Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [70]
“Nor am I,” he responded. “Thank you.”
She hobbled back to the sitting room, tossing over her shoulder, “What sort of car is that, by the way?”
“Car?”
“That amazing thing you’re driving. I saw it when you arrived yesterday. Quite stylish but it must absolutely swill petrol like a camel at the oasis.”
“Healey Elliott,” he told her.
“Never heard of it.” She found a chair unburdened by magazines and boxes. She deposited herself into it with a thud and said to him, “Find a spot. Move anything. It hardly matters.” And as he was searching for a place to sit, “So what were you doing at the boathouse? I saw you there yesterday with my father. What’s the attraction?”
He made a note about being more careful in his movements. It was appearing that aside from occupying herself with the Internet, Mignon spent her time in observation of what was going on round the property. He said, “I’d thought about taking that scull out on the lake but my natural bent towards sloth got the better of me.”
“Just as well.” She jerked her head in the general direction of the boathouse. “Last person who used it drowned. I reckoned you were tiptoeing down there to have a look at the scene of the crime.” She chuckled grimly.
“Crime?” He took a sip of the coffee. It was ghastly.
“My cousin Ian. Surely you’ve been informed. No?” She told him much of what he already knew, as blithely as she’d told him everything else. He wondered about her general frankness of conversation. In his experience, such commitment to ostensible veracity hid, in reality, a wealth of information.
Ian Cresswell had definitely been murdered, as far as Mignon was concerned. Her reasoning was that, as far as she knew, people rarely died just because someone else wished them to. To his raised eyebrow upon hearing this, she went on. Her brother Nicholas had had to stumble along in Cousin Ian’s sainted footsteps for most of his life. From the moment dear Ian had arrived from Kenya to take up residence with the Fairclough family upon the death of his mother, it had been Ian this and Ian that and why can’t you be more like Ian? First-class pupil at St. Bees, he was, first-class athlete, first-class nephew to his uncle Bernard, shining star, blue-eyed boy, never put so much as a toenail wrong.
“I reckoned when he dumped his family and took up with Kaveh, that would open Dad’s eyes to our darling Ian. I’m sure Nicky felt the same. But even deserting his family didn’t do it. And now Kaveh’s working for my mother and who orchestrated that if not Ian, hmm? No, nothing poor Nicky’s done in his life has been enough to shine a light on him that was brighter than the light shone on Ian. And nothing Ian did dimmed his own light in my father’s eyes. It does make one wonder.”
“About?”
“All sorts of delicious things.” Her face wore an I’ll-say-no-more expression: saintly and pleased simultaneously.
“So Nicholas killed him?” Lynley enquired. “I assume he stood to gain somehow.”
“As to the killing part, personally, I wouldn’t be the least surprised. As to the gaining… Lord knows.” She also seemed to be saying she wouldn’t much blame Nicholas for anything that might have happened to Ian Cresswell, and this, along with her remarks about the man himself, was something that bore looking into. As did, Lynley thought, the terms of Cresswell’s will.
He said, “It does seem a risky way to go about killing him, though, wouldn’t you say?”
“Why?”
“I understand your mother uses the boathouse nearly every day.”
Mignon straightened in her chair, receiving this news. She said, “And you’re implying…?”
“That your mother might have been a target for murder, assuming in the first place that someone was