Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [268]
So was the worst really those boxing lessons? Alatea asked herself now. Or was the worst the promise that Raul Montenegro had held out to her and the reality of how she’d been intended to keep up her end of the bargain they’d struck with each other? She wasn’t sure. But what she did know was that Raul Montenegro was a driven man. Just as he’d been unwavering in his promise to fulfill the feminine dreams of his young lover Santiago Vasquez y del Torres, so was he equally unwavering in his decision to find Alatea Vasquez y del Torres so that she could repay him in coin he’d long ago determined.
And now here she was, as lost as ever, with no choice left but to move or to die. So she moved in the direction she hoped against hope was Arnside, although she no longer knew. Within ten yards she hit the quicksand, a scour she had feared she’d stumble upon. In an instant she was up to her thighs. And cold, cold. So horribly cold.
No panic was necessary, she told herself. She knew what to do. Nicholas had told her. A long-ago walk across the expanse of the empty bay and she remembered his words. It’s completely counterintuitive, darling, but you’ve got to do it, he had said.
She knew that. She prepared herself.
That was when the siren began to blare.
ARNSIDE
CUMBRIA
“Are you certain, sir?” the voice asked Lynley. The man at the Coast Guard station on Walney Island spoke with the kind of calm authority meant to soothe whoever was phoning in an emergency of the sort that Lynley was reporting. He spoke with cool-headed reason, which could lead to a decision, because he and he alone had the authority to put the wheels in motion. “I don’t want to launch a boat out into the bay unless we know for a fact that the woman’s out there. Conditions are deadly. Has she rung on her mobile? Was there a note?”
“Neither. But we’re certain.” Lynley described for the officer the position of the house, the lack of an escape route, and what they’d done to attempt to find Alatea Vasquez y del Torres. The only possibility besides the bay had been the walk along the seawall: a public footpath that branched into half a dozen other public footpaths leading to Arnside Knot, to the village of Silverdale, and ultimately onto the Lancaster Coastal Way. But Alatea didn’t know those footpaths other than the footpath to Arnside Knot and she had no reason to climb to the knot in the fog while she had every reason to try to make a run for it across the bay.
“What reason would this be, sir?” the officer had asked, not unreasonably.
Lynley told him he was in the midst of an enquiry into a drowning, which could have been a murder, and all the et ceteras. He was not only stretching the truth of the matter. He was actually lying to the man. But there seemed no choice available other than setting out themselves for Arnside Knot to search for her there, which he’d managed to persuade Nicholas Fairclough to do, hopeless task though it was.
Fairclough had agreed to do this, although he’d built a bonfire first on the seawall path. This Deborah was keeping at a roar, feeding into it armfuls of whatever was flammable: logs, branches, newspapers, magazines, old pieces of furniture. The fire had attracted the attention of the fire brigade as well as the good citizens of Arnside, who joined in the effort to make from these combustibles a beacon that might glow through the fog and signal to Alatea the route she needed to take in order to return.
It was more something to do than was it useful, and Lynley knew this. For if Alatea was indeed out there in Morecambe Bay and if the tide was coming in, it was hardly likely that she’d be able to outrun it. Hence his call to the Coast Guard.
The officer on Walney Island said to him, “Sir, I can put out a boat, but let’s not deal in fantasy here. Visibility just now is less than twenty yards. The bay is over one hundred square miles. With the combination of fog and the tidal bore… I’m not putting a crew out there on a whim.”
“I assure