A Banquet of Consequences (39 page)

“Oh, mate.” Al C groaned sympathetically while Bob T said, “Dead mad, you are.”

“How’d it go and where’d it go?” Barbara asked, hoping for a bank transfer or the like but fairly sure she wasn’t going to get one.

“Cash,” he said.

“Posted or dropped somewhere?”

“Posted. An address in Shaftesbury.”

“D’you happen to remember it?”

“Just the street, Bimport, this was. I went up and had a drive by in the afters. Fancy big stone house. Nice garden out front. She wasn’t hurting for it.”

“What about you?” Barbara asked Al C. “Cash as well?”

“Didn’t pay, did I,” Al C said. “That message she sent? The wouldn’t-wifey-like-to-know? Didn’t sound like the same woman wrote it, you ask me. I teach composition, see. English and the like at the local comprehensive and I’m not saying where so don’t even ask. Kids. You know what they’re like when it comes to writing. Plagiarists one and all. There’s a site you c’n use on the web to work
out whether the kids’ve done their own writing or ‘borrowed’ someone else’s. I ran all the emails came from Caro24K through it. Programme said the last one, the one asking for eight hundred quid . . . ? Wasn’t from her. You ask me, someone was on to what this woman”—with a nod at Clare’s picture which lay on the table looking up at them all—“was doing on the website. Someone either knew her passwords—”

“Or had access to the same computer Clare Abbott had used, where her passwords were all stored in memory,” Barbara finished. “Did you let Clare know?”

“Rang her mobile and left a message,” he said.

“Did she ring you back? Ask any questions? Get in touch in any way?”

He shook his head. They all sat there for an additional thirty seconds, during which time an elderly couple and their three West Highland terriers came into the pub. They were followed in a moment by a family of four, who joined them at the bar where a noisy examination of the menu began, accompanied by “Granny, I want the steak pie!” and “Fish fingers for you and no argument” from Dad and “I’m paying, Ian,” from Granddad, “so let the boy have what he wants.”

That was it in a nutshell, Barbara thought wryly as the family continued their discussion over food. Wasn’t it always down to a case of letting the boy have what he wants.

FULHAM

LONDON

Rory Statham knew she was nearly back to normal when the expression on her mother’s face caused her to smile. She was being quite heroic, her mum, having brought from Rory’s flat a recording of a piece of music she’d been composing in her free time for the last several months. Rory had very little occasion to use her Cambridge first in geopolitics in the course of her work as a feminist nonfiction editor. But her other first in music theory she still dabbled with in her limited free time. She’d done so from the first when she’d graduated. She’d let it go for many of the years with Fiona. But she’d ultimately
returned to composing purely for her own enjoyment. And if she had nothing published, professionally recorded, or produced for the public by one or another of London’s orchestras, it was no matter. She enjoyed the process.

“My,” her mum said with her customary gracious smile when Rory showed mercy at the end of the first movement by switching the music off. “That’s all quite . . . different, isn’t it?”

Rory could tell she meant that the composition sounded like a tailback on the Hammersmith Flyover at rush hour, with countless taxis heading to Heathrow, carrying anxiety-ridden passengers in fear of missing their flights. There was an accident up ahead. The fire brigade was involved as were two ambulances. Lorries were jockeying with buses and SUVs. Nerves were unstrung. Tempers were flaring. Rory wanted to tell her mother that she was completely spot-on in her understanding of the piece.

But instead she said to her, “We don’t have to listen to this. It was good of you to bring it, but . . . well, obviously it needs work.”

“Nonsense, darling,” her mother said. “It’s lovely. Quite lovely.”

Rory laughed. “Bet it reminds you of
Swan Lake
, Mum.”

Her mother chuckled. “All right, then. I’ll never understand these things. Did I tell you Eddie and David have been phoning twice a day to see how you are? They were going to come up to town straightaway, but it seemed to me that as you’re on the mend, and what with having a four-year-old and a seven-year-old to contend with . . . I told them best to wait till the holidays. I hope that was right.”

Rory felt the flicker of an expression cross her face at the mention of her brother, his husband, and their children. Her mind went to Fiona and what things might have been like had Rory only agreed to a baby. But no, she thought. How much more horrible would everything have been to have had a child with them on holiday, a child who would have been at least ten years old when Fiona was murdered. She said to her mother, “You did exactly right. I’d rather see them all at Christmas anyway.”

The room’s door opened, and all regret was swept away when Rory saw that Detective Inspector Lynley had come again to the hospital, only this time he had Arlo with him. The dog wore the vest that
declared him an assistance animal, and when his eyes lit upon Rory in the hospital bed, his tail became a blur of joy.

Lynley said, “I managed to convince everyone below that Arlo is indeed an assistance dog. What with my police credentials, his winsome ways, and my own limited ability to be affable, we have a quarter hour to visit.”

“Do lift him onto the bed, Inspector,” Rory said and when Lynley did so, Arlo writhed ecstatically among the linens before placing himself at Rory’s legs with his chin on her thighs and his eyes fixed lovingly on her face. Rory said, “He’s giving me love eyes. Hello, darling boy. Have you a dog, Inspector?”

“I don’t,” he said. “But my mother has three who generally spend their time arranging themselves artfully in front of the fireplace in her home. Completely addicted to a roaring blaze, they are.”

“Where does she live that she’s even allowed a roaring blaze?” Rory asked.

“Cornwall.”

“You don’t sound like a Cornishman,” Rory’s mother said. “Did you not grow up there?”

“I did,” Lynley told her. “But my school days—and my father—made certain the accent didn’t stick.” And then to Rory, “I’ve had a call from our forensics people. They’d been backlogged when it came to fingerprints but now they’ve managed to sort everything out. It’s a bit curious, what they’ve found. Your toothpaste has not only your fingerprints on it but two other sets as well.”

Rory frowned, wondering what this meant. Lynley clarified with, “One of the sets is unidentified as yet. The other belongs to Clare Abbott.”

“
Clare’s
fingerprints?” Rory’s mother said. “And someone else’s? On Rory’s toothpaste?”

“It could mean any number of things to have more than one set of prints,” Lynley said. “But to have Clare’s prints on Rory’s toothpaste in circumstances in which Clare herself has been poisoned, the most reasonable—”

“Wait!” Rory cried out. Arlo sprang to his feet. Rory said to him quickly, “Arlo. Stay. I’m fine.” And then she said to Lynley because
everything had suddenly become quite clear to her, “Oh God. Here’s what it is, Inspector. We had words.”

“You and Clare?”

“Caroline Goldacre. Before I left Shaftesbury. She was quite angry. She’d been banging on about Clare and her next book and there not being a book at all, and we got into a bit of unpleasantness about it. I ended up telling her that she wouldn’t be needed any longer because—obviously—she wouldn’t be. She wanted to collect her things but I said that wasn’t going to be possible just then as I had to go through everything in the house. I allowed her to take a few articles from the office, but that was it.”

Rory’s mother said, “But, darling, surely the woman wouldn’t poison you because—”

“It’s not that at all,” Rory cut in. “I don’t like to argue with people. You know that, Mum. All I wanted to do was to get back to London at that point. So when she’d left, I gathered up Arlo’s things in a hurry, and off we went. It was only when we got to London and I gave him his walk that I realised I’d left my suitcase back in Shaftesbury. I’d nothing with me at home—”

“Nothing?” Lynley asked.

“I mean one-off items. What one puts in a sponge bag. I’d none of those things, so I used Clare’s. I had her overnight case, you see,” she said to Lynley. “From Cambridge. From the night she was there.”

“Of course,” Lynley said. “Because when her death was initially declared to be heart-related, you were sent her belongings, I expect.”

“I’d not even unpacked them,” Rory told him. “There was no reason. But when I realised I’d left my own things in Shaftesbury—”

“You used her toothpaste. Who would have packed her bag for the Cambridge trip?”

“Clare herself. Possibly Caroline.”

“And they had adjoining rooms in Cambridge,” Lynley said.

They all took a moment. Rory saw what the implications were. She said, “She would have known what kind of toothpaste Clare used. She always did the shop for her. She could have substituted . . . But, Inspector, she had no reason to murder Clare. It would have been biting the hand, and why on earth would she have done that?”

It was a good question, Lynley acknowledged. But at this juncture motives or the lack thereof were details that could be mooted forever. The real issue was getting to the bottom of the third set of fingerprints next. If they weren’t Caroline Goldacre’s, then they were someone else’s, and that person would have had to have access to Clare Abbott’s possessions in order to slip the poison into those items she had taken with her to Cambridge.

FULHAM

LONDON

“So we’ve had a chat with three of the four blokes,” Barbara Havers said, “with the fourth declaring his motor conked out on the way so that’s why he didn’t show.
Which
, at this point, I believe like I also believe I can swim to France. But he’s declaring we can come to him if we want to check his story. He says he’s in a lay by off the A352 waiting for a tow.”

Lynley leaned against the wing of the Healey Elliott. Traffic crawled by him on Fulham Road. He’d rung the sergeant to get her on to Caroline Goldacre’s fingerprints, but they hadn’t got there yet. Havers was recounting the group interrogation that she and Winston Nkata had conducted with three men who’d met Clare Abbott for, as Havers put it in her inimitable fashion, “a bit of pound-and-dash.” Two of them had gone through with it once they’d met her in the flesh, Havers was saying. The third was someone Clare had merely interviewed about using the adultery website in the first place.

“Way I’m starting to see things,” Havers was saying in conclusion, “the reason we can’t find any Internet adultery book could be that Clare Abbott was doing nothing more ’n catting round with men she’d picked up off the Internet. At first she
meant
to write that book. P’rhaps she even started it. But she ended up liking what she found when she got to man number two—this is the bloke who smears chocolate on the ladies and then licks it off—and decided the whole meet-greet-eat-and-beat of Just4Fun chuffed her a hell of a lot more than writing about it did. But what’s really interesting is what happened next.”

“There’s actually something more interesting than licking chocolate off a woman one’s just met?” Lynley enquired pleasantly.

“Too right there is,” Havers told him. “’Cause every one of the men we talked to heard from her afterwards.”

Havers told him about emails from Caro24K then, directed to the men with whom Clare had had assignations. She touched on demands that were made for eight hundred pounds, as well as which of the men caved into the blackmail and which of them hadn’t. “One ’f them reckoned the blackmail message hadn’t come from the same person at all, and he had some sort of computer programme or access to a website or something like to work out he was right. Now, what’s your guess on who that person is?”

“If that’s the case and it proves true,” Lynley said, “doesn’t it make more sense that Caroline Goldacre was the target for a murder and not Clare Abbott?”

“I see that,” she said. “Me and Winnie? We talked about it as well.”

So when they’d returned to Clare’s house, she said, they’d had a look at Clare’s bank statements and her chequebook and, as things turned out, “Those blokes weren’t the only ones hearing from someone who wanted money after they’d met up with Clare. There was cheques written to Caroline Goldacre as well. Not pay cheques, these, but cheques for varying amounts. Twenty-five quid here, fifty quid there. One hundred once. What d’you reckon that’s about? You ask me, she was blackmailing her.”

“That doesn’t sound like blackmail, Sergeant. Twenty-five pounds? Fifty? Even one hundred? It well could be that the Goldacre woman was merely being repaid for something she’d bought with her own funds. Food, wine, office supplies, God knows what. If she was blackmailing Clare, doesn’t it seem more likely that she’d want cash? Have you checked Clare’s other accounts? There and in London?”

“Not yet. But bank accounts aside, the situation
also
could be Caroline casually dropping the word that ‘Clare, luv, I’m running short this week. What d’you think about giving me fifty quid?’”

“Not direct blackmail but implied?”

“Right.”

“It’s possible, but that takes us back to Caroline Goldacre as the target for murder,” he reminded her.

This led them directly to the fingerprints on the toothpaste tube and to Lynley’s request that Havers get Caroline Goldacre’s prints as
soon as possible. The local police would, he reckoned, be able to assist her with a mobile fingerprinting device and at this point, SO7 would have put the unidentified fingerprints from the toothpaste into the system.

Havers acquiesced to this but added, “If Caroline Goldacre’s dabs’re the ones on that tube of toothpaste, something’s rotten, and it’s not in Copenhagen, Inspector.”

Lynley smiled. “You impress me. To be rather more accurate, however: Elsinore.”

“What?”

“Elsinore,” he repeated. “It’s in Denmark.”

“So’s Copenhagen, ’less they moved it.”