Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [210]
She knew, then, where this was heading. She supposed she’d known where it had been heading all along. She murmured the name: “Montenegro. You think she was hired by Raul?”
“Who the hell else could it possibly be? And I did this to you, Allie. How am I supposed to live with that?”
He pushed past her. He made his way along the corridor and into the drawing room. There, she could see him more clearly in what remained of the daylight. He looked ghastly, and for a completely mad moment she felt herself responsible for this although he and not she had been the one to allow the putative documentary scout into their lives. But she couldn’t help herself. It was the role she played in their relationship, just as his role was to need her so desperately that from the first he had questioned nothing about her as long as he’d been assured of her love. Which was what she herself had been looking for: a place of permanence where she could abide, where no one would ask the kind of dangerous questions that grew from a moment’s wonder.
Outside, Alatea could see that the afternoon was bringing on mid-autumn’s dusk. The sky and the bay beneath were identical in colour, with grey clouds encroaching on apricot streaks cast across both water and air by the setting sun.
Nicholas went to the bay window. He sank into one of the two seats there, and he dropped his head into his hands.
“I’ve failed you,” he said. “I’ve failed myself.”
Alatea wanted to shake her husband. She wanted to tell him that this was not the time for him to feel himself the sun round which all the brewing troubles revolved. She wanted to shout that he could not possibly begin to understand how bad things were about to become for both of them. But to do any of that was to waste what little ability she had left to come up with a way to forestall an inevitable conclusion of which he was still entirely ignorant.
Nicholas thought that Raul Montenegro’s reintroduction into her life meant the end of things. He could not possibly have known the truth of the matter: Raul Montenegro was only the beginning.
BLOOMSBURY
LONDON
Barbara took herself to Bloomsbury in order to be in his vicinity when she finally heard from Taymullah Azhar. Faced with her need to get more information on the topic of Raul Montenegro— not to mention sorting out everything that there was to sort out about Santa Maria de la Cruz, de los Angeles, y de los Santos— she reckoned an Internet café was in order. She’d kill two birds while she waited for Azhar to produce a Spanish translator for her.
Before Nkata had left the Met’s library, he’d said softly, “Look for key words and follow the trail. It’s not brain surgery, Barb. You’ll get better as you go on.” From this, Barbara reckoned that she was to do searches on the names she came across in the articles she had, regardless of what language the articles were in. When she found an Internet café not far from the British Museum, then, that was what she did.
It was not the most pleasant environment in which to conduct her Web search. She had stopped to purchase an English/Spanish dictionary on the way to the spot, and now she was sandwiched between an overweight asthmatic in a mohair sweater and a gum-popping goth with a septum ring and a score of eyebrow studs who kept receiving calls on her mobile phone from someone who, apparently, did not believe she was sitting at a computer because each time he rang, she barked, “Well then, come to the bloody place if you don’t believe me, Clive… Don’t be so bloody stoopid. I’m not fucking e-mailing anyone. I can’t, can I, since you keep bloody ringing me every thirty seconds.”
In this atmosphere, Barbara tried to concentrate. She also tried to ignore the fact that the mouse looked like it hadn’t been disinfected since the day it had come out of its box. As best she could, she attempted to type without actually touching the keys, hitting them only with her fingernails, although these were mostly too short to make a proper job of it. But she reckoned the keyboard was crawling