A Banquet of Consequences

by Elizabeth George

  Lynley believed the man. If he’d travelled anywhere out of the country of his present residence, Sheridan was correct in assuming that there would be records aplenty to show it.

  He finished his phone call. It was, he decided, simply something that had needed crossing off his list. Another motive to have attempted to kill Caroline Goldacre, to be sure, but it was a nearly impossible feat for Adam Sheridan.

  That was just the point, Lynley thought. The near impossibility of anyone’s being able to manage what had been managed to get the doctored toothpaste into the woman’s possession. There were motives aplenty. Turn over a stone and another one popped up. But with so few people with both access and opportunity . . . Were they—the police—being played for fools by Caroline Goldacre? For truly, what better way to eliminate someone was there than to do it in such a manner that the killer herself looked like the intended victim? But then they were back to the question of why Caroline might have wanted to kill Clare Abbott. Because she’d discovered that Clare had interviewed both her mother and her former husband? Because Clare had used a form of her name when meeting married men for sex? Where in that was the desperation that drove one person to kill another?

  His mobile rang as he was pondering all this. He saw it was Havers. He took the call. She sounded lit up with excitement when she said his name. Then, “Everything was in the boot of her car. In Clare’s car, Inspector” told him what her excitement was all about.

  FULHAM

  LONDON

  Rory had just bade farewell to her sister Heather and to her own assistant from the publishing house when DI Lynley arrived. Her assistant had come bearing flowers, cards, a stuffed animal, and well-wishes from everyone, beginning with the managing director and ending with the interns who sorted the post. Her sister had come bearing fresh pajamas, shampoo, and lotions. Together, the two women had got Rory out of bed for the first time and over to the window to look out at a blustery autumn day. And now she was longing to wash her hair and to have a shower, which she assumed was a good indication that she was fully mended, with no touch-and-go about it any longer. She also wanted Arlo, and she asked the inspector about him straightaway.

  Lynley declared Arlo well and awaiting her. He reported the dog’s adventures at London Zoo, and he pulled a chair up next to her bed, crossed one well-trousered leg over the other. He spoke frankly, all the time with his gaze fastened on her face in a manner that told her he would be reading her every reaction. This belied the friendliness of his tone and put her on her guard at once.

  He began by telling her that one of the two detective sergeants he’d sent to Shaftesbury had discovered a mass of data in the boot of Clare’s car. It had been hidden in the well for the spare tyre, he explained, and locked carefully into a strongbox to protect it. The box’s contents turned out to be transcripts of interviews with individuals associated with Caroline Goldacre as well as several hundred emails to Clare from the woman herself and a memory stick that suggested additional material might be contained upon it.

  “I’m hoping that, as her editor, you might make something of all this,” he said.

  DI Lynley waited for her response and asked no questions as Rory tried to take in the information he’d given her. She told him that she wasn’t sure what any of it meant. Nor could she claim, she said, that what had been found in the boot of Clare’s car had anything to do with the world of publishing. Clare had been hard at work on a book about adultery. So this business of transcripts and emails from Caroline Goldacre . . . ? Rory didn’t know what to tell him.

  “We’ve not come across a book on adultery,” Lynley told her. “So I’m wondering . . . Could this material from Caroline and about Caroline comprise data for a different book or another book Clare wanted to write? Perhaps a future book?”

  “Emails? If she was planning to develop a book from emails, I couldn’t guess what it was, Inspector.”

  Lynley appeared to think about this before going on. He sounded reluctant when next he spoke, but Rory wasn’t sure if his reluctance was real or manufactured. She reminded herself that, despite his pleasant manners, he was still a cop. He said, “There’s something else,” and he told her it had also come out that Clare had made contact with a number of men who looked for sex online.

  “That would be for the follow-up to the Darcy book,” Rory reminded him. “Adultery. She was interviewing the men.”

  “I understand that was her intention,” Lynley said. “But upon questioning them, we’ve learned that Clare had been meeting these men for more than interviews.”

  Rory looked at him in silence as the implication became clear. She wondered if she could somehow avoid it, but she knew at heart that she couldn’t. She said, “You’re saying that Clare was . . . what? Sexual? With these men?”

  “It does appear that she was. Two of them she interviewed. But then even with one of those two and then with the others—”

  “I see.” Rory smoothed her hand along the rumpled hospital sheets upon her bed. “Caroline kept claiming that there was no book, that there is no book, that Clare wasn’t writing a thing. I dare say . . .” She chuckled weakly. “I do hate to think she was right, Inspector.”

  “She may not have been. Clare’s ‘research’ may merely have gone too far. There might well be a book that we’ve not yet uncovered.”

  “How can you suggest that, really?” Rory found that the question—lightly spoken—worked a fist tightly round her heart.

  Lynley’s face, she realised, was far too compassionate for a policeman. They were never compassionate on television dramas. They hadn’t the time, and they’d seen far too much anyway. He said, “Perhaps getting these chaps to speak to her honestly was more difficult than Clare thought it would be, since she was apparently corralling them in the first place by making it seem that she was interested in sex. But then, once she met them . . . It could be the temptation was too much for her. Sex with no commitment and no questions asked, without even a surname attached to the partner? For some people, that would be a powerful draw.”

  “For you?” she asked him.

  “I’m far too romantic for my own good,” he said with a shrug. Then he added, “According to my sergeant, Caroline Goldacre could easily have worked out that Clare was meeting these men. She could easily have got access to her email. And it seems Clare was using a version of Caroline’s name as a sort of nomme de coucher: Caro24K in email, then Caro in person.” He paused for a moment as if to let her digest this, then added, “And Caroline’s done a bit of blackmail in her time, we’ve discovered.”

  “Has she? I’m not surprised.”

  “Why?”

  “Just a feeling about her. Honestly? I don’t like her much.”

  “Here’s what I’m wondering, Ms. Statham. If Caroline knew about these men—as it could be she did—and if she attempted to blackmail them, could she also have been blackmailing Clare? Not for money but perhaps for something else?”

  “What else, for heaven’s sake?”

  “We’ve no clear idea yet. But as you knew Clare Abbott . . .” His pause suggested that Rory think about the matter, so think she did.

  “It would certainly explain why Clare kept her on despite her being unpleasant at times and not a particularly talented employee,” Rory said. “I did ask Clare about that. Repeatedly.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “Everything from ‘she needs the work’ to ‘she’s not a bad sort when you get to know her.’ Frankly, I never believed her. I just felt something was wrong, something was going on, but I never knew what. Now I do, I suppose.”

  “If the case is that Caroline was blackmailing her with regard to these Internet men in order to keep her job, might Clare on her part have been gathering information to prevent Caroline from revealing what she knew? In the event, let’s suppose, that Clare did sack her?”

  “Possibly. But what
was Caroline supposed to do with her information about Clare and these men, such as it was?”

  Lynley seemed to think about this for a moment before he said, “Let’s consider the country’s foremost feminist arranging online to meet married men for anonymous sex. If that got out, wouldn’t it have been a rather serious blow to her reputation? The tabloids alone would have had a field day. And Caroline certainly had enough information to interest a tabloid.”

  “God, yes.” Rory recognised how weary she sounded. “Yes. God, yes. And with Clare under contract for the adultery book, with a deadline for it looming . . . No wonder you can’t find evidence of a book being written. How could anyone write a single word with that hanging over her head? God. How I bloody wish that she’d just told me what Caroline was up to. Certainly, we could have done something.”

  “Perhaps Clare thought she couldn’t tell you, for some reason,” Lynley said.

  Rory kept her eyes deliberately on his. She waited for him to ask why Clare hadn’t revealed what she’d been going through. Rory was, after all, not only her editor but also her longtime friend. So what was it that had kept Clare from speaking? Concentrating on coming up with an answer for these two unasked questions, Rory wasn’t prepared for what the inspector said to her next.

  “We had to go through your flat once you were poisoned, Ms. Statham. The source of the poison was crucial, as was a motive for poisoning you. The forensic team took everything that could have contained the poison. The detectives took everything that could have pointed to a motive.”

  Rory felt her heart beating more rapidly than before. The pulse of it was in her fingertips. “I’m not sure where you’re heading.”

  “I’ve read Clare’s letters to you. Forgive me, but it’s part of my job. So is evaluating the evidence to reach a conclusion about murder, suicide, or accidental poisoning.”

  Rory said nothing. But her mind went back over the letters from Clare, and she wondered whether hers to Clare were among Clare’s belongings and perhaps hidden away. She would have liked to think that this was the case, but she was forced to look squarely at the facts. If Clare had binned them—God, so pathetically fraught with love the later ones had been—then she herself had more information than she really wanted and certainly more than she could bear to face just now.

  Lynley said, “I suspect you were in love with her.”

  Rory nodded. If he’d read Clare’s letters, he knew the truth of it, so what did it really matter?

  “But on her part . . . ?”

  “She didn’t lead me on, Inspector. I wouldn’t have you think she ever led me on because she wasn’t like that.”

  “Were you lovers at some point?”

  “Briefly. While I stayed with her. After Fiona . . . You know about Fiona, of course.” And when Lynley nodded, as she’d reckoned he would do since he was, after all, a detective, “Clare eventually told me she just wasn’t easy with sex with a woman. I told her I could make her easy. I could see who she really was, I said, and everything she wrote and believed pointed to who she really was. She said that I was trying to replace Fiona, that I would see it eventually and anyway, this thing about sex . . . She said none of it actually interested her. Women and women, men and men, men and women. She said she’d never liked sex much—the closeness, the intimacy, the flesh-on-flesh of it. She said it was good at first but soon enough she didn’t want any of it. ‘I just like to get on with things’ was how she put it, ‘and sex bloody well gets in the way.’” Rory cleared her throat, which was close to shutting off her windpipe. She added, “Of course, I see now that she was merely trying to let me down gently. She didn’t want to wound me after what I’d been through when Fiona died.”

  Lynley took this in, and once again she was forced to meet his deeply dark eyes. He gave the impression that he knew exactly what she was talking about: love and desire and disappointment and loss and the agonising pain of being human. But how could he? For unless one experienced the magnitude of love at its fullest, with all its blessings and all its curses and its untimely end, how could anyone really know what it was like to live with its loss?

  He said, “Actually, her involvement with these Internet men rather suggests she was telling the truth. If you think about it, with these encounters she’d have had an outlet for whatever sexual needs she had. They’d be taken care of in some hotel, with no commitment, no requirements, no questions, and no future. It probably made perfect sense to her.”

  Rory nodded although she felt so heavy with the knowledge he’d given her that all she wanted to do was to curl on her side and sleep for days. She said, “And Caroline knew all of this. The Internet business. The men Clare arranged to meet.”

  “She declares not, but that doesn’t seem likely.”

  “And you agree that Caroline was probably using all this to keep her job?”

  “That part’s trickier, isn’t it? We just don’t know. But the fact that Clare was doing some sort of investigating of Caroline suggests things were becoming insupportable for her. So what we need to discover now is whether there’s something Clare uncovered that made things just as insupportable for Caroline.”

  BELSIZE PARK

  LONDON

  Sitting in his car a short distance from Daidre’s flat, Lynley suddenly felt the loss of Helen more acutely than he had in weeks. He certainly hadn’t expected this to be the result of his conversation with Rory Statham. Blackmail, Internet sex, delving into the private life of one’s employer . . . Certainly none of this could have triggered the overwhelming ache within him, having the absence of his wife as its throbbing centre. So he knew that it was something more, and he came up with it when he considered the relationship between Rory Statham and Clare Abbott. At its heart had been what Rory had wanted and what Rory had been denied.

  He himself had had it all with Helen: the connection, the commitment, the future unfolding. It had been ripped from him in an instant that he could not have anticipated no matter how he’d looked into the years that had lain ahead of them. He wanted it all back. He was, he admitted, quite terribly desperate to have it all back. Now. Today. This night. Whatever. He couldn’t keep going, he thought, if he didn’t know it was out there somehow, a goal he was within yards of reaching.

  He sighed. He looked up the street to the conversion in which Daidre lived. He examined his brief history with her in an attempt to see whether in reality all he was doing was running from the void. He simply didn’t know. He couldn’t decide. He felt at once immobilised and frantic for action, as if everything in what comprised his life had to be determined in the next quarter hour.

  He understood exactly why he wanted to see Daidre: to move her forward, to move them forward. What he didn’t know was what was compelling him to this action. Was it her obvious reluctance to dip into his world more deeply than she had acquiesced to so far? Or was it a real connection he felt to her, a sense that combined profound belonging and emancipated homecoming that, without Helen, he now shared with no one else?

  He’d grown up knowing that he owed a great deal to more than 250 years of his family’s history on a great estate in Cornwall. He’d grown up knowing that part of what he was intended to do as the eldest son was to produce the child who would inherit this land and pass it along to another child. He’d managed a life away from that responsibility for a good many years, but there was a limit to how long he could stretch that time before the demands of his birth and his position told him it was necessary to get on with things as they’d been got on with for generations. He asked himself how much that knowledge also influenced his behaviour. He had no answer to that any more than he had an answer to what he was doing at this moment in Belsize Park asking himself questions in the first place when any other man would have bounded up the steps, banged on Daidre’s door, and taken her to bed without a second thought. Or taken her to camp bed, he thought wryly. She was being rather clever about not ha
ving a real bed.

  He rather hated himself for being so caught up in his thoughts. It was owing to his conversation with Rory, he reckoned, and watching the dawning understanding break over her face as she came to terms with who the woman she loved might actually have been. It was also owing to his exhaustion, though. He ought to go home, he told himself. If nothing else, he could manage a good night’s sleep.

  But he wanted none of that. He wanted to see Daidre. Even if he could not explain why he wanted to see her, he wanted to see her.

  He got out of the Healey Elliott. Climbing the short flight of stairs to her front door, he was still telling himself that he could turn round, make the drive down to Belgravia, unlock his front door, go through the day’s post, and take himself to bed, with or without a meal because he still had not had his dinner. Ringing the buzzer to her flat, he continued to question himself about the rightness of what he was doing with Daidre. But when he heard her voice—a simple “Yes? Who is it?”—nothing of what he’d been considering seemed to matter.

  He said, “I’ve sworn to Rory Statham that I’d check on Arlo. Is he in?”

  “He is. Would you like to see him or would speaking to him be enough?”

  “Seeing him is preferable.”

  She released the lock. When he went inside, she’d already opened her door and she stood with Arlo at her feet, his tail happily flicking the air. Woman and dog were backlit by a floor lamp in the sitting room. Its shade had been removed so that stark shadows were cast upon the walls, and the colour of the walls themselves was in the process of being altered, with Daidre wielding a roller on which a soft grey paint dripped onto one of several dust sheets spread across the floor.

  She was wearing what looked like a man’s secondhand boilersuit. The name Jackson was embroidered across the left breast of it, and the various colours that speckled it at once brought Pollock to mind. Arlo wore some of the paint himself, Lynley saw. One of his eyebrows was grey and it appeared that his left front paw had done some exploration in the tray that held Daidre’s paint.