He heard Kaveh’s voice as he descended the stairs. It seemed to be coming from the fire house. The door to the room was partially closed, but a shaft of light fell on the floor from inside and he heard the sound of a poker stirring coals in the grate.
“…not actually in my plans,” Kaveh was saying politely to someone.
“But you can’t be thinking of staying on now Cresswell’s dead.” Tim recognised George Cowley’s voice. He also recognised the subject. Staying on meant they were talking about Bryan Beck farm. George Cowley would be seeing the death of Tim’s father as his chance to sweep in and buy the place. Obviously, Kaveh wasn’t having that.
“I am,” Kaveh said.
“Thinking of raising sheep, are you?” Cowley sounded amused by the entire idea. He probably pictured Kaveh mincing round the farmyard in pink Wellies and a lavender waxed jacket or something like.
“I’d actually hoped you’d continue renting the land as you’ve been doing,” Kaveh said. “It’s worked out so far. I don’t see why it can’t continue to do so. Besides the land’s quite valuable if it ever came to a sale of it.”
“And you reckon I’d never have the funds to make it mine,” Cowley concluded. “Well, d’you have the funds to buy it up yourself, laddie? I reckon not. This whole place’ll go on the block in a few months’ time and I’ll be there with the money.”
“I’m afraid it won’t be going on the block at all,” Kaveh said.
“Why’s that, then? You’re not claiming he left it to you?”
“As it happens, he did.”
George Cowley was silent, digesting this unexpected bit of news. He finally said, “You’re taking the piss.”
“As it happens, I’m not.”
“No? So where d’you plan to come up with the death duties, eh? That’ll take a real pile of dosh.”
“Death duties aren’t actually going to be a problem, Mr. Cowley,” Kaveh said.
There was another silence. Tim wondered what George Cowley was making of all this. For the first time, he also wondered how Kaveh Mehran fit into the picture of his father’s death. It had been an accident, plain and simple, hadn’t it? Everyone had said so, including the coroner. But now it didn’t seem so simple at all. And the next thing that came out of Kaveh’s mouth made the matter complicated beyond Tim’s imagining.
“My family will be joining me here as well, you see. Our combined resources will see to it that death duties— ”
“Family?” Cowley scoffed. “What’s the meaning of family in the light of day to your sort, eh?”
Kaveh didn’t reply for a moment. When he spoke, then, his tone was deathly formal. “Family means my parents, for one. They’ll be coming up from Manchester to live with me. Along with my wife.”
The walls seemed to shimmer around Tim. The earth itself seemed to tilt. Everything he’d thought he’d known was suddenly thrown into a vortex where words meant something far beyond what they’d meant for all of his fourteen years and what he thought he’d actually understood was obliterated by the uttering of one declaration.
“Your wife.” Cowley said it flatly.
“My wife. Yes.” The sound of movement, Kaveh crossing to the window perhaps, or to the desk at one side of the room. Or even standing at the hearth of the fireplace, one arm on the mantel, looking like someone who knew he was holding all the good cards in the deck. “I’ll be marrying next month.”
“Oh, too right.” Cowley snorted. “She know about your little ‘situation’ here, this next-month wife of yours?”
“Situation? What on earth do you mean?”
“You little pixie. You know ’xactly what I mean. You two arse bandits, you an’ Cresswell. Wha’s this, eh? Think the whole village didn’t know the truth?”
“If you mean that the village knew Ian Cresswell and I shared this house, of course they knew. Beyond that, what else is there?”
“Why, you little bum fucker. You trying to say— ”
“I’m trying to say that I’ll be marrying, my wife will live here along with my parents, and then our children. If there’s something not clear to you in that, I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“What about them kids? You think one’f them won’t tell this next-month wife of yours what’s up with you?”
“Are you talking about Tim and Gracie, Mr. Cowley?”
“You goddamn bloody well know I am.”
“Aside from the fact that my fiancée doesn’t speak English and wouldn’t understand a word they said to her, there’s nothing for them to tell anyone. And Tim and Gracie are going back to their mother. That’s already in the works.”
“That’s that, then?”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“You’re a real deep one, then, aren’t you, lad? Had this planned from the first, I expect.”
What Kaveh said in answer, Tim did not catch. He’d heard all that he needed to hear. He stumbled from the passageway into the kitchen and from there out of the house.
LAKE WINDERMERE
CUMBRIA
St. James had decided there was a final possibility in this matter of Ian Cresswell’s drowning. It was a tenuous one at best, but as it existed, he knew he had to set out to see about it. He required a single sporting implement to do so.
There was no angling shop in either Milnthorpe or Arnside, so he drove the distance to Grange-over-Sands and made his purchase in a concern called Lancasters. Lancasters sold everything from baby clothes to gardening tools and it was strung along the sloping high street as a series of shops that had obviously been snapped up by the eponymous and enterprising Lancaster family over the last hundred years in a remarkable and successful project of expansion, one shop now tumbling into the next. The governing philosophy behind them all seemed to be that what wasn’t sold within the place didn’t need to be bought. This being a part of the world given to fishing, what they did have was a fillet knife exactly like the one that Lynley had brought up from the water inside the Ireleth Hall boathouse.
St. James made his purchase of this, rang Lynley on his mobile, and told him he was heading to Ireleth Hall. He also phoned Deborah, but she wasn’t answering. He wasn’t surprised, as she would have seen he was the caller and she wasn’t happy with him at the moment.
Nor, particularly, was he happy with her. He loved his wife deeply, but there were moments when the fact that they couldn’t see eye-to-eye on something made him despair of their entire marriage. This despair was always a fleeting thing, a feeling that he generally reflected upon later and chuckled over when both his temper and Deborah’s had cooled. Why were we so caught up in that? he would wonder. Matters so crucial one day were mere bagatelles the next. This one didn’t seem so insignificant, however.
He took the most direct route to Lake Windermere although at another time he would have quite enjoyed taking a diversion and cruising up through the Lyth Valley. Instead, he sped along the northeastern route and ended up at the very tip of Lake Windermere, where the mass of end moraines at Newby Bridge spoke of glaciers, an ice age, and a time long ago when the village had stood at the southernmost point of the lake itself, which now lay some distance away. Then he sped north. Within moments, Lake Windermere came into view: a broad unwrinkled sheet of grey-blue reflecting the autumn-hued trees that formed woodlands along its shores.
Ireleth Hall was not far from this point, a few miles beyond the area where the Victorian beauties of Fell Foot Park offered walks and vistas that at this time of year were growing cold and forbidding but in spring would be a palette of nodding daffodils and colourful rhododendrons that grew to the height of buildings. He passed by this place and entered one of dozens of arboreal tunnels along the road: auburn and ochre where still there were leaves on the trees, skeletal branches where there were now none.