Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [249]
Lynley thought it unlikely that no one knew. Indeed, he thought it wildly improbable. He said, “I daresay Ian Cresswell knew.”
At that she raised her head. Her eyes were luminous, but her expression was shifting from distraught to confused. “Ian?” she said. “There’s no possible way. How could he ever have known?”
“As a homosexual man, still in the closet, his was a double life. He would have come into contact with people like you. It would have been easier for him than for other people to recognise— ”
“Is that what you think I am?” she asked. “A homosexual man? A transvestite? A cross-dresser?” A dawning knowledge came over her face. She added, “You’re thinking that I killed Ian, aren’t you? Because he… what? He discovered something? Because then he threatened to betray me if I didn’t… what? Pay him money that I didn’t have? Oh my God, had that only been the case.”
Lynley found himself quite down the rabbit hole. The nature of her initial response to the name Santiago Vasquez y del Torres had indicated she was indeed the long-ago adolescent boy who’d run off from the town of his birth and somehow ended up on the arm of one Raul Montenegro. But her reaction to the suggestion that Ian Cresswell had come to know who and what she was was beginning to alter Lynley’s thoughts on the subject.
She said, “Ian didn’t know. No one here knew. Not a single person.”
“Are you telling me that Nicholas doesn’t know?” Lynley stared at her. He tried to take her in. Making sense of what she was telling him demanded he take a leap into an area that was completely unknown to him. He was like a blind man trying to get himself to a hidden doorway in a room cluttered with furniture whose misshapen nature only confused him. He said, “If that’s the case, I don’t quite understand. How could Nicholas not have known?”
“Because,” she said, “I never told him.”
“But I daresay his own eyes…” And then Lynley began to understand what she was actually revealing about herself. If she’d never told Nicholas Fairclough about Santiago Vasquez y del Torres, and if Nicholas Fairclough’s own eyes hadn’t told him, there was only one reason for this.
“Yes,” she said, apparently reading the dawning knowledge on his features. “Only my immediate family in Argentina know, along with one cousin, Elena Maria. And Elena Maria, she always knew. Right from the first, even when we were children.” Alatea pushed her hair from her face, a distinctly feminine gesture that was discommoding to Lynley, putting him off balance, as perhaps she intended. “She shared with me: her dolls when we were children, her clothes and her makeup when we grew older.” Alatea looked away for a moment, then back at him directly, her expression earnest as she said, “Can you understand this? It was a way for me just to be. It was the only way for me just to be, and this Elena Maria understood. I don’t know how or why, but she simply did. Before anyone, she knew who and what I was.”
“A woman.” Lynley finally put it into words. “Trapped in a man’s body. But still a woman.”
“Yes,” Alatea agreed.
Lynley took this in. He could see that she was waiting for his reaction, perhaps steeling herself to whatever it would be: revulsion, confusion, curiosity, disgust, pity, abhorrence, interest, acceptance. She’d been one of five brothers in a world where being male equated with being accorded privileges that women had had to fight for and were still fighting for. She would know that most men would never comprehend why any man from that world would wish to change the gender into which he’d been born. Yet this, apparently, was what she had done, as she went on to clarify, saying:
“Even when I was Santiago, I was a woman. I had the body of a male. But I was not male. To live like that… belonging nowhere… having a body that is not your own body… so that you look upon it with loathing and would do anything to alter it in order to be who you are…”
“So you became a woman,” Lynley said.
“I transitioned,” she said. “This is what it’s called.