When he left them in Milnthorpe, he headed north, then east. Then he took the road that coursed down the spatulate landmass at whose tip sat Barrow-in-Furness. Barrow wasn’t his destination, however. He wanted to speak to Manette Fairclough privately, and that meant a trip to Great Urswick.
The route he followed took him through the hilly Victorian sea town of Grange-over-Sands, along the estuary where wintering birds formed a living landscape across the mudflats, establishing hierarchies in the search for food. It was abundant here, replenished daily by the tides from Morecambe Bay.
After Grange-over-Sands, the road opened to grey water, deceptive in its calm, along one side of the car and pastures on the other side, broken by the occasional line of cottages where seaside holiday makers came in better weather. This was far south in Cumbria, not the land of the lakes so treasured by John Ruskin and William Wordsworth and his daffodils. Here most people got down to the serious hand-to-mouth of daily living, which comprised generations of fishermen out on the shifting sands of the bay, first with horses and carts and now with tractors and always within inches of losing their lives to the quicksand if they made a wrong decision. And then there was no saving them if the tide came in. There was only waiting for their bodies to turn up. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they did not.
At Bardsea, he turned inland. Great Urswick was landlocked, one of those villages that seemed to exist merely because it was at a crossroads and contained a pub. To get to it, one traveled through a countryside completely unlike the dramatic fells, slate-studded screes, and sudden eruptions of limestone of the upper lakes. This part of Cumbria looked more like the Broads. One climbed briefly through a village and then out onto a landscape flat and windswept, suitable for grazing.
Buildings in Great Urswick didn’t look like part of Cumbria, either. They were prettily painted, but they were not done up in the vernacular of the Lakes. No neatly stacked slate fronted them for a consistency of appearance. Here, they were roughcast. Some even were clad in wood, a strange building material for this part of the world.
Lynley found Manette’s home alongside a large pond, which appeared to be the centrepiece of the village. Swans floated on it, and it was thick with reeds here and there to protect them, their nests and their young. There were two cars parked in front of the house, so he reckoned he could kill two birds by speaking to both Manette and her former husband, with whom, Bernard Fairclough had revealed, his daughter still lived. He went to the door.
A man answered. This, Lynley reckoned, would be Freddie McGhie. He was a decent-looking bloke, neat as a pin, dark hair, dark eyes. Helen would have declared how squeaky clean he is, darling, but she would have meant it in the best possible sense because everything about him was perfectly groomed. He wasn’t dressed for work, but he still managed to look like someone who’d stepped out of an advertisement for Country Life.
Lynley introduced himself. McGhie said, “Ah yes. Bernard’s guest from London. Manette said she’d met you.” He sounded affable, but there was a sense of questioning in his tone. There was, after all, no reason that Bernard Fairclough’s guest from London would come a-wandering into Great Urswick and knock on Freddie McGhie’s front door.
Lynley said he was hoping to speak to Manette if she was at home.
McGhie glanced towards the street as if for answer to a question he didn’t ask. Then he said as if remembering his manners, “Oh yes. Well, of course. It’s just that she didn’t mention…”
What? Lynley wondered. He waited politely for elucidation.
“No matter,” McGhie said. “Do come in. I’ll fetch her.”
He ushered Lynley into a sitting room that overlooked the back garden and the pond beyond it. The dominant indoor feature was a treadmill. It was state of the art with a screen that featured readouts, buttons, and assorted gee-gaws. To accommodate it and a rubber mat for preliminary stretching, much of the other furniture in the room had been stacked and lined against a far wall. McGhie said, “Oh, sorry. Not thinking. The kitchen’s better. It’s just this way,” and he walked on.
He left Lynley there in the kitchen for a moment and went off, calling Manette’s name. As his footsteps sounded against rising stairs, however, the kitchen’s exterior door opened, and Manette herself came inside. Lynley reflected— as he hadn’t done before— that she looked nothing like her sister. She had her mother’s height and her mother’s rangy build but, unfortunately, she’d inherited her father’s hair. This was sparse enough to see to her skull, although she kept the cut of it short and curly as if to hide its scarcity. She was dressed for running, obviously the person who used the treadmill in the district’s often inclement weather. She saw Lynley at once and said, “Goodness. Well, hello,” and her glance went to the door through which he’d come because she obviously heard her former husband calling her name.
She said, “Excuse me,” and went in the same direction as McGhie. Lynley heard her call out, “Down here, Freddie. I was out for a run,” and then his reply of, “Oh, I say, Manette,” which was all Lynley heard because at that point their voices became hushed. He caught McGhie’s “Should I…?” and his “Happy to, you know,” without knowing the what or the why of each. Still, when Manette returned, she had Freddie McGhie in tow. Her choice of words was apparently deliberate when she said to Lynley, “A nice surprise for us, this. Did Dad want you to pop in to see us for some reason?”
“I did want to speak to you both,” Lynley said.
They exchanged a look. He realised it was more than time to drop the pretence, which hadn’t worked with Mignon and which certainly wasn’t going to work with anyone else.
He took out his police identification and handed it to Manette. Her eyes narrowed. She pushed it to McGhie and while he was examining it, she asked the obvious question, “What’s this about? I can’t think it likely Scotland Yard’s on the trail of replacing their lavatories and they’ve sent you up here to evaluate our line of loos. What’s your guess, Freddie?”
McGhie was blushing faintly, and Lynley didn’t think his growing colour had anything to do with lavatories. He said to her, “I’d thought…” He shrugged, one of those you know movements in which a couple’s history allows them to communicate in a truncated fashion.
Manette barked a laugh. “I appreciate the vote of confidence,” she said. “But I have a feeling the inspector here likes them a little less long in the tooth.”
“Don’t be stupid. You’re only forty-two,” Freddie said to her.
“Female years are like dog years, Freddie. When it comes to men, I’m closer to eighty. What can I do for you, Inspector?”
He said, “Your father’s asked me to look into Ian Cresswell’s death.”
Manette’s response was to McGhie. “I rest my case.” There was a kitchen table at which she then sat. A bowl of fruit was in the centre of it, and she took a banana and began to peel it. She said, “Well, this must put a real pin in poor Mignon’s balloon.” She used her foot to push one of the other chairs out. “Sit,” she told Lynley. She said the same to McGhie.
Lynley thought at first that the gesture indicated her full cooperation, but she disabused him of that notion straightaway. She said, “If Dad thinks I’m about to finger anyone for anything, I’d appreciate your telling him that kite won’t fly. As a matter of fact, no kite’s launching from this house at all. Honest to God, I can’t believe he’d do this to his own family.”
“It’s more a matter that he wants to be sure of the local police,” Lynley told her. “That happens, actually, more often than people think.”