Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [176]
“What did I do to give the game away, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I just have a sixth sense about this kind of thing.” He tapped the side of his nose. “Can sniff ’em out pretty easily, if you know what I mean. Goes with the territory. Has to, doesn’t it.”
“What territory are we talking about?”
“Journalism. Thing is,” he said expansively, “you have to be able to see more than what’s just on the surface in my line of work. Investigative reporting is about more than sitting at one’s desk and waiting for some bloke’s lifelong enemies to ring up with details of a story that’ll bring down the government. You have to be adept at digging. You have to get into the hunt.”
Deborah found this nonsense impossible to resist. “Investigative reporting,” she said contemplatively. “Is that what you call working for The Source, then? They don’t seem to publish investigative stories about the government very often, do they? If at all.”
“Just using that as an example,” he said.
“Ah.”
“Hey, it’s a living,” he declared, doubtless picking up on her ironic tone. “Anyway, I’m a poet otherwise. And no one supports himself on poetry these days.”
“No, indeed,” Deborah said.
“Look, I know it’s a rag, Sergeant Cotter. But I like to eat and have a roof over my head and this is how I do it. Your line of work isn’t much better, I reckon, looking under stones to dig out society’s scum, eh?”
Mixed metaphor, Deborah thought. Odd for a poet but there you had it. “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” she said.
“There’s more than one way to look at everything.”
Up ahead of them, Alatea drove onward. It became apparent soon enough that she was heading for Lancaster. Once in the environs of the city, they had to take care not to be seen by her, so they dropped back with five cars between them.
They wound through the streets. There was no question that Alatea knew exactly where she was going. She ended up in the city centre, in the small car park of a stout brick structure, which Deborah and Zed Benjamin passed by. Thirty yards from this place, Zed pulled to the kerb. Deborah swivelled in her seat to look back at the building. In some forty-five seconds, Alatea came round the corner of it from the direction of the car park and went inside.
“We need to find out what that place is,” Deborah said. Considering Zed’s size, he wasn’t the one to accomplish this task unseen. Deborah got out, said, “Wait here,” and dashed to the other side of the street, where she could keep herself somewhat hidden by using the cars parked there.
She went as far as she needed to go to be able to read the lettering above the building’s entrance. Kent-Howath Foundation for Disabled Veterans it said. A home for soldiers wounded in war.
Deborah considered Alatea’s place of birth, which she knew was Argentina. This took her ineluctably to the Falklands War. She wondered about the likelihood of an Argentine soldier ending up here for some reason, someone whom Alatea was visiting.
She was thinking about other possible wars— the Gulf Wars being the most recent ones— when Alatea emerged. She wasn’t alone, but she wasn’t with anyone who looked remotely like a disabled veteran. She was instead with another woman, tall like Alatea but stocky. Her appearance and ease of movement suggested she was someone who regularly favoured the type of clothing she was wearing at the moment: a colourful long skirt, loose pullover, and boots. Her long hair was unstyled, dark in colour but peppered with grey, and she wore it pulled back from her face and held with a hair slide.
They walked in the direction of the foundation’s car park, talking earnestly. Considering what this meant, Deborah dashed back to where Zed had parked. She got into the car saying, “She’s going to be on the move. She’s got someone with her.”
In response, he fired up the engine and readied himself to follow once more. He said, “What was that place?”
“Disabled soldiers’ home.”
“That who’s with her?”
“No. She’s