Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [239]
They were more than friends of Kaveh, as it happened. They were his parents come up from Manchester. They’d brought his fiancée, newly come from Tehran, to see what was going to be her home in a few short weeks. She and Kaveh had not yet met. It was not the usual done thing for her future in-laws to bring the bride to call, but Kaveh had been anxious— well, what bridegroom wouldn’t be?— and so here they were. Just a little premarital surprise.
The girl’s name was Iman and she’d dropped her gaze in an appealingly diffident fashion while all this was being said. Her hair— copious, lustrous, and black— fell forward to hide her face. But the glimpse Manette had caught of it had been enough to see she was very pretty.
“Kaveh’s fiancée?” Manette’s smile froze as she took this on board. At least there was an explanation now for the pristine state of the house. But as to everything else, these waters were deep and this poor girl was probably going to drown in them. Manette said, “I had no idea Kaveh was engaged. Ian never told me about that.”
Whereupon the waters became deeper still.
“Who is Ian?” Kaveh’s father asked.
En route to London
When his mobile rang, Lynley was nearly seventy miles from Milnthorpe, fast approaching the junction for the M56, and more than a little disturbed. He’d been played for a fool by Deborah St. James, and he was far from happy about it. He’d turned up at the Crow and Eagle as agreed at half past ten, expecting to find her with her bags packed and ready for the drive back to London. He’d not been concerned at first when she was not waiting for him in the lobby since he’d seen her hire car in the car park, so he knew she was somewhere about the place.
“If you’d ring her room please,” he’d said to the receptionist, a girl in a crisp white blouse and black wool skirt who’d done so obligingly with a “Who shall I tell her…?”
“Tommy,” he said, and he saw the flash of a knowing look strike her features. The Crow and Eagle was, perhaps, a hotbed of hot beds— as Sergeant Havers would have put it— a central location for daily assignations among the landed gentry. He added, “Fetching her for the drive back to London,” and then was immediately irritated with himself for doing so. He walked away and studied the ubiquitous rack of brochures featuring tourist highlights in Cumbria.
The receptionist cleared her throat after a moment and said, “No answer, sir. Could be she’s in the dining room?”
But she wasn’t. Nor was she in the bar, although what Deborah would have been doing in the bar at half past ten in the morning was a mystery to him. Since her car was there, right next to where he’d parked the Healey Elliott, he sat down to wait. There was a bank across the street from the hotel, a market square in the town, a old church with an appealing graveyard …He reckoned she could be having a final look round the place before the long drive.
It didn’t occur to him for some ten minutes that if the receptionist had been ringing Deborah’s room, she clearly hadn’t yet checked out of the hotel. When it did occur to him, he moved fairly rapidly from there to a conclusion of “Bloody maddening woman.”
He rang her mobile at once. Of course, it went immediately to her voice mail. He said, “You must know I’m rather unhappy with you at the moment. We had an arrangement, you and I. Where the hell are you?” but there was nothing more to add. He knew Deborah. There was no point in trying to move her from the obdurate stand she had taken with regard to matters in Cumbria.
Still he had a look round the town for her before he left, telling himself he owed Simon that much. This ate up more of his day and accomplished nothing save an extended study of Milnthorpe, which, for some reason, appeared to have a plethora of Chinese takeaways round the market square. He finally returned to the inn, wrote her a note, left it with the receptionist, and went on his way.
When his phone rang on the approach to the M56, then, he thought at first it