A Banquet of Consequences

by Elizabeth George

  “She must’ve found it.”

  “So she had to die before she let loose with what it was.”

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  Lynley didn’t allow himself to feel irritated at Isabelle’s requiring a daily report from him. He’d gone round her in acquiring this case for Barbara to work upon, and had he been in the superintendent’s position, he would have probably been as outraged as Isabelle herself had been. So rather than exacerbate matters by sending her the previous day’s details by impersonal email—which he would have frankly preferred as a time-saving manoeuvre—he went to her office. He reported what there was to report, making a point of going on at some length about the carefully hidden set of documents that DS Havers had managed to unearth, which were, even as he spoke, being carefully assessed by the sergeant herself and DS Nkata in Dorset.

  Isabelle asked him what Winston Nkata had reported to him about Sergeant Havers’ behaviour in Shaftesbury. This surprised him. He said to her, “I don’t make that requirement of any officer, guv. If Barbara goes wrong, we’ll know of it eventually.”

  “It’s the eventually that I worry about” was her reply. “Do get on with it, then. We’ll speak tomorrow.”

  The abrupt dismissal told him she had things on her mind. He wanted to ask her what they were—pressure from above as to how she was using her manpower was always an issue—but he let the matter go. He had things on his mind as well, although very few of them had to do with the case in hand.

  He hadn’t parted from Daidre as he would have liked on the night before. He’d found, for once, that a sleeping bag on the floor of her bedroom—there was hardly room for both of them on the camp bed and it was far too unstable anyway—had lacked both physical comfort and romantic appeal. So afterwards, lying side by side with a thin blanket of questionable provenance thrown over their lightly perspiring bodies, he’d asked a question he knew she wouldn’t like. When, he wondered, was she going to get round to completing the bedroom?

  She chose to misunderstand him, which should have told him at once that this was territory best avoided. The flat had two bedrooms—this one and a very small one that she intended for a home office—and she spoke about having to make some sort of decision about keeping or removing a plate rail that indicated its long-ago use as a dining room. Thus he knew she was avoiding the real issue: this bedroom in which they were forced to use the floor for their lovemaking if they didn’t wish to engage in a knee trembler.

  Because he was tired, he said, “Daidre, you know which bedroom I’m talking about.”

  She rose on one elbow. Her glasses were a few feet from where they lay, and she reached for them and put them on, the better to see him clearly. She said, “I suppose I do.”

  He could tell from her voice that she was tired as well. More reason for postponing their conversation. But he didn’t want to and whether this was selfish of him or not, he found that he didn’t at the moment care. He said, “Should we talk about why you’re avoiding it? I ask because it seems logical to me that one would have provided adequate sleeping arrangements first when taking on a project of this size. Sleeping and bathing. The rest can wait.”

  “I hadn’t thought much about it.” She rose to a sitting position, her arms around her legs and her cheek resting upon her knees. There was virtually no light in the room due to the window that had been painted an unappealing shade of blue by some previous owner without the means to purchase curtains for the place. Thus he could barely see her, which he didn’t like. He wanted to read her face. She said, “What I have at the moment is adequate and it seemed to me that the larger question is—”

  “One of avoidance,” he finished for her.

  There was a silence. In it, they both could hear Arlo lightly snoring from the next room. Dimly in the distance, too, the sound of a bus passing along Haverstock Hill came through the single pane of glass. She said, “What do you think I’m avoiding, exactly?”

  “I think you’re avoiding me.”

  “Does the last hour look like I’m avoiding you, Tommy?”

  He touched her bare back. Her skin was cool and he wanted to put the blanket round her shoulders but he stopped himself. The gesture would be too fond, and he didn’t want fondness at the moment. He said, “On the surface, no. But there’s a sort of . . . I don’t know what to call it . . . an intimacy, I suppose, that you find frightening, perhaps? Not physical intimacy, but the other. Something deeper that can exist between a man and a woman. And I think it’s represented by this bedroom.”

  She was silent and he knew that she was pondering this, for that was exactly who she was and why he had been drawn to her from the first, even when he’d met her in Cornwall as broken as he had been at the time. She said, “I think it’s the guise of permanency that I’m avoiding.”

  “Nothing is permanent, Daidre.”

  “I know that. I did say guise. And then, of course, there’s the rest of it. Which is always there and always will be.”

  At this, he lifted himself to a sitting position as well. He was suddenly aware of feeling naked, which was so much different than merely being naked. He reached for his shirt. He began to put it on. Oddly, it was a bit of a struggle and he put this down to the lack of lighting. He said, “Christ, Daidre. You can’t be thinking of . . . what shall I call it? An antiquated social gulf between us? We’re not living in the nineteenth century.”

  She moved her head in a way that told him she would have cocked it had she not still been resting it upon her upraised knees. She said, “As it happens, I’m not thinking of that, the social thing. I’m thinking of the growing up thing and how that ‘thing’ moulds us from infancy to be who we are—standing here . . . or rather sitting here—as adults. We think we leave the past behind us, but it follows us round like a hungry dog.”

  “So it is the social gulf thing,” he said, “at the bottom of it all.”

  At this, she rose. In the corner of the room she had a chest of drawers and across this lay her dressing gown, which she donned. It was—like everything about her—practical, a serviceable garment of toweling material completely unlike something Helen would have worn. She said to him, “I think sometimes that you’ll never come close to understanding me.”

  “That’s unfair,” he said. For he believed he did know the nature of her struggle and what forces within her held the world at bay. Taken away at thirteen years of age from the ramshackle caravan in which she lived with her parents with her teeth loose and her hair falling out, she’d not even had the culture and traditions of a travelling community to provide her with a handhold in a world she had previously never been a part of. Rather, her father had been a solitary tin streamer, and the decrepit caravan the family called home had been positioned in various locations near riverbeds and creeks throughout Cornwall while he plied his marginal trade and his children—there were three—went largely ignored. They’d lacked the essentials—decent food, shelter, and clothing—but they’d also lacked the intangibles that form an infant into a child and a child into an adolescent becoming ready to step well rounded into the world. Her adoptive family had been loving, but in Daidre’s case the die had been cast and it was against the long-ago throw of it that she continued to struggle. Lynley understood this intellectually. It was emotionally that he had difficulty with it.

  He, too, rose. He began putting on the rest of his clothing. He said, “No one can dive back into the past and make things different. That’s stating the obvious, I know. But my point is that to allow the past to become a rampart against the future—”

  “That’s not what I’m doing,” she interrupted. “It’s not a case of doing at all. It’s a case of being. Tommy, it’s who I am. And there is a gulf. And it isn’t social. But it’s so deeply ingrained in each of us that there may well be no way to breach it.”

  “I don’t want to think that.” He’d been holding his shoes. He set the
m on the floor.

  “I know,” she said. “I think that’s why you keep coming round.”

  “You could stop me. A word from you would do it. Well, a sentence, rather. I wouldn’t like it. I’d feel it deeply. But a single sentence could settle matters between us.”

  She put her hands on the chest of drawers, as if she wished to keep herself across the room from him when her inclination was to come to him as he wished her to do, to stand before him so that he could do what he also wished, which was to take her into his arms. She said, “I’ve known that for a few months now. But the truth is, I’ve not been able to say it, that sentence.”

  “I am in love with you, Daidre. You do know that,” he told her.

  “Oh, I wish you weren’t. Or at least that you hadn’t said. You’re still much too vulnerable after Helen and—”

  “That’s not the case.”

  She rubbed her eyebrows. She pushed her glasses into a better position. She pressed her lips together and he could hear her swallow. In this as well she was so unlike Helen. As guarded as she was, there were moments when Daidre let her feelings escape, and this was one of them. She said, “There’s such equanimity in stasis, Tommy,” and he could tell from her voice that a tightness had come into her throat. It was one that he recognised, for he felt it as well, if for an entirely different reason.

  “For you, perhaps,” he said in answer. “But not for me.”

  Despite their conversation, they had not parted badly. At her door, they’d stepped easily into each other’s arms and wished each other a good night’s sleep. But he was still thinking of what had passed between them when he returned to his desk after his conversation with Isabelle. And when his phone rang, he did hope it was Daidre, although the words, “We’ve worked it out, sir. We’ve found the book. She was writing it; Caroline was trying to put a screw in it. Clare was looking for something to free herself of Caroline, and she found it” told him otherwise.

  Havers went on, words tumbling one over the other as she sought to explain what she and Nkata had discovered, how they had interpreted it, and what it all had to mean about the death of Clare Abbott. Their conclusions were remarkably similar to those he himself had reached with Rory Statham during their conversation on the previous day. And she had something powerful with which to back them up: the book on adultery, kept only on a memory stick and nowhere else, carefully hidden from Caroline Goldacre.

  Still, Lynley said at the end of Havers’ recitation, “But why give the Goldacre woman such moral support all along? If, as you said, Clare was trying to find something compelling to hold over her head . . .”

  “She wouldn’t want her to know that till she had it, sir. She had to hide from her that she was delving into her life at the same time she had to make it look like she was cooperating with everything Caroline wanted. If Caroline dropped a few hints about needing fifty quid or—say—wanting a nice bloody memorial for her son, Clare knew better than to ignore them. Caroline had complete control over Clare’s life once she knew about the Just4Fun blokes. Clare had to get that control back somehow. She found a way and it was huge and, because of that, she had to die. Believe me, it’s the only explanation for Clare encouraging the crazy-arse messages she was getting from the woman on her email practically every day. She needed some significant goods on her and she was trying to get them any way she could.”

  “And the goods are . . . ?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Lynley blew out a frustrated breath. “Christ, Barbara. Then where are we? Precisely nowhere, wouldn’t you agree? Or at least back where we were yesterday.”

  “I’m on it, sir. I’m going to find them. The goods. Whatever. There’s something. It’s here. It’s somewhere. Just look at what was going on. Caroline’s completely bonkers. She sends email after email to a woman she sees every day and Clare keeps replying with ‘tell me more, darling’ and never with ‘put a sock in it’ which any other person—believe me—would have done in a tick. And Caroline? She never notices this. Not once. Clare could’ve said, ‘Hang on, you’re contradicting yourself here because last time you said Alastair is a giraffe and now you’re saying the man’s a mongoose.’ Because that’s what’s in Caroline’s emails, sir. She says this, she forgets, then she says that. She rants, she raves, she wails, she whines. And all Clare ever says in return is along the lines of ‘oh me, oh my, do tell.’ Because she’s looking for something and by God she bloody found it. So what I want to know is can we get a search warrant because if there’s sodium azide anywhere, you ask me, it’s going to be at Caroline’s house.”

  “We’re not at the point of a search warrant,” Lynley told her. “Not with this. Not in any sense.”

  “We are. We have to be.”

  Lynley could hear the desperation in her voice, and he knew very well where that might take her. He said, “Barbara, get control of yourself. Even if everything you’re conjecturing is true, doesn’t it stand to reason that Caroline would be rid of whatever sodium azide was left over once she had the toothpaste tube loaded with it?”

  “She would do if Clare was the only person in her life she wanted to off. But think of what else is going on: Her hubby’s bonking a woman who works for him. She stands to lose a bundle if they divorce. D’you think she’d let that go when the poisoning bit worked so well the first time round?”

  “But it didn’t, Sergeant. It was found out.”

  “Right. But she didn’t know that would be the case. And it wasn’t found out at first and wouldn’t have been had Rory Statham not made an issue of it. Look, the stuff might not be there. I’ll give you that. It’s prob’ly not. But we need that warrant because her house and that bakery . . . ? They’re a t that wants crossing and with me and Winnie trying to work out all this alone—”

  “Barbara, it’s just not on. There’s not enough.”

  “There bloody well has to be.”

  “Calm down and you’ll see that there isn’t. What I suggest—if you’re intent on pursuing this—is that you use one of your many charms upon Mr. MacKerron. He might well let you have a look round the premises without a warrant. And—perhaps this is even more important—while you’re there you can question him about the contents of some of Caroline’s emails to Clare. I mean the facts of them. Her former husband and her mother have both suggested she’s quite a liar. You might well get something from Alastair that confirms it.”

  “What good’s that going to do? It’s his word, her word. And their words, her word. We’ve got enough of that. We need the evidence that—”

  “I have no argument there. But I know you’ll agree that where there’s this much smoke—”

  “It’s time to circle the wagons,” she finished. “Yeah. I see it.”

  “Not to mix a metaphor, but yes. Frankly? I doubt you’ll get more than mere conversation with the man. I can’t see a canister of sodium azide left lying around by anyone for future use. And there’s the question of how she could have come by it in the first place. But I admit that everything must be checked out.”

  “Well, thank God for small blessings,” Barbara said. “Ta, sir. As to the warrant, will you—”

  “No. Go to the house another time. But when you go there, for God’s sake be careful. Go by the book. Because if we need a warrant later—”

  “Can you at least start the paperwork on that? It’ll help if me and Winnie don’t have to come up with it.”

  What would it hurt to do that much? Lynley asked himself. He said, “I will,” and when they rang off, he decided to set about it. But he’d not even begun when his mobile rang. Assuming it was Havers, he answered with, “Sergeant, if this is—” only to be cut off by a soft voice.

  It was Sumalee Goldacre, to his surprise. Francis, she said, had not told her at first why someone from New Scotland Yard had come to call upon him. But while he had been speaking to her on the previous evening v
ia Skype from the work he was doing in India, they’d got onto the subject of Lynley’s visit and he’d explained. That, she said, was why she was ringing Lynley now.

  “Is there something you’d like to add to what your husband told me?” Lynley asked her.

  There was, she said. She would have a break in an hour at St. Charles Hospital. Could he come up to her there? They were about to scrub for surgery at the moment, but it was due to be quick and afterwards she’d be free.

  Lynley looked at his watch. North Kensington, he thought, nearly to Kensal Rise. He intended to keep his promise to Havers, but this sounded important. He would be there, he told her.

  NORTH KENSINGTON

  LONDON

  There was a small car park stretching the length of the hospital’s several buildings, but it was full. So he did a bit of a drive-around and found a space among the residents’ parking in St. Charles Square between a skip being used for a home renovation and a pile of three rusting bicycles that looked rather like a piece of modern art. He left the Healey Elliott here and walked back to the hospital, a complex of purpose-built London brick structures divided by a leafy central lane, becoming bright with autumn colours. It looked more like a city university than a hospital, and it was sheltered from street noise by its position some distance from the main artery, Ladbroke Grove.

  His mood wasn’t the best. Prior to departing Victoria Street, he’d made a request of Isabelle that she’d denied. He’d argued with her. She’d argued back. “This is down to you, Tommy, and I won’t be moved” was her final word on the topic.

  She was, he decided, a woman who knew how to hold a grudge, and he didn’t need her to intone the words Detective Chief Superintendent Daniel Sheehan for him to be very clear what the grudge was. But given that all he’d asked was the use of a civilian typist to do the paperwork for the search warrant that DS Havers needed, the fact that Isabelle had denied him this in order to prove a point was maddening.

  So he’d gone round her, even though he knew it was on the border of professional suicide to do so. He’d spoken at some length to Dorothea Harriman who, given enough information, could manage what he needed while at the same time appear to be doing something else. Would she? he’d asked her sotto voce after leaving Isabelle’s office. Leave it to me, had been her quiet reply.