Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [166]
There was no angling shop in either Milnthorpe or Arnside, so he drove the distance to Grange-over-Sands and made his purchase in a concern called Lancasters. Lancasters sold everything from baby clothes to gardening tools and it was strung along the sloping high street as a series of shops that had obviously been snapped up by the eponymous and enterprising Lancaster family over the last hundred years in a remarkable and successful project of expansion, one shop now tumbling into the next. The governing philosophy behind them all seemed to be that what wasn’t sold within the place didn’t need to be bought. This being a part of the world given to fishing, what they did have was a fillet knife exactly like the one that Lynley had brought up from the water inside the Ireleth Hall boathouse.
St. James made his purchase of this, rang Lynley on his mobile, and told him he was heading to Ireleth Hall. He also phoned Deborah, but she wasn’t answering. He wasn’t surprised, as she would have seen he was the caller and she wasn’t happy with him at the moment.
Nor, particularly, was he happy with her. He loved his wife deeply, but there were moments when the fact that they couldn’t see eye-to-eye on something made him despair of their entire marriage. This despair was always a fleeting thing, a feeling that he generally reflected upon later and chuckled over when both his temper and Deborah’s had cooled. Why were we so caught up in that? he would wonder. Matters so crucial one day were mere bagatelles the next. This one didn’t seem so insignificant, however.
He took the most direct route to Lake Windermere although at another time he would have quite enjoyed taking a diversion and cruising up through the Lyth Valley. Instead, he sped along the northeastern route and ended up at the very tip of Lake Windermere, where the mass of end moraines at Newby Bridge spoke of glaciers, an ice age, and a time long ago when the village had stood at the southernmost point of the lake itself, which now lay some distance away. Then he sped north. Within moments, Lake Windermere came into view: a broad unwrinkled sheet of grey-blue reflecting the autumn-hued trees that formed woodlands along its shores.
Ireleth Hall was not far from this point, a few miles beyond the area where the Victorian beauties of Fell Foot Park offered walks and vistas that at this time of year were growing cold and forbidding but in spring would be a palette of nodding daffodils and colourful rhododendrons that grew to the height of buildings. He passed by this place and entered one of dozens of arboreal tunnels along the road: auburn and ochre where still there were leaves on the trees, skeletal branches where there were now none.
The gates were closed at Ireleth Hall, but there was a bell buried within the ivy that climbed the stone plinth forming part of its boundary wall. St. James clambered out of his hired car and rang it. As he did so, Lynley pulled up behind him in the Healey Elliott.
This made entry easy. A moment of disembodied conversation with someone who answered the bell, Lynley saying over St. James’s shoulder, “It’s Thomas Lynley,” and that was that. They were inside, the gates creaking open like something from an old horror film, then creaking closed behind them.
They went directly to the boathouse. This was, St. James told his friend, the only other possibility in what went for his part of the investigation. While no one would ever be able to proclaim that all the circumstances surrounding Ian Cresswell’s death had been completely straightforward, if there was anything to persuade the coroner to reopen the matter, this was how they would find it. And even this guaranteed nothing, he said.
For his part, Lynley declared he’d be more than happy to close matters up here and return to London as soon as possible. St. James shot him a querying look at this remark. Lynley said, “The guv’s not happy with me.”
“Hillier hoping for something different from what you’re