A Banquet of Consequences (46 page)

They rang off. She made quick work of getting herself ready for the day, aware that Winston had probably been up and about and doing his duty for two hours. She descended the stairs to find him in the dining room—fast becoming their incident room—making some sort of appointment with someone via his mobile. He gave her a nod and indicated the kitchen doorway. She took this to mean there was something edible therein, and she took herself to find out what it was.

Within the oven was a baking tray covered neatly by aluminium foil. It contained a plate of toast and another of poached eggs, grilled tomatoes, and bacon, all of which were accompanied by the miracle of Heinz baked beans. The coffeemaker held a half-filled pot, so she poured herself a cup and carried the carafe out to the dining room, saying to Winston, “May I top you up, sir?” with a waitressly smile.

He’d just ended his call. “Psychiatrist,” he told her, nodding at the mobile.

“Am I sending you round the bend?”

“Too right,” he acknowledged. “But tha’ was Clare’s, not mine. Bird called Karen Globus. Remember the name? In her diary? Linne recognised it as she belongs to the Women’s League ’s well. Got an appointment to talk with her this af’ernoon in Sherborne. ‘Don’t know how helpful I c’n be to your enquiry’ and all that, she says.”

Barbara went for her breakfast, returned with it, and brought him up to the minute on her call from Lynley. Nkata, she saw, didn’t look surprised at the information about the fingerprints, the toothpaste’s ownership, and Clare Abbott’s lack of the same inside her suitcase. He said what Barbara herself had been forced to admit: If Caroline was telling the truth about Clare packing her own suitcase, then the
recipient of the ASBO wanted looking into. On the other hand, if she was lying, they had a different situation entirely.

When she’d eaten and got herself in order, they set off. What local information they had on Lily Foster had been supplied by Linne Stephens during Winston’s conversation with her on the previous day. This largely amounted to where Lily was: in a flat above her tattooing business in Swans Yard.

This business, they discovered, was called Needle Brush and when they arrived, the proprietor was just opening for the day. As they crossed the courtyard from the high street, she was setting up a sandwich board outside her door. She looked like one’s fantasy of a tattoo artist, Barbara thought. She was dressed in black from her boots to her unevenly hemmed skirt to her unseasonable tank top; black of hair which was clearly dyed; arms sleeved with colourful designs that would prove upon closer inspection to be dazzling in their pornographic intricacy. Her limbs were Gomorrahic in their depiction of intercourse in a variety of athletic positions. In all of them, curiously, the man was blindfolded. Barbara was awestruck at the detail involved, but she wondered how Lily was going to feel about her colourful skin when she hit fifty years of age.

Winston was the one to say, “Lily Foster?” as they followed the young woman into her shop.

She glanced over her shoulder with, “Yeah, me,” and continued on her way to a desk that sat behind a shop counter. The walls round her displayed photographs of completed work along with myriad designs from which a potential client could choose. These ran the gamut: a real A to Z of animals to signs of the zodiac and all points in between. None were like Lily’s, but Barbara reckoned there was a limited clientele for bodily painted perversity.

While Winston pulled out his police identification, Lily scooted a rolling stool from beneath the desk. A bright light was illuminating a design she was working upon, rendered on some sort of tissue paper. She sat, studied it for a moment, and made an erasure before turning back to them. Barbara saw her clock Winston’s warrant card, but she made a point of not reacting. Instead, she asked if they were wanting tattoos.

“Got a thing about needles,” Barbara told her. “And Winston here? He’s got a thing about not disappointing his mum who, I suspect, wouldn’t go in big for body art. Would she, Win?”

“Might go f’r her name in a heart, but tha’s about it,” Winston acknowledged. “Lily Foster, right? We need a word.”

Lily rolled back from the desk. The way the light hit her face, Barbara could see that she could have been quite pretty had she possessed fewer body piercings—the thick half-hoop through her septum was particularly gruesome—had her hair colour been whatever nature had given her, had her choice of clothing been less funereal, and had the body art not created such a disturbing diversion. She had an extraordinarily beautiful complexion of creamy white with an appealing dash of freckles on her nose and a mouth so perfectly formed that it looked like something created by a plastic surgeon. She had practically no eyebrows or eyelashes, but this made her look exotic rather than odd. All the strange accoutrements of her appearance aside, Barbara could see what her appeal had been.

Lily said, “If they’ve told you I’ve been hanging about, they’re lying. And even if I
was
walking by—which I wasn’t—it’s a public roadway and even the cops agree with that. So if I want to take a walk, I’ll take a walk. And if I want to stop to catch my breath, I’ll stop to catch my breath. And that, by the way, is all I’ve
ever
done.”

“You’re banging on about the ASBO, eh?” Barbara waggled her warrant card before the young woman. “You don’t really expect New Scotland Yard to come round because you’ve violated an ASBO, do you?”

“I
haven’t
violated the ASBO,” Lily said. “I live in this town as well. I can’t help it if I occasionally see her.”

“There’s that to be talked about,” Barbara admitted.

“What?”

“Why you’re living here,” Winston put in.

“I can live where I want,” Lily said. “Last time I looked that wasn’t against any laws.”

“Still and all,” Barbara pointed out, “I wouldn’t think tattoos would go down a treat in this part of the world.”

“You’d be surprised,” Lily told her. “There’s no artist within fifty miles of here. I checked before I moved house. So business is fine.”

“Yourself being an advert for what body painting can do to enhance an individual’s appearance,” Barbara said.

Lily flushed—she had the sort of skin that was going to do that easily—but she said nothing. She also did nothing to cover her tattoos. There was a loose cardigan—black, of course—hanging on the back of her chair, which she could have donned. She didn’t give it a glance.

“You were Will Goldacre’s partner, right?”

Lily turned back to her work, which appeared to be a complicated design incorporating a bull, a monkey, and a horse within it. She took up a pencil and as she did so, Barbara went on with, “Will’s mum told us a bit about you. Like how you were there when he went over the cliff. You hold her responsible. Why’s that?”

Lily tossed her pencil onto the desk. “She reduced him to a shell of a person who could barely function if she wasn’t round. And she hovered over him like she was put on earth to shepherd him through life and cure him and solve his every problem and—”

“Cure him of what?” Nkata asked, reaching into his jacket pocket where he habitually kept his notebook. “He sick or summat?”

“He had this thing with words that he couldn’t control,” Lily said. “They came out of his mouth when he got upset. They were nonsense words and foul words and  . . . Oh,
what
does it matter now he’s dead?” Her eyes had grown brighter as she was speaking. She surged from her chair and began rather desperately working among the shelves behind the counter, reorganising what seemed to be art books, collections of magazines, bottles and vials of liquids, and various volumes. When neither Barbara nor Winston said anything, she finally continued, her voice sharp. “She wanted to make him normal and perfect. She wanted to
be
him if she could possibly arrange it. He’d got away from her when he came to London, but he couldn’t manage it permanently.”

“That’s where you met him?” Barbara asked.

“He was living with his brother. He was doing a garden near my parents’ house. I stopped by to look at it. We talked. I liked him. I asked him did he want to go for a drink and we got on. After a bit, we started to live together. Only, of course, his mother couldn’t have that, could she? Lord, he might become happy. He might actually
function like a normal person and
then
what would she do? But there was no chance of that, was there, so he came back here and she got her claws into him and, yes, she’s who drove him to his death. No one who really knows her thinks anything else, but I’m the only one who’ll say it.”

She’d been speaking in nearly a stream-of-consciousness fashion—every cop’s wet dream, Barbara thought—but now she seemed to clock Winston writing rapidly in his notebook. Yet rather than put a plug in her gob to stop herself, she went on. “So did I hate her? Yes. Do I still hate her? Yes. She drove William over that cliff as well as if she’d been chasing him. He’d been doing well in London. We’d been doing well together. But she couldn’t leave him alone any more than she can leave Charlie alone. She’s always there and when she’s not there, she’s
still
there: this constant
presence
of her and, yes, all right, the only cure for that would be for her to die.”

Winston looked up at this. Barbara glanced his way. Lily laughed. She moved from the shop counter and held out her wrists. “Got the silver bracelets on you? Or don’t you lot use them any longer? Is it those pathetic plastic fasteners everyone uses now? I s’pose they’re more efficient.” She dropped her hands. Across from them a padded table appeared to be the spot for individuals to lie as their bodies were seen to with needles and inks. She went to this and began dressing it for the day in spotless linen—high-end tattoo shop, Barbara thought—which she tucked in firmly beneath the padding. She said, “Didn’t expect me to say all that, did you? So why don’t you tell me why you’re really here.”

“You know that Clare Abbott—Caroline Goldacre’s employer—died in Cambridge?” Barbara said.

“’Course I know it. You can’t live in Shaftesbury and not know it.”

“She was poisoned,” Nkata said. “So was her editor, few days later. Woman called Rory Statham.”

Lily stopped her tucking and adjusting and said, “What does that have to do with me?”

“Their poisonings?” Barbara said. “Nothing, prob’ly, as it relates to Clare. Only . . . now it looks like Caroline Goldacre might’ve been the target. And let’s be honest. That looks like something having a hell of a lot to do with you.”

Lily snorted. “So how am I s’posed to have poisoned Clare Abbott and her editor? While all the time intending to poison William’s loathsome mother?”

Barbara smiled. “Well, bloody hell, Lily, that would be telling,” she said pleasantly. “But with a gun in yours ribs, I expect you can see that this . . . What d’we call it, Winnie? Animosity?”

“Sounds ’bout right to me,” Winston said.

“Okay, then. I expect you can see that this animosity you have towards Mrs. Goldacre—”

“I’m probably one of two dozen people who wouldn’t mourn her passing,” Lily said. “Turn over a rock round here and you’ll find someone who wouldn’t’ve said no to putting arsenic in her porridge.”

“That could be the case,” Barbara acknowledged. “I’ve met the woman and she’s not at the top of my must-be-mates-with list. On the other hand, what you’ve said about her puts you in a dead bad light. And with an ASBO hanging over your head because you’ve not been able to keep away from her . . . ? Motives for murder have a way of piling up. So does circumstantial evidence.”

Lily laughed. Barbara wanted to think it was the wild laugh of a half-crazed woman with a canister of sodium azide hidden in her knickers, but she sounded genuinely amused. She went back behind the counter and sat at the desk where she once again took up her pencil and examined the drawing she was creating. She said, “You’ve got the wrong end of the stick on this one. If I’d decided to kill that bloody woman, believe me, I wouldn’t’ve used poison. I’d have strangled her with my bare hands ’cause not much else would’ve given me satisfaction.”

“What about Clare Abbott?” Winston asked this, and he made it sound like a point of curiosity.

“What about her?”

“We been looking through her clobber, and she’s got a diary with ’pointments in it. She did some names and she did some initials and LF are ’mong the initials. That be you?”

“I never talked to Clare Abbott,” Lily said.

“She never looked you up, rung you up, tracked you down?”

“She would’ve known who you are,” Barbara added. “Can’t
think Caroline would’ve been mum on the ASBO business once it got filed.”

Lily considered all this, and it seemed as if she was weighing not only her words but also how much information to include in them when she next spoke. She finally made up her mind, saying, “She rang me. She wanted to talk. We set up a time. I cancelled.”

“Why?”

“Because she wouldn’t tell me what she wanted to see me about and I bloody well reckoned it wasn’t a tattoo.”

“Why’d you want to miss a chance to bad-mouth Caroline?” Barbara asked. “No matter what she wanted to talk about, that was your chance to run her over hot coals with her employer.”

“Like she’d believe me?” Lily scoffed. “Not bloody likely. And Caroline would’ve given her sixteen earfuls about me in advance. And even if that wasn’t the case, I like people to work out what Caroline’s like on their own. It’s far more amusing that way.” She gave them a tight little smile and concluded with, “I’ve got to get to work now. I’ve someone coming in this morning to start the year of the bull, the year of the horse, and the year of the monkey. Those’re his kids’ birth years. Incredible how some people celebrate their children.”

That said, she turned from them and took up her pencil. She couldn’t have made it clearer that, unless they intended to arrest her for some infraction of the law or set themselves up for tattoos, their interview was finished.

VICTORIA

LONDON

“Wouldn’t mind seeing her guts on a spit and she’s nothing if not straight about that. Says Caroline was the ruin of the kid who offed himself—there was something bats about him as it turns out—and ’cording to Lily, she might ’s well’ve been there to give him the shove that sent him over the cliff.”