A Banquet of Consequences

  “He wanted to help,” Daidre explained, seeing the direction of Lynley’s gaze. “We had words about it and he’s been in the kitchen ever since.” And to the dog, “Bed, Arlo. After you say hello to Inspector Lynley.”

  Lynley patted the dog’s head, and Arlo obediently trotted to the kitchen where Daidre had placed a folded blanket within viewing distance of the sitting room and the work going on there. Lynley inspected this. She’d had the walls replastered or—knowing Daidre—she’d done the plastering herself. She’d also repaired and sanded the woodwork of the room, which was now taped off against the pearl grey that was going up on the walls. He saw that she’d also broken through the postwar walling of the Victorian fireplace. It would need the replacement of some of its decorative tiles, but he had no doubt she was the woman for the job, as well as the job of refinishing the dreadfully painted lavender floor that lay beneath the drop sheets.

  He said, “You’ve made good progress.”

  “What d’you think of the colour?”

  “On the walls, fine. In your hair, perhaps not.”

  “Oh God, have I got it in my hair?”

  “On your cheek as well. And there’s a rather beguiling spot of it on your chin.”

  “I’ve never been terribly good with paint,” she told him regretfully.

  “On the contrary, you wield a brush like . . . well, like a real housepainter. I didn’t think to find you embroiled in the project at this hour, though. Do you know the time?”

  “I expect I’ve missed dinner. What about you?”

  “The same.”

  She set down her roller and moved the tray to the top of a ladder, where she carefully balanced it. “Are you hungry?” she asked him. “We could easily forage in the fridge. I’m afraid it would be an every-man-for-himself sort of meal, though. I’d love to whip up something spectacular for you from the remains of whatever’s in the kitchen, but when it comes to that sort of whipping, I’m completely out of my league.”

  “I don’t want to ask what the other sort of whipping is,” Lynley said. “Let me see what you have while you . . . I expect you don’t want to eat in the boilersuit.”

  “And you’d be correct,” she told him. “Only . . .”

  He paused. He’d been on his way to the kitchen, and he turned to see her watching him. Her glasses, he saw, were also speckled with paint, as were her feet which, curiously, were bare. He raised an eyebrow. “Only . . . ?” he said.

  “Only I have nothing on beneath this,” she told him. “Well, not quite true. Knickers and a sports bra. But nothing else. I could put on jeans. A tee-shirt or pullover, perhaps. But, to be honest, it seems rather like a waste. Unless, of course, you’re famished. In which case, I completely understand.”

  “You seem to be suggesting something other than foraging in the fridge,” he told her.

  “Right. Well. How hungry are you?”

  20 OCTOBER

  SHAFTESBURY

  DORSET

  They’d been up till half past three, so Barbara at least had an excuse for her lie in the following morning. Together she and Winston had read every one of the emails that Caroline Goldacre had written to Clare Abbott. There were hundreds and they had run the gamut, covering everything from her personal history—with heavy emphasis on Caroline’s relationships with her mother and with her first husband—to her friendships and affiliations with other women in Shaftesbury during the years of her habitation in the town. She wrote of her sons often, particularly of Will and his suicide and her refusal to look upon his ruined body after his leap from a Dorset cliff. This soul-crushing inability had, she explained at great and repetitive length, robbed her of a final look upon her son, even in his coffin when all the damage had been repaired by an undertaker who’d come down from London as a personal favour to Francis and wasn’t that the only time that Francis Goldacre had so much as lifted a finger to help his son . . . when he was dead . . . because God knew he wouldn’t do a thing to help the boy when he was alive, no matter how she begged or what she did or what Will himself did to illustrate the depth of his self-loathing. This was, it developed, a favourite theme that Caroline had pursued in her emails, closely followed by her many examinations of her son Charlie’s marriage to the “loathsome India,” who was “plain as a pikestaff and doing nothing at all to make herself otherwise. It’s as if she wants to be as unattractive as possible and what woman would do that unless it’s to torment Charlie because I swear to you she wasn’t like that when he met her, she was quite lovely, but she has COMPLETELY let herself go.”

  On the theme of India, Caroline wound herself up tightly and let fly. In most cases, her epistolary creation was a rambling diatribe as one thought seemed to trigger the next. India wanted to make herself undesirable to Charlie, went one explication, because she had never liked sex in the first place and, “believe me, she was the one who insisted on marriage and she wouldn’t let up till she had him, and now she has him supporting her because what in God’s name can she expect to make as an acupuncturist I ask you? Now that he’s out there working like a dog for her, you watch, she isn’t going to bother with him sexually any longer. And I didn’t want him to marry her, you know. They were too young, and now what if India wants to have a baby which I wouldn’t put past her for a moment. That’s what’s probably behind everything she does. And if she does get pregnant—God forbid—what then? I’ll tell you: He’ll be caught for good.”

  It did not appear to dawn on Caroline that she continually contradicted herself, sometimes within a single email. It was as if, once she began writing, something was unleashed inside of her and she was unable to control what she said. But the real question that Barbara and Winston asked each other throughout the long night and into the early-morning hours of their reading was why Clare Abbott had kept all the emails, had gone so far as to print them up, had highlighted bits and pieces of them, and had made references to unknown names and numbers in the margins, as well as obscure abbreviations. But these were questions they could not answer as the night wore on. They were too exhausted, drained from all the reading and from their attempts at interpreting the motives of both women—Caroline and Clare—in writing to each other in the first place.

  Prior to sitting at the dining table with their respective stacks of emails, Winston had reported to Barbara the details of his time in Sherborne with Dr. Karen Globus, the psychiatrist whose name Clare had written in her diary. At first—and as they both had expected she might do—Dr. Globus had given Winston an outright refusal even to verify that Clare Abbott had come to her office, no matter his warrant card. But a revelation of the details of Clare’s death went a very long distance to loosening Dr. Globus’s tongue, her memory, and her files. It turned out that Clare had not gone to see the psychiatrist as a patient. “Or so she said at first,” Dr. Globus added.

  “Meaning what, ’xactly?” Winston had enquired.

  “Meaning that she presented as someone merely seeking background information for a book she intended to write. In her case, what she wanted to talk about was child abuse. In fact she requested a series of interviews about the long-term effects of the sexual abuse of a child,” Dr. Globus explained. “But it became clear during the course of our conversations that the child in question was herself.”

  This piqued Barbara’s interest as Winston told the tale of his conversation with Globus who, it had turned out, was not only a psychiatrist but also a fellow feminist whose paper on female genital mutilation within the UK had gathered a great deal of attention at the time of its publication. So Clare Abbott had known who Dr. Globus was and because of her reputation, Dr. Globus was also quite familiar with Clare Abbott’s work.

  “Sometimes,” she had told Nkata, “a person of Clare’s celebrity needs to approach a disturbing subject indirectly, and I think her ‘information gathering’ was a way she was beginning to deal with some deeply troubling aspects of her ow
n past.”

  “Her brother, Barb,” Winston said. “He did the job on her when they were kids.”

  “That was in one of the emails as well,” Barbara said. “One of Caroline’s. She made a deal of it.”

  Clare claimed, the doctor said, that she’d put the issue to rest when she’d been up at Oxford as a student. “Talked it all over with a headshrink then. But ’cause she wanted to talk ’bout late-adult man’festations of child abuse, the doctor thinks she was trying to cope with summat in her present life.”

  They never quite got round to dealing with that, though, because over twelve sessions, Dr. Globus revealed, she and Clare had engaged in a wide-ranging series of discussions instead of more intimate ones, and it proved impossible to draw Clare out any further than she wished to go. While these discussions began with conversations about child sexual abuse and its ramifications in adulthood, they went on to touch upon chronic anxiety, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, dependent personality disorder, sociopathy, the roots of passive-aggression, narcissistic personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Clare had taken extensive notes and had asked good questions, a great many of them.

  “No surprise there,” Dr. Globus had concluded. “She was not only a writer but also a highly intelligent woman.”

  During their reading of Caroline’s emails, then, Barbara and Winston had gone back and forth and round the mulberry bush on the why of it all. Not only on the why of a series of revealing emails from Caroline to her employer but also on the why of Clare’s appointments with Dr. Globus. It seemed to them at the end of a grueling evening of reading and evaluating and discussing that—given the circumstances of Caroline’s being employed by Clare, the email collection and the range of conversations with the psychiatrist—either Clare was attempting to understand the other woman in an effort to help her in some way or, more probably, they themselves had further evidence that she was looking for a way to get Caroline Goldacre out of her life with as few consequences to herself as possible. The overheard conversation—“We’re finished, you and I”—seemed to confirm this.

  “Not so easy to bring off when someone’s barking, I expect,” Barbara put it, and Winston did not disagree.

  When she finally dragged herself out of bed, Barbara found that Winston was getting on with Clare’s computer as well as with the memory stick that she had found in the locked box in the boot of Clare’s car. To “Why the computer, Winnie? I thought you were finished with it,” Winston replied that “Far as I know, there’s got to be some sort of answers from Clare to Caroline in deleted emails. Else why’d Caroline keep writing to her?”

  “Because, like we agreed, she’s barking?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no” was his reply. He rubbed the back of his neck and looked thoughtful. When Barbara asked him what was on his mind, he said, “Could use some help with all this, Barb.”

  “I’ve told the inspector we could use help here, but it’s not a go, Winnie. You can try, though. He might believe you better ’n me. But I expect there’re too many blots on my copy book for the superintendent to go along with sending someone down to assist or ringing the local nick for the loan of a couple of DCs. She’s hoping for a major cock-up on my part so she can pack me up north.”

  Barbara fetched her breakfast from the oven—once again carefully wrapped in aluminium foil—and she took this along with her coffee into Clare’s office. There, she’d placed the pile of emails, and she leafed through them, hoping for an aha! moment while she gobbled down eggs scrambled with cheese and flavourful bits of green that appeared to be some sort of vegetation. With a final piece of whole meal toast in her hand, she had a wander along Clare’s bookshelves and saw what she expected to see in the home office of a noted feminist: The Feminine Mystique; Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape; The Fountain of Age; The Female Eunuch, among other volumes of that ilk. She clocked the names of the authors, large in the feminist pantheon: Steinem, Greer, Friedan, and others. They were, of course, familiar to her. Then she came to another, familiar also but for an entirely different reason.

  Geoffrey Timms. She paused when she saw it. Timms, she thought, and she took the book back to Clare’s desk. She found the reference among the emails written by Caroline Goldacre. It was scrawled in the margin of one of them: “Timms 164.”

  The book itself was called Frantic: Manifestation of Borderline Personality Disorder. Barbara opened it to page 164 and saw that two passages had been bracketed off in pencil. Neither was long. She read the first: “The abandonment fears are real. They relate directly to an intolerance of solitude. They hearken to an inability to be on one’s own in life and a chronic need to be cared for by another.” And then she dropped her gaze to the second, which declared that “this tendency towards unstable and inappropriately intense relationships can be characterised by an inundation of the object necessary for need fulfilment. It can also be seen in the sharing of intimate details early in a relationship.” She considered the quotes in light of Caroline’s emails—inundation was the word, all right, she reckoned—and then she quickly leafed through them to find another annotated with “Ferguson 610.” This turned out to be a reference to one Jacqueline Ferguson, whose book The Psychopathology of Emotional Vulnerability stood on the same shelf that held the Timms volume. On page 610, Barbara found what she expected to see, more bracketed material: “It is when emotions repeatedly reignite or when their extended duration cannot be explained by the circumstances arousing them that a closer examination is in order.” And like the Timms volume, a second passage was marked, this one in yellow highlighting pen: “This dysphoria is generally characterised by extreme emotions, destructiveness or self-destructiveness, lack of strong identity, and feelings of victimisation, particularly at the hands of those previously trusted. This last often arises out of what other people might see as inconsequential but what the patient sees as of paramount importance, such as a cancelled lunch date or the lack of timely response to a telephone message.”

  Barbara frowned, put the volume back onto the shelf, and quickly found the next name in the margin of one of the printed emails. This was Cowley, and on page 242 of Howard Cowley’s book Obtaining Nurturance in a Hostile World she saw that “perhaps the most common misconception is that the impact of pathological behaviour upon others is the intention of the person with the disorder. The opposite is the case. The normal ability to manage painful emotions and interpersonal challenges has been impaired.” And farther down the page, “Frequent expressions of intense pain, self-harming, suicidal behaviour, and even violence directed towards others may instead represent either a method of regulating mood or an escape from a situation that feels unbearable.” On the facing page, a final quotation declared that “it should not be assumed that the patient bears no responsibility for his actions, however. Nor should it be assumed that the harmful nature of these actions should be allowed to continue. While it’s helpful for those involved with the patient to understand what drives the behaviour, the development of firm boundaries must be encouraged in those who deal with the person.”

  Barbara tapped her fingers on the page with this quotation. It seemed to her that things relating to Caroline and Clare were becoming clear. While Clare’s possession of these volumes, her visits to a Sherborne psychiatrist, and her annotating of Caroline Goldacre’s emails—not to mention her maintaining them among her records in the first place—might have indicated an attempt to understand Caroline, the fact that Clare had been going to such extreme lengths to gather information pointed in another direction altogether. With the emails and Clare’s own research declaring that something could be seriously wrong with Caroline Goldacre, that Clare had not eliminated her from her life suggested one of three things: There was indeed some significant blackmail going on, or Clare needed desperately to keep Caroline close to her for some reason, or Clare was afraid. If the last were true, perhaps she’d come to realise that only b
y dabbling into Caroline’s psyche could she possibly hope to—

  “Barb?”

  Winston, she saw, was in the doorway. He held Clare Abbott’s laptop computer in the broad palm of his hand. “Got summat you need to look at,” he said.

  “Is it going to help sort all this out?”

  “Think so,” he replied.

  CAMBERWELL

  SOUTH LONDON

  The fact that she’d already had to cancel her first two appointments of the day made India predisposed to be furious. She rang off on the telephone call from Charlie, and the first thing she wanted to do was throw a very heavy book through a very large window. Unfortunately, there was neither a large enough window nor a heavy enough book in her house, so she was left with nothing else to do but cancel her next two appointments as well.

  She told herself it wasn’t Charlie’s fault. He’d arrived in the vicinity of Tower Bridge only to discover it was up in order to accommodate “some bloody huge ship, India, I swear it must be an RN destroyer” and the ensuing tailback took ages to clear. Then a downed cyclist on the Old Kent Road caused further difficulties for him, and it was on this second apologetic phone call that she’d just rung off. He was on his way, he promised her. He was sorry this situation was turning out to be such a nightmare.

  That was one way to put it, India thought. The other way was to point out to herself—for the thousandth time—that such were the spoils of being spineless.

  To his credit, Charlie had told her to go on to work. He was on his way, he’d be there as soon as he could, she should be free to go about her day and not worry whether he was going to show up to collect his mother because he was going to do so, just as he’d promised. But India wasn’t willing to leave the premises, for her fear was that Caroline—left alone with Charlie when he came to fetch her—would talk him into letting her remain in India’s house. Worse, while she waited for her son to arrive, she would no doubt delve into India’s computer again since she’d already made mention of India’s planned trip to the Broads with Nat, which she only could have known about by invading her email. India had changed her password on the previous night, altering things so that her laptop did not remember it. But she had great faith in Caroline’s abilities in this area, and even if she had not, she just wanted the woman gone.