Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [216]
He said to her, “Why did you arrange for me to come to Cumbria?”
Valerie looked at him. At sixty-seven years old, she was a striking woman. In her youth she would have possessed great beauty. Beauty and money: a powerful combination. She could have chosen from a score of men of similar background to her own, but she had not done so.
“Because I’ve suspected for quite some time.”
“What?”
“Bernard. What he was up to. I didn’t know for certain that he was ‘up to’ Vivienne Tully, of course, but I probably should have realised that as well. When he didn’t mention her after the second time she and I met, those trips to London of his that became more frequent, so many things associated with his foundation that needed his attention … There are always signs, Inspector. There are always clues, red flags, whatever you wish to call them. But it’s generally easier to ignore them than to face the unknown that’s going to arise out of the wreckage of a forty-two-year marriage.” She picked up a discarded plastic coffee cup, something left by one of the workers. She frowned at this and crushed it into her pocket. She shaded her eyes and looked out at the lake, at storm clouds that were brewing on the hills to the west. “I am surrounded by liars and knaves. I wanted to smoke them out of their hiding places. You”— and here she cast him a small smile— “you were my fire, Inspector.”
“What of Ian?”
“Poor Ian.”
“Mignon could have killed him. She had motive, a very strong motive if it comes to that. By your own admission, she was in the boathouse. She could have gone in there earlier and loosened the stones somehow, in an undetectable way. She could even have been in there when he returned. She could have pulled him from the scull, pushed him from it…”
“Inspector, that sort of revenge is far beyond Mignon’s ability to plan. Besides, she would have seen no immediate monetary gain in that. And the only thing Mignon has ever been able to see clearly is the monetary gain of the moment.” She turned from the lake, then, and looked at Lynley. She said, “I knew the stones were loose. I’d told Ian as much, more than once. He and I were the only ones who used the boathouse regularly, so I told no one else. There was no need. I warned him to take care getting in and out of his scull. He said not to worry, that he would take care and when he had a moment, he’d fix the dock. But I think that night he had other things on his mind. He must have done. It was quite out of the ordinary that he came to row that late anyway. I think he wasn’t paying close enough attention. It was always an accident, Inspector. I knew that from the first.”
Lynley considered this. “And that filleting knife I found in the water with the stones?”
“I threw it there. Just to keep you here, in case you decided too soon it was an accident.”
“I see,” he said.
“Are you terribly angry?”
“I ought to be.” They turned and headed back towards the house. Above the walls of the topiary garden, the towering mass of shaped shrubbery loomed and behind it Ireleth Hall itself, sand coloured and teeming with history. He said, “Didn’t Bernard think it unusual?”
“What?”
“Your asking for an investigation into his nephew’s death.”
“Perhaps he did, but what could he say? ‘I don’t want that’? I would have asked why. He would have tried to explain. Perhaps he would have said it was unfair to Nicholas, to Manette, to Mignon to suspect them, but I would have argued it’s better to know the truth about one’s children than to live a lie and that, Inspector, would have taken us far too close to the truth Bernard himself didn’t want me to know. He had to run the risk you wouldn’t unearth Vivienne. He really had no choice in the matter.”