A Banquet of Consequences (27 page)

Daidre stood. She examined him with a gentle smile. “Truth to be told?” she said. “You’re not that sort at all.”

FULHAM

LONDON

F
or Barbara Havers, it was beggars and choosers. She’d wanted to be on the case. She was on the case. She’d wanted an opportunity to prove herself fully capable of working an investigation without recourse to the sort of colouring outside the lines that had got her into the position she was in with regard to a less-than-sunny future in Berwick-upon-Tweed. She had that opportunity. But her imagination had taken flight over the prospect that the case she might be able to work on—the death of Clare Abbott and the poisoning of Rory Statham—would be hers alone, part individual path to redemption and glory, part gauntlet thrown down by Detective Superintendent Ardery. To discover that she’d been outmanoeuvred and was thus going to be merely a cog in a machine operated by DI Lynley was not the fulfilment of her girlish dreams. To discover that she’d been partnered with her fellow detective sergeant Winston Nkata made her position worse.

Barbara knew why Winston had been assigned to work with her. Lynley wanted Nkata to keep her on the straight and narrow, and he wanted a report beamed in his direction the very nanosecond she got creative. It was humiliating. It was unfair. It was not right.

To her “But, Inspector . . .” Lynley had leveled a steady gaze over
the top of his reading specs. She knew better than to say another word. The rumour mill had been grinding energetically with the tale of Lynley’s row with the detective superintendent. Ardery, as reported by that font of information Dorothea Harriman, had even gone so far as to throw something at him. “Shouting like a binge-drinking uni student out on the street at two
A
.
M
.” was how Harriman put it. “Really, Detective Sergeant Havers, I thought I might have to intervene.”

So further argument with DI Lynley was out of the question. Barbara accepted the facts as they were: Her current lot in life was to be watched over by a six-foot-four-inch former street fighter from the Brixton Warriors. There were, she reckoned, worse fates.

She and Nkata thus began the day à deux, with Nkata behind the wheel of his new and exceptionally pristine Prius, and with Barbara suggesting that he drop her at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital to check on Rory Statham while he himself went on to that woman’s flat. She hoped to have a word with Rory if she’d regained consciousness, she explained to Nkata. If they divided their time and their efforts, they could accomplish more and—

“I’ll stick with you, Barb” was his reply.

She locked eyeballs with him. She said, “Winnie . . .” to which he shrugged and replied, “It’s not like I’m chuffed with th’ ’rangement, innit,” a remark that told her it was pointless to argue.

They found Dr. Bigelow in the vicinity of the isolation ward, but a few words with her told them that talking to Rory Statham wasn’t going to be on the day’s agenda. The patient, as Dr. Bigelow explained it, was holding her own, but they were not to take this as necessarily a good sign. With this kind of poisoning, people had been known to rally for a day or two and then to relapse and die. That could happen here, and no, she would not allow them to look in on Rory who was not conscious anyway.

They went on to Rory’s flat and found that three blokes from SO7 were waiting in their van and none too happy to be hanging about anticipating the arrival of someone who would give them access to the scene. They clambered into their boilersuits, gloves, and booties, handed over the same to Barbara, eyed Winston with the obvious concern that they might not have something large enough to house him, and did
their best to suit him up as well. Here at Rory’s building, Barbara was relieved to see that Nkata was going to be reasonable with respect to a slight division of labour. He would begin with checking the rest of the flats in the building to see whether Rory had had any known visitors on the day or night of her poisoning. Barbara in the meantime would take the SO7 team into Rory’s flat, where they would begin collecting everything that could possibly contain sodium azide.

Just outside the door, the forensics team put on additional protective gear. Since they’d not brought any for Barbara, they advised her not to go into the flat at all, although the fact that they’d given her the boilersuit suggested that they knew already she’d ignore their advice, which she did. She told them that she’d already been inside the place galumphing about and was still alive to tell the tale, so she reckoned she was safe enough to have another go. But she did put up the hood of her boilersuit and she did put on gloves in a bow to procedure. When they entered, the forensics blokes spread out to do their bit while Barbara went to Rory’s desk, which sat beneath a nicely framed poster of some French birds doing the cancan.

She was about to sit down and have a go when one of the SO7 team popped his head round the kitchen door and told Barbara that the answer phone’s light was blinking. She went to it, clocked the work of the officer who was removing everything from the fridge, and sorted out how to make the messages play. In short order she heard four. The first was some woman ringing to say that Professor Okerlund had had another think about the advance, and while he wasn’t thrilled to bits with the offer, he did not wish to end his otherwise fine partnership with Rory’s publishing company although he still had very high hopes that his proposal about the little princes was both timely and meaningful and he trusted that book sales would prove him correct. Barbara hadn’t the first clue what that was all about, aside from some book deal, but the second message was easier to decipher: “Rory, it’s Heather again. Dad thinks Mum isn’t going to want a party. He says she’ll be cross if we have one and taking her out to dinner is a better bet. Ring me, okay? I did try your mobile. Why aren’t you answering?” Then came Barbara’s own voice, telling Rory Statham that she would be by soon with the second autopsy report. And the
final one was clearly from her assistant at the publishing house: “Rory, are you taking the day off? Did you forget you have an appointment with Mr. Hodder this afternoon?”

Barbara made notes of all this and then went in search of Rory’s mobile, which she found charging on a table next to the sofa. It would have to be looked at, gone through, and dealt with. The perfect job for Winston when he finished harassing the rest of the occupants of the building, as Winston was skilled at technology while Barbara was hopeless with anything more difficult than a telly remote, and even then it was a case of touch-and-go.

She went to the desk and a two-drawer wooden filing cabinet next to it. She opened this latter and discovered a collection of manila folders, each with a different woman’s name printed neatly upon it. The folders’ contents turned out to consist of a plethora of printed material: from the internet, from magazines, from good old-fashioned gumshoeing round a library or a news-clipping morgue. Barbara began to go through them and saw that they appeared to be topics for future books, possibly suggestions that Rory was making to the relevant writer whose name was featured on each folder’s tab. The first dealt with child beauty contests in the United States, featuring five- and six-year-olds dressed up, made up, and coiffed to resemble unsettling miniature facsimiles of adults. The second contained gruesome material about female circumcision in Africa. The next dealt with the prevalence of “accidental” burnings in the kitchens of young married women in India whose families were not able to come up with additional dowry money after the fact. This was followed by information on rape in that same country, and hard upon the heels of this uplifting data came the stoning of women accused of adultery in several Islamic fundamentalist countries, after which came the discarding of female infants in China. Barbara sought Clare Abbott’s name on one of the folders’ tabs. She did not find it.

Winston returned. “Nuffin” was how he put it. “Only there’s a bird downstairs? She had some words ’bout a ‘disheveled creature’ who came banging on her door ’bout Rory couple days ago. Her words, not mine, Barb. Sorry. But tha’s it. Other ’n that, no one knows a thing. Seems she kept mostly to herself. What’ve you got?”

“Reasons to swear off men forever,” Barbara told him.

“Say what?”

“Some research Rory seems to have done. Can you check the bedroom and see what’s there?”

As he went to do so, Barbara opened the second drawer. More files, these for what seemed to be book proposals. She fingered through them to see once again if Clare’s name appeared. This time it did.

Anonymous Adultery—Clare Abbott
was on the folder’s tab. Inside the full title swept across a cover sheet.
The Power of Anonymous Adultery: Internet Encounters and the Dissolution of Family.
For this Clare appeared to have created an introduction, a table of contents, and an explanation of her intentions for a book. Barbara reckoned that she was looking at a proposal. To her, it seemed a winner if the subtitle could be lost. Anonymous adultery? That was a real attention grabber. It probably wouldn’t have been as hot as
Looking for Mr. Darcy
was proving to be, but it would have sold.

The first of the SOCO boys was leaving the flat with what looked like every item from Rory’s bathroom when Nkata came out of the bedroom with a stack of photos in one hand and a stack of letters in the other. Both stacks were contained by elastic bands. He said, “Bedside table. This looks like it, Barb,” and he joined her briefly at the desk. “’Cept a stack of books by the bed, unpacked suitcase heavy on funeral togs, an’ her clothes in the cupboard and a chest of drawers.”

The photos, Barbara saw, were oriented towards Rory’s personal life: herself and a younger woman on holiday somewhere. The letters were all in the same handwriting with the name
Abbott
in the corner. Barbara flipped through these but opened none. They’d have to be gone through, but that could wait.

She found a laptop computer inside the shallow drawer above the desk’s kneehole, and she handed this over to Winston for carting back to Victoria Street along with Rory’s mobile. In advance of SOCO scooping up the suitcase, which would put it out of their hands for days, she decided to have a quick look inside while Winnie took a moment with Rory’s phone.

The suitcase lay next to a chest of drawers in Rory’s bedroom, and a brief inspection told Barbara that it might well not belong to Rory
Statham at all, although Winston would not have known this from a look at it. Nor would she have done, in fact, had she not recognised the garment carelessly folded on the top of an equally carelessly folded stack of other clothing. It was a black linen blouse with a stripe of white descending from the shoulder to the hem, and when Barbara lifted it out, she recalled at once the sight of Clare Abbott at the front of the gathering in Bishopsgate, striding back and forth on the dais with a microphone clutched in her hand as she fielded questions from her audience on the night that Barbara had bought a copy of
Looking for Mr. Darcy.

Either Clare Abbott had borrowed the blouse from Rory Statham for her appearance at Bishopsgate Institute that evening or everything in the suitcase belonged to Clare.

RIVER HOUSE HOTEL

CAMBRIDGE

Despite the rain, which was bucketing down from a tarnished sky, Lynley arrived in Cambridge in an uplifted mood. An Oxford man, he knew it was wildly disloyal to find Cambridge appealing, but it was also wildly impossible to ignore its beauty. Even in a downpour, the backs offered an unmatchable view of the stunning architecture of the colleges across an expanse of lawns from which autumn-decked trees erupted, and the colleges themselves rose splendidly beyond the river from these lawns with the town spread out behind them. Everywhere university students biked, walked, jogged, and rollerbladed among professors engaged—he liked to think—in deep discussions of the critical issues of their times. It made him very nearly wish for the intellectual life and he would have believed all of this was the cause of his fine frame of mind had he been a less honest man.

He’d rung Daidre prior to leaving Victoria Street. His excuse had been the dog. He was merely checking to see that all was well with Arlo, he’d told her.

She’d laughed. “Are you actually ringing a veterinarian to ask about the well-being of a dog put into her care?”

“I see your point,” he admitted.

“You’re very silly, but Arlo is fine. He’s far more partial to lions than to elephants, I’ve discovered.”

“It must be a feline/canine thing.”

“It could well be. Listen, I must dash, darling. I’ve a meeting to get to. May we speak later?”

Of course they could.

It was the
darling.
It comprised a first-time moment, and that first-time moment was the sort of thing a young woman of the eighteenth century might have made note of in her nightly entry into a journal. He knew how ridiculous he was being in his decision to find
darling
somehow fraught with meaning, but the fact was that Daidre did not as a rule toss about
darling
—or any endearment—without attaching a sentiment to it. What that sentiment was . . . ? He wasn’t sure. But he liked to think it signaled a subtle shift between them.

Inside the River House Hotel, he showed his warrant card and asked for the manager. It had now been just over two weeks since Clare Abbott’s death, and the first order of business was to speak with the employees who had been on duty on the night she’d ingested the sodium azide. An identification from the Metropolitan Police gained him quick access to a Mr. Louis Fryer: grey-haired, dapperly dressed in a pin-striped suit, and wearing a carnation buttonhole. As it happened, Detective Chief Superintendent Sheehan had brought Fryer a bit more fully into the picture about Clare Abbott’s death than he’d been on the morning that her body had been discovered in one of the rooms of his hotel. While the River House’s manager did not know the exact cause of death, he did know it had been found unnatural. His primary concern, not unreasonably, was the reputation of the hotel since one didn’t like to see one’s residents carted off to the morgue after a night therein.