Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [143]
Alatea wasn’t sure what to say. She went with the lead he had given her during dinner the night before. She said, “Nicky, I didn’t think you were still at home. Are you ill?”
“Just needed to think.” He looked at her then and she saw his eyes were bloodshot. A tingling went up her arms and felt as if it would encircle her heart. He said, “This seemed like the best place to do it.”
She didn’t want to ask the obvious, but not to do so would have been more obvious still, so she said, “Think about what? What’s wrong?”
He said nothing at first. She watched him. He moved his gaze from her, and it seemed he was thinking about her question and all the different answers he might give. At first he said, “Manette came to see me. In the shipping department.”
“Are there problems there?”
“It’s Tim and Gracie. She wanted us to take them.”
“Take them? What do you mean?”
He explained. She heard but didn’t hear because all the time she was busy trying to evaluate his tone. He spoke of his cousin Ian; of Ian’s wife, Niamh; and of Ian’s two children. Alatea, of course, knew all of them, but she had not known of Niamh’s intentions towards her own flesh and blood. It was inconceivable to her that Niamh would use her children in this way, as chess pieces in a game that by all rights should have been over. She wanted to weep for Tim and Gracie and she felt the imperative of doing something for them as much as Nicholas obviously felt it. But for this to have disturbed his sleep, to have made him ill…? He wasn’t telling her everything.
“Manette and Freddie are the best ones to take them,” he concluded. “I’m no match for Tim’s problems, but Manette and Freddie are. She’d get through to Tim. She’d be good at that. She doesn’t give up on anyone.”
“So it seems there’s a solution, yes?” Alatea said hopefully.
“Except that Manette and Freddie have split up so that throws a spanner,” Nicholas said. “Their situation’s odd. It’s also unstable.” He was silent again for a moment, and he used the moment to top up his cold coffee with more cold coffee, into which he stirred a heaped teaspoonful of sugar. “And that’s too bad,” he went on, “because they belong together, those two. I can’t think why they split up in the first place. Except they never had kids and I think perhaps that wrecked them after a time.”
Oh God, this was the crux, Alatea thought. This was where it all headed in the end. She had known it would, if not with Nicholas then with someone else.
She said, “Perhaps they didn’t want children. Some people don’t.”
“Some people, but not Manette.” He glanced at her. His face was drawn. From this, Alatea knew he wasn’t telling her the truth. Tim and Gracie might indeed be in need of a stable place to live, but that was not what was bothering her husband.
She said, “There’s more, though.” She drew out a chair from the table and sat. “I think, Nicky, that you had better tell me.”
It had long been a strong part of their relationship that from the first Nicholas had told her everything. He’d insisted upon it because of how he’d lived in his past, which had been in a world of lies, experiencing a life defined by hiding his drug use in any way he could. If he didn’t tell her everything now— despite what that “everything” might comprise— his withholding of information would be more damaging to their marriage than whatever the information itself was. Both of them knew it.
He finally said, “I believe my father thinks I killed Ian.”
This was so far from what Alatea had been expecting that she was rendered speechless. There were words somewhere inside her, but she couldn’t find them, at least not in English.
Nicholas said, “Scotland Yard’s up here looking into Ian’s death. Considering it was ruled an accident, there’s only one reason that Scotland Yard’s turned up. Dad can pull strings when he wants to. I reckon that’s what he did.”
“That’s impossible.” Alatea’s mouth felt dry. She wanted to reach for Nicholas