A Banquet of Consequences

  “I didn’t.” She’d paused at the door to put on her indoor shoes. She didn’t come farther into the kitchen but instead observed him for a moment, saying, “But I hoped.”

  He had started whipping the eggs with a fork, but the way she’d said that final word made him pause. It had seemed to come from within her chest, like something deeply felt but only reluctantly spoken. The tone of it prompted him to ask her, “And if I’d not come . . . ?”

  “My life would go on. Life has a way of doing that.”

  He could feel his face alter despite his attempt to keep it from doing so. It hadn’t been the answer he’d hoped for. She apparently saw this change in him, for she came to him and said, “Alastair, have I hurt you?”

  He shook his head. “Bloody stupid is all.”

  She brushed her fingers against his thinning curls. Her look was fond. “Are you caught up in wanting what you already have? I’m yours, my dear. I’m no one else’s, and I’ve no intention of things changing. Now, do step aside and let me cook. I love cooking for you and looking over my shoulder and seeing you with that way you have of watching me. Like what you really want is not related to food at all.”

  Christ but he started to harden at that. What was it about her? He said, “There’s the truth of it.” He took her hand and pressed it to his groin.

  “Naughty,” she said. But her fingers squeezed and released, and made him catch his breath. She gently pushed him out of the way, though, and she went on with, “I’m due this morning at the Swanage site. I’ve just time for breakfast and then I must be off. Will you sleep here? Once we’ve eaten, I mean. You must be dead on your feet. Did you sleep at all last night?”

  “Enough,” he lied. “But it’s no matter as it wasn’t sleep I wanted.”

  She adjusted the flame beneath the bacon. She took over whipping up the eggs and added some milk to them, some salt, some freshly ground pepper. She said to him, “That’ll fade, you know. You best be prepared for that, or you’ll be very disappointed. It always fades.”

  “What’s that, then?”

  She gestured between them with her whipping fork. “This hunger we have for each other. It doesn’t stay the same. It can’t. What you want just now—this you-and-me thing of it with nothing else on our minds but climbing the stairs or me just taking my knickers off here in the kitchen—it doesn’t last.”

  “I know what I want,” he told her huskily. “This’s way bigger than lust between you and me.” And when she shot him a look of sceptical amusement, “I don’t deny the lust is there. You feel it as well, and you got to say it.”

  She smiled. “Your hands in my knickers would tell you the truth of it, but”—as he approached her—“I c’n only attend to the one hunger just now. We can’t let things fall apart in our lives. You’ve a business to run and—”

  “Curse me if I care about the business.”

  “You must care. You’ve built it up—”

  “’Cause of you.”

  “Rubbish. I’ve only suggested this and that. So let’s not forget what’s truly important cos no one lives on . . . well . . .” He could see her blushing and he loved this about her. “What you ’n’ me’ve been up to? No one lives on that. Now be a good lad and sit at table and wait for me to cook you this meal. Have some cornflakes. Eat your grapefruit. I reckon both of us need to keep up our strength.”

  SHAFTESBURY

  DORSET

  When Lynley finally rang her, Barbara was mightily cheesed off. She’d been waiting for him to give her the word about his interview with Caroline Goldacre and when he’d not rung her by nine o’clock on the previous evening, she’d begun to ring him. If the prints on that tube of doctored toothpaste were Caroline’s, it had seemed to Barbara that matters should have been to give the bloody cow her rights and cart her off to the nick. But ringing Lynley from nine until midnight had got her no information, so she’d finally dropped into bed with a “Where the bloody hell are you and what the bloody hell is happening?” and seethed for a good three more hours before she’d finally fallen asleep. His phone call awakened her at seven, and she punched the mobile in answer and barked, “Why the hell didn’t you ring me back when you knew I was waiting for word?”

  “Good God. Are you always this cheerful in the morning?” he asked pleasantly. “Have you not had your coffee?”

  “Why didn’t you ring me? What did you expect we were going to do without word from you?”

  “I expected you’d have dinner and make an early night of it. I had to take Arlo back to Daidre, Sergeant. I didn’t leave Camberwell to do that till nearly ten.”

  “You could’ve rung me on the way to North London.”

  “And violate the law regarding driving and using one’s mobile? Hardly.”

  “Then at Daidre’s. You could’ve rung me then. Oh, I get she was probably mad for you, ripping off your kit directly you stepped inside the place, eh? But seems to me you could’ve fought her off long enough to—”

  “It’s your leisure reading, Sergeant,” Lynley said. “Time to elevate it, I think. Although . . . aren’t the men doing the clothes-ripping in romances? No. Don’t answer that. As it was, Daidre was asleep.”

  “And you didn’t tiptoe to her bedside—shoes in hand—to lower yourself gently onto her comfortable mattress and breathe seductively onto the back of her neck?”

  “Alas. It’s a sleeping bag on a camp bed. She likes to rough it.”

  “Oh, I bet she does.”

  “Amusing,” he said.

  “Where are you now?”

  “Walking to the car. In Belgravia, by the way. Having spent the night on my own extremely comfortable mattress, breathing onto my pillow’s neck, should pillows have necks. Now that we’ve established all that, shall we get down to business?”

  In short order, he brought her into the picture, and it was a game changer, if Caroline Goldacre was to be believed. The killing tube of toothpaste was hers, and according to Lynley’s questioning of her, she hadn’t packed Clare’s suitcase for the trip to Cambridge so she didn’t plant the toothpaste within it.

  “Clare forgot hers, and Caroline handed her own over,” Lynley said.

  “So she says. She could’ve packed Clare’s bag and conveniently ‘forgotten’ the toothpaste. No one’s ever going to know the truth of that one.”

  “I’m not blind to that.” Needing some toothpaste later on in the evening and after their argument, Lynley went on, Caroline had rung down to reception in an attempt to acquire a tube so that she wouldn’t have to speak to Clare again. “All of this was mentioned to me earlier by the night receptionist, by the way,” Lynley said. “She wasn’t pleasant to him when there was no toothpaste to be had.”

  “That’s convenient,” Barbara noted.

  “The unpleasantness making her phone call memorable?” Lynley enquired. “Certainly. I see how all of this conveniently underscores Caroline’s declaration of herself as the true target, Sergeant. On the other hand, a motive for her actually wanting to kill her employer would be welcome. As to the third set of fingerprints on the tube? They were hers, so that rather supports her story. She’s not a fool, after all. If she poisoned the toothpaste, she’d hardly have left her prints on the tube.”

  “But that works both ways, sir, the motive bit. Who would have had a motive to kill her? Oh. Never mind. I’ve met the minge bag and made a note of her predilection for blackmail.”

  “Piquant as always,” Lynley said. “But it turns out that the present husband has been having a relationship with a woman who works for him, someone called Sharon. The son told me this. And they’ve been an item for a few months now, according to Caroline. So that wants looking into.”

  “S’pose there’s that ASBO as well,” Barbara said, filling him in on what she knew at the moment about Lily Foster, much of which she discovered he’d already learned from Car
oline Goldacre’s son. “We’ll be getting onto Lily Foster today.”

  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.