Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [141]
“That rather suggests Mignon herself is throwing up a smoke screen, doesn’t it?”
“It would explain her trying to divert attention onto her father last night. Evidently, Cresswell wanted Bernard to cut her off.” Lynley explained the financial arrangement Mignon apparently had with her father. “She wouldn’t have wanted that. And since Cresswell kept the books and knew every move Bernard made financially, there’s the additional possibility that he wanted someone else cut off as well.”
“The son?”
“He’s the likely choice, isn’t he? With Nicholas’s past, Cresswell would have argued not to trust him with a penny, and who could blame him? Nicholas Fairclough might be a recovering methamphetamine user but that’s the key word: recovering and not recovered. Addicts never recover. They merely cope day-to-day.”
Lynley would know about that, St. James acknowledged, because of his own brother. “And has Fairclough handed money to his son?”
“I want to look into that. The other daughter and her husband are my means to the information.”
St. James looked away. Noise and odours were coming from an open door into the back of the hotel: the crashing and banging of pots along with the smell of frying bacon and burnt toast. He said to Lynley, “What about Valerie Fairclough, Tommy?”
“As killer?”
“Ian Cresswell was no blood to her. He was her husband’s nephew and he had the potential to damage her children. If he wanted to cut off Mignon and he doubted Nicholas’s long-term recovery, he’d steer Fairclough away from helping them financially as Fairclough tended to do. And Valerie Fairclough’s behaviour that day was decidedly strange according to Constable Schlicht: dressed to the nines, perfectly calm, a phone call announcing ‘a dead man floating in my boathouse.’”
“There’s that,” Lynley admitted. “But she could have been the intended victim as well.”
“Motive?”
“Mignon declares her father is hardly ever there. He’s in London repeatedly. Havers is looking into that end of things, but if something’s not right with the Faircloughs’ marriage, Bernard could have hopes to rid himself of his wife.”
“Why not divorce her?”
“Because of Fairclough Industries. He’s run it forever and of course he’d stand to walk away with a great deal of money if it was part of a settlement unless there’s some sort of prenuptial agreement we’re not privy to. But as of now it’s still her company, and I daresay she can throw her weight into whatever decisions are made at the place if she wants to.”
“Another reason for her to want Ian dead, Tommy, if he’d been recommending decisions not to her liking.”
“Possibly. But wouldn’t it make more sense for her to have Ian fired? Why kill him when she had the power to cut him off as easily as he wanted to cut off two of her children?”
“So where do we stand?” St. James pointed out to him that the fillet knife they’d brought up from the water looked perfectly innocent to the naked eye, not a scratch upon it. The stones they’d also brought up bore no recent scratches to indicate they’d been jemmied away from the dock. They could get Constable Schlicht out to the boathouse and the local SOCO boys involved, but they were going to need the coroner to reopen the case and they had virtually nothing to give him in order to encourage him to have another look at Ian Cresswell’s death.
“The answer lies with the people,” Lynley said. “They all bear a closer looking into.”
“Which means, I think, that my usefulness to you has run its course,” St. James said. “Although there’s a final route we might go with the fillet knife. And another conversation that might be had with Mignon.”
Lynley was about to reply to these suggestions when his mobile rang. He looked at the caller and said, “It’s Havers. This could tell us where we need to head next.” He flipped the phone open and said, “Tell me you’ve got something meaningful, Sergeant, because all we’re running into here is one dead end after another.”
ARNSIDE
CUMBRIA
Alatea had gone out