Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [201]
You must excuse young Tim, Kaveh would declare solemnly. You must not worry what he says and does. He goes to a special school, you know, for children who are disturbed in one way or another. There are times when he makes claims, when he does things… He ripped his little sister’s favourite doll to pieces, for example, and just the other day or week or month or whatever I found him trying to kill the ducks in the village stream.
And people would believe him, of course. First, because people always believed what they wanted and needed to believe. Second, because every bloody word he said would be the truth. It was as if Kaveh had planned his whole game from the first, the very moment he locked eyes on Tim’s dad.
Tim reached for the handle of the door. He grabbed up his rucksack and jerked the door open.
“What are you doing?” Kaveh demanded. “Stay in the car. You’re going to school.”
“And you’re going to hell,” Tim said. He leaped out and slammed the car door behind him.
VICTORIA
LONDON
Raul Montenegro certainly wasn’t a dead end, Barbara Havers concluded. An hour or more of following various links connected to his name could easily have gleaned her half a ream of paper eaten up with printing stories about the bloke, so she tried to be selective. It was all in Spanish, but there were enough words similar to English for Barbara to be able to make out that Montenegro was a very big nob in industry and the industry in which he operated had something to do with natural gas in Mexico. From this she concluded that somehow Alatea Fairclough, neé Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, had got herself from Argentina to Mexico for reasons that remained unclear. She had moved herself either from a town still unknown to Barbara or, what was more likely considering the reaction of the woman to whom Barbara had attempted to speak in Argentina, she’d disappeared from Santa Maria de la Cruz, de los Angeles, y de los Santos. There, perhaps, she had lived as a member of the mayor’s extended family as a niece or a cousin or, equally perhaps and probably more likely, she had been married to one of his five sons. At least that would explain all the excited quiens and dondes Barbara had heard on the other end of the line when she’d managed to get someone within the mayor’s house to speak to her. Had Alatea done a runner from her marriage to one of the sons of the mayor, that son of the mayor might well like to know where she’d ended up. Especially, Barbara thought, if he and Alatea were still legally married.
All this was supposition, of course. She needed Azhar to get back to her with someone who could translate Spanish, and so far she’d heard not a word from him. So she kept struggling and following leads and vowing to take a tutorial from Winston Nkata on the use and abuse of the World Wide Web.
She also learned that Raul Montenegro was rolling in barrels of lolly. She got this from an online edition of Hola!, that journalistic mother ship from which Hello! had been launched. The two magazines were identical in their dedication to glossy photographs of celebrities of all ilks, all of whom possessed the kind of white teeth one needed to don sunglasses to gaze upon, all of whom dressed in designer gear and posed either at their own palatial estates or— if they lived too modestly for the magazine’s readers— at expensive period hotels. The only difference was in the subjects of the stories, since with the exception of film actors or members of various and sometimes obscure European royal families, Hola! generally appeared to feature individuals from Spanish-speaking countries, Spain itself being the most frequently used. But Mexico had been included more than once, and there was Raul Montenegro