Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [104]
They’d finished their meal and were each drinking a rather disturbingly large glass of limoncello, which was odd in both its size and the fact that an Indian restaurant was serving the Italian liqueur at all. “Simon likes me soused after nine in the evening,” was how Deborah explained at least the size of the glass. “I become putty in his wily hands although I don’t expect he’s worked out how he’s going to get me off the floor, out of the restaurant, and back to the hotel if I drink this entire thing.”
“A trolley,” St. James said. He indicated a nearby table with its unoccupied chairs. Lynley dragged one of them over and joined them.
“Anything?” St. James said to him.
Lynley knew he didn’t mean food or drink. “There are motives, I’m finding. It’s becoming a case of turn over a stone and find a motive.” He ticked them off for his friends: an insurance policy with Niamh Cresswell as the beneficiary; the land and the farm going to Kaveh Mehran; the potential loss of funds to Mignon Fairclough; the potential gain of position at Fairclough Industries by Manette or Freddie McGhie or, for that matter, Nicholas Fairclough; Niamh Cresswell’s need for revenge. “There’s also something not quite right about Cresswell’s son, Tim. Evidently he’s a day pupil in a school called Margaret Fox, which turns out to be an institution for troubled children. A phone call got me that much but no one’s saying anything else about him.”
“So troubled could mean anything,” St. James noted.
“It could.” Lynley went on to tell them about the Cresswell children’s being unceremoniously dumped first upon their father and his lover and now upon the lover alone. “The sister— Manette McGhie— was in quite a state about the situation this afternoon.”
“Who wouldn’t be?” Deborah noted. “That’s ghastly, Tommy.”
“I agree. The only people so far who don’t seem to have motives are Fairclough himself and his wife. Although,” Lynley added thoughtfully, “I do have the impression that Fairclough’s holding something back. So I have Barbara looking at the London end of his life.”
“But why ask you to look into matters if he’s got something to hide?” Deborah asked.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Lynley said. “It hardly makes sense for a killer, who’s got away with the murder, to head for the cops asking for a closer look.”
“As to that…” He’d been to see the forensic pathologist, St. James told Lynley. It seemed that all the i’s had been dotted and all the t’s crossed. He’d had a look at the reports and the X-rays and from the latter, it was perfectly obvious that Ian Cresswell’s skull had been fractured. As Lynley well knew when a skull was fractured, it didn’t bear the imprint of that which had fractured it. The skull either cracked like an egg with a spiderweb of breaks spreading out from the point of impact or it suffered a lateral break in the form of a semicircle on the surface. But in either case, one needed to examine the potential instruments that could have caused the fracture in order to decide how it had occurred.
“And?” Lynley asked.
And this had been done. There was blood on one of the stones remaining upon the dock when the others had dislodged and had fallen into the water. DNA analysis of this blood indicated it had come from Ian Cresswell. There were hairs, skin, and fibres as well, and when they were tested, they proved to be from Ian Cresswell, too.
“I tracked down the coroner’s officers who did the investigation prior to the inquest,” St. James went on, “There were two of them: a former detective from the constabulary offices in Barrow-in-Furness and a paramedic who does this sort of work on the side. They felt they were looking at an accident, not a murder, but they checked all alibis just in case.”
Like Lynley, St. James ticked them off, consulting a notepad that