Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [234]
Barbara took her English/Spanish dictionary with her. Having gathered enough information on the first two sons of Esteban Vega y de Vasquez and Dominga Padilla y del Torres de Vasquez— the first two sons being the priest Carlos and the dentist Miguel— and having seen a good enough photo of Miguel’s wife to know that no amount of plastic surgery in the world could have turned her into Alatea Fairclough, Barbara was ready to move on to Angel, Santiago, and Diego to see what she could unearth. If none of them had a connection with Alatea, then she was going to have to look at the rest of the extended family, and from what the Spanish student had told her on the previous day, there could be hundreds of them.
As it turned out, there was very little on Angel, who, despite his name, appeared to be the black sheep of the family. Using her dictionary and moving at a pace so tedious that she thought her outrageously expensive Knightsbridge haircut might grow out before she discovered anything useful, she ultimately was able to put together the fact that he’d caused a car crash that had crippled his passenger for life. The passenger had been a fifteen-year-old girl.
Barbara followed this lead— the fifteen-year-old girl being at least the first female she’d come across aside from Miguel’s unfortunate wife— but she came up with nothing but a dead end. No photo was available of her and while there was one of Angel, he appeared to be round nineteen years old and it didn’t matter anyway because after the accident, he dropped directly off the media map. If he was North American and preferably from the United States, at that point he would either have gone into a rehab programme or discovered Jesus, but this was South America and whatever happened to him after that accident, the available media didn’t talk about it. Too small a fish, probably. They’d quickly moved on to other things.
So did she. Santiago. She found a story about the boy’s first communion. At least she reckoned it was his first communion because he was standing in a neat arrangement of children in suits (the boys) and bride getups (the girls) and either the Moonies had decided to begin marrying them off when they were round eight years old or this was a group of children who, as Catholics in Argentina, had just been elevated to worthy recipients of the Sacrament. It was rather odd that there would be a story about a group first communion, so Barbara struggled through a bit of it. She got the gist: that the church had burned down and they’d been forced to have their first communion in a city park. Or so it seemed to Barbara’s extremely limited skill with Spanish. Truth was, the church could have been destroyed by a flood. Or even an earthquake. Or perhaps they’d tented the place for termites because God, God, God this was tedious work having to translate everything a single word at a time.
She squinted at the photo of the children and looked at it one girl at a time. She brought out the Internet picture she had of Alatea Fairclough and she began to compare it to each of the girls. Their names were listed and there were only fifteen of them and certainly she could do an Internet search on each of them but that would take hours and she didn’t have hours because once Superintendent Ardery returned, if she wasn’t beavering away at the witness statements she’d been ordered to deal with at the side of the CPS clerk, there would be hell to pay.
She considered choosing the most likely suspect among the girls and having an age progression done upon her. But she hardly had the time and she certainly didn’t have the authority. So she went back to the Santiago trail because if he had