Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [140]
He’d left the Crow and Eagle and walked in the direction of Arnside, along the road that skirted the River Bela and ultimately the mudflats of Milnthorpe Sands. As he walked, he tried not to think but rather merely to breathe in the rain-washed, damp day. He needed to clear his mind of this whole adoption business once and for all. If he didn’t— and if Deborah didn’t— it was going to poison their marriage.
The damn magazine hadn’t helped matters. Deborah had it in hand at this point, and she’d read the bloody thing from cover to cover. From a story in Conception she had concluded decisively that she wanted to go the surrogacy route: her egg, his sperm, a petri dish, and a host mother. She’d read a story of a six-time surrogate and the altruism she extended towards other women. “It would be our child,” was the point she kept making. “Ours and no one else’s.” Well, it would be and it wouldn’t, to his way of thinking. There were dangers here as well as dangers in the other routes of adoption.
The day was a fine one although the night had seen buckets of rain pouring down on Cumbria. But now the air felt clean and crisp, and the sky displayed an ashen wealth of cumulus clouds. Out on the mudflats, the stragglers from various flocks of birds heading to Africa and the Mediterranean still hunted for ragworms, lugworms, and tellins. He recognised the plovers and the dunlans among them but as to the rest, he could not have said. He watched them for a while and admired the simplicity of their life. Then he turned and walked back into Milnthorpe.
In the car park of the inn, he found Lynley just arriving. He walked over to join him as his friend got out of the Healey Elliott. They had a moment of mutual admiration for the saloon’s sleek lines and handsome paint job before St. James said, “But you didn’t come by to prompt further vehicular envy on my part, I expect.”
“Any chance to lord it over you in the transportation area is a chance I must grab on to. But in this case, you’re right. I wanted to talk to you.”
“A mobile would have done. This was a bit of a drive.”
“Hmm, yes. But part of the gaff is blown. I reckoned a few hours away from the Faircloughs wouldn’t go amiss.” Lynley told him of his evening encounter with Valerie, Bernard, and Mignon Fairclough. “Now that she knows Scotland Yard’s involved, she’ll make short work of letting everyone else know as well.”
“That could be good.”
“It’s actually as I’d have preferred it.”
“But you’re uneasy?”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“Because of who Fairclough is. Because of who Hillier is. Because of Hillier’s damnable propensity for using me to serve his own ends.”
St. James waited for more. He knew the history of Lynley’s relationship with the assistant commissioner. It included at least one attempted cover-up of a long-ago crime. He wouldn’t have put it past Hillier to use Lynley another time in a similar capacity in which one of their own— as Hillier would no doubt think of Fairclough, Lynley, and himself— had something serious he wished to bury and Lynley was supposed to wield the shovel. Anything was possible, and both of them knew it.
Lynley said, “It may all be a smoke screen.”
“Which part of it?”
“Fairclough wanting me to look into Ian Cresswell’s death. That’s certainly what Mignon Fairclough indicated last evening. It was a look-no-further-than-the-bloke-who-employed-you kind of remark. It’s something I’d already thought of myself and dismissed, however.”
“Why?”
“Because I just can’t make sense of it, Simon.” Lynley leaned against the side of the Healey Elliott, arms crossed at his chest. “I can see how he’d ask for the Met’s involvement if a murder had occurred and he’d been accused or suspected and wanted to clear his name. Or if one or more of his children had been accused or suspected and he wanted to clear their names. But this was deemed an accident from the first, so why