Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [275]
Valerie gazed at her daughter, but she couldn’t quite seem to make her out. Yet hadn’t that always been the case? Mignon was a stranger and the workings of her mind were the foreign country in which she dwelt.
“I’m far too tired to speak to you now,” Valerie told her, and headed for the door.
“Mother!”
“Mignon, that’s enough,” her father said.
Valerie heard Bernard following. She heard Mignon’s wail of protest. She paused for a moment then turned back to her. “You heard your father,” she said. “Enough.”
She went into the house. She was monumentally exhausted. Bernard said her name as she made for the stairs. He sounded tentative, unsure in ways that Bernard Fairclough had never been unsure.
She said, “I’m going to bed, Bernard,” and she climbed the stairs to do so.
She was acutely aware of the need for a decision of some sort. Life as she’d known it was something of a shambles now, and she was going to have to work out how to repair it: which pieces to keep, which pieces to replace, which pieces to send to the rubbish tip. She was also aware of how much the burden of responsibility fell upon her shoulders. For she had known all along about Bernard and his life in London, and that knowledge and what she’d done with that knowledge were the sins that would weigh on her conscience till the end of her days.
Ian had told her, of course. Although it was his own uncle whose use of the firm’s money he was reporting upon, Ian had always recognised where the true power in Fairclough Industries lay. Oh, Bernard ran the day-to-day business and, indeed, made many of the decisions. Bernard, Manette, Freddie, and Ian had together kept the concern moving forward, modernising it in a way that Valerie would never have considered. But when the board met two times a year, it was Valerie who took the position at the head of the table, and not one of them ever questioned this because that was how it had always been. You could climb the ranks, but there was a ceiling and breaking through it was a matter of blood, not strength.
“Something curious and rather unsettling,” was how Ian had reported it to her. “Frankly, Aunt Val, I’d thought not to tell you at all because… Well, you’ve been good to me and so has Uncle Bernie, of course, and for a while I thought I might be able to move funds around and cover the expenditures, but it’s got to the point where I can’t quite see how to do it.”
A nice boy Ian Cresswell had been when he’d come to live with them to attend school after his mother’s death in Kenya. A nice man Ian Cresswell had become. It was unfortunate that he’d hurt his wife and children so badly when he’d decided to live the life he’d been intended to live from birth, but sometimes these things happened to people and when they did, you had to muddle on. So Valerie had seen his concern, she’d respected the battle of loyalities he was fighting, and she was grateful that he’d come to her with the printouts that showed where the money was going.
She’d felt ghastly when he’d died. Accident though it was, she couldn’t help thinking that she hadn’t stressed enough the perilous condition of that dock in the boathouse. But his death had given her the opening she’d been looking for. The only suitable manner in which Bernard could be dealt with, she’d decided, was humiliation in front of his entire family. His children needed to know exactly what sort of man their father was. They’d abandon him, then, to his London mistress and his bastard child, and they’d circle the wagons of their devotion around their mother, and that would be how Bernard would pay for his sins. For the children were Faircloughs by blood, the three of them, and they would not brook the obscenity of their father’s double life for an instant. Then, after a suitable amount of time had passed, she would forgive him. Indeed, after nearly forty-three years, what else was Valerie Fairclough to do?
She went to her bedroom window. It looked out upon Lake Windermere. Thankfully, she thought, it did not