A Banquet of Consequences

  Honesty required Barbara to admit that coming up with that last bit of evidence was looking remote. She had to acknowledge how unlikely was the possibility that the poison would turn up among the substances they’d taken from the house and the bakery. So they were left with locating evidence by means of the written word, just as she and Winston had decided after searching the house and the bakery.

  Towards this end, Winston had gone with the computers to Dorset Police Headquarters, where two techs there would assist him with the monumental task of delving into the electronics from Caroline’s house and from Alastair’s bakery. Towards this end, also, Barbara had returned to Clare’s house. When her mobile rang, she’d just completed a second search of the locked drawer of Clare’s desk to see if she’d overlooked anything the first time through that might add another link in the chain of circumstantial evidence.

  It was Lynley ringing. He wanted to know their progress. Managing to acquire the search warrant was going to impress him, but Barbara knew that what little they had as a result of that warrant was not. So she tried to put on it the best face possible.

  “We’ve carted off everything that could be hiding a load of sodium azide,” she told him, “and it’s on its way to forensics. But Winnie and I have started to think that may well be a nonstarter, sir.”

  “That’s hardly good news,” Lynley said. “What’re you on to next?”

  “A convincing trail running from Caroline to the sodium azide, one that’s going to be enough to cook her once we come up with the goods telling us that Caroline knew Clare had uncovered lightning.” What Barbara didn’t add just then was how odd it seemed that Caroline might have found this evidence and not written an email about it to Clare since she’d written emails about everything else. On the other hand, it did make sense that there was no email on this topic if Caroline had decided that her only recourse was to eliminate the author before she could reveal what she’d discovered.

  “Winnie’s taken all the computers to police headquarters,” she said and added hastily, “so yes, we’ve split up again, but—”

  “I’ve no problem with that at this point,” Lynley interrupted, surprisingly. He went on with, “Sodium azide can be ordered straight from the Internet—”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “—so Winston needs to be looking for that connection as well. In the meantime, I’ve had a word with Rory Statham.” He explained what Rory had claimed about Clare’s willingness to reveal any detail—no matter how damaging to Caroline—to spare her own work and allow her to continue it.

  Barbara considered this. She said, “That whole business about Caroline watching Will play with himself . . . ? Looks good to me as a detail damaging to Caroline, Inspector.”

  “I don’t see how,” Lynley said.

  “The creep factor alone—”

  “What I mean is it’s completely inadmissible in court. It gives us nothing. It’s hearsay of hearsay, actually. So using it to get an arrest—”

  “But Caroline wouldn’t know that, would she?”

  “That it’s inadmissible? Possibly not. But believe me, her legal counsel would. Besides that, the information passed along by Sumalee about Caroline and the son isn’t enough to declare Caroline a killer. We have the second wife accusing the first wife of something with absolutely no proof and, for all we know, a world of animosity between them. That closes no gaps, no matter how you look at it. You need to find something that will. And I can’t say how much more time you have to do it. I’m painting things as well as I can with Isabelle—”

  Isabelle, she thought. It’s always Isabelle.

  “—but I can only bang on for just so long about how well things are going in Dorset without her wanting to know when an arrest is going to be made. What would you have me tell her?”

  “Tell her Winnie ’n’ me can close this.”

  “You know she’s going to ask how long that will take.”

  “Right. Well. Okay. I get that. Tell her twenty-four hours.” It was an utter lie, but what else could she do?

  “I’ll tell her that, then. See that you do it.”

  They rang off. Barbara muttered an oath. It was absolute murder to be desperate for something without knowing what that something was.

  She turned back to Clare’s desk. If it or Clare’s office contained what they needed to put the cuffs on Caroline Goldacre, Barbara knew she had to begin seeing everything in the room not as a cop would see it but as Clare Abbott’s assistant would see it: as a reason to be rid of her employer.

  Barbara completed her examination of the contents of Clare’s locked drawer, but once again she came up dry. She shoved the drawer closed and went to the bookshelves. She began removing volumes and uselessly shaking them, not sure what was going to fall out but hoping that if anything did, it was going to be gold. There was nothing, though. Aside from the marked-off sections of the individual books that Barbara had found earlier—which were going to prove exactly nothing to the CPS—Clare Abbott had been a reader who left her books in pristine condition.

  Her filing cabinet offered no sizzling details either. Nor were there any smoking-gun messages on her answer phone, and although a list of phone calls on Clare’s mobile to and from Francis Goldacre’s home could have been seen by Caroline, what was supposed to be concluded from these calls in the mind of the woman remained supposition only.

  At the end of her search, Barbara threw herself into Clare’s desk chair and stared and thought and further stared. A set of in- and out-trays stood upon the desk’s surface, with the in-tray empty and the out-tray waiting to be dealt with. Moodily, she grabbed for the contents of the latter. She saw they consisted of letters that had been answered and posted, as a copy of the reply to them was stapled to each, preparatory, she reckoned, to the letter’s being filed somewhere.

  She looked at the letters and the responses: requests for interviews, offers of temporary postings at various universities, requests for personal appearances, invitations to conferences, propositions about joining this and that board of trustees. She read through three or four of them as well as Clare’s replies before she twigged to how the latter had come about. At the bottom of each, below the signature, were two sets of initials: CA/cg. Clare Abbott and Caroline Goldacre, she realised. The letters had been composed by Clare but typed by Caroline.

  Well and good, she thought. Caroline took dictation. This seemed reasonable of an assistant . . . Only Caroline hadn’t begun her employment as an assistant, so did she take dictation or had there been another way the contents of the letters had been communicated from Clare to her?

  Barbara opened the unlocked desk drawers and saw the answer to her question in the top one where the dead-as-roadkill digital recorder lay among the other contents. She searched through the desk for batteries but found none. She carried on in the kitchen, looking through the drawers there. Everyone had a hell drawer somewhere. She could only hope that Clare’s held batteries.

  It did. A package of triple-A batteries lay among a jumble of small household goods.

  She took these back to Clare’s office, and in short order she had the digital recorder operational. Pushing the play switch gave her Clare’s voice at once, with its unmistakable gravelly nature:

  “A letter for University of East Anglia, Caroline,” Clare’s voice said. “Damn . . . where is it? Ah. No. Sorry. It’s somewhere on my desk. Will you search it out? It’s a ‘Dear Professor Whatever, I’ve received’ and all the et ceteras and blah blah blah. Tell her that while I’m complimented by the invitation to whatever groups she’s asking me to appear before, the calls upon my time just now prevent me . . . and you know the rest. Add a few lines about the possibility of doing this for her later on in the year or next spring. With regards, blah blah blah.”

  Barbara frowned. Disappointing, to say the least. She looked at the recorder and could see from its tiny screen t
hat more was contained on it, so she hit play another time.

  It was Clare again, dictating in the same offhand fashion as the first letter, but this missive going to America, to someone in Austin, Texas, where a conference was going to deal with the insidious encroachment of the American legal system into women’s right to self-determination. Directly up Clare’s alley, Barbara thought. She’d agreed to this along the lines of “Have them get in touch with my speaker’s bureau, Caroline. Very interested and all the polite et ceteras.”

  A third letter was in the same vein, and there was no fourth. Barbara sighed, muttered, and reached to switch the damn thing off. She hit the wrong button, however, an easy thing to do, considering its size. On the display screen, then, she saw that there were two more tracks on the recorder. She’d been listening only to the A track. She switched to B. Nothing was there. But when she switched to the C track, the screen showed that there was something on it.

  Again, Clare’s voice. No letter this time but rather some sort of musing that began with, “I’ve just left Sumalee Goldacre, and I want to get this down before I forget any of the details so I can transcribe it all later. Not at my best when I can’t take notes or record, but that’s how she wanted it so I had to go along. Right. Here it is. I’ll need to speak to Karen Globus again and more frankly this time, obviously.”

  What followed, then, was Clare Abbott’s recounting of her conversation with Sumalee Goldacre in precise detail, beginning with Sumalee’s phone call to her, continuing with her insistence that Clare not make a single note of what she said, and going on from there to document the same tale that Sumalee had told Lynley about Will Goldacre. To this tale, however, Sumalee had apparently added two points that she’d not mentioned to Lynley. “This next bit rather beggars belief but anything’s possible, I suppose. Will apparently told her that sometimes Caroline helped him, although God knows what that actually means because, heavens, does a boy need to be helped to wank off? Isn’t it more or less second nature? Two-year-olds stick their hands down their trousers for a feel, after all. But she said he was something like ten or eleven years old when Caroline first showed him what he was meant to do and helped him do it and this was apparently something to deal with his language problem. So all right, p’rhaps she’d come up with this somehow or been advised or whatever by a doctor. But the chilling thing is that she watched him and, according to him, she also enjoyed watching him and helped him, which suggests rather a bit more than a mum’s concern for her boy’s well-being. Sumalee said he was quite casual about it all. A bit shifty-eyed, as she remembered it, but not embarrassed. More like . . . There was an undercurrent, she said. She said it felt like defiance, a sort of hitting her in the face with something to see what she would do about it, but she didn’t know what to do about it and she reckoned it was best not mentioned again. She said he was fourteen or fifteen at the time when he told her. Could he have been lying? Yes. I suppose. Nonetheless, enjoys is the operative word. Or likes. ‘She likes watching.’ And helps, of course. Not past tense. Present tense and Sumalee was certain about that. She just didn’t know how to interpret it. Sometimes boys like to be sensational, don’t they? So do girls. A case of ‘Let me see how much I can shock you.’ But this whole extended grief of hers with no end in sight, experienced now at the very same level as the day he died . . . tears and wailing and gnashing of teeth whenever his name is brought up? What are we looking at here? Reaction-formation? Note to myself: Check Ferguson again. Additional note to myself: I must speak to Charlie. The boys were close. Doesn’t it stand to reason that Will might have said something to him if his mum was into his trousers? Or that Charlie might have suspected there was something seriously off between Will and his mum? I’ll need to speak with him. Can’t go at this directly, ask for his number or anything because she’ll twig something’s up. But I can get it off her mobile easily. She always leaves it—”

  Barbara switched the digital recorder off. Her entire body was tingling. Charlie, she thought. The other brother. Clare had intended to speak to him. She had intended to unveil for him the nature of the relationship between his mother and brother. The information was a nuclear warhead that detonated directly in the centre of how Caroline Goldacre depicted herself, not only to the world but also to her remaining child.

  This, Barbara thought, was the evidence they were looking for, and what rang out for her in that moment were the words overheard by the night porter in Cambridge. One woman saying, “We’re finished, you and I,” and the other declaring, “Not with what I know about you. We’ll never be finished.” Caroline had to have spoken the first, having come across Clare’s mental musings having understood from them that the power had shifted. Clare had responded. She had the goods on Caroline, and she could easily use them. As long as she held the threat of speaking to Charlie over Caroline’s head, she could write her book and proceed on her way to further glory. Unless, of course, Caroline killed her.

  SHAFTESBURY

  DORSET

  Alastair parked in his regular spot at the far end of the bakery. He stared through the windscreen at the building’s brick-clad exterior and shifted his gaze to the window to take in what he could see of the pristine shelves. Acknowledging that his assistant had got on quite well with the work in his absence, he felt largely numb.

  He wondered how he could possibly have got so many things wrong in his life. He wanted to put it down to a badly set broken leg long ago and what that leg had done not only to obliterate his soldiering dreams but also to foster within him the sense of desperate unworthiness that had driven most of the decisions he’d made.

  What nearly slew him was the whole concept of intentions. No matter what he’d decided or what actions he’d taken, he’d always intended the best. From that first embrace of Caro in the street straight on to sitting on a cold wet bench in Pageant Gardens earlier that day, he’d meant to hurt no one; he’d intended only to express his love.

  Despite Sharon’s protests that morning, Alastair had adhered to the belief that he knew the ways of the world far better than she did. So once he’d removed the damning container of baking powder from her house, he’d driven off to Sherborne to be rid of it. Their conversation had delayed him, though, as had looking into Sharon’s stricken eyes. That last had prompted him to tell her not to worry. He’d said, “Let me do this for you,” and she’d let him be on his way.

  When he arrived in Sherborne, jouncing over the railway tracks and making the turn into the Sainsbury’s car park, he did it in the company of two articulated lorries, there to make their morning’s delivery to the supermarket. One lorry bore baked goods—there was an irony, he thought—and one bore paper products, and the presence of them pulling up to the great delivery doors at the back of the building necessitated his coming up with plan B to be rid of the container he’d taken with him from Sharon’s house.

  Nearest to Sainsbury’s was the railway station, so he scooted there. But people were already gathering for the morning train, and he couldn’t afford to be seen disposing of anything in their presence, which called for plan C.

  He left his vehicle near the station, in the car park, and considered his options. From where he was, he could see the autumn-leaved trees in Pageant Gardens across the street from the station, and this seemed to him to be what he was looking for. But it had to seem natural, just in case.

  He went first into the station, where he bought a newspaper and a takeaway coffee. Then he carried these across to the garden, where he strolled along the macadam path and paused as if to admire the bandstand in the garden’s centre. There were others in the garden, despite the hour, but they were hurrying across to the railway station and he knew they wouldn’t remember him, just a bloke on his way home with the morning paper and a cup of coffee. Bit young to be a pensioner, of course, but who really knew these days anyway?

  Benches stood at intervals along the path, and Alastair was about to stroll to one when a
uniformed policewoman came striding into the gardens and set off in his direction. He had a heart-slamming moment as he did his best not to note her progress while noting her progress. He was fully expecting her to stop to have a word—just as he was fully preparing some sort of excuse to give her about why he was there—when she strode past with a brisk nod and a “good morning” and went through a gate at the top of the gardens. He followed her a bit to make certain she wasn’t going to linger, and that was when he saw the proximity of the police station to where he was. He nearly gave it up then.

  But he pulled himself together and decided his plan was still a good one, for how likely were the coppers to come through the gardens and riffle through the rubbish? He went to a bench, frowned at its sheen of morning dew, and reckoned there was nothing for it but to sit or to walk on to look for another rubbish bin, which he was loath to do.

  So he sat. He opened his paper with a crack. The heir to the throne and spouse, surrounded by minority schoolgirls in headscarves, a very large cake with dripping candles, everyone smiling toothily. He saw the photo without seeing it. He read the accompanying story without reading it. One bloke passed him on the way to the train and a young woman floated by on a scooter. Two dog walkers said hello. And then, finally, there was no one.

  Alastair slid the container of baking powder out of his pocket in the same movement as he rose from the bench. His trousers were wet in the back—he should have had the sense to sit on part of the paper, he thought—but his jacket fell far enough to cover the damp, so all he had to worry about was the discomfort and not someone catching sight of a pathetic bloke who looked like he’d pissed himself.