A Banquet of Consequences (35 page)

The man came to the bedside and spoke quietly, his hand on Rory’s shoulder as he said, “Arlo’s fine, Ms. Statham. You’ve no cause to worry. I’ve taken him to a friend of mine. She’s a vet, and she’ll take quite good care of him until you’re well. Fact is, she’s taking him to work with her. At London Zoo. She tells me he fancies the lions.” He smiled. He had a bit of a crooked smile and a small scar above his lip. He was otherwise quite handsome, and it came to her that his looks might well put people off. He said, “I’m Thomas Lynley. I’m a colleague of Barbara Havers at New Scotland Yard.”

His presence had the oddest effect. His voice soothed her, and Rory felt her body ease.

“Barbara was the one who found you,” he said. “I’m afraid she broke a window to get into your flat when she heard the dog. You had an appointment with her. Do you remember?”

This sounded familiar, but Rory wasn’t sure. She knew it should be crystal clear—along with everything else that had happened to her—but it was not.

The door opened again. A white-coated woman strode into the room. She said, “Thank you, Sister,” to the nurse and then to the rest of them, “You’re disturbing the patient, and there should be no more than one of you in this room anyway. Please leave at once.” She came to the bed and looked at the blipping machine which Rory took for a heart monitor. She was on a drip as well, and the woman—she would be the doctor, Rory reckoned—checked the bag hanging from its pole.

When no one stirred at her order, she said sharply, “Do you lot not speak English? How did you get in here in the first place?”

Rory murmured, “No. Mum . . .” and her mother came forward.

She said, “Right here, darling. Heather is here as well. Heather . . . can you?”

Heather came forward and took Rory’s hand. At her touch, more of what had happened to her came back to Rory. Heather’s voice had been on her answer phone that night she’d arrived home from Shaftesbury. She’d walked Arlo. She’d got a few things from her car and gone up to her flat. She’d fed Arlo. She’d heated some soup and made some toast with butter and jam and she’d been so awfully tired. So she’d had a bath and gone directly to bed but she’d begun to feel so terribly ill: dizzy, nauseated, with pounding head and pounding heart . . .

Thomas Lynley was speaking to the white-coated woman. She was holding his indentification in her hand and she was saying to him, “Police? You’re the last person we need in here. The mother may stay, but you two . . . ? Leave at once or I’ll ring security.”

But Rory realised that the man had said something to her about Barbara Havers and she said, “Please,” although it took more strength than she would have expected. She forced out more words. “What happened?”

“You were correct,” Thomas Lynley said to her, ignoring the doctor’s protestation. “Something caused Clare’s heart attack and seizure. Neither was natural and the same thing—we think—happened to you.”

“You’re going to have to leave,” the doctor said. “That’s quite enough for now.”

“I want . . . him . . . ,” Rory murmured. “Stay.”

“You’re not the person to be deciding that,” the doctor said.

“If you’ll give me ten minutes with her, I’ll be gone,” Lynley said. He appeared to be trying to read her name tag, but it looked to Rory as if he needed specs to do so. “She’s going to have some valuable information and it’s going to pertain to whatever happened to her as well as someone else. Ten minutes,” he repeated. “Doctor . . . ?”

“Bigelow,” she said, “and I’ll give you five.”

“Seven,” he said.

“This isn’t a bloody negotiation.”

“Five, then.” He looked at Rory’s mother and sister and added, “If I might speak with her alone?”

They left with promises that they would be just outside of the room. The doctor left as well with her own promise that there would be hell to pay should Lynley take more than his allotted five minutes with the patient.

He drew a chair up to the bed, saying to Rory, “Clare was poisoned with something called sodium azide. We believe you were as well. You were in Shaftesbury prior to returning to London, weren’t you?” And when Rory nodded, “Did anyone give you anything before you left? Something that you brought back with you?”

Rory thought about this, but she shook her head. No one had given her a thing.

“Could someone have got access to your flat while you were gone, then? Does anyone have an extra key?
Are
there extra keys?”

Rory thought about this. “My desk . . . at work,” she said. “But no mark on it. No one would know.” Her mind was largely on the idea of poison as she spoke. She raised her hand—God, it took an almighty effort—and laid it on her chest, saying, “How?”

“It was in your toothpaste, Ms. Statham. As most people do, I expect you cleaned your teeth before you went to bed, yes?” And when she nodded, “There you have it. Since both of you were targeted, we’re looking for connections, and there appear to be two of them. The first is Clare Abbott’s recent book. You’re her editor, aren’t you?”

Rory nodded and murmured, “But . . . a book? Only a book.”

“I don’t disagree,” he said. “Which takes us to the other connection, Caroline Goldacre. You were staying in Shaftesbury, weren’t
you? One or two nights, perhaps? In connection with a memorial service for Clare? Could Caroline Goldacre have got access to your belongings while you were there? To your toothpaste, specifically?”

Rory thought about this as best she could. But so little was available to her. Yet Caroline Goldacre had indeed hung about, maddeningly so and far more than was completely necessary. But why would she seek to harm Clare and then to harm Rory afterwards?

Prevention
came into Rory’s mind. But she had no idea where to apply it.

SHAFTESBURY

DORSET

Barbara saw in short order that Winston had found a website Clare Abbott had ostensibly accessed, and it was directly in line with the questionnaires in her desk. It was also in line with the book proposal that Barbara had found in Rory Statham’s flat. This seemed to negate what Caroline was asserting about the absence of a new Clare Abbott project.

The website in question was called Just4Fun, and unsurprisingly one used it to find married adults willing to meet for extracurricular sex with no strings attached. It was a simple matter to find someone in your immediate vicinity with whom you might have a decent go, apparently, as the site was set up by region and within the region one could even choose the desired city or town, possibly with the wish to engage in the sexual act with a fellow supporter of one’s football team, Barbara reckoned.

Pictures were not included, she saw, and for obvious reasons. One would hardly wish to advertise one’s infidelity to a curious public who might stumble on the site for a bit of ooh-la-la. The chances of an associate or—worse—one’s life partner
also
stumbling upon the site were far too great, she reckoned. One would wish to be at least moderately clever. She assumed no one used his or her real name either.

Winston was standing in the doorway as she looked the site over. He was casually blocking Caroline Goldacre’s access route to liberty
should she decide to seek it. She didn’t seem bent on going anywhere, however. Instead she said, “What’s going on? Whose laptop is that? Clare’s? What’ve you got onto? Her email? How did you do it?”

“She had it set so it ’members all her passwords to ever’thing,” Nkata told her. “Dead thick to do that but people get lazy with their own PCs. Anyone with access could see wherever she’d been.”

Barbara looked up, as the penny certainly dropped with that remark. She was about to speak when Caroline said, “Are you accusing
me
 . . . ? What is it exactly that you’re accusing me of, Sergeant?”

Barbara continued to click through the website, looking at the various adverts regarding who wanted what from whom and where and how. Some of them were bloody imaginative, she thought. It was sodding incredible what people could manage to do with their body parts and a decent amount of flexibility.

“ . . . having sex round Dorset, Hampshire, and Somerset,” Nkata was saying to Caroline. “How much ‘bout this d’you know?”

Caroline appeared to be taking this in at some considerable length. She stared at Nkata, and for that matter, so did Barbara as she realised what Nkata was declaring, having apparently done his homework with regard to Clare’s use of the site. A vein beat energetically in Caroline’s temple. She said, “You seem to be telling me that Clare Abbott was meeting strangers for sex.”

“I’m telling you
someone
was trolling for men and meeting ’em,” Nkata corrected her. “Clare Abbott? P’rhaps. But could be someone else was using this laptop to do it. ’Cause like I said ’bout her laptop . . . ? Passwords were on it so anyone could’ve spent some time having a look at summat she was ’xploring and then deciding—” He shrugged.

“What the sergeant is saying,” Barbara added, “is that it could’ve been Clare or it could’ve been Mother Goose on this site. Or . . . I s’pose it could even have been you looking for a friendly anonymous poke.”

“Me? Using Clare’s computer to troll for men? Oh, that’s very rich. You do know I’m married, don’t you?”

“So’s everyone else on the site,” Nkata pointed out.

“Or they’re people
pretending
to be married,” Caroline said tartly,
“as I doubt they ask each other to bring proof of marriage with them for their little encounters. For all you know, that . . . that
thing
you’ve got there on her computer is merely a filthy place to meet and have it off with a nameless someone without any strings. Someone merely
pretends
to be attached by marriage so that no one has any expectations of him.”

“Or her,” Barbara said. “Sounds good to me in either case. Playing a bit of anonymous mattress poker in the afternoon. Sound good to you, Winnie? Whoops. Never mind. I forget about that moral streak you have.”

“Hmm,” he said. “My mum find out I do summat like that and she beat me with a broomstick, Barb.”

“Child abuse. Terrible. And at your age.”

“Very amusing.” Caroline had dropped her shoulder bag on a chair near the door, and she made a move towards it, prefatory to leaving them. She said, “I can see that—”

But Nkata broke in. “Blokes responding?” he said, with a nod at the laptop. “Here’s summat in’eresting. They’re writing to someone called Caro, not Clare. Caro.”

Caroline stopped in her progress to the door.

“Now that
is
an intriguing bit,” Barbara said. “Would that be you, Mrs. Goldacre? Caro short for Caroline?”

“Of
course
it’s not me. These individuals don’t
use
their real names. She’s obviously . . . God, all her rubbish about feminism . . . And using
my
name . . . She didn’t even know them. She didn’t bother to discover if they were criminals or . . . or diseased . . . or rapists . . . or . . . or wife beaters . . . or
God
only knows because they’re probably all psychopaths anyway and there she is trotting round the country, spouting all this rot about women being their own masters and putting themselves into the picture about romance being utter nonsense intended to trick them into marriages where they can only be miserable for the rest of their lives while all the time she’s running round making damn sure those women are
going
to be miserable once they uncover what their husbands are up to . . .” She laughed, but it wasn’t amusement. It sounded to Barbara like something very close to triumph.

“The men seem to’ve liked her, though,” Nkata said. “Looking at their reactions in the afters . . . ?” He nodded at the computer. “You see that, Barb?”

Barbara had indeed seen. “She was picking and choosing after a while,” she said. “Second go, third go. Lots of energy for a bird her age.”

“Wasn’t exactly a looker either, eh?” This Nkata directed to Caroline Goldacre.

“What does
that
mean?”

“Means, like I said, they’re calling her Caro.”

“And
I’ve
already said she’s used my name. And don’t you bloody dare
begin
to think . . . If you believe that I was so madly stupid as to use Clare’s laptop to seek whatever sort of loathsome males are advertising themselves for whatever sort of disgusting encounters they have in mind, then what I suggest is that you meet with them. Meet with each one of them. Take along my photo. Take a photo of Clare. They’ll have a look and tell you at once that the bloody filthy whore they’ve been fucking—” She stopped herself. She’d begun to perspire lightly on the forehead, and her skin showed this in the light from the lamp on Clare’s desk.

Barbara and Nkata said nothing. Barbara’s mobile rang and she gave it a glance. Lynley, she saw. She would ring him back.

Caroline said to them, “You’ve upset me.”

“Happen a lot?” Nkata asked.

“What?”

“You getting upset like that. You get pushed too far and what happens next?”

“Nothing we need discuss,” she told them.

She made for the door. Nkata stepped aside and allowed her to go.

SHAFTESBURY

DORSET

Alastair found that he was having difficulty actually hearing what Sharon was saying. He was listening well enough. That wasn’t a problem. But remembering from one moment to the next the details of
their bi-monthly meeting was a challenge. He looked down at his notes. They needed to hire a few more shop assistants: Dorchester, Bridport, and Wareham were doing so well that a single person behind the counter was no longer sufficient. Then, there was something not quite right about the building being worked on for the new shop in Swanage, he saw. Sharon was recommending that she spend half a day there soon to look things over and to have a meeting with the contractor doing the renovation.

He nodded and nodded, said yes and yes, and he became aware of how well taken care of he was by Sharon. He also felt completely calm with her, and it was a strange and not unwelcome sensation to be with someone who was tranquil and confident. His experience of so many years with Caroline had given him an entirely different view of women, as if he’d forgotten that they could be any way other than needing him and sucking upon his essence in order to drain it until there was nothing left.