Elizabeth George - Believing the Lie

She hadn’t thought of that: that there might not be a body. There had been a death so there would be a body, she wanted to insist. After all, a body was a form of finality. Without one, how would grief ever be navigated?

When Lynley had left with the woman he’d introduced as Deborah St. James — unknown to Valerie and, frankly, unimportant at this point save the knowledge that she’d been present during the time of Alatea’s disappearance — Valerie climbed the stairs and made her way to Nicholas’s room. She’d said to the panels of his door, “We’re here, darling. Your father and I. We’ll be downstairs,” and she’d left him alone.

Throughout the long night, she and Bernard had sat in the drawing room, a fire burning in the grate. Near three in the morning, she’d thought she heard movement above them on the first floor of the house, but it turned out to be only the wind. The wind blew away the fog and brought with it the rain. The rain beat against the windows in steady waves and Valerie thought aimlessly about heaviness enduring for a night but joy coming in the morning. Something that came from the Book of Common Prayer, she recalled. But the words did not apply in this terrible case.

She and Bernard did not speak. He attempted to draw her into conversation four times, but she shook her head and held up her hand to make him stop. When he finally said, “For the love of God, Valerie, you must talk to me sometime,” she understood that in spite of everything that had passed in the last twelve or more hours, Bernard actually wanted to talk about them . What was wrong with the man? she asked herself wearily. But then, hadn’t she always known the answer to that?

It was just after dawn when Nicholas came into the drawing room. He’d moved so quietly, she hadn’t heard him and he was standing in front of her before she realised it was not Bernard who’d entered the room. For Bernard had never left the room, although that too was something she hadn’t taken note of.

She started to get to her feet. Nicholas said, “Don’t.”

She said, “Darling,” but she stopped when he shook his head. He had one eye closed as if the lights in the room were painful to him, and he cocked his head as if this would help bring her into focus.

He said, “Just this. It’s not my intention.”

Bernard said, “What? Nick, I say…”

“It’s not my intention to use again,” he said.

“That’s not why we’re here,” Valerie said.

“So you stayed because …?” His lips were so dry they seemed to stick together. There were hollows beneath his eyes. His cherub hair was flat and matted. His spectacles were smudged.

“We stayed because we’re your parents,” Bernard said. “For the love of God, Nick — ”

“It’s my fault,” Valerie said. “If I hadn’t brought the Scotland Yard people up here to investigate, upsetting you, upsetting her — ”

“If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine,” Bernard said. “Your mother is blameless. If I hadn’t given her cause to want an investigation, no matter the bloody reason — ”

“Stop.” Nicholas raised his hand and dropped it in an exhausted movement. He said, “Yes. It’s your fault. Both of you. But that doesn’t really make a difference now.”

He turned and left them in the drawing room. They heard him shuffle along the corridor. In a moment they heard him trudging up the stairs.

They went home in silence. As if knowing they were coming down the long drive from the road — perhaps she’d been watching for them from the roof of the tower, where, Valerie now knew, she’d doubtless been skipping up the stairs to spy upon everyone for years — Mignon stood waiting for them. She’d wisely discarded the zimmer frame, no doubt understanding that her jig was decidedly up, and she was wrapped up in a wool coat against the cold. The morning was fine as it sometimes is after a good rain, and the sun was as bright as an undashed hope, casting gold autumn light on the lawns and the deer grazing upon them in the distance.

Mignon advanced on the car as Valerie got out. She said, “Mother, what happened? Why did you not come home last night? I was sick with worry. I couldn’t sleep. I nearly phoned the police.”

Valerie said, “Alatea…”

“Well of course Alatea,” Mignon declared. “But why on earth did you and Dad not come home ?”

Valerie gazed at her daughter, but she couldn’t quite seem to make her out. Yet hadn’t that always been the case? Mignon was a stranger and the workings of her mind were the foreign country in which she dwelt.

“I’m far too tired to speak to you now,” Valerie told her, and headed for the door.

“Mother!”

“Mignon, that’s enough,” her father said.

Valerie heard Bernard following. She heard Mignon’s wail of protest. She paused for a moment then turned back to her. “You heard your father,” she said. “Enough.”

She went into the house. She was monumentally exhausted. Bernard said her name as she made for the stairs. He sounded tentative, unsure in ways that Bernard Fairclough had never been unsure.

She said, “I’m going to bed, Bernard,” and she climbed the stairs to do so.

She was acutely aware of the need for a decision of some sort. Life as she’d known it was something of a shambles now, and she was going to have to work out how to repair it: which pieces to keep, which pieces to replace, which pieces to send to the rubbish tip. She was also aware of how much the burden of responsibility fell upon her shoulders. For she had known all along about Bernard and his life in London, and that knowledge and what she’d done with that knowledge were the sins that would weigh on her conscience till the end of her days.

Ian had told her, of course. Although it was his own uncle whose use of the firm’s money he was reporting upon, Ian had always recognised where the true power in Fairclough Industries lay. Oh, Bernard ran the day-to-day business and, indeed, made many of the decisions. Bernard, Manette, Freddie, and Ian had together kept the concern moving forward, modernising it in a way that Valerie would never have considered. But when the board met two times a year, it was Valerie who took the position at the head of the table, and not one of them ever questioned this because that was how it had always been. You could climb the ranks, but there was a ceiling and breaking through it was a matter of blood, not strength.

“Something curious and rather unsettling,” was how Ian had reported it to her. “Frankly, Aunt Val, I’d thought not to tell you at all because… Well, you’ve been good to me and so has Uncle Bernie, of course, and for a while I thought I might be able to move funds around and cover the expenditures, but it’s got to the point where I can’t quite see how to do it.”

A nice boy Ian Cresswell had been when he’d come to live with them to attend school after his mother’s death in Kenya. A nice man Ian Cresswell had become. It was unfortunate that he’d hurt his wife and children so badly when he’d decided to live the life he’d been intended to live from birth, but sometimes these things happened to people and when they did, you had to muddle on. So Valerie had seen his concern, she’d respected the battle of loyalities he was fighting, and she was grateful that he’d come to her with the printouts that showed where the money was going.

She’d felt ghastly when he’d died. Accident though it was, she couldn’t help thinking that she hadn’t stressed enough the perilous condition of that dock in the boathouse. But his death had given her the opening she’d been looking for. The only suitable manner in which Bernard could be dealt with, she’d decided, was humiliation in front of his entire family. His children needed to know exactly what sort of man their father was. They’d abandon him, then, to his London mistress and his bastard child, and they’d circle the wagons of their devotion around their mother, and that would be how Bernard would pay for his sins. For the children were Faircloughs by blood, the three of them, and they would not brook the obscenity of their father’s double life for an instant. Then, after a suitable amount of time had passed, she would forgive him. Indeed, after nearly forty-three years, what else was Valerie Fairclough to do?