A Banquet of Consequences

by Elizabeth George

“And I’ve always longed to be a secret agent. Does it impress you?”

  “It does. I find I rather like you more or less . . . well . . . crumpled.”

  “As I was in Cornwall.”

  “But with rather less dirt and mud hanging on your person. How’s it all going?”

  He knew she didn’t mean his life and how it had altered since they’d met in Cornwall. He said, “I’m not sure. I feel a bit odd, delving into the lives of this particular group of people.”

  “Isn’t that part of the job?”

  “It is. But this time, it’s all rather sadder than usual: love, loss, confusion, misunderstanding.”

  She examined him in that way she had that told him she was following beneath the superficial meaning of what he’d said. “Do you think you’re getting to the bottom of everything?”

  “Truth to tell, I’m not at all certain.”

  “Ah. Mankind’s condition.” She extended Arlo’s lead to him, saying, “I’m finding I quite like having this little fellow round me. I’ve never had a dog, at least not as an adult, which I realise is quite a strange admission from a vet. They do so wriggle their way into one’s heart, don’t they?”

  “They do. Perhaps that’s why you’ve never had one.”

  She didn’t avoid his eyes when she replied. Instead she looked at him directly and said, “Yes. Perhaps. I do guard my heart.”

  “So I’ve noticed,” he said.

  They might have said more, but his mobile rang. When he saw that it was SO7, he told her that he had to take the call. She said on her part that she had to get back to work. She added, “Take care of our little friend, won’t you?” and he told her that he would do so.

  “This is Lynley,” he said into the phone once she’d kissed him lightly in farewell and turned to go on her way back to the zoo.

  At the other end, someone said, “We’ve finally got the fingerprints, Inspector. Sorry it took so bloody long.”

  CERNE ABBAS

  DORSET

  Upon Barbara’s return from her sojourn into the centre of town, she did not find it a shocking revelation to learn that Caro24K’s Just4Fun companions were reluctant to speak to anyone about their use of that website. As Winston told it over a tuna-and-sweetcorn sandwich at the dining room table—he knew his way round a jar of mayonnaise, Barbara thought as she tucked in—the blokes had concocted a variety of excuses: from a mother-in-law rushed to hospital with severe angina to “I don’t believe I have to talk to anyone about a perfectly legal arrangement between consenting adults.” However, when the full facts concerning the various methods of tracing the physical location of an Internet user were revealed to each of them, their cooperation had been garnered. The last thing any of them apparently wanted was to have New Scotland Yard showing up on their doorsteps to question them about their use of an Internet assignation site.

  Nkata hadn’t illuminated them with regard to the death of Clare Abbott. All in good time, he told Barbara. They had an appointment at the Royal Oak in Cerne Abbas to meet the lot of them round half past two.

  “Do these blokes know it’s a group meet?” Barbara asked the other DS.

  Winston shook his head. “Surprise,” he said. “It’s a good thing, innit?”

  When they’d consumed their sandwiches, they set off for Cerne Abbas, with Winston at the wheel of the Prius once he’d checked it over from bow to stern to quell whatever anxiety he was feeling over having allowed Barbara to drive it from Clare Abbott’s home to a car park in the centre of town. She waited for him patiently although she did allow herself to shoot him a look when he at last was willing to take them on their way. He shrugged and said, “Jus’ checkin, Barb,” to which she said, “Bloody hell. I’ll use Clare’s motor next time. I swear, Win, some people take less care of their children than you take of this thing.”

  She’d never been to Cerne Abbas just as, prior to Clare Abbott’s death, she’d never been to Shaftesbury. As the crow flew, it wasn’t an enormous distance, but as this was the countryside, there was no direct route. Winston’s chosen direction took them first towards Sherborne and then through the middle of Blackmore Vale, where the grassy covering atop the natural clay land created a pleasing green and rolling carpet that ultimately climbed to a limestone ridge bisecting the valley north to south. On the valley floor and lower hillsides, cows grazed in lush pastures defined by hedgerows while small farms were sheltered by whatever trees could find a foothold in soils that ran the gamut from unbreathable clay to soaking marsh.

  Cerne Abbas was a bit beyond Blackmore Vale, a village of ponds, rivulets, and antique houses that appeared to span more than four hundred years. It was a small enough place that time and the creation of the A352 just beyond its boundaries had not managed to spoil. The remains of an abbey graced it, as did a row of half-timbered houses whose narrow front doors, uneven rooflines, and sagging beams declared them to be the real thing and not some coy replica of buildings from a bygone age, complete with mod cons and Wi-Fi access. Across from them stood the village church and in front of this, the village stocks still occupied a position from which disgraced citizens might while away a few hours being humiliated for one infraction or another.

  The Royal Oak rested at the intersection of Abbey Street and Long Street, two of the very few lanes that defined the village. It was a steeply gabled structure with a single moss-dappled picnic table before its front door and a sign above its slate-roofed porch declaring the building’s genesis as 1540. Vines covered it, newly brilliant with rain-washed autumn hues, and as Barbara and Winston Nkata approached the place, the sun appeared for the first time that day, shining its particular beams on the pub’s freshly created sign: a nobleman bearing only a slight resemblance to Charles II, his position of hiding in the eponymous tree, doing what it could to confirm his identity.

  Nkata had to duck to get in the door of the pub, and once inside Barbara saw that two men stood chatting at the bar, one with a half pint of Guinness and the other with a virtuous Coke in which two pieces of ice and a slice of lemon floated. Otherwise, aside from the barman, the place was empty.

  In the way of all pub goers, both the barman and the drinkers turned for a look as Barbara and Nkata entered. If these were the blokes who’d used the Just4Fun site, Barbara reckoned, they did not twig instantly that she and Winston were the expected rozzers.

  She took out her warrant card. Winston did likewise. That was all it took. One of the men said, “So I’m here, all right? I’ll give you ten minutes,” as the other said, “You didn’t say there’d be two of you,” at which point they looked at each other and said, “You as well?” simultaneously.

  The barman looked immediately interested. He was a young individual of rather ovine appearance suggestive of too much inbreeding among people with excessively curly hair and faces of a triangular shape in which the apex was upended to form a chin. Business was slow at this hour and his curiosity was piqued. It grew even more so when the door opened another time and a fifth stranger to Cerne Abbas entered and clocked the others who were—at Nkata’s suggestion—removing themselves to a table as far as possible from the bar.

  Introductions followed, with the interviewees insisting upon Christian names and surname initials only. Barbara waited for Nkata to tell them that it didn’t matter, his expertise with the Internet being what it was, but he didn’t bother. He shrugged and the men identified themselves as Dan V, Bob T, and Al C.

  Bob T spoke first once the social niceties were gone through. He wanted assurance that this meeting was private, that no record was going to be made of it, that whatever information he provided was going to be considered background only, and that when he left, he would so in advance of the others. Barbara wondered why he reckoned he had any clout when it came to negotiating terms with the police. She was about to tell him this when Nkata said that, as far as he was concerned, what they needed to know was limited at th
e moment to an identification of the woman they’d met for sex after connecting with her on the Internet.

  Bob T surprised them then. He said, “I didn’t have sex with her,” to which one of the other men guffawed as the third rolled his eyes. Thus Bob T declared himself ready to tell all in order, it seemed, to prove his chastity, and he launched into the tale of his acquaintance with “this bloody mad women’s libber, she was” who showed up at an establishment called the Wookey Hole Motel in Somerset.

  Barbara recognised the name from Clare’s diary. One of the two other men snickered at it, but when Bob T fired a look at him, the man produced a clearly spurious sneeze and said, “Sorry. Allergies, mate.”

  Winston provided a photograph of Clare Abbott at this point, taking out a publicity shot that he’d apparently unearthed from the writer’s study. Bob T gave it a glance and said, “That’s the slag, all right, and not too sodding glad I was when it turned out she wanted to interview me and nothing else. Case of thank God for small favours cos I had no clue how I was going to get it up for her once I had a look at her face. You say she’s dead?” he then asked Winston.

  “Said it was a murder enquiry is all,” Nkata told him pleasantly.

  “Well, who else would be dead if not her?” Bob T asked. “Hell, if she was tricking men into meeting her and they thought it was for a good shag and she turned up with her forms and her pens . . . She was taking her life in her hands, you ask me. When she got there, she told me it was about a book she was writing and I bloody well told her I didn’t want to be in a book. I just wanted to get it off because the wife . . . Christ, women, you know? Hot and cold and on and off they are. Makes me want to become a Catholic priest.”

  “Altar boys being what they are,” Barbara noted.

  “Hey, I don’t do—”

  “What about you?” Nkata said to the other men. “This the woman?” And when they both nodded, “Sex or interview?”

  They looked at each other as if trying to decide upon truth or falsehood and which of these choices would make them look less like louts. Dan V finally took the plunge with, “Sex,” and Al C nodded. “Same,” he said.

  “So what was different with you?” Barbara asked. “Did she not have her interview forms with her? Or did something happen?”

  “Like what?” Dan V asked.

  “Like force,” Barbara said. “That comes to mind.”

  Dan V said hotly, “Are you accusing me of . . . Let me tell you, that’s bloody well not on. No one had to force anyone to do anything, and I’ve never forced a woman in m’life.”

  “Goes as well for me,” said Al C. “She might’ve had forms or whatnot with her, but I never seen them, did I. We met for a drink—”

  “Where was this?” Barbara asked him as Winston took out his leather notebook and mechanical pencil to memorialise the details.

  “Over Bournemouth. At Travelodge.”

  “What, she wore a bag on her head?” Bob T asked. Dan V guffawed.

  “Didn’t need to,” Al C said frankly. “My thing is melted chocolate and women’s private parts and you c’n figure out the rest on your own. All’s I’ll say is I keep the chocolate warm. She liked what I was giving her just fine. She was the one—not me, mind you—who wanted a few more goes after the first one. So we met—me and her—maybe five times? I dunno for sure. Then that was enough for us both and off we went to find someone new, no apologies and no regrets. I mean, that’s what it’s about, eh? Someone new.”

  Barbara glanced at Winston who was managing to keep his face impassive although God only knew what he was thinking. Despite his past street-gang affiliation, she knew he was a virtual innocent when it came to some of the seamier ways of the world. She said to Dan V, “Anything you want to add about your own proclivities?”

  “Say what?” he said.

  “The where, the when, and the how,” she clarified.

  “Best Western,” he said. “Ilminster.”

  “You lot are real romantics, eh?” Barbara commented. “Travelodge, Best Western. I have to wonder where things go from here.”

  “’S not about romance, is it,” Dan V protested. “’S about sex. No questions and no expectations. Condoms required. We have a few drinks and we decide. It’s yes or no, split the cost of the room, have some fun, and off you go. Easy as anything since everyone wants it or they don’t use the website in the first place.” He shrugged. He glanced at the other two men. They glanced back. Everyone looked away.

  There was a silence. In it Barbara wondered what had happened to the fourth bloke who was meant to show up. They’d have to make an effort to track him down at this point, and she was considering how much a waste of time the entire line of enquiry was turning out to be—aside from its marginally dispiriting amusement value—when Dan V said to Al C, “She get back to you, then?” in a casual tone but with an expression on his face that belied his indifference.

  Barbara felt the hair stir on the back of her neck. Winston, she saw, looked up from his note-taking. She waited to see how Al C would reply and for a moment he didn’t, although he moved in his chair and glanced towards the window before looking back at Dan V and giving a single head jerk as a nod.

  “What’s this, then?” Barbara asked them.

  Bob T was the one to answer. He said to the other two men, “She went after you, didn’t she? She tried it with me: ‘I expect you’d like it if the wife and kiddies didn’t know what you were up to, eh?’ Email. ’Bout two weeks after I met the slag.”

  Winston and Barbara exchanged a look. Winston said, “What’d she want, then? Money?”

  “Aye.” Dan V was the one to answer. Al C confirmed with a nod and then a headshake of what seemed to be disgust: directed at himself, the woman, or the entire idea of meeting for anonymous sex and expecting no fallout? It was difficult to tell.

  “Blackmail,” Barbara added. “So how’d you play it?”

  Bob T said, “I told her I didn’t bloody care what the wife knew about me giving an interview to a women’s libber. I reckoned she’d like it just fine and I told the bloody cow as much. As f’r the kids, I got twins in nappies and I don’t expect they’d care what their dad was up to.”

  “And you?” Barbara said to Dan V and Al C.

  Dan V, it turned out, had paid. The other two men groaned when he admitted to this. He explained that he had a lot to lose in a divorce if the wife had decided to go that way upon a revelation of his extracurricular activities with willing women. “Eight hundred quid this was,” he said.

  “Oh, mate.” Al C groaned sympathetically while Bob T said, “Dead mad, you are.”

  “How’d it go and where’d it go?” Barbara asked, hoping for a bank transfer or the like but fairly sure she wasn’t going to get one.

  “Cash,” he said.

  “Posted or dropped somewhere?”

  “Posted. An address in Shaftesbury.”

  “D’you happen to remember it?”

  “Just the street, Bimport, this was. I went up and had a drive by in the afters. Fancy big stone house. Nice garden out front. She wasn’t hurting for it.”

  “What about you?” Barbara asked Al C. “Cash as well?”

  “Didn’t pay, did I,” Al C said. “That message she sent? The wouldn’t-wifey-like-to-know? Didn’t sound like the same woman wrote it, you ask me. I teach composition, see. English and the like at the local comprehensive and I’m not saying where so don’t even ask. Kids. You know what they’re like when it comes to writing. Plagiarists one and all. There’s a site you c’n use on the web to work out whether the kids’ve done their own writing or ‘borrowed’ someone else’s. I ran all the emails came from Caro24K through it. Programme said the last one, the one asking for eight hundred quid . . . ? Wasn’t from her. You ask me, someone was on to what this woman”—with a nod at Clare’s picture which lay on the table looking up at them
all—“was doing on the website. Someone either knew her passwords—”

  “Or had access to the same computer Clare Abbott had used, where her passwords were all stored in memory,” Barbara finished. “Did you let Clare know?”

  “Rang her mobile and left a message,” he said.

  “Did she ring you back? Ask any questions? Get in touch in any way?”

  He shook his head. They all sat there for an additional thirty seconds, during which time an elderly couple and their three West Highland terriers came into the pub. They were followed in a moment by a family of four, who joined them at the bar where a noisy examination of the menu began, accompanied by “Granny, I want the steak pie!” and “Fish fingers for you and no argument” from Dad and “I’m paying, Ian,” from Granddad, “so let the boy have what he wants.”

  That was it in a nutshell, Barbara thought wryly as the family continued their discussion over food. Wasn’t it always down to a case of letting the boy have what he wants.

  FULHAM

  LONDON

  Rory Statham knew she was nearly back to normal when the expression on her mother’s face caused her to smile. She was being quite heroic, her mum, having brought from Rory’s flat a recording of a piece of music she’d been composing in her free time for the last several months. Rory had very little occasion to use her Cambridge first in geopolitics in the course of her work as a feminist nonfiction editor. But her other first in music theory she still dabbled with in her limited free time. She’d done so from the first when she’d graduated. She’d let it go for many of the years with Fiona. But she’d ultimately returned to composing purely for her own enjoyment. And if she had nothing published, professionally recorded, or produced for the public by one or another of London’s orchestras, it was no matter. She enjoyed the process.

  “My,” her mum said with her customary gracious smile when Rory showed mercy at the end of the first movement by switching the music off. “That’s all quite . . . different, isn’t it?”

  Rory could tell she meant that the composition sounded like a tailback on the Hammersmith Flyover at rush hour, with countless taxis heading to Heathrow, carrying anxiety-ridden passengers in fear of missing their flights. There was an accident up ahead. The fire brigade was involved as were two ambulances. Lorries were jockeying with buses and SUVs. Nerves were unstrung. Tempers were flaring. Rory wanted to tell her mother that she was completely spot-on in her understanding of the piece.