Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [188]
“I’m taking that point very well, Manette,” Valerie said. And to Freddie, “Stop the payments to Vivienne at once. Contact her through the bank to which the payments have gone. Tell them to inform her it’s my decision.”
Bernard said, “That’s not— ”
“I don’t care what it is and it isn’t,” Valerie said. “Nor should you. Or have you a reason to be paying her that you’d care to explain?”
Bernard’s expression was agonised. Had things been different, Manette thought she might actually have felt sorry for him. She gave passing consideration to what shits men were, and she waited for her father to attempt to lie his way out of this situation as he was surely going to do, in the hope that she would say nothing about their conversation and what he’d admitted to her about his affair with Vivienne Tully.
But Bernard Fairclough had always been the luckiest bastard on the planet, and that proved to be the case in that moment. For the door burst open as they sat there waiting for Bernard to answer, and the wind swept in. As Manette turned, thinking she and Freddie had left it off the latch, her brother Nicholas strode into the room.
LANCASTER
LANCASHIRE
Deborah knew the only course open to her was to speak to the woman with Alatea Fairclough. If indeed she was correct in her surmise that what was going on with Alatea had to do with conceiving a child, then she seriously doubted that Alatea was going to be willing to talk about it, especially to someone who’d already been found out as misrepresenting her true purpose in Cumbria. Nor was she likely to unburden herself to a tabloid journalist. Thus, the other woman seemed like the only possibility to get to the bottom of Alatea’s odd behaviour and to learn whether it had anything to do with the death of Ian Cresswell.
She rang Zed on his mobile. He barked, “You took your bloody sweet time. Where the hell are you? What’s going on? We had a deal and if you’re reneging— ”
She said, “They’ve gone into a science building.”
“Well, that’s got us nowhere in a basket. Could be she’s just taking a course. Mature student, right? The other could be doing the same thing.”
“I must talk to her, Zed.”
“I thought you already went that route with no result.”
“I don’t mean Alatea. Obviously, she’s not going to talk to me any more than she’s going to talk to you. I mean the other, the woman she fetched from the disabled soldiers’ home. She’s the one I need to talk to.”
“Why?”
And here was where things got tricky. “They seem to have a relationship of some sort. They were talking quite companionably all the way from the car park to the science building. They seemed like friends, and friendships mean confidences shared.”
“They also mean keeping those confidences to oneself.”
“Of course. But I find that, outside of London, the Met have a certain cachet with people. Say ‘Scotland Yard CID’ and show your identification and suddenly what was sworn to secrecy gets offered for police consumption.”
“Same thing with a reporter’s work,” Zed noted.
Was he joking? Deborah wondered. Probably not. She said, “I take your point, of course.”
“Then— ”
“I think I might be a less threatening presence.”
“How so?”
“It seems obvious. First, it would be two against one: two complete strangers confronting a woman about her friendship with another woman. Second… Well, there’s your size, Zed, which you have to admit could be rather threatening.”
“I’m a lamb. She’ll see that.”
“Perhaps she would. But then there’s the entire matter of who we are. She’ll want to see our identification. Picture the result. I show her mine, you show her yours, and what’s she going to think— let alone do— when she sees the Met in bed with The Source? It wouldn’t work. The only route we have is for me to talk to this woman privately, see where that takes us, and share the information with you.”
“And how’m I s’posed to know you’ll do that? I see this as a bloody good