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.”
“Never mind,” he told her. “Carry on, Sergeant.”
CAMBERWELL
SOUTH LONDON
India wished lying to Nat hadn’t been necessary. She’d already created an excuse to cancel her last three clients of the day and while telling them that there was a family emergency she had to deal with hadn’t actually constituted a lie, she still didn’t like having to let them down. But to Nat, she couldn’t use the excuse of a family emergency since he would ask with justifiable concern what the emergency was and could he do something to help her. So instead she’d asked him if he’d mind her cancelling their after-work wine date. Her last three clients had all changed their scheduled appointments, she told him, and that being the case, she’d like to go home early and do the pile of laundry that had been growing exponentially for the past two weeks.
“You wouldn’t be desperately unhappy if I just went home?” was how she put it.
He’d said, “Of course I’ll be desperately unhappy, darling. You were going to be the antidote to the day I’ve had.”
He’d been meeting at some length with an architect chosen to design the plans that would preserve an enclave of tiny cottages in Tower Hamlets, which comprised his new project. Facing one another across front gardens with a single pavement bisecting the minuscule neighbourhood like a straight edge, they were just the sort of accommodation that could go under the wrecking ball in order to make way for a block of modern flats if someone didn’t fight for their historical significance, which Nat and his battalion of twinset-wearing warriors had done for the past two years. They’d won the day but now there was the matter of getting to the work of preservation, and in this cause the firm of architects Nat generally employed had decided that this particular project would be perfect for their twenty-three-year-old intern.
“Limited experience and thick as yesterday’s porridge,” Nat told India with a sigh. “I need a diversion. I was intent upon your being it.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Not to worry. Just tell me I’ve made an impression upon your guarded heart.”
“You know you have. And my heart has hardly been guarded in your case.”
“Christmas, then,” he said. “In Shropshire. Say that you’ll come. Dad dressed as Father Christmas for the grandkids. A neighbour’s four alpacas done up as reindeer. A wheelbarrow badly disguised as a sleigh. Hats, crackers, poppers, and the Speech after lunch. Really, darling, you don’t want to miss it.”
She laughed. “It’s only October. You might not be able to bear me by Christmas.”
“Try me,” he said.
“I shall think about it.”
“And I shall be thinking of you the rest of the day. You and your laundry.” So he’d accepted her excuse as given and as she did have laundry to do, India had not needed to mention that she was hosting her mother-in-law for what she earnestly hoped was going to be less than forty-eight hours.
Caroline had been in Camberwell since the morning. Charlie, as promised, had taken her to India’s house and had secured the spare key from where she’d left it just inside the rim of the porch light. He’d phoned India once he’d established his mother within. With thanks that India knew were sincere, he told her that Caroline was far calmer on this morning than she’d been the night before. “It was a grim evening all round,” he said, “so it’s just as well that I kept her even though it meant sleeping on the sofa. Me, not her. What were we thinking when we bought that piece of furniture, India? It’s like sleeping rough in a shop doorway. At any rate, she shouldn’t give you any trouble. She was completely on board with staying with you in Camberwell. Far less obvious a place, she says, for a killer to come looking for her.”
“You haven’t been able to talk her out of seeing herself as the third victim?” India asked.
“I learned long ago that one can’t talk my mother out of anything. I don’t expect this will be any longer than a day or two, by the way. She doesn’t want Alastair on his own for long. I think she’s afraid he’ll get used to her absence and start seeing its benefits.”
India was depending on that repeated promise of brevity. She also knew that Caroline’s chameleon moods could make that promise a reality as well. She might have left Dorset in a state about Alastair, about his inamorata, about her treatment at the hands of the police who had come calling upon her, about the likelihood of someone out there having her—Caroline—in his or her sights as a murder victim, but all of that could turn on a knife’s edge and have her trotting back to Shaftesbury on a moment’s notice.
Finally back at home, India looked the house over before she entered the front gate. The curtains were drawn over the sitting room window, the window of the upstairs bedroom that India used as her office/sitting room was also curtained, and when she put her key in the lock, she found that the door was bolted against her.
She rang the bell. Once, twice, three times, although she had to admit herself unsurprised when nothing happened to give her entrance to her own house. Finally, she rooted her mobile out of her bag and punched in her home number. When the answer phone came on, she said, “Caroline? Caroline?” And then when Caroline did not answer, she went on sharply with, “Mum, open the door at once. I can’t get in.”
At this, finally, Caroline’s voice came into India’s ear. She said inanely, “Who
is this? Please identify yourself.”
To which India snapped, “Honestly, who do you think it is? Open the door at once.”
“I’ve no idea who you are without your identifying yourself,” Caroline told her.
“Oh for heaven’s sake. Whoever I say I am, I might be lying, so I suggest you come to the sitting room window, have a look, and then open the goddamn door.”
There was silence at this. India reckoned that Caroline was trying to come to terms with the alteration in her previously compliant daughter-in-law who was now tartly ordering her about. After a moment, movement at the bay window attracted India’s attention, and she saw her mother-in-law peering through the glass at her, hand grasping one melon breast as if to still her pounding heart. India gestured at the front door, saying loud enough to be heard within the house, “Unbolt it at once. This is absurd.”
Caroline disappeared. Then came the sound of the bolt being released. The door opened. Caroline stepped back from it and said, “It was the way you were speaking to me. I’d no idea you . . . Well, never mind, then. I’m so glad to see you, darling India. Thank you so very much for allowing me . . .” She gestured round the small entry and beyond as India stepped past her. When the door was closed and once again bolted, Caroline went on. “I’ve been in the kitchen and the bedroom most of the day, just watching the telly and trying to distract myself from . . . I don’t know what to call it, India. From whatever is going to happen next, I suppose. First Clare and then Rory and then Scotland Yard detectives showing up on my doorstep with their questions and their peering at me like some kind of specimen, as if I might have actually had a hand in what’s happened. And there was Alastair being no support whatsoever because of that . . . that . . . I don’t want to call her what she deserves to be called.”