A Banquet of Consequences

by Elizabeth George

  “Why?” It was, Lynley thought, a most complicated picture of a marriage and family. Tolstoy, he decided, and not for the first time, had been right.

  Goldacre rose and went to a table beneath the room’s bay window. From the plethora of photos arranged there, he selected one far at the back. He handed it to Lynley, who saw that the picture depicted the darker of his two sons with his Richard III haircut. While Lynley gazed at this and wondered what he was meant to be seeing, Goldacre rustled in the table’s centre drawer and after a moment found another photo, this one a snapshot taken of an infant’s head, his face turned in profile to the camera as he rested on his mother’s shoulder. The baby, Lynley saw, had no ear, just a hole and a miserly flap of skin.

  Goldacre said, “Caroline wanted surgery for him directly. Days after he was born. She simply could not come to grips with the fact that it had to wait. Giving him surgery as an infant would require an infant-sized ear and, as he grew, another ear after that, and another after that. I tried to explain this to her, but she wouldn’t have my explanation, and she carted the poor child all over London to other surgeons who told her the same thing. It was better to wait. This, unfortunately, made her so overprotective of the poor boy that she ended up making more of the deformity than he ever would have made of it himself. It became a case of constantly telling him he was fine, he was beautiful, he was talented, he was clever, he was whatever came into her mind. And of course, the boy knew that at least some of this wasn’t true.”

  “This led to your divorce?”

  “Alastair MacKerron led to that. She left me for him, although she apparently told Clare that I left her for Sumalee. Truth told, I’ve always been grateful to poor Alastair for having taken Caroline off my hands. I did miss the boys. But over time, Caroline made it so difficult to see them, and as I’ve always travelled so much for my work . . . Frankly, I allowed Alastair to take up the reins of fatherhood. I’m not proud of that. It’s led to all sorts of difficulties with the boys. Well, with Charlie now that William is gone. We’re not close. And he despises Sumalee.”

  Lynley considered all this. A phone rang somewhere in the house, but Goldacre made no move to answer. After six double rings, a disembodied voice that was Sumalee’s asked the caller to leave a message. No one did.

  Lynley said, “So all of this is what Clare wanted to talk to you about?”

  “That and what she referred to as Caroline’s ‘relationship with the truth.’ Evidently, she’d caught her out in a number of lies.”

  “Was her job in jeopardy?”

  “I suppose it could be argued that having a liar working for one is disconcerting, so Clare may have been looking for a way to sack her, but she didn’t indicate that. Just that she wanted to talk about Caroline and her relationship with the truth as she’d told Clare some . . .” He smiled as he looked for the word he wanted. “What do children say? Whoppers?”

  “Beyond your marriage, you mean?”

  “It seems over time she gave Clare quite an earful about her entire life, but in the way of pathological liars, she began to contradict herself. Clare wanted to check with someone to learn if there was any truth in what Caroline was claiming.”

  “You could have lied to Clare as well,” Lynley pointed out.

  “Indeed I could have done. So I suggested she speak with Caroline’s mum and with other people—women in particular—who’ve had the experience of knowing her.”

  “But not with men?”

  Goldacre laughed ruefully. “Inspector, Caroline has always been perfectly capable of charming the trousers off any man. I can attest to that and I expect Alastair MacKerron can as well.”

  SHAFTESBURY

  DORSET

  “So he suggested that Clare arrange to speak with a woman called Mercedes Garza.” Lynley’s voice broke up for a moment. He was on his mobile, Barbara reckoned. He said, “Hang on, I’ve got to . . .” And then after a moment, “Sorry. I was wrestling with my car keys. Mercedes Garza is Caroline Goldacre’s mother. Have you any indication that Clare Abbott interviewed her?”

  MG, Barbara thought. The initials were there in Clare’s diary. She told him this.

  The front bell rang assertively, three times in quick succession. Barbara walked to the window and looked out on a rainy day. On the front step stood Caroline Goldacre.

  “She’s here,” she told Lynley.

  “Caroline Goldacre?”

  “Large as life with a cardboard box on her hip.”

  “Bringing you something of Clare Abbott’s?”

  “Haven’t a clue. What’re you onto next?”

  “Mercedes Garza.”

  “Anything from SO7 yet?”

  “Not a whisper.”

  Outside, Barbara saw that Caroline Goldacre had clocked her through the window. Her eyes narrowed and she gestured to the cardboard box. She rang the bell another time, more insistently, and she turned to the door as Winston opened it. Barbara listened to the ensuing conversation with one ear as Lynley spoke into her other ear.

  “’Fraid not, Missus Goldacre,” came from Winston.

  “Whyever not?” from Caroline Goldacre. “Look here, Sergeant . . . What was your name? This is ridiculous.”

  Her voice grew louder, and from the window Barbara saw her elbow her way into the house as Nkata said, “A police investigation means—”

  “Really, my personal effects have no bearing on a police investigation. Do step out of my way.”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Am I going to have to ring your . . . your superiors or whatever they are?”

  “ . . . about Lily Foster,” Lynley was saying.

  “Say what, sir?” Barbara asked him. “C’n you hang on? Something’s going on with Winnie and the Goldacre woman.”

  Mobile in hand, Barbara left Clare’s office and went out into the entry area of the house where Winston had managed to block Caroline Goldacre’s access. They were doing a bizarre dance together, consisting of you step one way and I follow your lead. Winnie obviously did not want to put his hands on the woman.

  Barbara said, “You can’t be here, Ms. Goldacre.”

  “I’ve come for my property,” Caroline said. “I have no intention of stealing one of Clare’s baubles if that’s what you’re worried about. This . . . This policeman here is preventing me from—”

  “Like he’s supposed to do,” Barbara said.

  “I want to speak with whoever is in charge,” Caroline said.

  Barbara extended her mobile to the woman. “Have a go, then. He’s called DI Lynley.”

  She turned on her heel and went back to the office. Lily Foster, she was thinking. Lynley said something about a Lily Foster. She looked at Clare’s diary and there it was, not long before Clare’s trip to Cambridge: LF and a date and a time.

  While Caroline was speaking to Lynley—who, Barbara could only pray, was using the Voice upon her—Barbara went back to the files displaying the Christian names and the surname initials of the two men. It was time to take a deeper look at these, and she opened the first of them to the questionnaire. She began to read as Caroline Goldacre’s arguing voice came from the other room.

  In short order, Barbara understood that Clare Abbott had indeed been speaking to married men about assignations they’d been having with women met over the Internet, and for their part, the men appeared to have been quite frank. The how, when, where, and why of it all revealed that for Bob T, it was “for laughs,” “for a bit of fun,” and “to get away from the ball and chain,” and for John S it was “because the wife won’t do what these birds’re willing to” and “because I’m not getting enough at home” and “because how many bloody headaches can one woman have in a month.” Both men indicated that having kids had put paid to romance, and for these reasons they had logged onto two different websites on which married individuals sought out o
ther married individuals for no-questions-asked sex in hotels, in the open air, in the back of cars, in the ladies’ toilet of a Dorchester pub, in a relative’s house, in a garden shed, in a holiday caravan, and—in one case—in a pew at St. Peter’s Church here in Shaftesbury.

  Caroline Goldacre came into the room. Stiffly, she handed the mobile to Barbara. She said, “I could have come earlier. I could have come directly Clare died and cleared out my belongings.”

  “And you didn’t because . . . ?” Barbara said.

  “I assumed that I would be needed to continue my work here till everything regarding Clare’s career and her death was handled.”

  Barbara nodded. “Good of you, that.” And then into the mobile, “Sir?”

  Lynley’s smooth baritone replied with, “I suggested a court order although I cautioned her that it’s not likely she’d be granted one in the midst of a police investigation inside the very premises she wishes to invade.”

  “Used that lingo, did we?” Barbara asked. “That lovely sentence structure of yours and all the rest?”

  “I do what I can. As to this Lily Foster . . .” He went on to explain that this individual had played a trick upon Caroline concerning a memorial service dedicated to her dead son William. “You might want to enquire about that,” he said.

  They rang off and Barbara turned to Caroline Goldacre, saying, “One Lily Foster, Ms. Goldacre. Can you enlighten me about her?”

  HESTON

  MIDDLESEX

  Mercedes Garza lived not far from the magnificent neoclassical mansion of Osterley Park which had once, during the time that Robert Adam transformed it from a redbrick Tudor dwelling of the sixteenth century to the grand palace it became, rested deep in the countryside. Now it lay in the flight path of Heathrow Airport, and around its spacious grounds the suburbs of London consumed the once open land. The Garza home was in one of these suburbs not far from the park. It sat across the street from a collection of allotments in a state of autumnal disrepair.

  From her home, Lynley had discovered, Mercedes Garza ran a quite successful housecleaning business. Calling it The Cleaning Queens, she had over the years built her clientele to such an extent that she now employed fifty-seven individuals to do the work.

  When Lynley arrived, he found Mercedes doing the monthly billing. With fifty-seven people working two or three to a house, some of them doing two houses a day . . . There was a lot of maths to contend with. But Mercedes appeared up to the challenge, he discovered, as she sat at her computer with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and a plume of its smoke snaking into the air.

  She put her work aside after a member of her cleaning team answered the door and led him into her sitting room/office. They had to dodge a bucket and mop that stood in the corridor leading to the back of the house. The same cleaner who’d come to the door was seeing to the place’s weekly scrubbing, it appeared.

  Mercedes slapped her hands on her desk and rose to greet him. Lynley knew from speaking to Francis that the woman was from Colombia and sixty-eight years old, but although he might have guessed the former—or at least somewhere in South or Central America—he wouldn’t have known the latter. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t look her age, but rather it was her overall devil-may-care appearance. She dressed in an aggressively ageless manner out of line with her years: An orange cowl-necked tunic hung over purple leggings, and on her feet were beautifully polished knee-high brown boots of the type worn by officers during World War I. Her spectacles’ frames were lime green, and the headscarf holding back black-coffee hair threaded with grey was bright yellow. Somehow, it all worked upon her. Lynley reckoned it was the woman’s confidence, which she appeared to have by the bucketful.

  She shook his hand firmly. She talked past the cigarette bobbing between her lips. “Francis, he rings me when you leave.” She spoke rough English with a heavy accent. “You don’t to think that means nothing. Just courtesy on his part. You want coffee? Tea? Water?” She smiled. “Or you like whiskey?” She blew cigarette smoke into the air. She stubbed the cigarette out in the perfect saucer of a Georgian pattern that Lynley recognised from his Cornwall home. He thought of his forebears spinning in their graves at such a misuse of fine china.

  He demurred on all offers of refreshment as Mercedes lit another cigarette. She told him to sit and he took a place in the bay window. Then, she did not sit herself, and he felt an immediate discomfort associated with his meticulous upbringing. When he started to rise, she said, “Stay. I sit all day and my piles act up. I give them a break.” She laughed at his expression. “Didn’t expect me to say that, sí? People need to be real. Ahora. What do I do for you, Inspector? Not wanting your house cleaned, I expect. Since you see Francis and now you come here, it’s probably about Carolina, I think. She’s the only thing we have in common, me and Francis.”

  “There’re problems between you?”

  “Me and Francis? Not a whit, as you Brits say.” She took off her glasses and went to the desk, where she excavated for a cleaning rag. She used this upon the lenses vigorously. “Verdad? I couldn’t work out why he married her. ’Course, when she tells me she is two months pregnant, it all gets clear.”

  “Did you speak to Clare Abbott about her by any chance?”

  Mercedes nodded. She flicked ash into the room’s small fireplace, took another deep drag, and spoke through the smoke. “We don’t seen each other in years, so at first I can’t understand why this woman wants to talk to me. We were . . . Carolina and me . . . oh, I forget the word sometimes . . . can you help? We are not talking to each other?”

  “You were estranged?” Lynley asked,

  “Yes, is it. We don’t see each other p’rhaps . . . ten years? No, more. Back then, I ask her . . . no, I tell her . . . I am at my limit with her. I have other children, see, and I ask her to stay away from all of us till she can control what she says.”

  “To the other children? About the other children?”

  Mercedes used one hand to massage the small of her back and then made an adjustment to her yellow headscarf. “I get tired of being accused of . . . how do you say this word? . . . mal-something. Bad behaviours, this is.”

  “Malefactions.”

  “These are acts of cruelty she says I have to done to her life. I bring her to London, you see, when she has two years and what she wants to believe is that back in Colombia she would be happy with my mother.” Mercedes chuckled past her cigarette. “My mother? She does a nice thing for Carolina one time. She gives her a kitten. And ’course, we can’t bring this animal to England when we come. The rabies, you know. And the aeroplane. But Carolina, she dwells on this and makes it something big in her mind. It’s all very stupid because—this I tell you in honesty—I would be happy to leave Carolina with my mother if it was possible. To be free and twenty-one years in London? How nice that would be, eh? But my mama tells me that Carolina is my ‘little consequence’ and daily I must be reminded of my sin.” Mercedes made an adjustment to an ornament on the fireplace mantel, a figurine of a woman in a bathing costume of the 1930s. There was a collection of them, all in different costumes and in various poses. She admired them for a moment. “Catholics,” she said, more to herself than to him. “Purgatory, hell, heaven, and so on. We live in the past. To stay in present, this is impossible. You are a Catholic, Inspector?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are lucky. Me, I still try to recover from being Catholic. My sins, you see.”

  “Having a child at nineteen? That was the sin?”

  “I was not married to the papa.” Mercedes seemed to gauge him for a reaction to this, but as women having children outside of marriage was the rule and not the exception these days, there was hardly a point to his having one. “This is a grave sin to my mother,” she said, “and I pay for it those first two years with Carolina at home in Bogotá. Then I come here and I work and I am not afraid of hard wo
rk, ever. I clean other people’s houses and because I have a head for business, I make a big success. Carolina has pretty dresses, she has a special toy now and then, she eats well, she sleeps in her own bedroom, she goes to school. This is not a bad life, I think.”

  “I take it she thought otherwise?”

  “I marry when she is sixteen, sí? This she doesn’t expect. I have three more children. This she also does not expect.” From her desk next to the computer she’d been working on when he’d entered the room, Mercedes fetched a framed photo. Twin boys, by the look of them, along with a girl. It was an older picture, the children in it long since grown. Mercedes proudly told him that one boy was a hedge fund manager, the other a solicitor, while the girl was a graduate student in nuclear physics. She was understandably delighted with their success. Carolina, she informed, was not.

  “And your husband?” he asked her.

  “A locksmith,” she told him. Like her, he had his own company. Like her, he’d begun with nothing. “Not even an education,” she said. “Neither of us. But we know how to work. I try to build this in Carolina . . . with determination you can achieve much, eh? But here, I fail.”

  Mercedes went on, unbidden, to confirm much of what Francis Goldacre had told Lynley about how he and Caroline Garza had met, about their marriage, about her disappointment in her husband’s choices regarding his career. She finished with, “She decides to stay at home and raise their boys—Guillermo and Carlos—and this should work, no? But Guillermo is born with this . . . this bad ear and Carolina makes so much of it.” Mercedes shook her head. “She is like . . . she swarms him. Like bees.”

  “Is this why Clare Abbott wanted to speak with you? Was it about William?” Lynley told her of the memorial that Clare had arranged for Caroline Goldacre’s son.