Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [48]
She hadn’t heard from him. She’d phoned his mobile during the afternoon, once she’d learned from ringing Fairclough Industries that Nicholas hadn’t gone into work that day. She’d made that phone call round eleven, when he still should have been there prior to leaving for the Middlebarrow Pele Project, where he now spent half of his workdays. She’d first assumed that he’d gone to the project earlier than usual and she’d then rung his mobile. But all she heard was that disembodied voice telling her that she had to leave a message. This she had done, three times now. The fact that Nicholas had not replied filled her with concern.
His cousin’s sudden death loomed large. Alatea didn’t want to think about it. Not only did death in general shake her, but this death in particular and the circumstances of this death filled her with a dread that took every ounce of her skill at subterfuge to hide. Ian’s drowning had hit the family hard. Particularly had it devastated Nicholas’s father. So staggered had Bernard been at first that Alatea had wondered at the nature of his exact relationship with Ian. But it was only when Bernard had begun to distance himself from Nicholas that Alatea had sensed an undercurrent beneath the older man’s grief.
Nicholas was not involved in Ian’s drowning. Alatea knew this for a hundred and one reasons but most of all she knew it because she knew her husband. He seemed weak to people because of his past, but he was no such thing. He was the rock and substance of her life, and he would become the same to many others if he only had the chance. This was what the Middlebarrow Pele Project was giving to him.
But he hadn’t been at the project today any more than he had been at Fairclough Industries. Had he been, he would have had his mobile switched on. He knew it was important to her to have contact with him periodically and he was always willing to allow her the access. He’d said at first, “Do you not trust me, Allie? I mean, if I’m going to use again, I’m going to use again. You can’t stop me with a phone call, you know,” but that hadn’t been the reason she wanted close contact with him, and through partial truths she’d ultimately been able to persuade him that her need had nothing to do with the need he himself had finally managed to conquer.
Whenever he was gone from her, she worried that something might happen to him, entirely unrelated to his addictions. A car crash, a stone falling from the old pele tower, a freak accident… exactly like what had happened to Ian. Except she wouldn’t think about Ian, she told herself. There were too many other things to consider.
She turned from the sight of the floodwaters swirling into the Kent Channel. Up the slope of the lawn in front of her, Arnside House spread out. She allowed herself a momentary feeling of pleasure as she looked upon the building. The house gave her a focus for her energies, and she wondered if Bernard had known that when he presented it to them upon their return to England.
“It was used for convalescing soldiers after the war,” he’d said as he’d walked her through it, “and then it spent some thirty years as a girls’ school. After that there were two sets of owners who did a few things to restore it to what it once was. But then I’m afraid it stood vacant for a time. Still, there’s something about it that’s very special, my dear. I think it deserves a family running about inside it. And more, it deserves someone like you to put your touch upon it.” He’d kept his hand on the small of her back as he’d walked her through the place. He had a way of looking at her that was a little disturbing. His gaze would go from Nicholas to her and back to Nicholas as if he couldn’t understand what they had between them: either where it had come from in the first place or how it was going to endure.
But that didn’t matter to Alatea. What mattered was Bernard’s acceptance of her, and she had that. She could tell he thought she possessed a form of magical