Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [235]
She found an older picture of Santiago playing Othello sans black pancake in the eponymous play as an adolescent. There was a final picture of him with the school football team and an enormous trophy, but then there was nothing. Just like Angel of the car crash, he fell off the radar. It was as if once the boys reached mid-adolescence, if they hadn’t accomplished something important— preparing for the priesthood or for dentistry being cases in point— then the local news media lost interest in them. Either that or they became useless to their father politically. Because, after all, he was a politician, with a politician’s bent for trotting out his family in election years to demonstrate their essential wholesomeness for the voters.
Barbara thought about this: family, politics, the voting public. She thought about Angel. She thought about Santiago. She stared at every photo she’d come up with and she ended with the children in the park at their first communion. Finally, she picked up the photograph of Alatea Fairclough again.
“What is it?” she whispered. “Tell me your secrets, luv.”
But there was nothing. A string of noughts stretched out to infinity.
She muttered a curse and reached for the mouse to log off the Internet and get back to Diego— the final brother— later. But then she looked a last time at the football photo, then at Othello. From them she went to Alatea Fairclough. Then Alatea on Montenegro’s arm. Then she went back to the first communion. Then she riffled through the photos of Alatea Fairclough’s modelling years. She went back and back and back through those photos, back through time, back to the first one she could find. She studied it. She finally saw.
Eyes on the terminal’s screen, she reached for her mobile. She punched in Lynley’s number.
BRYANBARROW
CUMBRIA
“Can she be forced?” Manette asked Freddie. They were coursing through the Lyth Valley at a good speed, with Freddie behind the wheel. They’d just made the turn into the southwest end of it, where the emerald fields spread out behind crusty drystone walls on either side of the road and the fells rose above them with peaks that wore the grey shawls of cloud on their shoulders. It would be misty up there, and soon it would be misty on the valley floor as well. A good fog was probably going to develop as the day wore on.
Manette had been consumed by their conversation with Niamh Cresswell. How, she wondered, could she have known Niamh for so many years without really knowing her at all?
Freddie, it seemed, had been thinking thoughts unrelated to Niamh and their call upon her because he glanced Manette’s way and said, “Who?”
“Niamh, Freddie. Who else? Can she be forced to take the children back?”
Freddie looked doubtful. “I don’t know the law when it comes to parents and children. But, really, old girl, what sort of plan would that be, to get the law involved?”
“Oh Lord, I don’t know. But we should at least find out what the options are. Because the very idea that she’d just leave Tim and Gracie to their fate… especially little Gracie… Good God, Freddie, does she expect them to go into care? Can she give them into care, for that matter? Can’t someone force her…?”
“Solicitors, judges, and social services?” Freddie asked. “How d’you see that sort of thing affecting the children? Tim’s in a bad enough way already, what with Margaret Fox School and all that. I daresay knowing his mum has been forced by a court to take him back would send the poor lad right over the edge.”
“Perhaps my mum and dad, then…?” Manette suggested. “With that enormous play area she’s building…? Mum and Dad could take them. They’ve got the space, and the kids would love to be near the lake and to use the play area, certainly.”
Freddie slowed the car. Up ahead, a flock of sheep were being moved from one paddock into another in a manner typical to Cumbria: They were in the middle of the road with a border collie directing them and the farmer strolling along behind. The pace was,