A Banquet of Consequences

  He was startled. Odd, he thought, how someone so plain—not to mention so unappealing of body—could be transformed by a smile. It was the same for Sharon, but then in her case it was also the soul of her that shone through like sun through sheer curtains. She became an angel when she smiled, did Sharon, whereas this woman merely became just a little less like a barrel on legs with porcupine hair.

  When she had the notebook in hand, she said, “Turns out your dabs weren’t necessary after all, Mr. MacKerron. But your wife’s? That’s another matter.”

  He put his mop into the bucket and rested its handle against the spotless wall. The policewoman—Havers, that was it! Sergeant Havers. Odd how things dropped into one’s mind like that—looked round with a bright and interested expression on her face. She said, “This is where the magic happens, eh?” and she set about having a look at this and at that: thrusting her head into the adjoining rooms and having a go with the mixing machines as if she expected a finished loaf to appear at the bottom of one of the enormous vats. “I always reckoned bread grew inside of plastic packages in the grocery.” She returned to where he was, and she fingered a row of utensils hanging from the wall. “How d’you keep the unwanted creepy crawlies out of your ingredients? I expect that’s a chore. Weevils and all that. They’re dead mad for flour, aren’t they?”

  He said to her, “Every bag of flour opened gets used up each day. Same for the salt and sugar and yeast. Nothing left loose for them to get into.”

  “Mind showing me round?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Why? And you been looking round already, far as I c’n see. Can’t tell me you’ve come to learn how to bake bread. And wha’s this ’bout Caro anyway?”

  “What’s what?” She leaned her bulk against one of the worktables where the clean baking trays were stacked, waiting for tomorrow’s work. She cocked her head and looked at him pleasantly, but he didn’t miss the fact that her gaze was darting all over the bakery, like the woman expected a plague-carrying rat to come running across the large sacks of flour stacked on pallets in the room beyond where he and she were standing.

  “Caro,” he said. “You said her prints were another matter.”

  “Oh, that. My colleague went to fetch her dabs up in London and hit a bull’s-eye with them. We were looking for a third set and there they were, sitting at the end of her fingers. So what it means is that there’s a very strong possibility that she whacked Clare Abbott. ’Course, there’re other ways to look at the matter, but just now we’re liking Caroline for the job.” The sergeant paused. She pushed herself off the worktable and said, “D’you mind if I have a peek through here?” She didn’t wait for his reply. “Are these the ovens? Always on, are they? Sort of a Hansel-and-Gretel thing you’ve got going on? Should I have brought breadcrumbs? Bloody hell, they’re huge, they are.”

  She was peering at the temperature gauge in the upper of the old cast-iron ovens. It was true what she said: They were always on. It was less costly to keep them fired up than it was to heat them again every morning. She sauntered from the baking room into the storage area beyond it where the wood pellets were fed into the heating unit for the ovens. He had already topped up the bin through which they slowly slid into the burner, and she fingered these meditatively as she took in the pellet sacks in their neat ranks waiting to do their job of keeping his business running.

  He said, “What d’you mean? You saying you think Caro meant Clare harm?”

  The sergeant shrugged. “Could be someone else, I s’pose. Someone who had access to your wife’s bits and bobs and clobber and togs. I reckon that’s you. And your lady friend, ’course. She comes round here, right? She works for you, after all.”

  “Sharon’s got naught to do with Clare Abbott!” Alastair said hotly. “You even once think she’d lift a finger to harm so much as a . . . a . . . a butterfly or . . .” He found himself sputtering.

  “I expect the butterflies are safe,” Sergeant Havers said. She waggled her hand and added, “As to everyone else . . . maybe yes, maybe no.”

  He followed her. She was popping her head into the big refrigerator, having her way with butter, eggs, milk, cream, and the like. She said, “I’d no idea so much stuff was used in baking. You lot have an official taster or someone like? You don’t want all this going bad, eh? Make the customers sick up over their morning toast and there goes your business down the toilet. Where d’you keep your salt, by the way? And that other business for baking. Powder, soda, what’s it called?”

  “Like I said. It gets used up. Every day.”

  “So you . . . what? Run to the market and buy more? Bloody inefficient, that, I’d think.”

  “It comes by the crate and gets stacked in the storeroom with everything else. What’re you looking for?’ Cause I’m not thick and I c’n see you’re looking.”

  “Whoops. That obvious, eh? Might as well tell you we’re setting things up for a search warrant, Mr. MacKerron.”

  “What the bloody hell for? What’re you thinking? Caro did something? Me? Who?” He felt a heat in his gut and he didn’t know what to name it. Anger? Fear? Nerves? He said to her, “You look where you want ’f you think someone round here did something to someone and then . . . what? Hid evidence? Like what? A knife dripping blood?”

  “Worked for Shakespeare, that,” she said. “Only, I s’pose it wasn’t hidden, was it?”

  “What?”

  She paused. She’d come full circle round the premises and was standing in front of his office door. She nodded at it, said, “C’n I . . . ?” and walked inside. He followed her and saw her take in the desktop computer, the printer, the stacks of paperwork, the folders, old newspapers, a few magazines, and a pile of unfolded work clothes. She placed her hand flat on the top of the old computer monitor as if testing its warmth and then she said, “Did you know your wife was pen pals with Clare Abbott? Wrote to her every day, she did. Great long email missives these were and Clare kept ’em all. Even printed ’em.”

  Alastair knew nothing of emails. He told the sergeant this, and she informed him that these were early-in-the-morning emails—three in the morning as often as not—and would Caroline have written them here in this room or was there another computer in the house?

  “Her own laptop,” he said. “She took it back and forth from Clare’s. Why?” he demanded. “What’s emails got to do with anything?”

  “They tell interesting tales, is all,” Sergeant Havers said. “C’n I park it, by the way?” She indicated a chair. He shrugged. She sat. She beckoned him to do the same. He did so with great reluctance, thinking how he should ring a solicitor or at least ring Sharon ’cause it came to him that if this cop was here on her own to question him, the other might well be on his way to bother Sharon. But then he thought how it would look, him ringing Sharon. It would look like they had something to hide.

  “Has Caroline mentioned Clare’s next project?” Sergeant Havers asked.

  “Caro didn’t talk to me about work.”

  “No? Never ‘What a bloody day I’ve had’? No ‘Rub my feet darling? There’s a dear’?” When he said nothing in reply to this, the sergeant asked him—of all mad things—about an affair he was supposed to have had with a childminder when they all lived up in London!

  He gaped at her before he asked the obvious which was, “What childminder? I don’t know naught about any childminder.”

  “The one Caroline says she caught you with? The one she says Will saw you with?”

  “Will? Me with some childminder? And what? You talking about sex or summat?”

  “Caroline told Clare all about it. It was part of her emails.”

  “When? Where?”

  “In the early morning, like I said.”

  “I mean where’m I s’posed to have sex with the childminder and Will watching?”

  The sergeant scratched her ear with her pencil and said, “As
I recall, it was sex in the kitchen. Or was it the larder?”

  Alastair laughed. He couldn’t help it although he could hear the edge of wildness his laughter had. It was, actually, more like a bark than a laugh. He said, “Bloody stupid. Do I look like someone a childminder would have it off with?”

  “My experience, Mr. MacKerron?” the sergeant said. “Looks don’t have much to do with anything. When it comes to the this-ing and that-ing below the waist, pretty much anything goes. F’r all I know? Could be you slipped her an extra bob or two on the side. But Caroline waxed more or less eloquent on the topic.”

  “Then she’s lying.”

  “Does that often?”

  “Didn’t say that, did I?”

  “Admittedly, no. What about the girl she caught you with in your shop? I think that one was a trousers-round-the-ankles job. That’d be you and not the bird. She—I expect—is on her knees or spread out on the shop counter. Not sure about which. But the end of it all was your wife putting her hand through the window when you won’t unlock the door for her.”

  “The window,” Alastair said, “that part’s true,” but he couldn’t get his mind round how Caroline had altered the facts of it. She’d come to his shop, but she’d come inside and she’d locked the door because she wanted to have it out with him. She’d found the bakery advertised for sale in Dorset some months earlier; she’d wanted him to buy it; he was dragging his feet. He’d been trying to work out how to say no to the woman in a way she’d understand. For he wasn’t a baker, he didn’t want to leave London, he loved his little business, and it was growing. But saying that had got him nowhere with Caroline who argued that he was, at the end of the day, just like all men, wasn’t he? All about himself, he was, without a thought of her and her boys and especially Will who so obviously needed to be away from London but that didn’t matter to him, did it, when he could be here with his stupid repurposed items that no one wanted and no one would buy when people buy bread every day of their lives, Alastair, are you listening to me? Oh no, that would be too much trouble, wouldn’t it why should you listen to me when all I do is keep your house and launder your clothes and cook your meals and open my legs for you no matter do I want it or not and why, eh?, so that you can do whatever is it you do because I don’t for a moment believe you come here day after day and sit here and wait for someone to come in off the street to purchase this . . . this ludicrous rubbish . . .

  She’d run off, or at least she’d tried to, but she forgot she’d locked the door behind her upon entering and when it wouldn’t open, she pounded on the glass till it broke into shards.

  He told the sergeant this—the relevant bits—and she pointed out that it would take a hell of a lot of strength to put one’s hand through the glass of a shop door, wouldn’t it? He agreed. But Caro, he told her, had a hell of a lot of strength and a temper to match it. And when she got unreasonable, it was double temper and double strength.

  “That why you took up with Sharon Halsey?” Sergeant Havers asked. “We know all about her, by the way.”

  “I’m not speaking to you ’bout Sharon.”

  The sergeant shrugged. “No real matter as Sharon was happy to speak about you.”

  He felt a little roll of his stomach at that. He wondered what Sharon had said, but he told himself that she was true and never mind anything else.

  The sergeant went on. “You see how it looks, I expect. You and your employee doing some horizontal trampoline jumping on the closest mattress?”

  “Eh?” he said.

  “Dip the banger,” she clarified. “Send in the probe. Whatever you’d like to call it.”

  “I call it lovemaking,” he said in something of a rising temper, “and don’t you try to make it what it’s not.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Something unclean. That woman’s an angel, and if I had the chance—a single chance like one thing in the entire world that I could do tomorrow—then I’d bloody do it and not look back and—” He stopped himself. Fool, he thought. He’d walked directly into the sergeant’s plans for him to run his mouth like an open tap. Even now she was listening, those bright eyes of hers locked on his, her expression saying Gotcha or whatever police types thought when they reckoned they were one step away from giving the caution. He said, “I don’t deny anything ’bout Sharon, but I won’t have you making it look like what it’s not. How it looks is how it looks. I know what it is.”

  “In the regular way of things, I s’pose you’re right,” the sergeant said. “But in the middle of a murder enquiry . . . ? With something deadly tucked into your wife’s belongings? Looks count, and I reckon you see it.”

  “Something deadly? Caro’s belongings? You telling me Caro was the one meant to die?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. We’re not sure yet. But the long and short of it is that with you and Sharon giving true love a go . . . ? Makes me think someone wouldn’t mind seeing Caroline’s coffin heading into the oven for a proper baking.”

  “You think that, then you look round,” he told her. “You see anything suggests I tried to hurt Caro, you take me in. And don’t you bother Sharon over this ’cause the last thing that woman wants is having anything go wrong in my life, her life, or anyone’s life. She’s a decent woman, she is. She’s the only reason . . .” He couldn’t go on. It wasn’t that he sensed a trap in his words; it was merely that Sharon was the heart of the matter, the clean and precious soul of the matter, and bringing her anywhere close to this vile business was something he couldn’t allow himself to do.

  But the copper didn’t know that, did she, so when he paused, she jumped in with, “Yeah? She’s the reason . . . ?”

  “The reason I keep going,” he said. “Here. In this. With this. With her.”

  “You mean with your wife? And what? You saying Sharon wants it that way? You and Caro tight as squirrels in the winter with Sharon doing what? Just waiting? That doesn’t make sense to me, Mr. MacKerron.”

  “It’s not meant to make sense to you,” he said. “The woman’s a saint.”

  “Is she that?” the sergeant said. “In my experience, Mr. MacKerron? No one’s a saint when it comes to what you two have been up to together.”

  FULHAM

  LONDON

  Rory was moving along carefully, pushing her drip pole as she went, with Dr. Bigelow assessing her progress. A word from the doctor and Rory would be released back into her life, her recovery deemed complete with no chance of a sudden onslaught of symptoms that would suggest the poison had not completely washed out of her system. She was just about to make the turn to head back towards her room when Inspector Lynley came off the lift at the very end of the corridor. He was carrying a few manila folders under his arm.

  He walked up to her, saying, “You’re looking fit.”

  She said, with a nod at Dr. Bigelow, “I’m hoping to impress.”

  “And is she?” he asked the doctor.

  “She’ll do,” Dr. Bigelow said. “Back to your room now,” she added to Rory. “Let’s check your vitals.”

  Rory made the turn, Lynley at her side. She told him she was very close to being released. Her sister Heather had promised the doctor that she would remain with Rory at her flat for four more days to make certain all was well, and if she—Rory—got back to her room without having to grasp onto the railing that ran along the corridor’s wall, she believed she’d be able to go home in the morning.

  “Arlo,” Lynley said, “will be delighted.”

  “He’s still with the vet?”

  “He was attempting to help her paint her sitting room last evening. He’s a very clever dog.”

  “He is.” She arrived at her room, where Dr. Bigelow waited to take her vitals: heartbeat, blood pressure, listening to her lungs. At the end of this, Rory said, “Well . . . ?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” Dr. Bigelow said. “Be careful w
hat you ingest henceforth.” With a nod at them both, she left the room.

  Rory didn’t return to the bed but rather to the two chairs by the window. She sat in one and said to Lynley with reference to the folders he was carrying, “Have you brought me something?”

  “I have.” He placed the folders on a small table between the chairs and he sat as well, once she’d asked him to do so. Where on earth, she thought, had he got such good manners? “One of my two sergeants in Shaftesbury has been going through Clare’s computer: her documents, her emails, Internet searches, correspondence . . . whatever he’s been able to find. He’s forwarded all the relevant items to me. It’s been quite a project.”

  “I imagine it has.”

  “Among other things, we’ve learned that Clare didn’t keep everything she was working on in sight,” he went on. “Or even conveniently accessible. I mentioned that my sergeant had come across a memory stick in the boot of Clare’s car . . . ?” When Rory nodded, he rested his hand on the top of the folders and told her that his sergeant had made certain that the documents on the memory stick had been among what was forwarded to London. The folders he’d brought contained these materials, and he said he’d much appreciate Rory’s looking at everything.

  She did so, and here it was before her at last: proof positive that Clare had indeed been as good as her word. She had been hard at work upon her next book and, from the look of it, had also been determined to meet her deadline. Rory skimmed the proposal she’d seen before, went on to the table of contents, and dipped into a few chapters. It was very good, she thought. She looked at Lynley.

  “You said it was on her memory stick but nowhere else?”

  “It was,” he said.

  “That’s extraordinary. Not at all like her. She always had copies, hard and electronic. Just to have one . . . She’d have considered that tempting fate.”

  “And yet that’s what she did,” he said. “We’re thinking that she wanted—and needed actually—to keep Caroline Goldacre from knowing she was at work on the project.”