“You wouldn’t have.” He laced his fingers with hers. “I expect everything was all too fresh for you then.”
“What?”
“Leaving Charlie. When will you tell him that you’re not going back?”
She drew her hand away from his. She looked back at the computer screen, at Clare Abbott’s intelligent face. Clare, she knew, would have called India’s present life a very good example of out of the frying pan and into the fire. Going from one man to another? After such a brief hiatus? Clare would not have approved, and who could blame her? What did she really know of Nathaniel Thompson, India asked herself. She said, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know when you’re going to tell him or you don’t know whether you’re making this separation from him permanent?”
“Either,” she said.
He rose. They were in the second bedroom of her tiny house, which she used as a sitting room and office since the real sitting room was her weekend acupuncture clinic. The room was tiny, but Nat found enough space to pace its perimeter. He was a tall man, and he seemed to fill the area not only with his presence but also with his feelings. Odd, she thought, that she would end up with another man who lived so openly with his feelings, as Charlie had done prior to Will’s death. What was the attraction? she wondered. Her determination not to end up with her father? But why would that be? She’d have been wise to choose a man like her father, diplomat that he long had been.
“So what are we, you and I?” Nat asked her. “Merely a break from your normal routine?”
“You know that isn’t the case.” She turned from the computer to watch him.
“I know that you haven’t said a thing about how you feel. I’ve been forthcoming with you, the whole heart spread out on a boulder for the carrion eaters. What’s stopping you if it isn’t Charlie? What is it about him, India? Since when did neediness become so compelling?”
“Let’s not quarrel. If I haven’t said it, it’s not because I doubt it but because . . .” She hesitated, searching for a way to explain what she herself only imperfectly understood.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Truly, Nat, I don’t. And no, neediness is not compelling. But I don’t want to deal him a death blow.”
“So you’ll do what instead? Keep both of us hanging?”
“I don’t mean to do that.”
He resumed his pacing, but his steps took him only as far as the window which looked down at the street, through her tangle of a front garden barely the size of a steamer trunk. He said to this view rather than to her, “I know he’s not a proper man to you.” He turned then, perhaps to gauge her reaction.
India knew she looked startled, for she’d never said a word. It had seemed too disloyal to Charlie.
Nat said as if in answer to a question she didn’t ask, “It was the way you reacted. And what you said: ‘Such a long time.’”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You did, in fact. Before you fell asleep. Just on the edge of asleep and awake. You felt as you hadn’t felt in years. We both know why.”
She felt the wound of his words, although every one of them was the truth. She said again, “Please. Let’s not quarrel.”
He came back to her then. He raised her from her chair and took her into his arms. “So we won’t,” he told her. “Not when it comes to the truth. We won’t quarrel about that.”
1 OCTOBER
HOLLOWAY
LONDON
It was an escape from speed dating, of all bloody mad things, that revealed to Barbara Havers twenty-four hours after the fact that Clare Abbott had unexpectedly died. She’d arrived home, thoroughly knackered by what it was taking in the energy department for her to maintain the dispiriting air of panting cooperation personified, all for the pleasure of Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery. Jaw clenching, lip biting, teeth grinding, fingernails digging, and tongue holding were all taking their toll, and Barbara wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold on to this new twist in her personality without the top of her head erupting. Berwick-upon-Tweed was starting to sound like paradise to her. So when she trudged up the driveway of the Edwardian villa behind which she lived—having been forced to park her Mini practically at the top of Haverstock Hill—the last activity she wished to engage in was speed dating.
It was all Dorothea Harriman’s idea, and she’d proved herself unrelenting on the topic. Dee’s outlook on life, unfortunately, had not been adjusted by Looking for Mr. Darcy which, it turned out, she’d only glanced at before pressing it upon DI Lynley. After that, having apparently given up on the idea of making Barbara over, she’d decided upon another way to put an end to the sad state of affairs that was Barbara’s love life. Speed dating, she announced, was going to get Barbara’s feet wet in the stream in which hoards of available men were apparently swimming.
Barbara had attempted protest. She’d never been interested in pulling men.
To this, Dorothea had said, “Everyone is interested in pulling men, Detective Sergeant Havers. So I’m not listening to no. And neither is anyone else.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Dorothea had been forced to confess, at that point, that “everyone wants you back, Detective Sergeant. We’re rather desperate to have you back, not to put too fine a point on things.”
To Barbara’s hot “I haven’t gone any-bloody-where,” Dorothea said, “You know what I mean. This Berwick-upon-Tweed situation? And Detective Superintendent Ardery? And you being extra-extra-special good? You see, while I think it’s terribly heroic for Detective Inspector Lynley to have tried to pull the plug on all that—”
“What?” Barbara cried. “What did he do?”
“Oh dear. I’m saying too much. I’m getting flustered. Look, let’s just try this, shall we? Let’s call it a new experience, something to tell your mum next time you see her . . . Please? And afterwards . . .” Dorothea paused, apparently to give the afterwards some thought. “Afterwards, I’ll take you to dinner. You name the restaurant. I’ll pay the bill.”
“I’d rather have my toenails pulled out,” Barbara told her.
“No. You’d rather have something on your mind besides Berwick-upon-Tweed. I’m not taking no for an answer, by the way. You can’t reject something you’ve never tried.”
Thus, the evening that lay before her. Dee had found the experience they were about to undergo by browsing through the ads at the back of Time Out. There it had been, tucked beneath an offer for Expert Thai Massages Given in Your Hotel Room. The event was scheduled to take place in Holloway, conveniently close—as things turned out—to HM’s prison for women.
Wonderful, Barbara thought as she plodded towards the pub that was going to house the affair. Off-duty screws looking for love. She should fit right in.
Dorothea was waiting just inside the door. To Barbara’s greeting of “Are you half mad, Dee? Do you actually reckon anyone decent is going to turn up here?,” Dorothea said, “We’re going to shine, like pearls among the . . . whatever.” And she led the way into the function room before Barbara could point out to her that pearls generally didn’t shine at all.
The function room was decorated . . . just. Twisted crepe paper crisscrossed the ceiling, and above the reception table a clutch of helium balloons floated. Here sat three female greeters, who were collecting money and providing drinks tickets. In front of them, Hello! I’m name tags waited to be filled out in black marking pen, and once the arriving singles had accomplished this, they drifted to the sides of the room and milled about, surreptitiously examining the other singles.
Five rows of long tables indicated where the speed daters were supposed to sit. Each held a sign affixed to a metal pole. 25–30 said one. 31–40, 41–50, 51–60, and 60+ said the others. Lined along each were chairs for the daters, and in the centre of each table and spaced along its le
ngth were slim white vases holding plastic daisies.
A corpulent man with slicked-back black hair of a suspiciously youthful hue began to “set up the rules,” which were simple enough. He said his name was Sunny Jack Domino and he was going “to keep you lot in line, this evening.” Keeping them in line referred to a timer he held up and whose workings he demonstrated by having it sound and then following it with a handheld bell of town crier variety. Their “dates” would be five minutes long, he told them. When they heard the timer, they had thirty seconds to finish up, at which point he would ring the bell. The gents would move to the chair on their right while the ladies remained seated. “You c’n pass your details to whoever you take a fancy to,” he said. “Only rule is to keep moving.”
The mention of details told Barbara she should have brought some business cards on the very remote chance that she actually made a connection with someone. She had a moment of concern about this, but that faded soon enough once Sunny Jack Domino explained the purpose of the signs on the tables. Those, he said, indicated the age groups. Daters were to sit in accordance with their years. “And no cheating,” he warned them with a show of his execessivly white teeth.
It was all rather like being in school. The daters headed for their age-appropriate tables, with Sunny Jack chortling about the fun to come. With a “Ready, steady, go!” he set the daters upon each other.
Soon enough Barbara discovered that while the women had taken themselves to the age-appropriate table, few of the men had done so, instead shaving a decade and in one case three off their ages. Thus she found herself conversing with blokes from forty-one to sixty-seven years of age.
She lasted three dates. Her first exposed her to a devotee of a diet that appeared to consist of laying into flapjacks and chip butties, a sort of nutritional Russian roulette that contributed to a girth which oozed over the chair he occupied. He gazed at Barbara and waited, apparently, for her to entertain him, which she was loath to do. Her next encounter proved to be a gentleman who admitted readily that he wasn’t close to being in his thirties—this would be the sixty-seven-year-old—but “I like ’em young an’ bouncy, I do, and I got the stamina of a bull,” he said, with a wink and a meaningful gesture employing the index finger of his right hand and the circled index finger and thumb of his left. Her final meeting had her listening to a man who demanded “what sort ’f music you listen to, eh? ’Cause what I’ve found is that if the music doesn’t fit, nothing else is going to.”
It was at that point, that Barbara rose from the table and headed for the exit. She hadn’t made good her escape before Dorothea was upon her, crying, “Detective Sergeant Havers! You aren’t—”
Barbara saw that only a lie would do. She held up her mobile. “Just got a call, Dee. I’m on rota tonight, and you know how that is . . .” With a wave, she was gone, out onto the pavement.
She sought out a chippy. She’d not had dinner, and after the speed dating folly she reckoned she was owed. She set off down the road. Fittingly, it seemed, it began to rain, not a gentle autumn shower to wash the summer’s grime from the trees but a real downpour. And, of course, she had no umbrella.
She stumbled upon a newsagent within fifty yards, and she went inside to get out of the rain. A meaningful gaze from the hijab-wearing woman behind the counter indicated that Barbara ought to make a purchase, and she was happy to do so. Wrigley’s Spearmint, a packet of Players, a plastic lighter, and a copy of her favourite light reading material, a tabloid called The Source. She handed these over for payment and enquired the location of the nearest chippy. She discovered that it was close to where she was, a mere eight or ten doors farther along the way.
Inside, she placed her order for haddock and chips. There were no tables, only a Formica-topped eating counter that ran round the walls. Stools with greasy-looking vinyl seats stood before this, which made sitting an unappealing prospect, but as eating chips in the rain was less appealing still, Barbara decided to be satisfied with the fact that the counter was wide enough to accommodate her reading material. And really, she reckoned, what more could one ask for on a rainy evening?
So it was that she uncovered the information telling her that well-known feminist author and lecturer Clare Abbott was dead at fifty-five years of age. This wasn’t front-page material, though. Instead the front page was given to the shocking revelation that a footballer previously said to be devoted to his wife—always a dead giveaway, Barbara thought sardonically—had been keeping a mistress on the coast of Spain for the last three years. “I’m faithful to them both,” he was claiming, “which is more than you can say for the rest of this lot.” It didn’t seem to be a problem for him that his wife had recently given birth—she was pictured leaving their house, bundled baby in her arms, weeping inconsolably—and that the mistress was pregnant. “I’m only a human being!” had been his protest at being discovered a perfect lout.
Barbara made the jump to page five, where this sad tale continued. It was on her way to this page that she saw first Clare Abbott’s picture and then the news about her death. Although the exact cause wasn’t given, it appeared to have been a heart attack, she read. That was a pity as she hadn’t been old, Barbara thought. The idea of a heart attack caused her to look a bit askance at her fish and chips, though. She decided to douse them both with another round of malt vinegar. This, she reckoned, could stand in place of the vegetables that she should have been eating.
4 OCTOBER
MARYLEBONE
LONDON
Rory Statham sat in silence as David Jenkins read and turned the pages. Arlo was with her, lying comfortingly at her feet. Jenkins hadn’t looked up since bidding Rory to take one of the two seats on the far side of his desk, and she was glad of this. It suggested to her that he shared her concern, and why wouldn’t he? He’d been Clare’s physician for the better part of thirty years, and when Rory had phoned and asked for his last appointment of the day because his patient Clare Abbott had died unexpectedly five days earlier, he’d responded at once with, “Good heavens. Yes. Of course. I’m afraid it won’t be till half past six,” which was absolutely fine with her. She was hoping to go over the autopsy report with him, she confided.
Now she watched him, trying to gauge his reaction to what she herself had already read: a seizure caused by fatal cardiac arrhythmia. She wasn’t sure what it meant other than something having gone badly wrong with Clare’s heart.
How could it have happened? It seemed to Rory that if Clare’s heart had failed her in some way, her physician would have known that this was a possibility and would have warned her of it. She waited in an agony of nerves and grief as the doctor read on.
Jenkins was the age of a pensioner, very avuncular in the way he’d welcomed Rory, very kind about the unexpected presence of an assistance dog. He was one of what Rory thought of as the old-fashioned doctors of Harley Street vintage, despite his surgery not being on Harley Street at all. He wore a three-piece suit that was far too heavy for the time of year, and he used half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose. He sprouted ear hairs, nose hairs, and the chinstrap beard of another century. Oddly enough, Rory thought, she found this comforting.
At last he looked up. He removed the half-moon spectacles and from his wallet he excavated a purpose-made square of cloth on which he cleaned them. He drew rather impressive eyebrows together and rolled his chair back from his desk. He’d set a fan to blowing in an attempt to cool the room, which had benefited from the afternoon sun, and he made an adjustment to this before he said to her, “Will you tell me exactly how you fitted into Clare’s life?”
Rory said, “I’m her editor and her friend,” and to her mortification, she felt the onset of tears. She pressed her fingers to her upper lip in an effort not to weep. She’d been doing so for days. She couldn’t seem to get control of herself. She’d been gently asked by the managing director of the publishing house to take a few days off, but she hadn’
t been able to do so. Being alone with her thoughts was so terrible an idea that she would have done anything at all to escape such a fate. She said, “We’ve been very close, Clare and I. As she has no family in England, I was long ago made the one who would take care of matters should anything happen . . .” She lowered her head. Arlo raised his, his brown eyes questioning.
“Yes, I see,” Jenkins said. “And her body?”
“It’s on its way . . . She’s on her way to Shaftesbury. There’ll be a cremation, but it’s still to be arranged, so the mortuary will keep her . . .” Talking about the disposal of the remains felt so inhuman, not only like a desecration of who Clare had been but also a desertion of the friendship they’d shared. She changed course. “It seems to me that there would have been some indication, somewhere, somehow . . . How could she not know that her heart was bad?”
Jenkins steepled his long fingers beneath his chin, elbows on his desk. “It happens occasionally, this business with her heart. The accompanying seizure, however? I do find that rather troubling.”
Rory wanted to cling to that last bit. She wanted it to mean something, although she could not have said what.
Jenkins continued, meditatively. “Children sometimes have seizures—we call them benign seizures—accompanying high fevers, but adults generally don’t. So to have a seizure brought on by the arrhythmia . . . It’s rather odd that there wasn’t an indication of a tumour in the brain or even an old traumatic scar from a head injury. But there’s no mention or even suggestion of that in the report. If you’ll excuse me for a moment . . . ?” He left his office, but he was not gone for long. He returned with a thick manila filing folder which turned out to be the history of Clare’s health: all the years of her relationship with Jenkins. He spent a good few minutes looking through this, and when Rory was about to ask him what he was searching for, he told her that there was nothing in Clare’s medical file to indicate she’d ever sustained a head injury. She had undergone a physical examination once a year—“Commendably so,” he added—and at the age of fifty she’d insisted upon her first colonoscopy, an electrocardiogram, a bone density screening, and a stress test to measure her heart’s endurance. She had all her yearly “female tests” on schedule, he said, adding that he only wished the rest of his female patients were as attentive to their health.
A Banquet of Consequences Page 19
