Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [7]
His final decision was as instantaneous as it was necessary. He said, “I’m off to Cumbria, Mum.”
She blinked. “Cumbria? But didn’t you just— ”
“More to the story and I’ve got to go after it. Very time-sensitive as things turn out.”
“But when are you leaving?”
“Soon as I pack my bag.”
Which, he decided, ought to take him five minutes or less.
EN ROUTE TO
CUMBRIA
The fact that he wanted and needed to leave posthaste before his mother built the chuppah right in the lounge forced Zed to catch a train that would get him to Cumbria by a most circuitous route. That couldn’t be helped. Once he packed his bag and tucked his laptop into its case, he was gone, effectuating a very clean getaway. The bus; the Tube; Euston Station; slapping down a credit card to pay for his ticket, four sandwiches, a copy of The Economist, The Times, and the Guardian; wondering how long it was going to take him to find something— anything— to sex up his story; wondering even more how long it was going to take him to break his mother of bringing women in off the street like his procurer… By the time he was able to board the train, he was ready for the distraction of work. He opened up his laptop and as the train left the station, he began to search through his notes, which he’d meticulously recorded during every interview, which he’d meticulously typed into the laptop every night. He also had with him a set of handwritten notes. He would check those as well. For there had to be something, and he would find it.
He reviewed the subject of his story first: Nicholas Fairclough, thirty-two years old, the formerly dissolute son of Bernard Fairclough, first Baron of Ireleth in the county of Cumbria. Born into wealth and privilege— there was that silver spoon— he’d squandered throughout his youth the good fortune that he’d been handed by Fate. He was a man graced with the face of an angel but in possession of the inclinations of Lot’s next-door neighbour. A series of rehabilitation programmes had seen him as an unwilling participant from his fourteenth year onward. They read like a travelogue as progressively more exotic— and remote— locations were chosen by his parents in an attempt to entice him into healthy living. When he wasn’t taking the cure somewhere, he was using his father’s money to travel in a life-owes-me-a-living style that led him time and again directly back into addiction. Everyone threw in the towel on the bloke, after wiping their washed hands upon it. Father, mother, sisters, even a cousin cum brother had—
Now that was something he hadn’t thought about, Zed realised. The cousin-cum-brother angle. It had seemed a nonstory, and Nicholas himself had certainly emphasized that during interviews, but there was a chance that Zed might have missed something he could now use… He flipped through his notebook first and found the name: Ian Cresswell, employed by Fairclough Industries in a position of some quite serious responsibility, first cousin to Nicholas, eight years older, born in Kenya but come to England in late childhood to be a resident in the Fairclough home… Now that was something, wasn’t it, something that could be moulded somehow?
Zed looked up thoughtfully. He glanced at the window. It was pitch-dark outside, so all he saw was his own reflection: a redheaded giant with worry lines becoming incised on his forehead because his mother was attempting to marry him off to the first willing woman she was able to find and his boss was ready to deposit his well-written prose into the rubbish and he himself just wanted to write something marginally worthwhile. And so, what did he have in these notes? he asked himself. What? What?
Zed fished out one of his four sandwiches and began to devour it as he checked his paperwork. He was looking for a clue, for the way he could spin his story, or at least for a hint that further digging in one area or another might