A Banquet of Consequences

by Elizabeth George

  He said, “She didn’t want a solicitor. The cops asked her. They told her—”

  “Oh, don’t be absurd. They would’ve been thrilled I wasn’t there to advise her.”

  “They brought in the duty solicitor.”

  “Some grossly incompetent has-been jurist who hasn’t a clue what he ought to do.”

  Alastair didn’t think that was the case. Fact was that the duty solicitor had nothing to do once Caroline made it clear that she wished to confess. He told Ravita Khan this much.

  She went on with, “You should have rung me the moment those detectives showed up at your house. Why didn’t you?”

  “Like I said—”

  “People think that when the police show up they’re meant to give them access, but they aren’t. The police rely on your knowing nothing about your rights. They rely on the element of surprise, on just about anything but your understanding what your rights actually are. Why did she confess? Did they coerce her? Did they threaten? Did they disclose that there was something they’d found in the house? God. Never mind. How would you know? You weren’t in the interview room either.”

  He told her what he did know from having been in his own sitting room when the police had first spoken to Caro the previous night. “There was poisons researched,” he said. “She ordered it off the Internet. There was a trail.”

  “They told her this? My God, anyone could have ordered it. And a good barrister would have brought that up at trial.”

  “She packed Clare’s bag,” he went on. “She told me herself. All she had to do was leave out Clare’s toothpaste. Clare was meant to borrow hers and that’s what she did. The poison was in it.”

  “But my God, is there supposed to be a motive in all this?” Ravita Khan demanded.

  And at this point, Alastair had to lie. He couldn’t bring himself to tell the solicitor or anyone else about what Caroline had done to Will. So what he said was, “If there’s something behind it, Caro’s got to tell you.”

  “She won’t see me. I’ve already tried. That’s why I’m ringing. Will you try to talk some sense into her? We’ll retract the confession. All of their evidence is circumstantial from what you’ve told me. Beyond that, she had no solicitor present.”

  “Like I said, the duty solicitor—”

  “They threatened her into accepting his presence. She was bullied into it.”

  He sighed. “Don’t think that happened, is what,” he said. “It was like . . . The cops told her what they had on her and she confessed. It was like she’d been waiting for them to work it all out and when they did, she just gave it up. It was like . . . I think she was tired of fighting and pretending.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, ’xactly.”

  And that was the truth. He didn’t know a thing. Whatever Caroline had done to Will, he’d been completely, utterly, and stupidly in the dark. That she’d kept things that way was no excuse, he thought. And the why of everything she’d done to the boy asked to be defined with the term for his own good, but Alastair couldn’t make himself believe that.

  He saw her insistence that Will return to them in Dorset after his London breakdown in an entirely new light. He saw her dislike of Lily Foster in a new light as well. He understood how people convinced themselves of all sorts of mad things to excuse the horrors they inflicted on others. What he simply could not come to terms with was how he had missed every single sign.

  Leave us alone, Alastair.

  I’ll see to this.

  He needs his mother just now.

  And all the rest. He’d gone along because he thought that a mother’s love dictated what was best for her child. More fool him.

  It was afternoon when he finally left the house. He wasn’t sure where he intended to go, but he needed to be out in some air, he decided. He had little enough energy for the act, but he walked the distance back towards the town, up between the hedgerows the length of Foyle Hill, making the turn at last into Breach Lane. He came upon Will’s memorial without understanding that all along he’d been heading to it.

  He saw that, as Caro had described it, people had been hanging slips of pink and blue ribbons from the shrubbery that had been planted near the spring. On the slips names were printed, some fading, some bleeding into the fabric after being hit by the rain, some new, some old. He lifted a few and read what was written, name after name of the dead and buried.

  There were candles as well that had been brought to the spot, lit and left to burn down to stubs or to be extinguished by the Dorset wind. As it was a windless afternoon, he relit those that still had wicks. Those that had burnt to the ground, he removed, beginning to stack the stubs on one of the limestone benches.

  When he was finished with this little job, he sat next to the candle stubs he’d gathered and he gazed upon the boulder and its memorial plaque. He felt the need to say something to the young man who was remembered here, but all there was to voice was his profound sorrow.

  “I didn’t know, Will,” he told him. But, he thought, had he been more of a man, more certain of himself, believing himself to be the equal of anyone and especially the equal of his own wife, he would have known, seen, understood, and acted. But he hadn’t ever once felt her equal. Instead he’d felt so stupidly grateful that a woman such as Caroline Goldacre would look upon him favourably. He’d seen himself a toad to her princess. But when she’d kissed him, he’d remained a toad.

  A car stopped on the lane behind him, but he didn’t stir. Someone coming to visit the spring, to light a candle, to hang another ribbon . . . This was a good thing, he thought. Somehow it made Will’s suicide less of a horrible, senseless, heart-crushing event.

  “I expect you’ll be wanting a rubbish bag for that.” Behind him, Sharon’s voice was low. He swung round, but he said nothing. She touched his shoulder. “I’ll fetch one for you,” she said.

  He watched her walk back to her car. From the backseat’s floor she brought out a Sainsbury’s carrier bag. When she had the stubs of the candles cleared from the bench, she tied off the bag neatly and sat. Together they looked out beyond the spring to the land falling away to the valley beyond, Blackmore Vale, where even from this distance the familiar Jersey cows could be seen placidly grazing in hedge-defined fields as their ancestors had done for more than two hundred years.

  “Peaceful, this spot,” Sharon said.

  “It is.” Alastair found he had nothing else to say. An apology was needed, and he knew that, of course. But how to apologise for something such as he had done: adhering to an outrageous belief that she was a killer despite her attempt to tell him otherwise. He didn’t have the words.

  “You didn’t ring me back,” she said. “I was that worried. I went to the bakery, finally.”

  He felt her looking at him, but he kept his eyes straight ahead and his gaze as far as his gaze would take him, which was the gentle sweep of Melbury Hill across the great chalk downs—favoured by grassland—that formed the valley.

  “No one was there,” she said. “But nothing was locked up, which didn’t seem right what with the trouble and Lily Foster’s ASBO and all of that. I didn’t go inside the house, but I tried the door. Something seems a bit off, Alastair.”

  He realised, then, that she didn’t know, but then how would she? Not even twelve hours had passed since Caro had signed what the police had placed before her, and there was no real reason for the word to be out yet. It would go out, naturally. One didn’t murder someone like Clare Abbott and hope one’s arrest, charging, and confession might pass by unnoticed.

  So he told her. He was brief. He did it as he’d so far done the rest of it: his gaze fixed in the distance. “It’s Caro,” he said.

  “Has something happened to her?”

  “It’s down to her,” he clarified. “The police have been. She told them everything. She’s the
one, Shar.”

  Sharon changed her position then. She got off the bench and knelt in front of him so that he couldn’t avoid looking at her. Her face, he saw, was all sympathy. There was no triumph in it, no I told you so. She wasn’t that sort of woman.

  She said, “She told them what?”

  “Clare Abbott,” he said. “It was down to Caro. They had evidence, ’course, but it might’ve not been enough. But then they played this recording they also’d come up with . . . ? Clare talking about Will and Caro and what Caro did to him . . .” He bit down hard on his lip. He wanted to feel the pain of it, now. Not only the pain of having hurt this woman before him but also the pain of having failed his stepson.

  Sharon leaned forward—still on her knees, she was—and she put her arms round his waist. She said, “I’m mightily sorry.” Any other woman, he thought, might have asked for the details, displaying an unattractive interest in another’s misfortune. Sharon asked to know nothing else. She merely repeated, “I’m very sorry.” And then, “How are you, Alastair?”

  “Dead sorry as well,” he replied.

  “’Course you are,” she said. “It’s not like you wanted a single bad thing to hang over her head, did you? And now . . . like this . . . poor woman. What will become of her? What happens when someone talks to the police? Where is she? Has a solicitor—”

  It came to him that she’d misunderstood his words of sorry, thinking he was echoing her own when that was not the matter at all. He said, “I mean for what happened, between you and me. For thinking what I thought. That laburnum tree and its pods and all the rest when you tried to tell me . . . when you even asked to eat the sodding baking powder in front of me . . . as if you had to prove or wanted to prove . . . I’m so bloody sorry.”

  “Ah. That.” She got to her feet. She walked to where the slope began to fall away, where the Shaftesbury plateau, so exposed to wind and to weather, gave onto the farmland spread out below. She studied it for what seemed an eternity and finally said, “I’d come to speak to you about all that. It did change things between us.”

  “I only wish I’d listened to you. You were trying to explain and there I was all kinds of a fool because . . . Here’s the worst. It didn’t matter to me because I wanted you one way or the other and what’s that say about me? I don’t even know. I just couldn’t face you not being in my life. And if that meant you wanted Caro dead and gone and out of our way, so be it. That’s how it was for me.”

  “And how is it for you now?” She turned back to him. The light struck her face, and he could see that she, too, was exhausted. She’d probably not slept since he’d devastated her and what under heaven was to be done about that?

  He gave a weary wave of dismissal in the direction of the bakery and his home. “I’m finished with this. I was never a baker. I took this on for her and the boys. It was what she wanted and what she said they needed. While all the time . . .” He couldn’t put into words the pictures he had in his head of what Caroline had been up to with poor Will, so he said, “While all the time what I wanted was to do what I did in London, the work I used to do. I loved it, I did.”

  She nodded. She tilted her head, as if this would allow her to observe him better. She said, “What I’m wondering . . .”

  “What?” he asked her.

  “Whether you could do that work in Thornford. See, I’m a country girl, lived here forever, and it’s all I know.”

  He said, “What’re you . . . Sharon . . .” He was too afraid to finish his question.

  She said, “I was bloody damn angry after what you thought. I couldn’t believe you saw me as someone who could murder anyone, no matter the reason.”

  “I know. And I’m so . . . sorry’s not even enough to say, Shar.”

  “Then I started to think how we all say mad things and do mad things from time to time. We all reach conclusions that we sometimes regret. But this . . . Between you and me? There’s nothing bad here, is there? Aren’t we just a man and a woman who found each other, stumbled round badly, and then righted themselves? Oh, I was furious with you at first. Make no mistake. I wanted you gone from my life. But then I had a day to think things out—like who you are and what’s gone so badly wrong for you since Caroline’s boy died—and I came to see that I c’n go on from here, but I don’t know about you. After what’s happened.”

  He said, “You’re saying you’d have me? After all my thinking and accusing and everything else?”

  She said, “I told you from the first the only thing that matters is you and me, Alastair. P’rhaps it’s time you begin to believe me.”

  SPITALFIELDS

  LONDON

  India didn’t know what to name what was going on inside of her. She knew part of it was profound sadness based on profound loss. The other part felt like the frustration of being unable to persuade another person to one’s way of thinking but, then again, that frustration seemed to be bleeding directly into the anguish of being set adrift without oars or rudder on an ocean whose current was both unmanageable and unknowable. There had to be, she thought, a single word for what she was feeling, but she was so done in from a nearly sleepless night that she couldn’t grasp it. So she stood at the window of Charlie’s flat, and she looked down at the chicken takeaway shop on the corner where still the customers came and went despite the lunch hour being long since past. She willed herself to feel nothing, but failed in that endeavour.

  She’d been with Charlie since one hour after he’d rung her with the news about his mother. Nat had driven her from Camberwell. She could have driven herself, but he’d said no, let him do this for her because she was clearly upset and more than a little frantic. It wouldn’t do to have her out in the street driving round in this condition, no matter the hour. And besides, they could talk on the way, he said, and she could tell him what had happened that Charlie had rung her in the middle of the night.

  To her “Charlie didn’t know you were with me,” Nat replied, “Of course. I know that,” which she allowed to soothe her. He would see that it hadn’t been Charlie’s intention to disrupt the first full night that she and Nat had spent together in her home.

  On the way to Spitalfields, she’d told him everything. She’d been calmer then, and she was able to lay the facts out in a way that asked Nat to understand her need to offer Charlie her comfort and support. He nodded, looked gravely concerned, and appeared to find this reasonable. It was only when he’d stopped his car at the glass doors to the building in Leyden Street that his words told her something different.

  Her hand was on the door handle when he said, “India, it’s best we break things off.”

  She looked at him, at how the light from a street lamp struck the plane of his cheek and put his eyes in shadow. But she didn’t need that light to display his eyes in order to show her their pain because she heard it in his voice. She said, “Please, Nat. No. At least not now. If nothing else, it’s not fair of you to—”

  “I know it seems like that: unfair, bad timing, and all the rest.”

  “Nat, his mum’s just confessed to murder. His brother’s committed suicide.”

  “How many years ago, darling?”

  “Don’t. It’s not been easy for him. He’s made enormous strides, but this is a setback and it’s not as if he’s asked me to come to him. I just can’t abandon him at the moment. Not with his mum . . . Please. Try to understand. I’m only trying to be his friend.”

  “I understand that. But I also understand that he’s got a hold upon you that he’s not going to release and that you’re not going to break.”

  “For God’s sake. His mother—”

  “First his brother, then you leaving him, then his mum. It’s all been devastating and I’m on board with all that. But it’s always going to be something in Charlie’s life, isn’t it? His mother’s trial, her imprisonment, his distress at seeing her imprisoned, his further distress
upon visiting her in prison. It will go on forever.”

  “I’m swearing to you: That’s not going to happen.”

  He smiled at her, his expression fond but sad. “I know that’s what you think, the possibility of walking away and not looking back, but it isn’t who you are and I suppose that’s one of the reasons I love you. But sometimes a woman’s tie to a man is just too strong, and this is one of those times.”

  She swallowed. How she wanted to argue. How she desired to lay out the facts yet another time, to call him unreasonable, and to maintain that compassion was the better half of all types of human intercourse. But she could only come up with, “But your tie to me isn’t strong enough to see this through?”

  He did think about this. She could see that. At least it seemed he was considering her words but, at the end, perhaps it was only his response that he considered, for he said, “That’s not entirely fair of you, India, but I’ll play along. I suppose it’s not.”

  He leaned towards her then and kissed her good-bye.

  “Nat . . .”

  “Go to him” were his final words.

  She’d done so. She would never know if Charlie had been waiting for her at the window overlooking the street, but he was so quick to the door at her knock that she reckoned he must have been watching. He would have seen the brevity of her conversation with Nat. He would have seen the kiss. But the rest he would not know, and she did not intend to tell him.

  He’d been in bed when Alastair had phoned him, but there was little enough sleep left for him or for her that night. She insisted he at least attempt sleep, though, and she went to the bedroom with him and made certain he tried. She’d lain next to him, not under the covers but on top of them and completely clothed. She did this, she told herself, so that Charlie would understand that she’d come to him only as a friend would come, to see another friend through a terrible moment. She did this although she knew it was a futile gesture, most especially as far as Nat was concerned. There had, she understood, been a great deal of truth in what he’d said to her. Always, there would be Charlie on the periphery of her life.