Believing the Lie il-17 Read online

  She met him at the door. He’d expected she would have long gone to bed, and it did seem she’d been there at first. But a light was on next to the sofa in the sitting area of her flat, and he saw a magazine spread out there, evidently discarded when she’d heard his key in the lock. She’d left her dressing gown on the sofa as well, and as she wore nothing beneath, she came to him nude and when he closed the door behind him, she stepped into his arms and lifted her mouth to his.

  She tasted of lemons. For a moment he allowed himself to wonder if the taste of her indicated that she was trying to hide the fact that she’d been drinking again. But then he didn’t care as his hands travelled the distance from her hips to her waist to her breasts.

  She began to undress him. She murmured, “This is very bad, you know.”

  He whispered, “What is?”

  “That I’ve thought of little else all day.” His jacket fell to the floor and she worked the buttons of his shirt. He bent to her neck, her breasts.

  “That,” he said, “is very bad in your line of work.”

  “In yours as well.”

  “Ah, but I’ve more discipline.”

  “Have you indeed?”

  “I have.”

  “And if I touch you here, like this?” She did so. He smiled. “What happens to your discipline then?”

  “The same thing, I daresay, that happens to yours if I kiss you here, if I decide on more, if I use my tongue… rather like this.”

  She drew in a sharp breath. She chuckled. “You’re an evil man, Inspector. But I’m fully able to match evil for evil. Rather, as you say, like this.” She lowered his trousers. She made him as naked as she was herself. She used her nakedness to force action from him.

  She was, he found, as slick and as ready as he was. He said, “The bedroom?”

  She said, “Not tonight, Tommy.”

  “Here, then?”

  “Oh yes. Right here.”

  2 NOVEMBER

  BRYANBARROW

  CUMBRIA

  Because of the hour of the day, Zed Benjamin had been able to score a good table at the Willow and Well, and he’d been sitting there for fifty minutes, waiting for something to happen on the other side of a window whose lead mullions were in need of replacement. The cold seeped past them like a visitation of the angel of death, but the benefit of this discomfort was the fact that no one would question the knitted ski cap that Zed was thus able to keep planted on his head. The cap was his bow to making himself less memorable since it fully covered his flame-coloured hair. There was nothing he could do about his extreme height save slouching whenever he remembered to do so.

  He was managing just that at his table in the pub. He’d been going from hunching over his pint of lager to slumping in his chair with his legs stretched out till his arse was as numb as the heart of a pimp, but in all the time he’d maintained one posture or another, nothing suggesting that illumination was in the offing had occurred in what he could see of the village of Bryanbarrow just outside of the window.

  This was his third day in Cumbria, his third day of searching for the sex that would keep his story on Nicholas Fairclough from being binned by Rodney Aronson, but so far he’d come up with nothing except fifteen lines of a new poem, which, God knew, he wasn’t about to mention to Aronson when the odious editor of The Source made his daily phone call to ask meaningfully how things were going and to remind Zed that whatever costs he was incurring would be his own. As if he didn’t know that already, Zed thought. As if he were not staying in the most modest room in the most modest bed-and-breakfast he could find in the entire region: an attic bedroom in one of the multitudinous Victorian terraces that lined virtually every street in Windermere, this one on Broad Street within walking distance of the public library. He had to duck to get through the door of the room and practically do the limbo if he wanted to walk to the single window. The loo was on the floor below and the heat was by means of whatever came up from the rest of the house. But all of this made the price extremely right, so he’d snapped it up upon a single glance once he learned how little it was going to cost him. In recompense, it seemed, for the myriad inconveniences of the room, the landlady provided sumptuous breakfasts involving everything from porridge to prunes, so Zed hadn’t had to eat lunch since he’d arrived, which was just as well since he used the time he would have otherwise spent in a cafe trying to suss out who — besides himself — was prowling round the death of Ian Cresswell. But if Scotland Yard was indeed here in Cumbria in the person of a detective on the scent of the unfortunate drowning of Nicholas Fairclough’s cousin, Zed had not been able to locate that person, and until he saw him, he wasn’t going to be able to mould The Ninth Life into the Nine Lives and a Death that Rodney Aronson apparently wanted.

  Naturally, Aronson knew who the Scotland Yard detective was. Zed would have put a week’s meagre wages on that. He would have put a further week’s wages on Aronson’s having a master plan to give Zed the sack upon his failure to unearth said detective, which would equate to his failure to sex up his story. That was what this was all about because Rodney couldn’t cope with the combination of Zed’s education and his aspirations.

  Not that he was getting far with his aspirations and not that he would get far with them. Oh, one might survive artistically in this day and age by producing poetry, but poetry did not put a roof over one’s head.

  That thought — a roof over his head — put Zed in mind of the roof in London under which he lived. It put him further in mind of the people beneath that roof. Lodged among those people were those people’s intentions, his mother’s foremost among them.

  At least he didn’t have to worry about those intentions just now, Zed thought, for one morning soon after the first night of Yaffa Shaw’s presence in the family flat — which had been effected with a rapidity astounding even for his mother — the young woman waylaid Zed outside of the bathroom they were going to be forced to share, and sponge bag in hand she’d murmured, “No worries, Zed. All right?” His mind on his job, he thought at first she was speaking of what lay in front of him: yet another trip to Cumbria. But it came to him that Yaffa was actually talking about her presence in the family flat and about his mother’s determination to throw them together as much as she could until she wore down their resistance and they succumbed to an engagement, marriage, and babies.

  Zed said, “Eh?” and fiddled with the belt of his dressing gown. It was too short for him, as were the trousers of his pyjamas, and he never could find slippers to fit so he was wearing what he usually wore on his feet in the morning, which was a pair of mismatched socks. He felt all at once like what Jack found at the top of the beanstalk, especially in comparison to Yaffa, who was neat and trim and all of a piece with everything on her a coordinated affair in an appealing colour that seemed to enhance both her skin and her eyes.

  Yaffa looked over her shoulder in the general direction of the kitchen, from where breakfast sounds were emanating. She said quietly, “Listen, Zed. I have a boyfriend in Tel Aviv, in medical school, so you’re not to worry.” She’d pushed back a bit of her hair — dark, curly, and hanging down below her shoulders quite prettily, whereas earlier she’d worn it pulled back from her face — and she gave him a look that he’d had to call impish. She said, “I didn’t tell her that. You see, this” — with an inclination of her head towards the door of the bedroom she’d been given — “saves me heaps of money. I can cut back my hours at work and take another course. And if I can do that each term, I can finish uni earlier, and if I can do that, I’m one step closer to getting back home to Micah.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “When she introduced us — you and me — I could see what your mum had in mind, so I didn’t say anything about him. I needed the room — I need the room — and I’m willing to play along if you are.”

  “How?” He realised he seemed only capable of one-word responses to this young woman, and he wasn’t at all sure what this meant.

  She sai
d, “We develop a pretence.”

  “Pretence?”

  “We’re attracted, you and I. We play the role, we ‘fall in love’” — she sketched inverted commas in the air — “and then conveniently I break your heart. Or you break mine. It doesn’t matter except considering your mum, I’d better break yours. We’d probably have to go on one or two dates and maintain some kind of enraptured contact on our mobiles while you’re gone. You could make kissing noises occasionally and look soulfully at me over the breakfast table. It would buy me time to save the money I need to take the extra course each term and it would buy you time to get your mother off your back for a bit about getting married. We’d have to play at a little affection now and then but you’re off the hook having to sleep with me as we wouldn’t want to show such disrespect to your mum. I think it would work. What about you?”

  He nodded. “I see.” He was pleased he’d advanced to two words instead of one.

  “So?” she said. “Are you willing?”

  “Yes.” And then in a graduation to four words: “When do we start?”

  “At breakfast.”

  So when Yaffa asked him over the breakfast table to tell her about the story he was working on in Cumbria, he played along. To his surprise, he found that she asked very good questions and her pretence of interest in his affairs caused his mother to beam at him meaningfully. He’d left London with his mother’s ecstatic hug and her “You see, you see, my boy?” burning in his brain, along with a note from Yaffa in his pocket: “Wait thirty-six hours, phone the flat, ask your mum if you can speak to me. I’ll give you my mobile number while she’s listening. Good hunting in Cumbria, my friend.” He’d phoned at the thirty-six-hour mark exactly, and he’d ended up again surprised to find that he actually enjoyed the brief conversation he had with Yaffa Shaw. This was due, he reckoned, to the fact that everything was out in the open between them. No pressure, he thought. And he always operated best when there was minimal pressure.

  He only wished that were the case with regard to this damn story. He couldn’t think of what to do to unearth the Scotland Yard detective aside from planting himself in Bryanbarrow and waiting to see who turned up at Ian Cresswell’s farm on the scent of the man’s untimely death. The Willow and Well afforded him an unobstructed view of this place. For Bryan Beck farm sat across the small triangular green that served as the centre of the village, its ancient manor house visible behind a low stone wall and a tenant cottage making a crumbling statement at right angles to it.

  As he watched, into the second hour of nursing his pint and maintaining his vigil, there was finally a sign of life at the farm. It didn’t emanate from the manor house, though, but rather from the tenant cottage. From this emerged a man and a teenage boy. They left the property side by side and walked onto the green, where the man placed a step stool that he positioned in the centre of the lawn among the fallen leaves blown from the oak trees that bordered it. He plopped himself on this stool and gestured to the boy, who was carrying what looked like an old bedsheet, along with a shoe box tucked under his arm. The bedsheet he draped round the older man’s shoulders, and from the box he took scissors, a comb, and a hand mirror. The older man removed the tweed cap he wore and jerked his head at the boy: the sign to begin. The boy set about cutting his hair.

  This, Zed knew, had to be George Cowley and his teenage son Daniel. They could be no one else. He knew that the dead man Ian Cresswell had a son, but as Cresswell was dead, he didn’t reckon the son was hanging about the farm and he reckoned even less that that son would be cutting the hair of the tenant farmer. Why they were doing this in the middle of the village green was an interesting question, but cutting it there made cleaning-up simple, Zed supposed, although it wasn’t likely to endear George Cowley to the other residents of Bryanbarrow, some of whom lived in the terrace of cottages that comprised one side of the green.

  Zed downed the rest of his pint, which at this point had long gone both warm and flat. He lumbered out of the pub and he approached the haircutting on the green. It was chilly outside, with a breeze, and the combined scent of wood smoke and cow dung hung on the air. Sheep were sounding off from beyond Bryan Beck farm and as if in response ducks were quacking with undue volume from Bryan Beck itself, which gushed along the west side of the village out of Zed’s view.

  “Afternoon.” Zed nodded at the man and the boy. “You’re Mr. Cowley, I understand.” He understood because he’d spoken to the publican at some length during his first hour’s deployment within the Willow and Well. As far as the publican knew, Zed was one of the myriad walkers who came to the Lakes either to discover what Wordsworth had spent his creative energies extolling or to see what the profits from Peter Rabbit had managed to save from mankind’s tendency to build hideous structures upon it. He’d been more than willing to increase Zed’s knowledge of the “real Lakes” with a good period of gossip about its denizens, many of whom were “gen-u-ine Cumbrian characters,” one of whom was, ultimately and conveniently, George Cowley. “A real piece o’ work, is George,” the publican had said. “One of those blokes never lets go of a grievance. Love to feud, they do, that sort of bloke. I feel dead sorry for that boy of his ’cause the only thing George has any fondness for is feuding and his bloody dog.” His bloody dog was a border collie who’d come as far as the hedge when George Cowley and his son crossed over to the green. A word from George and the dog had dropped to its belly obediently. There it remained, a watchful eye on the proceedings, throughout Zed’s conversation with its master.

  Cowley eyed Zed with no small degree of suspicion. His son held his scissors poised, but he’d stopped cutting his father’s hair. George said over his shoulder to him, “Get on with it, Dan,” and looked away from Zed. So much for friendly conversation, Zed thought.

  “Lovely farm you’ve got,” Zed said. “Unusual to have it actually part of the village.”

  “Not mine,” George remarked sourly.

  “You run it, though, don’t you? Doesn’t that make it as good as yours?”

  George cast him a look indicative of scorn. “Not hardly. And what’s it to you anyway?”

  Zed glanced at the man’s son. Daniel’s face flushed. Zed said, “Nothing, actually. It merely looks an interesting place. The big house and all that. I’ve a curiosity about old buildings. It’s an old manor house, isn’t it? The bigger building?”

  Cowley scowled. “Could be. Dan, are you cutting or not? I’m not ’bout to sit here all day in the cold. We’ve things to see to.”

  Daniel said quietly to Zed, “Elizabethan, it is. We used to live there.”

  “Dan!”

  “Sorry.” He resumed his cutting. It looked like something he’d been doing for years, as he used both the comb and the scissors efficiently.

  Cowley said to Zed, “So who bloody wants to know and why?”

  “Eh?”

  “The house. The farm. Why’re you asking about ’em? What’s your interest? You’ve some sort o’ business in the village?”

  “Oh.” Zed thought of the approach that would glean him the most information with the least revelation on his part. “Just interested in the history of the places I visit. In the Willow and Well, the barman was saying that’s the oldest building in the village, that manor house.”

  “Wrong, he is. Cottage’s older by a hundert years.”

  “Is it really? I expect a place like that could be haunted or something.”

  “That why you’re here? You looking for ghosts? Or” — sharply — “for something else?”

  God, the man was suspicious, Zed thought. He wondered idly if the bloke had pieces of silver shoved up the chimney or something very like, with Zed there to case the joint, as the saying went. He said affably to Cowley, “Sorry. No. I’m only here visiting. I don’t mean to unnerve you.”

  “Not unnerved. I c’n take care of m’self and Dan, I can.”

  “Right. Of course. I expect you can.” Zed went for a jolly tone. “I don’t expect you ge
t many people asking questions about the farm, eh? Or actually many people here at all, especially this time of year. Asking questions or doing anything else.” He winced inwardly. He was going to have to do something about developing a subtlety of approach.

  Cowley said, “’F you like history, I c’n give you history,” but he crossed his arms beneath the sheet that was keeping the hair from his clothing, and his posture suggested nothing was forthcoming, in spite of his words.

  Daniel said, “Dad,” in a tone that took a position between advising and warning.

  “Didn’t say nothing, did I,” Cowley said.

  “It’s only that — ”

  “Just cut the bloody hair and have done.” Cowley looked away, this time to the manor house behind the wall. It was all of stone, neatly whitewashed right to the top of its chimneys, and its roof looked as if it had been recently replaced. “That,” he said, “was meant to be mine. Got bought out from under my nose, it did, with no one the wiser till the job was done. And look what happened: what needed to happen. That’s how it is. ’N am I surprised? Not bloody likely. You pay the wages in the end, you do.”

  Zed looked at the man in utter confusion. He reckoned “what happened” was the death of Ian Cresswell, who, he knew, had lived in the manor house. But, “Wages?” he asked, while what he was thinking was, What the hell is the man going on about?

  “Of sin,” Daniel said in a low voice. “The wages of sin.”

  “That’s right, that is,” George Cowley said. “He paid the wages of sin right and proper. Well, there he is and here we are and when affairs get settled and the farm goes up for sale again, we’ll be there this time and make no mistake. Bryan Beck farm is meant to be ours, ’n we’ve not been scrimping from day one in our lives to have it go to someone else a second time.”