The woman and child crossed safely to the pavement on the other side of the road. He went on. Through the village, down the Promenade with its display of Victorian mansions lined up on a rise of land overlooking the water, and then he was on the drive into Arnside House, where the Promenade ended. The building was set at an angle that made the most of its view, across an expanse of lawn from the water. That view was obscured today as the fog became more and more like wet cotton wool, once singed by fire.
Arnside House itself looked deserted, with no lights burning in the windows despite the gloom of the day. He couldn’t decide if this was bad or good. No car meant, at least, there was a very good chance that Deborah had not bulldogged her way into a bad situation. The best scenario of all would be no one at home, but he couldn’t rely on that.
He braked the Healey Elliott at the top of the driveway, where the gravel shaped into a winnow for parking. When he got out of the car, he found that the air had altered in the few hours he’d been gone. It felt nearly tubercular in his lungs. He moved through it like someone separating curtains, along the path to the heavy front door.
He heard the bell ring somewhere inside the place. He expected no answer, but this was not the case. He heard footsteps against a stone entry, and the door swung open. Then he faced the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
He was unprepared for the shock of Alatea Fairclough: the tawny skin, the wealth of wild, curly hair captured in tortoiseshell slides, the large dark eyes and sensuous mouth, the shape of a woman who was entirely woman. Only her hands betrayed her, and even then it was only by their size.
He had no trouble at all seeing how Alatea and Nicholas Fairclough had duped everyone around them. Had Barbara Havers not sworn this woman was, in fact, Santiago Vasquez y del Torres, Lynley would not have believed it. Truth to tell, he still couldn’t. So he was careful with his words.
“Mrs. Fairclough?” he said. When she nodded, he took out his identification. He said, “DI Thomas Lynley, New Scotland Yard. I’ve come to talk to you about Santiago Vasquez y del Torres.”
She went white so quickly that Lynley thought she would faint. She took a step away from the door.
He repeated the name. “Santiago Vasquez y del Torres. It seems the name’s familiar to you.”
She felt behind her for the oak bench that ran the length of one of the panelled walls of the entrance. She lowered herself onto it.
Lynley shut the door behind him. There was little light. What there was came from four small windows in the entrance, all of them stained glass in a stylised pattern of red tulips surrounded by greenery, which cast a subtle glow against the skin of the woman— or, he thought, whatever she was— who sat slumped on the bench.
He still wasn’t certain of his facts, but he chose to take a stab at being direct and waiting for the consequences. So he said, “We must speak. I’ve reason to believe you’re Santiago Vasquez y del Torres from Santa Maria de la Cruz, del los Angeles, y de los Santos in Argentina.”
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Is that your true name?”
“Not since Mexico City.”
“Raul Montenegro?”
She reared up at that, her back against the wall. “Has he sent you? Is he here?”
“I’ve not been sent by anyone.”
“I don’t believe you.” She rose then. She hurried past him, nearly losing her footing on the step that gave access through a doorway into a dark corridor panelled, like the entrance, in oak.
He followed her. A short distance along the corridor, she slid open two pocket doors with stained glass panes of lilies surrounded by drooping fronds, and she passed through them and into a hall. It was half restored and half in tatters, an odd mixture of medieval revival and Arts and Crafts, and there she made for an inglenook fireplace, where she sat in the most sheltered corner, drawing her knees up to her face.
“Please leave me,” she said, although she seemed to be speaking more to herself than to him. “Please leave.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
“You must leave. Don’t you see? No one here knows. You must leave at once.”
Lynley thought it unlikely that no one knew. Indeed, he thought it wildly improbable. He said, “I daresay Ian Cresswell knew.”
At that she raised her head. Her eyes were luminous, but her expression was shifting from distraught to confused. “Ian?” she said. “There’s no possible way. How could he ever have known?”
“As a homosexual man, still in the closet, his was a double life. He would have come into contact with people like you. It would have been easier for him than for other people to recognise— ”
“Is that what you think I am?” she asked. “A homosexual man? A transvestite? A cross-dresser?” A dawning knowledge came over her face. She added, “You’re thinking that I killed Ian, aren’t you? Because he… what? He discovered something? Because then he threatened to betray me if I didn’t… what? Pay him money that I didn’t have? Oh my God, had that only been the case.”
Lynley found himself quite down the rabbit hole. The nature of her initial response to the name Santiago Vasquez y del Torres had indicated she was indeed the long-ago adolescent boy who’d run off from the town of his birth and somehow ended up on the arm of one Raul Montenegro. But her reaction to the suggestion that Ian Cresswell had come to know who and what she was was beginning to alter Lynley’s thoughts on the subject.
She said, “Ian didn’t know. No one here knew. Not a single person.”
“Are you telling me that Nicholas doesn’t know?” Lynley stared at her. He tried to take her in. Making sense of what she was telling him demanded he take a leap into an area that was completely unknown to him. He was like a blind man trying to get himself to a hidden doorway in a room cluttered with furniture whose misshapen nature only confused him. He said, “If that’s the case, I don’t quite understand. How could Nicholas not have known?”
“Because,” she said, “I never told him.”
“But I daresay his own eyes…” And then Lynley began to understand what she was actually revealing about herself. If she’d never told Nicholas Fairclough about Santiago Vasquez y del Torres, and if Nicholas Fairclough’s own eyes hadn’t told him, there was only one reason for this.
“Yes,” she said, apparently reading the dawning knowledge on his features. “Only my immediate family in Argentina know, along with one cousin, Elena Maria. And Elena Maria, she always knew. Right from the first, even when we were children.” Alatea pushed her hair from her face, a distinctly feminine gesture that was discommoding to Lynley, putting him off balance, as perhaps she intended. “She shared with me: her dolls when we were children, her clothes and her makeup when we grew older.” Alatea looked away for a moment, then back at him directly, her expression earnest as she said, “Can you understand this? It was a way for me just to be. It was the only way for me just to be, and this Elena Maria understood. I don’t know how or why, but she simply did. Before anyone, she knew who and what I was.”
“A woman.” Lynley finally put it into words. “Trapped in a man’s body. But still a woman.”
“Yes,” Alatea agreed.
Lynley took this in. He could see that she was waiting for his reaction, perhaps steeling herself to whatever it would be: revulsion, confusion, curiosity, disgust, pity, abhorrence, interest, acceptance. She’d been one of five brothers in a world where being male equated with being accorded privileges that women had had to fight for and were still fighting for. She would know that most men would never comprehend why any man from that world would wish to change the gender into which he’d been born. Yet this, apparently, was what she had done, as she went on to clarify, saying: