Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [45]
“That’s right, that is,” George Cowley said. “He paid the wages of sin right and proper. Well, there he is and here we are and when affairs get settled and the farm goes up for sale again, we’ll be there this time and make no mistake. Bryan Beck farm is meant to be ours, ’n we’ve not been scrimping from day one in our lives to have it go to someone else a second time.”
From this it seemed to Zed that Ian Cresswell’s sin had been purchasing Bryan Beck farm before George Cowley had been able to do so. Which meant— and this was useful, wasn’t it?— that Cowley had a motive to murder Cresswell. And that meant it was only a matter of time before New Scotland Yard came calling, which also meant that all he himself had to do was wait for their arrival. Confirm they’re here, use their presence to sex up his story, and get the hell back to London, where he could resume his life. Yes. Things were looking up.
He said, “You’re talking about Mr. Cresswell’s purchase of the farm, I take it.”
Cowley looked at him as if he were mad. “Purchase of the farm?”
“You said ‘the wages of sin.’ I reckoned purchasing the farm was his sin.”
“Bah! That was bloody wrong, that was. That put us where it did, me and Dan. But no one pays wages ’cause of property.” He loaded the final two words with derision, and he seemed to feel Zed was dim enough to require further elucidation. “Indecent, it was, him and that Arab lodger of his. And what’re those kids of his still doing there? That’s the question I ask, but no one’s answering, are they. Well, that’s indecent on top of indecent. And I tell you this: More wages are coming, an’ they’re bound to be big. You can count on that.”
SWARTHMOOR
CUMBRIA
Tim Cresswell hated Margaret Fox School, but he put up with it because it spared him from having to go to a comprehensive where he might be expected to make friends, which was pretty much the last thing he wanted. He’d had friends once, but he’d learned that having them meant having to look at the smirks on their faces when they twigged what was going on in his life. Having friends meant having to overhear their murmurs of speculation as he passed them in one corridor or another on his way to lessons. The fact was, he didn’t care if he ever had a friend again, since those he’d once possessed had ceased being friends just about the time his dad had walked out on the family to arse-fuck a limp-wristed Iranian. Word had gone round about that soon enough, for Tim’s mum didn’t possess the sense to keep her outrage to herself, especially if she was certain about being the aggrieved party in a situation. And she was definitely that, wasn’t she. Turned out his dad had been fucking other men for years, exposing her to disease, disaster, disgust, disrespect, all the other disses there were, because one thing Niamh was especially good at was listing those disses to whoever wanted to hear them. She made sure Tim knew them from the word go, and in response he broke a few things, he burned a few things, he hurt a few people, he dismembered a kitten— never mind that the poor thing was already dead— and he ended up in Margaret Fox School just outside of Ulverston. Here Tim intended to stay, but to manage that he had to do just enough to be cooperative and not enough to be given the boot back into the system where the normies were educated.
Most kids boarded at Margaret Fox School because they were too disturbed to live with their families. But there were day pupils as well, and Niamh Cresswell had seen to it that Tim was placed among them. All the better to force his father or Kaveh Mehran to cart him from Bryanbarrow all the way to Ulverston and back each day, a drive that took forever, ate up their time together, and punished them for putting a real bazooble of a crater in Niamh’s pride. Tim went along with it all because it got him far away from everyone who knew the story of what had happened to his parents’ marriage, which was just about everyone in Grange-over-Sands.
But one of the things he hated about Margaret