Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [0]
ALSO BY
ELIZABETH GEORGE
A Great Deliverance
Payment in Blood
Well-Schooled in Murder
A Suitable Vengeance
For the Sake of Elena
Missing Joseph
Playing for the Ashes
In the Presence of the Enemy
Deception on His Mind
In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner
A Traitor to Memory
I, Richard
A Place of Hiding
With No One as Witness
What Came Before He Shot Her
Careless in Red
This Body of Death
NONFICTION
Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach
to Fiction and the Writing Life
ANTHOLOGY
A Moment on the Edge:
100 Years of Crime Stories by Women
Two of the Deadliest
ELIZABETH GEORGE
Believing the Lie
DUTTON
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, January 2012
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © 2012 by Susan Elizabeth George
Map copyright © by David Cain
Title page photo of Morecambe Bay copyright © by John Sparks/Alamy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase authorized editions.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
George, Elizabeth, 1949–
Believing the lie : an Inspector Lynley novel / Elizabeth George. p. cm.
EISBN: 9781101565797
1. Lynley, Thomas (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—England—Fiction. 3. Havers, Barbara (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.E478B45 2012 813’.54—dc23 2011032904
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Bembo
Designed by Amy Hill
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental..
In loving memory of
Anthony Mott
brilliant raconteur
adored companion
always Antonio to me
This life’s five windows of the soul
Distorts the Heavens from pole to pole,
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not thro’, the eye…
WILLIAM BLAKE
Table of Contents
10 October
18 October
25 October
28 October
30 October
2 November
3 November
4 November
5 November
6 November
7 November
8 November
9 November
10 November
11 November
12 November
15 November
10 OCTOBER
FLEET STREET
THE CITY OF LONDON
Zed Benjamin had never been called into the office of the editor before, and he found the experience simultaneously disconcerting and thrilling. The disconcerting half of it resulted in massive sweating of the armpits. The thrilling half of it produced a heartbeat he could actually feel, for some reason, in the pads of his thumbs. But since from the first he’d believed it essential to see Rodney Aronson as just another bloke at The Source, he attributed both the sweating of armpits and the pulsing of thumbs to the fact that he’d switched from his one summer suit to his one winter suit rather too early in the season. He made a mental note to change back to the