Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [71]
“No one would be the least interested in seeing my mother die,” Mignon declared. She felt the need, apparently, to tick off on her fingers every person devoted to her mother, and topping the list was her father again, and all those claims of his devotion to Valerie.
Lynley thought of Hamlet and ladies protesting too much. He also thought of rich people and what they did with their money and how money bought everything from unwilling silence to reluctant cooperation. But all of this begged the question of what Bernard Fairclough had then intended by coming to London and requesting someone to look into the death of his nephew.
Too clever by half came to mind. Lynley just wasn’t certain where the expression ought to be applied.
GRANGE-OVER-SANDS
CUMBRIA
Manette Fairclough McGhie had long believed there was no one on earth more manipulative than her own sister, but now she had other ideas. Mignon had used a simple accident at Launchy Gill to control their parents for more than thirty years: slip on the boulders too near the waterfall, knock your head, sustain a skull fracture, and my God, you’d think the world had ended. But really, Mignon was nothing at all in comparison to Niamh Cresswell. Mignon used people’s guilt, fear, and anxiety to get what she wanted. But Niamh used her own children. And this, Manette decided, was going to stop.
So she took the day off from work. She had a good reason, being bruised and sore from Tim’s attack on her on the previous afternoon. But even had he not kicked her kidneys and her spine so savagely, she would have come up with something. Fourteen-year-old boys did not behave as Tim was behaving without good reason. She’d known, of course, that something more serious than confusion over his father’s life choices was behind Tim’s attack on her as well as his placement in Margaret Fox School. She just hadn’t known the reason was his own miserable excuse for a mother.
Niamh’s home was just outside of Grange-over-Sands, some distance from Great Urswick. It was part of a neat and newish housing estate that curled down a hillside overlooking an estuary in Morecambe Bay. The houses here reflected someone’s taste for things Mediterranean: They were uniformly a blinding white, uniformly trimmed in dark blue, with uniformly simple front gardens heavily given to gravel and shrubbery. They were of various sizes and, true to form, Niamh possessed the largest of them with the best view of the estuary and the wintering birds who domiciled there. This was the home to which Niamh had decamped upon Ian’s desertion of his family. Manette knew from talking to Ian after the divorce that Niamh had been adamant about moving house. Well, who could blame her, really? Manette had thought at the time. The memories within the former home would have been painful, and the woman had two children to care for in the aftermath of the nuclear explosion that had occurred in the centre of her family. She’d have wanted something nice, at least, to help cushion the blow of such a transition in Tim and Gracie’s lives.
That conclusion of Manette’s, however, existed before she had learned that Tim and Gracie weren’t living with their mother at all but rather with their father and his lover. She’d adjusted her thinking to What the hell is going on?, ultimately letting the question go when Ian had told her it was what he wanted as well: having his children with him. Upon Ian’s death, Manette had thought that Niamh would naturally have taken the children home with her. That she had evidently not done so brought up What the hell is going on? once again. This time, she intended to have the question answered.
Niamh’s estate car was in front of the house, and she came at once to the door when Manette knocked. Her expression was expectant, but this expression altered when she saw that her caller was Manette. Had Niamh not been wearing enough scent to knock over a pony as well as a hot-pink cocktail dress showing a copious amount of cleavage, that altered expression alone would have told Manette someone