He headed in the direction of the railway station and the car park. Directly on his route was a rubbish bin. As he passed it, he slipped the container into its depths. On top, he placed the paper he’d bought. It was all completed in less than three seconds.
He went on his way and decided that it only made sense for him to stop inside Sainsbury’s. He needed to buy Sharon a replacement for the baking powder, for she had to have that stored among her baking ingredients. When the coppers showed up to have a go with her house, it would be something of a giveaway, wouldn’t it, if she had everything else but not a crucial leavening substance without which no decent cake would rise.
He had to wait a bit for the supermarket to open and when it did, he thought it would be wise to purchase a few things that he was accustomed to eating, things she didn’t have like the granola he favoured, the type of honey he liked to use, a lemon curd that she didn’t have in her stock. It would do for him to have shaving gear as well, he thought, and while he was at it, he picked out a bouquet of flowers because what woman didn’t like flowers brought to her, eh?
Thus encumbered with offerings among which was the new baking powder, he returned to Thornford. He called Sharon’s name as he entered the house, and he found her sitting at the kitchen table. She was dressed for work, which called to his mind that it was a workday for her, and although he wanted to tell her to forget about going to work today, he knew that it wouldn’t do for her to behave any different from normal.
He presented her with the bouquet, saying, “Flowers for the flower of my heart. That’s you, girl,” and kissing the top of her head. He set the rest of his purchases on the work top and he told her he’d “got rid of that business. I’m not telling you where, am I. Just know that it’s safely gone and just to make certain no one’s the wiser . . .” He rustled through the carrier bag for the baking powder. This he handed over to her. “Wouldn’t do for you not to have this,” he said.
She said nothing in reply. She’d set the bouquet on the table, and now she held the baking powder in her hands. It was a circular container and she rolled it between her palms. Finally, she got to her feet and went out of the room.
He followed her. She was, he thought, behaving oddly. She looked . . . He wasn’t quite sure what to call it. Just that she walked like someone in a dream. She went to a cupboard in the corridor between the kitchen and the sitting room. This she opened and from within, she brought out a container of baking powder, which she handed to him.
He said, “What’s this then?”
She said, “Like I told you, Alastair. I do my cupboards twice each year. This’s the replacement for the other. If something’s use-by date is close, I toss it. Like I told you, Alastair.”
He wasn’t sure what he was meant to think, let alone what he was meant to say. So he said nothing. He merely stood there—a mute—and he couldn’t bring himself to raise his gaze from the baking powder. As she had done, he turned it in his palms. Unlike her, however, he upended it to see its best-by date. He saw what he expected to see: The date was, of course, for the future.
She said quietly, “We don’t know each other ’s well ’s I hoped. Else you wouldn’t’ve thought . . . What was it you were thinking? That I was trying to poison . . . who? Caroline? You? Why? Cos I’m after the bakery myself or something? Why’d you think that?”
He felt something clutching at his throat. He saw a door closing, and he knew he had to rush through it before he was locked out forever, but he didn’t know how to get himself going. He said, “That tree out back. It clouded my mind. It’s due to living with Caro that I can’t think straight, and besides there’s that tree and how easy it would be . . . But I believed you. Every word, Shar.”
“Not the words that counted,” she told him.
“I couldn’t let something happen to you. You’re . . . It’s everything I have, you are. And . . .” He set the baking powder on the shelf from which she’d taken it. “We c’n laugh ’bout this later, can’t we? Me rushin off to Sherborne whiles all along you got this powder here to use and I would’ve found it had I only looked, eh?”
She was quiet for a moment, her gaze on the container: where he’d put it and what it meant. She said at last, “You would’ve found more ’n that if you’d only looked. I wish you’d done that.”
Now, Alastair forced himself to open the door of his van. Because he couldn’t face coming home to Caro after what had passed between Sharon and him, he’d spent hours driving round Dorset instead. He’d visited his bakeries. Might as well see how well his assistant had done, he’d reckoned. So he went to five of the shops, and while he felt like a block of ice in every single one of them, he could see that business was brisk and that his assistant could do very well without him. As, he was concluding, could everyone else.
He approached the house. It looked unoccupied, but he had little hope that this was the case. Caro’s car was in its usual spot and as she wasn’t given to walking, she was probably within.
She met him at the door. “They’ve taken everything,” she told him. “They’ve been here, they’ve torn the house apart, it’s taken me the rest of the day to put it together. But you’re not to worry about that because the important bit is that you had your night with your piece of tail.”
“Don’t call her that.” He pushed past her into the body of the house. “Her name is Sharon. Call her that or keep still.”
“I’ll keep still when I’m dead,” she said behind him. “Of course, that’s what you were hoping for, isn’t it? The two of you with your Very Big Plans. Well, they’re about to come to nothing, Alastair. The police have your computer and mine and everything else that can possibly link you and her . . . And they’ll go there next. Don’t think they won’t. So if there’s nothing to find among your things—because there’s certainly nothing to find among mine—then off they’ll go to that bloody little cunt—”
“I damn well told you, Caro.” He heard his voice in an entirely new way, as the instrument of violence it had never been before.
“—once they work out that whatever they think I might have done was actually done by someone with a hell of a lot more to gain.”
“You listen to me,” he said, and he grabbed her wrist for emphasis. “Shar wanted nothing.”
“Oh please,” she scoffed.
“You don’t understand cos you’re not like that. You want everything. You want to suck a man dry. I should’ve seen that when you went on and on about Francis like you did, when you did everything you could to keep your fingers on Will and Charlie and not let them, not ever let them—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. And let go my arm. You’re hurting me.”
He found he quite liked that idea of hurting Caro. He gave her wrist a sharp twist. He said, “God but I was mad for you. ’Course, you knew that. That was part of it. Men always go a bit mad for you and you use that, don’t you?”
She tried to jerk away from him. He held her fast. “Let go of me!” Her voice rose. He liked that as well: the sound of fear in it. But then she regrouped as she would always do. She tossed her head and said, “Let me understand this. Sharon didn’t use you, but I did. Sharon offered you nothing to get you exactly where she wanted you, but I did. I’m some sort of . . . What am I? A schemer? A demon? While she is what? What is she, Alastair?”
“Decent and good,” he said. “Only for ten minutes maybe I forgot that: the decentness and goodness that would’ve stopped her. I saw that tree outside and I remembered what she said and I thought she . . . But she wouldn’t’ve, ’course, and I see that now. Because she was telling the truth from the first, just like from the first you never knew what the truth even was.” He released her then and threw her arm to one side and was intensely gratified to see the harsh redness of her wrist and to know that it was going to bruise.
She said, “You’re mad.”
“
Prob’ly,” he told her. “But for the first time what I feel is sane.”
SHAFTESBURY
DORSET
Lynley wasn’t impressed. It was an intriguing detail, he told Barbara, but it wouldn’t serve their purpose because there was—and she knew it—no way to prove that Caroline Goldacre had ever listened to what Clare Abbott had dictated onto another track of the digital recorder. Yes, yes, it stood to reason that just as Barbara had discovered there were two more tracks, so Caroline could have done had she, too, pressed the wrong button on the recorder. And unlike Barbara, Caroline might have assumed that what was on the third track was another letter she was meant to type so she had reason to listen to it just to make certain. But Barbara knew this was supposition and declaring it proof of anything, no matter how it helped fill in the picture of what had happened, would get them tossed out of the CPS office on their collective ear. It would also serve as yet another element to convince Isabelle—
Isabelle, Barbara thought sourly. Isabelle, Isabelle, bloody sodding Isabelle.
—that this entire venture was a waste of the Met’s valuable resources. Then, of course, there was the question of why it was still on the digital recorder at all.
“Because she hadn’t yet transcribed it,” Barbara said.
“Still and all,” Lynley began.
She cut him off with, “Look, sir. You know how unlikely it is that there’s going to be hard evidence. But when we link things up—and we’re going to do that—that recording’s going to make the chain unbreakable.”
“When you link things up,” Lynley told her.
He also told her he’d made his dutiful report to the superintendent, who’d agreed on another twenty-four hours. But that was it, she’d told him. If Sergeants Havers and Nkata had nothing sewn up by that time, they were to hand over what they had to the Dorset police and be on the road back to London before she had to enquire as to their whereabouts.
Thus Barbara was more than a little worried. She’d thought the recording was going to be their smoking gun, and she didn’t like learning that Lynley considered it a water pistol. She continued her search through Clare’s office. She was still searching to absolutely no avail when Nkata rang from Dorset Police Headquarters with an announcement that immediately cheered her.
“Got it,” he said. “Trail of bread crumbs, Barb. We got a search for poison, we got a zeroing in on four of ’em and sodium azide’s one, and we got an order for it. All been deleted, ’course, but tha’s nothing for these blokes at headquarters.”
“Yes!” was Barbara’s reaction and she wanted to ring Lynley immediately. The hour was growing late, the twenty-four-hour clock was ticking, and they had to move. “We need to bring her in,” she told Nkata. She brought him up to the minute on the recording she’d found and said, “That’s motive in a sandwich, you ask me. I’ll fetch her from the house and take her to the nick. If you c’n meet me there in, say, an hour, we c’n—”
“Little problem,” he told her.
God, she thought. What? What? She said, “What sort of problem, then?”
“It’s both computers.”
“What’s both computers?”
“What we found. It’s Alastair’s computer and Caroline’s been used. And there’s something more. It’s ’bout Lily Foster. Look, I’m heading back there now. I’ll ’xplain when I get there.”
She wanted to demand that he explain now. But she needed time to regroup. Both computers? Lily Foster as well? Barbara had a very bad feeling about it all.
So she smoked and paced and smoked again. She did her pacing round Clare’s house: kitchen to sitting room to sunroom. She did her smoking in the front garden away from the wind. Nkata was coming from south Dorset, and like every route to any place in the county, there was no direct way to make the journey from there to Shaftesbury unless one sprouted wings. So while she waited, she had plenty of time to examine not only what they had on Caroline Goldacre but also her own predilection for pinning guilt upon the woman.
It wasn’t pleasant to consider she might be blindly stumbling towards disaster merely because she disliked Clare’s assistant. Caroline had declared herself the actual target of a killer, and wasn’t the reality that it could still be the truth?
When Winston finally arrived, Barbara had smoked so much that her eyeballs felt raw. She also, she reckoned, smelled like an afternoon in Wigan circa 1860 if Winston’s expression was anything to go by. His comment of “D’you ever give it a rest, Barb?” sent her up the stairs to search out some mouthwash, but at that point, it did little good as the rest of her—hair, clothing, and probably skin—was permeated with smoke.
She made coffee and toast while Winston did them some scrambled eggs. They’d neither of them had dinner, so a quick after-hours high tea was going to have to do. As they cooked and then ate, Winston went over the details. Barbara had to admit that it was going to be difficult to massage them into anything impressive in the guilt department.
Winston referred to his notebook. First, Alastair’s computer, he said. It contained the search for the poison. Phenmetrazine hydrochloride had been choice number one: It caused, among other things, tachycardia—
“There’s the heart,” Barbara pointed out.
—circulatory collapse, and coma. Possibly rejected by the killer as death wasn’t a certainty. Next was chloral hydrate, which depressed the central nervous system. Probably rejected because it took too long for the victim to succumb to all the respiratory problems it caused. Then came amitriptyline, which could bring on heart attack. Rejected, no doubt, because of the difficulty involved in putting one’s hand on it as it was a prescription medication. And then, at last, sodium azide. Quick, effective, and available over the Internet.
“The inspector told me to let you know about that Internet bit,” Barbara said. “Sorry. I forgot.”
No matter, he told her, because the order for sodium azide hadn’t been difficult to find. It was on Caroline’s laptop. Deleted, of course, buried as well as it could be buried without taking the hard drive out, smashing it to pieces, and having the laptop rebuilt with another hard drive in it. The order appeared to use her credit card number as well.
“So Bob’s your uncle.” Barbara breathed in relief.
“Tha’s where things get dodgy,” Nkata said.
For although the delivery address was indeed the address of the bakery and the home of Caroline Goldacre, the person whose name had been given as the recipient was Lily Foster.
“Bloody hell,” Barbara said. “Can I count the ways that doesn’t make sense?”
“She has motive, Barb,” Nkata pointed out. “Has done from the first, innit?”
“Christ, but how is she supposed to have done it? Sneaked into the house in the dead of night? Sneaked into the bakery as well? Used Alastair’s computer to lay a trail there and then the same on Caroline’s? And how’d she put her mitts on Caroline’s credit card? Better yet, how did she manage it all without getting caught? That beggars belief. Makes more sense to me that Caroline’s the one who’s laying false trails left, right, and centre. Does the search on Alastair’s computer to sink him once she declares herself the intended victim: ‘He meant to kill me ’cause of his lady love’ and all that. And she hates Lily as much as Lily hates her, so if she could make it seem that Lily was after her just in case the Alastair bit didn’t work . . . Win, it does start to make sense if you look at it that way. Caroline wants Clare gone because Clare was going to talk to Charlie about what she’d done to Will. She wants Lily gone because she blames her for Will’s death. And on the chance we don’t work it all out the way she intends, if we settle on Alastair as our boy, she takes care of him and his affair. No matter how it worked out, it’s a win for her.”
“If tha’s how it happened.” Nkata’s voice was slow, though, so Barbara knew he was thinking. When he next spoke, he made his thinking clear.
“Charlie,” he said.
“What about him?”
“He could’ve done it all, Barb. He comes down from London to see them, yeah? That gives him opportunity to mess about with the computers much ’s he wants. When Alastair’s having a kip middle of the day, he uses his. When Caroline’s asleep dead of night, he uses hers. He c’n put his hands on her credit card easy, too. He’d’ve had a good idea where she keeps it.”
“Then why the Lily Foster bit? Why have the poison sent to Caroline’s digs but in Lily’s name?”
Nkata admitted that that was where things got tricky. With an ASBO hanging over her, Lily couldn’t exactly linger round the bakery and the house to receive a package sent to her there. There was far too much risk involved. Yet if she hadn’t been there to receive it and if it had fallen into the hands of either Alastair or Caroline, what would they have made of a package sent to their address but to Lily’s name?
“They’d’ve taken it d’rec’ly to the police,” Nkata said slowly. “’Less, of course, they were meant to open it. They open it, have a whiff, and you know the rest.”
“Which they’d never have done. Not with what had happened already between them and her. They’d have been dead mad to do that.”
“So it’s all back on again,” Nkata said.
“Let’s ring the inspector,” Barbara suggested. She told him about the limit of twenty-four hours, and then she said, “We need more time, and I think the computer trail’s going to give it to us.”
That, however, did not turn out to be the case. When Barbara had Lynley on his mobile, she put hers on speaker and let Nkata do the honours. He went through the information he’d just given to Barbara: Alastair’s computer, Caroline’s computer, the bakery’s address, Lily Foster’s name as recipient of the sodium azide. Barbara added her bit about the manner in which the information could be interpreted: with the logical conclusion that the person who could have managed all this with the most ease being Caroline Goldacre.
A Banquet of Consequences Page 58
