A Banquet of Consequences (10 page)

“Barbara Havers,” Barbara told her. “That’s a gift. The book, I mean. Here . . .” And Barbara rooted round in her shoulder bag to bring forth her own card, which she handed over.

Clare Abbott took it from her with thanks, sliding it among the others that Barbara had seen people hand to her during the signing. For her part, she slid Clare Abbott’s card into her trouser pocket and promised her that the tee-shirt she wanted would soon be in the post. She demurred the twenty-five pounds from Caroline, saying, “It’ll be on me,” as she went on her way.

She didn’t get far. She’d just reached the corridor and was heading towards the stairway when she heard, “Excuse me . . . ?” behind her. She turned to see Caroline following her.

“Caroline Goldacre,” the woman said by way of introducing herself. “I’m Ms. Abbott’s personal assistant.” She looked a bit hesitant as she said, “I don’t know how else to say this, but if I don’t keep my eyes and ears open, she gets herself into all sorts of trouble.”

Barbara wasn’t sure what to make of this, so she waited for more.

“I must get back to her, so just to be brief: May I ask you to return her card to me please? She’s terribly impulsive when it comes to meeting people. She gets wound up and makes promises that she can’t possibly keep and I’m the one who has to sweep up after her. I’m awfully sorry. I feel wretched about it, but it’s my job.”

“Oh. The tee-shirt thing . . . ?”

Caroline made a regretful face. “You’re not to take her at all seriously. And you’re definitely not to go to the trouble. It’s just her way. She loves meeting people and chatting to them but afterwards . . . ? She can’t remember a thing and when the phone starts ringing or the front bell goes, she wants to know why I didn’t stop her before she even got started. So if you wouldn’t mind . . .”

Barbara shrugged. She dipped into her trousers and brought forth the business card. As she handed it over, she asked curiously, “What d’you do with all the cards she collects from people, then, during one of these events?”

“She gives them to me to bin on the way out,” Caroline said frankly as she put Clare’s card into her pocket. “It’s just the way she is.”

BISHOPSGATE

LONDON

From her position at one side of the room, Rory Statham had been keeping an eye on everything, so she saw Caroline Goldacre’s manoeuvre. As was her wont, Caroline had been trying to hurry Clare along. This was something that Caroline saw as her job. “Clare’s minder,”
she said in reference to herself. “God only knows how she’d get anything done if I didn’t keep her on task.”

Rory found this claim curious. She herself had been working with Clare Abbott from the time of her first book—a brilliant and brilliantly reviewed polemic called
The Uterine Dilemma
that had sold a discouraging 3,561 copies before it sank into permanent obscurity—and as Clare’s editor she’d cajoled the writer over the creation of ten other volumes and countless articles for demanding publications to make her work more accessible to the ordinary reader.
Looking for Mr. Darcy
was the result of that cajoling, and Rory was enjoying Clare’s success as much as Clare was. She wasn’t, however, entirely enjoying the presence of Caroline Goldacre in Clare’s life and although she’d tried to question Clare more than once about employing the woman as her assistant, she’d not got far in learning what the attraction was. Clare had never seemed to need someone to sort her, monitor her, mind her, or otherwise keep her on track, but for quite some time, Caroline Goldacre had been doing just that.

“I could
always
use a bit more organisation in my life” was how Clare had explained it. Rather too breezily, Rory thought. Her own conclusion was that something more was going on.

Jealous, Rory?
she asked herself.

She didn’t
feel
jealous. But she certainly felt something.

So when she’d seen Clare in laughing conversation with the tee-shirt woman, she’d watched their interaction, and she’d seen Caroline watching it as well. She knew what the outcome would be once Caroline followed the tee-shirt woman out of the room. So she waited until Caroline returned, her expression announcing that all had gone according to her wishes. At that point, Rory herself left the meeting room with Arlo trotting at her side. She headed in the direction of the stairway, and she caught the tee-shirt woman up.

She said to her, “I beg your pardon . . . ?” and she scooped Arlo up from the floor, tucking him beneath one arm so his weight was balanced on her hip. He settled against her. He was quite used to this procedure in which he became something akin to a canine shield. The shield allowed Rory to ignore her own racing heart.

The woman turned. She was remarkably ill dressed, although Rory
couldn’t blame her. The heat inside the building was intolerable and had she not believed in looking professional when appearing with one of her authors, she might have dressed in a similar manner sans slogan printed across her chest. The woman slung a blob-like shoulder bag into position and used the back of her wrist to blot the perspiration on her upper lip.

Rory joined her at the head of the stairs. “I couldn’t help seeing that Ms. Goldacre followed you out of the room.” She looked back at the doorway and shifted her topic to say, “Well. Right. That’s not quite true. I make it my business to keep an eye on things when it comes to Clare, so I was watching. I saw her give you her card, I saw you leave, I saw Caroline follow, and I have an idea what happened from there.” She set Arlo on the floor for a moment and worked her shoulder bag open. She dug within it to find her card case, from which she extricated one of Clare’s cards and one of her own. As she did this, she said, “Something tells me you’re not a stalker.”

“I’m a cop,” the woman replied. “Barbara Havers,” she added.

“Ah. Well, Ms. Goldacre is sometimes too dedicated to keeping Clare safe from what she considers undesirable elements who might lure her from her assigned task of writing and lecturing. I, on the other hand, know that nothing and no one on earth can lure Clare Abbott from her work because she thrives upon it. She wanted you to have her card for some reason, so . . .” Rory extended it to Barbara. But before Barbara could reach for it, Rory said, “You’re not, right? I mean, a stalker. You’re not just
claiming
to be a cop?”

Barbara Havers tucked her copy of
Looking for Mr. Darcy
under her arm and fished inside her own shoulder bag. She brought forth a tattered wallet. From this she took her police warrant card as well as a business card printed with her name and all the relevant details that established her as part of the team “working together for a safer London” from Victoria Block in New Scotland Yard. Rory looked at the one and took the other in hand. She saw that Barbara Havers was a detective sergeant attached to a homicide squad. She’d never met a detective before.

She said, “Homicide. Goodness. Did . . . This is terribly odd of me to ask, but why is it that Clare gave you her card?”

Barbara Havers pointed to her tee-shirt and said, “Told her I’d fetch her one from Camden Lock Market and post it along. She said she wanted to wear it next time she saw her doctor.”

“That sounds exactly like her.” Rory extended Clare’s card to the detective and added, “Then here, please take it because Clare doesn’t give out her business card if she isn’t serious. The better course will be to send the tee-shirt to her Shaftesbury address rather than her London address. She’ll be heading there directly after her tour. If you can wait . . . say, perhaps six weeks?”

“Can do,” Barbara said. “But I c’n also send it along to her publisher if it’s going to cause a problem with her minder.”

“Caroline? Please don’t give that a thought. Clare Abbott really has no minder but Clare Abbott. I’m her editor, by the way. Victoria Statham. Rory, actually. And this is Arlo,” she added as she reestablished the dog on her hip.

“I saw him earlier,” Barbara said. “Bit hot for a vest, isn’t it?” She indicated the canvas jacket on Arlo, green and PAD printed in large white letters on either side of it. “What’s PAD?”

“Psychological Assistance Dog,” Rory said.

The policewoman frowned. “Psychological . . . what?”

“He makes it easier for me to go out in public.” Not wishing to explain further about how essential Arlo was to her, Rory hurried on with, “Now, you
will
take Clare’s request seriously, won’t you?”

“Will do, of course,” Barbara Havers told her. “I have to say it, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Someone actually liking one of my tee-shirts? It’s more or less a first.”

CAMBERWELL

SOUTH LONDON

India Elliott was finding more of her old self every day. This was the self that had been confident and capable of making friends quickly, the self who also had learned early on and at the knee of her father to
“cut your losses when you realise you must.” He’d instructed her carefully on that aspect of life, saying, “There’s no shame in it, my girl. Better to end something than to carry on in a losing situation.”

She hadn’t yet decided if cutting her losses applied to her marriage to Charlie, but she knew it was a possibility. Nat Thompson was part of the reason behind this. While she wasn’t sure if Nat was going to be a fixture in her life, she enjoyed his company. Yet, the very last thing she wanted was to end up yet again the docile and agreeable mate of a man who cared for her.

She was frank about this. As a woman separated but not divorced from her husband, she thought it only fair that Nat knew the truth. So on their third date, she’d explained her situation. They’d gone to Somerset House and wandered through a Matisse exhibition, and afterwards, over a shared slice of chocolate gâteau, she’d told him about Charlie, about Will’s death, and about herself.

She didn’t begin with those topics. She wasn’t the sort to offer mounds of personal information to anyone, a habit also learned at the knee of her father. He called it “holding one’s cards close, India.” He’d always loved gambling metaphors.

So she began with the logical questions about schooling and growing up and work. Ultimately, she asked about marriage. Had Nat ever been married? He was thirty-four, well of the age to have a failed starter marriage behind him. But he said no. “I’ve always been a late bloomer. What about you?”

“Separated from my husband,” she told him. “It was . . . I’ve been through a rather difficult time and so has he. There was a suicide in the family.”

He looked concerned. “I’m sorry to hear that. Not your own immediate family, I hope.”

That seemed to give her entrée to speak about Will and his death. Nat, she discovered, was a man of great sympathy.

After that date, there had been another. On that one, he’d taken her to see his work. He was an expert in the preservation of old buildings, his last completed project a row of almshouses that had been under threat of being torn down. Tucked away in Streatham with the sounds of roadwork rising from a brick wall behind them,
they’d been ready for the earthmover when Nat had taken them in hand.

They were London’s history, he explained. “If someone doesn’t take a stand against tearing things down merely because they’re old and in disrepair, we lose part of who we are.” Then he added with an appealing shrug of his shoulders, “Very old-fashioned of me, but there you have it.”

“I don’t find you old-fashioned.”

“I’m glad of that,” he told her.

When he took her home later that evening, he kissed her good night. She’d begun wondering if he was even attracted to her, so the kiss was something of a relief. It lingered and then grew more intimate, and she found that she liked this very much. When they broke off from each other, he said, “I like you a great deal, India.”

“And I like you.”

To which he said, “No. I mean I really like you. As in . . . I don’t know. I’m not very good at this sort of thing. As I said, I’m a late bloomer.” He seemed to read the
oh no!
in her expression because he hastily added, “Not in that way. It’s just that I’ve never mastered the art of the chat so I guess what I’m saying is that . . .” Even in the faint illumination from the porch light she could see him blushing, “I feel some quite serious desire when I’m around you. I don’t feel it for every woman I meet. Of course that could be because most of the women I meet are wearing twin sets and pearls and carrying large handbags filled with news articles about a building they wish to save. But I don’t think so. It’s just that—”

“Shush,” she said. “I feel the same about you. Please kiss me again.”

He did. Then, as was his way, he left her after making sure she got safely inside and had locked the door behind her. He waited till she came to the window of the sitting room that she used as her surgery. After she waved an all’s-well, he turned and left her.

Less than thirty seconds later, her doorbell rang, so she assumed that he’d returned. She swung the door open with a ready smile. But on her front step was Charlie.

CAMBERWELL

SOUTH LONDON

Charlie knew she thought he was the other bloke ringing the bell. He saw this in her face, which was still aglow from kissing, and she’d believed he’d returned for what logically followed the kissing as the night the day.

He saw her expression immediately alter. She looked at the street—for the other bloke, obviously—then back at him. While her expression asked what on earth he was doing there, her words said something different.

“You look terrible, Charlie.”

That hardly mattered. It was no wonder to him that her first remark would refer to his appearance. He had, after all, just had a very good look at the bugger who’d a moment earlier had his tongue in her mouth, and he wasn’t doing well by comparison.

“You’re planning to sleep with him, aren’t you?” were his first words although he hadn’t intended them to be. They simply slipped from him nearly without his awareness, and he wanted to snatch them back the moment he said them. But since he couldn’t do that, he went on instead. “And it will be normal, won’t it? It’ll be excellent. It will actually be what you’ve—”