A Banquet of Consequences

by Elizabeth George

  “Because Caroline may have threatened her, you mean. To reveal Clare’s involvement with men from that site.”

  He nodded. “As you and I have agreed, the information was explosive. It would have revealed her to be . . . a rather whited sepulchre.”

  “An empty vessel,” Rory agreed. “She could have overcome that in time. Perhaps she could even have talked her way out of it. But the damage would have been significant. She was in a dreadful position. I wish she’d explained it all to me. This book was such a strong idea. It’s the logical next step in what Clare was working on. It proved her thesis about romantic love and marriage: that it’s all stuff and nonsense and she had the proof, courtesy of Internet adultery.” Rory sighed. She looked out of the window. There was little to see: just Fulham Road, traffic, and a crocodile of children heading somewhere with a chaperone fore and a chaperone aft.

  “Do you really believe all that?” Lynley asked her suddenly.

  Rory turned back to him. He looked very earnest. “What?” she asked.

  “Romantic love and marriage. Are you a believer in Clare’s thesis?”

  She examined him. He was, she realised, still quite young, somewhere in his thirties. Clare would have said that he had a few good years left before he put away romantic dreams forever. Rory said, “You’re in love, aren’t you?”

  He smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid I am.”

  She cocked her head and thought about everything he’d said up to this moment. “I suspect it’s the veterinarian.”

  “It is. And it’s early days, so it may come to nothing as she’s not . . .” He shrugged.

  “Romantically inclined? The marrying kind? Or merely not falling into your arms?”

  “Not precisely in the way I would like. But one has hopes.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that, is there. One has to take a risk now and then. Even Clare would approve of that.”

  “Actually,” he said, “that’s what we think may have led to her death. She took a risk. She’d been interviewing members of Caroline’s family.”

  “Who? Alastair? The son?”

  “Her mother. And Francis Goldacre. And then Francis’s current wife. She’d also spoken to a Sherborne psychiatrist about various aberrations in personality. We think that somewhere along the line, she came across something serious enough to stop Caroline in her tracks.”

  “And revealed it to her?”

  “We’ve not yet found evidence that she did. Did Clare give you any indication . . . We do know they were arguing in Cambridge the night Clare died.”

  “Clare did tell me they’d had words. But she said they’d been about the length of her debate that night.”

  “That’s doubtful, considering what was overheard. One of them saying, ‘We’re finished,’ and the other, ‘Not with what I know about you. We’ll never be finished.’” He was quiet a moment. Then, “Let me ask you,” with a gesture at the folder. “How committed was Clare to her written work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean how far do you think she would have gone to free herself of someone’s hold on her in order to complete her writing?”

  Rory thought for a moment. “She would have hated what Caroline was doing to her,” she said slowly. “She would have done anything to rid herself of her. But she wouldn’t have killed herself, Inspector, if that’s what you’re wondering. Nor—if this is where you’re heading—would she have killed Caroline. She would have absolutely hated herself for getting into the position she was in with the Internet adultery business, but the fact that she was writing her book secretly tells me that she had no intention of letting Caroline win whatever game she was playing.”

  Lynley looked out of the window when she said this. Rory could tell that he was considering something. He finally said, “You knew her well. If she had managed to uncover something, an unexpected detail that—revealed—would render Caroline completely powerless, would she have used it, no matter what it was?”

  “To safeguard herself and her work?” Rory asked. And when he nodded, “Absolutely, Inspector.”

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  With all of this information in hand, Lynley rang Havers from the Healey Elliott. He brought her into the picture of Sumalee’s story first, and at the conclusion of this, he heard her low whistle and then, “That’s it, Inspector, exactly what we’ve been looking for. God, but it’s sick. I never heard anything like it. Gives me the bleeding creeps. What sort of mum makes sure her boy knows how to wank off properly, then watches to see show? And wouldn’t you reckon he would’ve worked that out on his own anyway? I mean how to wank off.”

  “One would assume,” Lynley agreed. “But apparently, masturbating was a device that stopped him from carrying on verbally. God knows how they came up with it, but apparently—at least according to what Sumalee tells me that Will told her—it settled him.”

  “And Sumalee passed the story to Clare?”

  “She claims she did.”

  “There have to be notes somewhere, then. She’s kept notes on everything else. No way would she have let that one go without jotting down the A to Z on the whole bloody mess.”

  “My thinking as well.”

  “But where are they? We’ve gone high and low. We’ve been in every nook and cranny. I swear to you, sir. Unless they’re in London . . . They could be in London. She’s got a house there. If you could arrange . . . God, this is impossible. It’s taking forever. How much more time d’you reckon the superintendent—”

  “I don’t want to begin a guess on that, Barbara. But if there are notes that Caroline saw, we’ve got to find them,” Lynley said.

  They rang off. It seemed to Lynley that—this new information about Caroline Goldacre notwithstanding—a crucial question needed resolving and that was where the sodium azide had come from. No matter who was its intended victim, someone had to have access to the deadly poison. When he returned to Victoria Street and sat at his desk, he flipped through all the notes he’d made. He began with the various uses of the substance, and he compared these uses to what they knew about everyone associated with the case.

  Oddly enough, he quickly discovered that, aside from its use as a reagent, sodium azide was also employed in automobile air bags. No matter the chemical’s toxicity, it was instrumental in saving lives . . . as long as it remained within the air bag itself, merely assisting in the bag’s inflation within an instant. For someone to have put hands upon sodium azide through means of an automobile, however, that person would have had to open the air bag without detonating it while simultaneously wearing a hazmat suit so as to keep from being affected by the poison. That seemed improbable, but it was either that or having employment in an air bag factory, which was not the case of anyone involved in Clare Abbott’s life.

  Dismissing the entire idea of air bags took Lynley to the use of sodium azide in detonators and other explosives, with much the same result, so he moved to its use in agriculture for pest control. That appeared to bring under the microscope everyone who lived in the area of Shaftesbury, where there would be farms. As far as he knew, no one’s abode was on a farm or near a farm, but he made a note to ask Havers and Nkata to delve into this as a possibility.

  Also in need of checking out was the use of sodium azide as a chemical preservative in hospitals and labs. Both Francis Goldacre and his wife Sumalee worked in and round hospitals, and he wondered if India Elliott somehow had access through her employment. He recalled the sign in her sitting room window that said she offered acupuncture at the weekends in her home. But the rest of the week . . . ? She had to work somewhere, and he made a note to suss out where and whether that place would have sodium azide on the premises.

  In all of these cases, however, the strongest suggestion was that Caroline Goldacre had—as she had claimed—been the target of the killer. But that could have been
what Caroline had wished them to believe from the first: that this had all been a deadly mistake, with the wrong woman falling victim to the poison. They had only Caroline’s word that Clare had packed her own bag and forgotten her toothpaste, and it was clear that Caroline was nobody’s fool. If she wanted to make certain that there was no way her secrets would ever come to light, what better way than to kill Clare while making herself look like the intended victim? She knew that she herself was disliked and hated, even. There appeared to be more than one person who would be happy to see her dead. All she had to do was to make it look as if one of them had attempted to kill her, with Clare being collateral damage.

  It was a clever plan, and it hadn’t been difficult to carry off considering how often she was with Clare Abbott. The only question was: How could Caroline Goldacre have put her hands on sodium azide?

  Lynley turned to the Internet. He accessed a search engine and into it he typed sodium azide as a starting point. He followed a link, and to his surprise, he saw that the toxic compound was accessible directly from suppliers via the Internet. His heart pounded hard a few times as he took in this information and what it meant to the case. No expertise was needed to purchase it, no guarantee for its use, no affidavit as to the identity of the purchaser either. There wasn’t a single control on its sale. Anyone could have bought it.

  THORNFORD

  DORSET

  Alastair had come on the run. He’d been driven to Sharon’s home by Caroline’s return, and he understood as he shut off his car’s engine that his angry wife hurling accusations and insults had probably intended this flight to Sharon from the moment she’d stepped out of Charlie’s car.

  Charlie’s bringing her back to Shaftesbury had taken much longer than it should have done. She’d been sicking up along the way, forcing Charlie to call a halt to their trip time after time until she felt well enough to travel again. With each incident of Caroline’s sicking up, her recovery had taken longer. Between vomiting and giving in to anxiety attacks that apparently provoked not only claustrophobia but also the ultimate need to leave the motorway and to remain off it lest she fall victim to a full-blown panic attack, the drive ate up a good six hours. To get her home, Charlie had had to cancel his every appointment for that day, straight into the evening.

  Alastair would have felt sorry for the lad had the purpose of this excursion with his mum not been to return Caroline to her home. The boy looked completely done in when they arrived, and Alastair wouldn’t have blamed him had he merely escorted Caroline to the front door of the house and then turned on his heel and left her there. But instead, he seemed to feel compelled to repair things between his mother and stepfather.

  Alastair was in Will’s garden when they arrived. He’d been sitting on one of Will’s benches, doing nothing more than gazing at the flagstones at his feet and wondering idly how the lad had managed to get anything to grow in the sandy soil that surrounded each heavy stone. Tiny hedges of unnameable greenery grew in many of these cracks now. They formed a pleasant patchwork effect, and Will must have known that they would although he’d not lived to see it.

  The detective sergeant had taken Alastair up on his invitation to look round the place. Indeed, Alastair had finally realised to his chagrin that that had been her intention all along. He wondered how he’d ended up such a perfect fool when it came to the ways of women. He seemed to lose all sense of self-preservation when faced with a female, caving in to whatever wiles she might use to position him to do whatever she desired. He began to feel ever the complete idiot as the policewoman had inspected each nook and cranny of the bakery. The last thing he now wanted to do upon Caroline’s arrival was to admit that he’d stupidly played into that bloody cop’s hands.

  She’d found nothing, of course, the detective sergeant. He’d known she wouldn’t. But she didn’t seem put off by the lack of evidence. She’d pointed out that there was more than one way to skin a cat and more than one cat that wanted skinning, and from that he’d taken that she meant Sharon. So the moment the detective left, he’d phoned her. Sharon had not been at home—obviously, she was still at work—and as she was also not answering her mobile, he’d stammered a message about the police, a search of his home and business, Caroline, poison, Clare, and perhaps the coppers coming to you now, Shar, and you don’t have to let them in or even speak to them. That message given, he’d spent ages waiting for her to ring him back, but she hadn’t done. He was left in a state of nerves unlike anything he’d ever experienced.

  His life felt like something reduced to tatters, with him trying vainly to piece those tatters back together into some sort of fabric. He thought that there had to be a way to bring all of this to an end. But he didn’t know what that way was, he couldn’t even define what “this” was in the first place, and here was Caroline returning to Dorset and God God God how could he bear that?

  When Charlie arrived with Caroline, Alastair rose heavily from the bench, discovering that he felt quite stiff from the time he’d spent sitting and attempting to devise a plan. He walked across Will’s terrace of stones, and he waited for his wife to come round the side of the house, where Charlie parked his car.

  “So you’re still here” were the first words Caroline said to him. She didn’t look as he expected her to look after a day of sicking up along the side of various roads from London to Dorset. She looked quite fit. But he wasn’t surprised. He’d reckoned the sicking up had been a ruse, as had the claustrophobia and everything else she’d tried on Charlie that long day. Either that or she’d forced him to pull onto a lay-by so that she could see to her appearance before descending upon Alastair once again.

  She said to him, “It was among my things, but you know that, you and your little bit of skirt, don’t you? What you didn’t expect was that I’d hand it over to Clare. And what you also didn’t expect is that someone along the line wouldn’t believe Clare’s heart gave out. So nothing’s worked out the way you planned it. But that really shouldn’t surprise any of us. In the brains department, you were always rather wanting.”

  “Mum,” Charlie said wearily, “you need to get inside the house, have a cup of tea, sit down, relax, and—”

  “What I need,” she cut in sharply, “is to have some words with your stepfather. You can listen to them or you can leave us. The choice is yours.”

  Charlie was carrying his mum’s overnight bag, and he passed her to set this on the front step. He opened the door and said to her, “Whatever you want to say can be said inside.”

  He was showing good sense, Alastair thought. There was no reason to remain outside, and the fact that Caroline wanted to do so prompted him to follow Charlie into the house. If she was after words with him, she would come along. She did.

  She went into the sitting room and he had half a mind not to join her there. Charlie took himself to the kitchen, where the sound of cupboards opening and closing and water running told Alastair he was making the tea he’d spoken about. As he was considering joining Charlie, Caroline turned to him. She said she wanted a word “before you do whatever you intend to do next,” and while he had no plan to do anything at all at that juncture, it did come into his mind that they were fast approaching a point of no return when he was going to have to take an action.

  In the sitting room, she went to the fireplace and there she stood. She said, “You should have thought everything out more thoroughly. The toothpaste wasn’t a good idea. Not everyone would have had access to it, just the three of us, and I’d hardly want to poison myself.”

  He stared at her, trying to work out what in the name of God she was talking about.

  Her expression altered, losing its sharpness but not its exasperation. She said, “The poison, Alastair? The police did trace it to the toothpaste, you know. It wasn’t difficult to put in, naturally, since these new tubes of the stuff bounce right back into shape when you squeeze a bit out. So all that was needed was squeezing, allowing t
he tube to reshape, putting the poison inside the hollow bit, and mixing it with what remained. I’ve had most of the day to think how it was done. Access to my toothpaste was the key, which makes it all a bit of a giveaway.”

  He said to her, “What’re you on about?”

  “I’m on about the police looking for a motive for someone wanting to kill me, not Clare. They want motive, means, and opportunity. And what exactly are you and little Miss Roundheels going to do about that since the two of you happen to have all three?”

  “Police were here,” he told her. “Least she was, the woman sergeant. She talked about you and me. I told her if she thought I had a single reason on earth to hurt you, she could look round the place for whatever it was she was after ’cause she wasn’t going to find it and she didn’t.”

  “Played directly into her hands, eh? How bloody like you, Alastair. D’you know how to put your socks on if I’m not here to say, ‘They go on your feet, darling’?” She left the fireplace and walked to the window. A table sat beneath it, on it an open fan of the magazines she spent hours perusing: celebrity tales with their marriages and their partnerships and their dozens of children, long articles about European millionaires, house decoration, women’s beauty, high-end travel, living the good life. It came to him that she read these as if expecting that it was all out there for her, just within her reach if she could only put together the proper circumstances to make it happen as she wished it would. She said to him, “You do know, don’t you, Alastair, that you’re the simplest man to manipulate who ever lived? This policewoman tricked you into telling her she’d be welcome to look round the place without bothering to get a search warrant. All she had to do was position you to invite her to overturn my drawers or whatever she did. Have a nice look round for whatever you want, you told her. Well, you can bet that your little piece of skirt won’t be so stupid, so I hope the two of you hid the poison at her place.”