Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [209]
She hurried to find him. She called out, “Here, Nicky. I’m here.”
They met in the long oaken corridor, where the light was dimmest. She couldn’t read his face. But his voice frightened her, so intense was it. “It’s down to me,” he said. “I’ve ruined everything, Allie.”
Alatea thought of the previous day: Nicholas’s distress and the fact that Scotland Yard was in Cumbria looking into the circumstances of Ian Cresswell’s death. For a terrible moment, her conclusion was that her husband was confessing to his cousin’s murder, and she felt light-headed as she was struck with the knowledge of where this terrible admission could take them should they not be able to hide the truth. If terror had a presence, it was there in the darkened corridor with them.
She took her husband’s arm and said, “Nicky, please. You must tell me very clearly what’s wrong. Then we can decide what to do.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Why? What’s happened? What can be so terrible?”
He leaned against the wall. She held on to his arm, and she said to him, “Is it this Scotland Yard matter? Have you been to speak to your father? Does he actually think…?”
“None of that matters,” Nicholas said. “We’re surrounded by liars, you and I. My mother, my father, probably my sisters, that damn reporter from The Source, that filmmaking woman. Only I didn’t see it because I was so intent on proving myself.” He spat the penultimate word. “Ego, ego, ego,” he said, and with each repetition, he hit his forehead with his fist. “All I cared about was proving to everyone— but especially to them— that I’m not the person they used to know. The drugs are gone, the alcohol is gone, and they’re gone forever. And they were meant to see that. Not only my family but the whole bloody world. So I took every opportunity to show myself off and because of that and nothing else, we’re where we are just now.”
His mention of the filmmaking woman sent fear coursing down Alatea’s spine. More and more, everything was coming down to that woman whom they had blindly admitted into their home with her camera, her questions, and her apocryphal concern. From the first, Alatea had known there was something very wrong about her presence. And now she’d been to Lancaster to see Lucy Keverne. So quick she was to follow the clues. Alatea wouldn’t have thought it was possible. She said, “Where are we, then, ‘just now,’ Nicky?”
He told her and she tried to follow. He spoke of the reporter from The Source and of that man’s belief that the red-haired woman had come from New Scotland Yard. He spoke of his parents and a confrontation he’d had with them that day over this very matter in the presence of his sister Manette and Freddie McGhie. He spoke of his mother and her admission to having brought Scotland Yard into the mix. And he spoke of the surprise of all of them when he railed about the detective who’d been sent into his house, the woman who’d upset Alatea so very much… And that was where he stopped.
Alatea said carefully, “What then, Nicky? Did they say something? Did something more occur?”
His words sounded hollow. “She’s not the Scotland Yard detective at all. I don’t know who she is. But because she’s been hired to come up to Cumbria… to take those photographs… Oh, she claimed she needed none of you, that you weren’t going to be part of that bloody film, but someone had to hire her because there is no filmmaker and she’s not Scotland Yard and do you see why it’s down to me, now, Allie? What’s going to happen is down to me. I thought it was bad enough that my parents wanted a detective to investigate Ian’s death because of me. But then to know that nothing that’s happened here in this house, with that woman, has anything to do with Ian’s death but rather has happened because I agreed, because of my ego… because a stupid story in a stupid magazine