Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [34]
His son Nicholas had always been the fly in the ointment of Bernie’s otherwise ideal life. Lynley found volumes of information on the bloke. For when Nicholas Fairclough went periodically bad, he did it in a very public manner. Public drunkenness, brawls, break-ins, football hooliganism, drunk driving, car theft, arson, indecent exposure while under the influence… The man had a past that read like that of the prodigal son on steroids. He’d played out his dissolution before God and everyone and in particular before the eyes of the local press in Cumbria, and the stories generated from his behaviour caught the eyes of the national tabloids always on the prowl for sensation to feature on their cover pages, especially when the sensation is generated by the scion of someone notable.
Early death was the usual outcome of a life led in the manner Nicholas Fairclough had led his, but in his case love supervened in the person of a young Argentine woman with the impressive name of Alatea Vasquez y del Torres. Fresh out of yet another rehab programme— this one in America, in the state of Utah— Nicholas had taken himself to a former mining town called Park City for what he apparently believed was a well-deserved spate of R & R, financed as usual by his desperate father. The old mining town served this purpose well, for it was nestled in the Wasatch Mountains and into its embrace every year from late November till April came avid skiers from round the world, along with scores of young men and women hired to service their needs.
Alatea Vasquez y del Torres had been among this latter group, and she and Nicholas Fairclough— according to the more breathless reports Lynley was able to scavenge— locked eyes over the till in one of the ski resort’s many eateries. The rest, as is generally said, was history. What ensued was a whirlwind courtship, a courthouse marriage effected in Salt Lake City, a final descent into a drug-fuelled pyre of dissolution on Nicholas’s part— odd way to celebrate matrimony, but there you have it, Lynley thought— from which the phoenix that was apparently the man’s amazing physical constitution arose. The arising of this phoenix, however, had little to do with Fairclough’s determination to get the better of the beast on his back and everything to do with Alatea Vasquez y del Torres’s decision to walk out on him barely two months into their marriage.
“I’d do anything for her,” Fairclough had later declared. “I’d die for her. To take the cure for her was child’s play.”
She’d returned to him, he’d stuck with sobriety, and everyone was happy. So it seemed from all the accounts that Lynley was able to glean in his twenty-four hours of research into the family. Thus if Nicholas Fairclough had been involved some way in his cousin’s death, at this point in his life it seemed wildly out of character, for it was hardly reasonable to assume that his wife would remain loyally at the side of a murderer.
Lynley went on to read about the rest of the family from whatever sources he could find. But information on them was vague, considering how dull they were in comparison to the son of Lord Fairclough. One sister divorced, one sister a spinster, one cousin— this would be the dead man— the master of the Fairclough money, that cousin’s wife a homemaker and their two children respectable… The Fairclough family were a disparate group but on the surface they all seemed clean.
At the end of his second day of exploration, Lynley stood at the window of his library in Eaton Terrace and looked out at the street, the gas fire burning brightly behind him in the late afternoon. He didn’t much like the situation he was in, but he wasn’t sure what he could do about it. In his line of work, the objective was to gather evidence in proof of someone’s guilt, not to gather evidence in proof of their innocence. If the coroner had declared the death accidental, there seemed little point delving further into the matter. For coroners knew what they were about, and they had evidence and testimony to bolster their findings.