Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [253]
He gave it quickly enough. And she was quick enough to decide. She rang off on whoever had been at the other end of her phone conversation, scooped up the money, and said, “Let voice mail take the calls if any come in. You won’t say …?” and she gestured round to complete her question.
“You’ve gone to see about a room for me,” he assured her. “I’ve just booked in and you’re letting me use this thing to check for crucial messages. Twenty minutes?”
She nodded. She pocketed the ten- and twenty-pound notes and headed for the stairs to play her part. He waited till she’d mounted them and made the turn round the landing before he began to write.
The story led in every direction. Its parts were like tributaries pouring into the Amazon, and all he had to do was paddle up them. He began to do so.
He went first with the Scotland Yard angle and the irony attached to it: A detective sent up to Cumbria to investigate the drowning of Ian Cresswell ends up stumbling upon an illegal surrogacy deal that could— bet on it— lead to an entire illegal surrogacy ring that fed on the desperation of couples struggling to conceive. Then he touched on the artistic angle: The struggling playwright so desperate to support herself that she was willing to sell her body in pursuit of the higher calling of her art. He moved directly from there to the deception angle and was pounding away at the tale of Nick Fairclough’s ignorance in the manner of his wife’s deal with Lucy Keverne when his cell phone rang.
Yaffa! he thought. He needed to tell her that all was well. She would be worrying about him. She would want to encourage him. She would have words of wisdom and he wanted to hear them and more than that he wanted to interrupt her with the news of his impending triumph.
“Got it,” he said. “Darling, it’s hot.”
“I didn’t know you and I were that close,” Rodney Aronson said. “Where the bloody hell are you? Why aren’t you back in London by now?”
Zed stopped typing. “I’m not in London,” he said, “because I’ve got the story. All of it. From bloody alpha to sodding omega. Hold the front page because you’re going to want this plastered across it.”
“What is it?” Rodney didn’t sound like a man experiencing a come-to-Jesus moment.
Zed rattled it all off: the surrogacy deal, the starving artist, the husband in ignorance. He saved the very best for last: the humble reporter— that would be me, he pointed out— working hand-in-glove with the detective from New Scotland Yard.
“She and I cornered the woman in Lancaster,” Zed announced. “And once we had her— ”
“Hang on,” Rodney said. “‘She and I’?”
“Right. The Scotland Yard detective and I. She’s called DS Cotter. Detective sergeant. She’s the one investigating the Cresswell death. Only she got sidetracked onto Nick Fairclough and his wife and as it turned out, that was a dynamite direction. Not for her, of course, but for me.”
Rodney said nothing at his end. Zed waited for the kudos to flow. He waited in vain. For a moment he thought they’d been cut off. He said, “Rod? You there?”
Rodney finally said, “You are one fucking loser, Zedekiah. You know that, don’t you? One fucking class-A loser.”
“Sorry?”
“There is no Detective Cotter, you idiot.”
“But— ”
“Detective Inspector Lynley is up there, the bloke whose wife took a bullet from a twelve-year-old kid last winter. Sound familiar? It was front-page news for two weeks.” He didn’t wait for Zed to make a reply. Instead he went on with, “Jesus, you are pathetic, you know? Get back to town. Collect your wages. You and The Source are through.”
ARNSIDE
CUMBRIA
Alatea saw them in the driveway. Their body language told her everything. This was not a conversation between strangers who happen to come upon each other in passing at the same destination. This was an exchange between colleagues, friends, or associates. The exchange was one of information shared. She could tell this much when the woman tilted her head towards Arnside House in the manner of someone speaking about it. Or, more likely, speaking about a person within it. Or, most