Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [84]
“I do,” Lynley said.
“Then there’s this: Alatea Fairclough has a copy of Conception magazine. It’s got pages torn out of the back, and we might want to put our hands on a copy and have a look at what they are. Nicholas told me they’ve been trying to conceive.”
St. James stirred. His expression said that the magazine meant nothing and would have meant nothing to anyone else save Deborah, whose own concerns about conceiving would probably cloud her judgement.
Lynley saw that Deborah read her husband as well as he himself had done because she said, “This isn’t about me, Simon. Tommy’s looking for anything unusual and what I was thinking… What if his drug use has made Nicholas sterile but Alatea doesn’t want him to know that? A doctor may have told her but not him. Or she might have convinced a doctor to lie to him, for his ego, to keep him on the straight and narrow. So what if, knowing he can’t give her children, she asked Ian to lend a hand in the matter, if you know what I mean?”
“Keeping it in the family?” Lynley asked. “Anything’s possible.”
“And there’s something else,” Deborah said. “A reporter from The Source—”
“Jesus God.”
“— has been there four times, ostensibly doing a story on Nicholas. Four times but nothing’s come of it, Tommy. One of the blokes at the Middlebarrow Pele Project told me.”
“If it’s The Source, there’s dirt on someone’s shoe soles,” St. James pointed out.
Lynley thought about whose shoe soles those might be. He said, “Cresswell’s lover has evidently been on the estate— on the grounds of Ireleth Hall— for some time now, working on a project for Valerie. He’s called Kaveh Mehran.”
“PC Schlicht mentioned him,” St. James said. “Has he got motive?”
“There’s the will and insurance to be looked into.”
“Anyone else?”
“With motive?” Lynley told them about his meeting with Mignon Fairclough: her insinuations about her parents’ marriage followed by her denial of those insinuations. He also told them about the holes in the background of Nicholas Fairclough that she’d been only too happy to fill in. He ended with, “She’s rather a piece of work and I have the impression she’s got a hold over her parents for some reason. So Fairclough himself might bear looking into.”
“Blackmail? With Cresswell somehow in the know?”
“Emotional or otherwise, I daresay. She lives on the property but not in the house. I suspect Bernard Fairclough built her digs for her and I wouldn’t be surprised if one reason was to get her out of his hair. There’s another sister as well. I’ve yet to meet her.”
He went on to tell them that Bernard Fairclough had put a videotape into his hands. He’d suggested Lynley watch it because if there was indeed someone behind Ian’s death, then he needed to “see something rather telling.”
This turned out to be a video of the funeral, made for the purpose of sending to Ian’s father in Kenya, too frail to make the trip to say farewell to his son. Fairclough had watched it at Lynley’s side, and as things turned out, it was what he didn’t see that he wanted to point out. Niamh Cresswell, Ian’s wife of seventeen years and the mother of his two children, had not attended. Fairclough pointed out that, at least to be of support to those grieving children, she might have turned up.
“He gave me a few details on the end of Ian Cresswell’s marriage.” Lynley told them what he knew, to which St. James and Deborah said simultaneously, “Motive, Tommy.”
“Hell hath no fury. Yes. But it’s not likely that Niamh Cresswell could prowl round the grounds of Ireleth Hall without being seen and so far no one’s mentioned her being there.”
“Still and all,” St. James said, “she’s got to be looked into. Revenge is a powerful motive.”
“So is greed,” Deborah said. “But then, so are all the deadly sins, aren’t they? Why else be deadly?”
Lynley nodded. “So we’ll have to see if she benefits in any way other than vengeance,” he said.
“We’re back to the will. Or an insurance policy,” St. James said. “That information’s not going to be easy to suss out while keeping your head down about why you’re really