

She said, “What is it?”

“Pornography. It goes back quite a way in time.”

“What sort are we talking about?” She made a move to go round his chair, which he’d also shifted so that he could see when she came into the room. He held up his hand. “You don’t want to see this, darling.”

“Freddie, what
is
it?”

“It starts out mild, not much more than what you’d see if a boy managed to get his hands on one of those magazines they keep encased in black wrappers. You know what I mean. Naked women showing off their privates in rather more detail than is actually attractive photographically. Boys do this kind of thing all the time.”

“Did you?”

“Well…Yes and no. I was more of a breast man, frankly. Their artful presentation and all that. But times do change, eh?”

“And then?”

“Well, I met my first girlfriend when I was young enough for this to be—”

“Freddie, dear, I’m talking about the computer. Is there something more? You said it starts out mild.”

“Oh. Yes. But then it goes on to men and women engaged…Well, you know.”

“Still normal curiosity, perhaps?”

“I’d say. But then it changes to men with men.”

“Because of Ian and Kaveh? Perhaps because of his own doubts?”

“Always a possibility. A likelihood, even. Tim would have wanted
to understand. Himself, them, whatever.” But Freddie sounded so sombre when he said all this that Manette knew there was more.

She said, “And then what, Freddie?”

“Well, then it switches from photographs to film. Live action. And the actors—or whoever they are—change as well.” He rubbed at his chin and she could hear the
scritch
of his palm against the whiskers on his flesh and it came to her how comforting a sound that was, although she couldn’t have told him why.

She said, “Do I want to know how the actors change?”

“Men and boys,” he said. “Young boys, Manette. They look round ten to twelve years old. And the films themselves…” Freddie hesitated before he looked at her squarely, his dark eyes reflecting the depth of his concern. “Young boys ‘performing’ on older men, sometimes alone but more often in groups. I mean, it’s always just one young boy but sometimes there’s more than one man. There’s even…well, it’s a mockery of the Last Supper except it isn’t feet-washing that ‘Jesus’ is engaged in and ‘Jesus’ looks round nine years old.”

“Dear God.” Manette tried to put it together: why Tim’s interest would have gone from naked women displaying their genitals to male/female sex to male/male sex and then eventually to man/young boy sex. She didn’t know enough about young adolescent males to understand if this was natural curiosity or something more sinister. She feared the latter. Who wouldn’t? she thought. She said, “What d’you think we should…?” but had no way to frame the rest of the question because she didn’t know what the next step was beyond handing it all over to the police and a child psychologist and hoping for the best from there. She said, “I mean, for him to be searching this stuff out…We’ll have to tell Niamh, at the very least. But of course, what good will that do?”

Freddie shook his head. “He’s not been searching, Manette.”

“I don’t understand. You just said—”

“Aside from the pictures of women and men and the male/male sex, which we might be able to attribute to his confusion about his father and Kaveh, he’s not been searching at all.”

“Then…?” She twigged. “He’s been
sent
this stuff?”

“There’s a trail of e-mail from someone calling himself Toy4You.
They lead all the way back to a chat room for photography. I should guess that various routes through that chat room lead on to types of photography or photographic models or quirky photography or nude photography or any number of potential subjects from which users can then go into more-private chat rooms for more-private chats. The Web is called
the Web
for a reason. Threads lead everywhere. You just have to follow them.”

“What does this Toy4You have to say?”

“What you’d expect of a slow seduction. ‘Bit of harmless fun,’ ‘shows affection,’ ‘between consenting adults, of course,’ ‘must be of age,’ and then the switch to ‘Have a look at this and tell me what you think,’ ‘would
you
ever consider,’ et cetera.”

“Freddie, what’s Tim saying in reply?”

Freddie tapped his fingers on the desk. He appeared to be trying to formulate an answer. Either that or he was attempting to put together the pieces. Manette prompted him by saying his name again. He finally said, “Tim actually appears to be striking a bargain with this person.”

“With Toy4You?”

“Hmm. Yes. The bloke—I assume it’s a bloke—says in the last one, ‘You do something like this and I’ll do whatever you want.’”

“What’s ‘this’?” Manette asked, although she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

“He’s referring to another video attached.”

“Do I want to know?”

“Garden of Gethsemane,” Freddie said. “But the Roman soldiers don’t make any arrest.”

Manette said, “My God.” And then with her eyes widening and her hand lifted to cover her mouth, “‘I’ll do anything you want’? Freddie, oh my God, do you think Tim arranged for this person to kill Ian?”

Freddie rose quickly, the chair scraping the floor. He came to her and said, “No,
no
,” and touched her cheek briefly. “That last one…It postdates Ian’s drowning. Whatever Tim wants, it’s something besides his father’s death. And it looks to me like he’s going to receive it in exchange for being part of a pornographic film.”

“But
what
could he want? And where
is
he? Freddie, we have to find him.”

“We do indeed.”

“But how…?” Then she recalled the map she’d seen and she rustled for it again among the items that had been on Tim’s desk. She said, “Wait, wait,” and then she found it. But a glance told her the map was going to be of little use. For it was an enlarged section of some unnamed town and unless Freddie knew where Lake, Oldfield, Alexandra, Woodland, and Holly Roads were, they were going to have to waste time trying to rustle up a street atlas, sort out how to use this information on the Internet, or perform some magical feat to discover what town in Cumbria contained these places.

She said, “It’s nothing,
nothing
. It’s just streets, Freddie,” and she shoved the map at him. She said, “What next? We must find him. We must.”

He gave the map a glance and folded it quickly. He unplugged the laptop and said, “Let’s be off.”

“Where?” she asked. “Where on earth…Do you
know
?” God, she thought, why had she
ever
divorced this man?

“No idea,” he said. “But I’ve a notion who will.”

ARNSIDE
CUMBRIA

Lynley made excellent time. The Healey Elliott had been designed originally as a racing car, and despite its age it did not disappoint. He had no flashing lights to use, but the time of day and year did not make them necessary. He was coursing off the motorway in an hour’s time, at which point the slickness of the streets and the heaviness of the mist encouraged him to have care with regard to his speed.

The difficult bit was getting from the motorway over to Milnthorpe and from Milnthorpe to Arnside. Off the motorway, the roads were narrow, not one of them was straight, there were few
lay-bys into which slow drivers could pull to allow him to pass, and every farmer in Cumbria appeared to have chosen this day to move his tractor like a lumbering pachyderm from one spot to another.

Lynley felt a sense of rising urgency. It had to do with Deborah. God only knew what she would stumble into at this point, but she was obstinate enough to do something mad that would put her straight into the path of danger. How, he wondered, did Simon manage not to wring her neck?

Along the route from Milnthorpe to Arnside, at last, he saw the fog. Unlike the little cats’ feet of the poem, this bank of grey was moving across the empty plain of Morecambe Bay’s ebbed tide with startling swiftness, as if pulled along by unseen horses dragging a mantle of coal smoke behind them.

He slowed at Arnside village. He’d not been to Arnside House, but he knew where it was from Deborah’s description. He passed a pier jutting into the wide and waterless channel of the estuarial River Kent and he braked to allow a woman with a pushchair to cross the street, a child hanging on to her trousers with a mittened hand and otherwise bundled against the chill. As they crossed—taking their bloody time about it, he thought, and why
was
it that when one was in a hurry, all occasions conspired against one?—he read the sign warning all the dangers of this place.
Fast Rising Tides!
it shouted,
Quicksands! Hidden Channels! Danger! Beware!
Why on earth, he wondered futilely, would someone want to bring up children here when one wrong move at one wrong time of day would snatch them towards a watery end?

The woman and child crossed safely to the pavement on the other side of the road. He went on. Through the village, down the Promenade with its display of Victorian mansions lined up on a rise of land overlooking the water, and then he was on the drive into Arnside House, where the Promenade ended. The building was set at an angle that made the most of its view, across an expanse of lawn from the water. That view was obscured today as the fog became more and more like wet cotton wool, once singed by fire.

Arnside House itself looked deserted, with no lights burning in the windows despite the gloom of the day. He couldn’t decide if this
was bad or good. No car meant, at least, there was a very good chance that Deborah had not bulldogged her way into a bad situation. The best scenario of all would be no one at home, but he couldn’t rely on that.

He braked the Healey Elliott at the top of the driveway, where the gravel shaped into a winnow for parking. When he got out of the car, he found that the air had altered in the few hours he’d been gone. It felt nearly tubercular in his lungs. He moved through it like someone separating curtains, along the path to the heavy front door.