Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [242]
But again, that wasn’t how Zed Benjamin saw it. The law itself was the story, he declared. It produced desperate women looking for desperate remedies using desperate means to attain them.
Deborah said, “Pardon me for saying so, Mr. Benjamin, but I hardly think The Source is going to issue a clarion call for women’s reproductive issues upon your recommendation.”
“We’ll see,” he’d promised.
They’d parted ways at the door to her lodgings, and she’d trudged inside, only to be given a sealed envelope with her name written on the outside in a cursive she recognised from years of receiving letters from Tommy while she studied photography in California.
The message was brief: Deb, What can I say? Tommy. And it was true enough. What could he say? She’d lied to him, she’d ignored his phone call on her mobile, and now he was as upset with her as Simon was. What a mess she’d made of things.
She went to her room and began to pack up her belongings. As she did so, she considered the various ways in which she’d utterly bollocksed up everything. First, there was the matter of Simon’s brother, David, whom she’d strung along by refusing to make up her mind about the open adoption he was trying to arrange purely out of a desire to help them. Then there was Simon, whom she’d alienated in any number of ways but particularly by being so bloody minded about remaining in Cumbria when it was clear that their real business in the county— which had been to assist Tommy with his enquiry into Ian Cresswell’s death— was completed. Finally, there was Alatea Fairclough, whose hopes for a surrogacy were now probably dashed by Deborah’s bashing into her private affairs when all she wanted was what Deborah herself wanted: the chance to bring a child into the world.
Deborah stopped packing for a moment and lowered herself to the bed. She thought about how much of her life had been dominated over the last few years by something completely out of her control. It was beyond her power to grant her own wish. She could do nothing to make herself a mother simply because she wanted to be one. Alatea Fairclough had probably gone through exactly what she herself was going through.
Deborah could see at last why the South American woman had been so fearful of her presence and so reluctant to talk to her. She and her husband were set to pay someone to carry a baby for them and for all she knew, Deborah had been sent there to Cumbria by Lancaster University’s reproduction scientists to sniff out the truth behind her arrangement with Lucy Keverne before they went forward with all the procedures required for a surrogate pregnancy. And there’d be a handful of them, no doubt about it. None of which would begin until the scientists and the doctors were certain about Alatea Fairclough and the surrogate.
So Deborah had been dogging the poor woman since the moment she herself had set foot in Cumbria when all along, she and Alatea Fairclough had in common the most agonising of desires, something granted so easily to other women, something often even deemed a “mistake” in the lives of other women as well.
Deborah realised she owed apologies everywhere for how she’d conducted herself over the past few days. She had to begin those apologies with one to Alatea Fairclough. Before leaving Cumbria for the south, she resolved, that was what she was going to do.
MILNTHORPE
CUMBRIA
So much of what Zed had said to the Scotland Yard detective was bluster, and he knew it. After he dropped her off at her hotel, he didn’t return to Windermere. Instead, he went across the main road through Milnthorpe and made his way to the street that ran east to west along the market square. There was a Spar shop at a junction where another street led off to a grim-looking housing estate of unremittingly grey roughcast, and he parked nearby and went inside. It was cluttered and hot and it suited both his mood and his thoughts.
He browsed aimlessly for a few minutes before caving in and buying a copy of The Source. This he carried the short distance