A Banquet of Consequences

by Elizabeth George

  With a display of disturbingly white teeth, Mr. Fryer ushered Lynley into his office. There, the words murder or suicide made the man cooperation incarnate. It became a small matter to unearth the duty schedule for the night of Clare Abbott’s passing. These individuals, Mr. Fryer pointed out as he handed it over, were not on duty at present as, obviously, they comprised part of the night staff and would not be in until much later. He could, of course, ring them all and ask them to come in and he’d be happy to do so. In advance, however, if he and the inspector could have a word about adverse publicity . . . ?

  Lynley told him that he could not promise anything when it came to publicity, but he’d do what he could to keep any word of the hotel’s involvement out of the papers. “The best course,” he said, “is to bring your employees in today as smoothly as possible so I can speak to them and be gone. I’d like to see the room as well, which I assume I might be able to do while I’m waiting.”

  Fryer flashed his teeth another time and said, “The room?”

  “Where Clare Abbott died,” Lynley said.

  “But surely, Inspector, you wouldn’t be looking for evidence. A drinking glass had been overturned, but I assure you that was the only thing amiss when the poor woman’s body was found. And now, two weeks after the fact . . . ? As the cleaning staff have been in and out a number of times since then, you can’t hope to find . . . What does one look for? Fingerprints and such?”

  Lynley told the man wryly that he hadn’t brought his fingerprinting kit with him nor did he have his magnifying glass. It merely helped him, he said, to see where events occurred. He wanted to add that he hardly expected to find anyone lurking behind the arras at this late date, but he reckoned the allusion might fall upon unknowing ears.

  Fryer took himself off to fetch the key to the room and to ask his assistant to start ringing the night duty staff. “I’ll arrange for coffee and cakes,” he told Lynley, as if some form of bribery were going to be necessary to get them to the hotel on their off hours.

  Considering her reputation, it was no surprise to Lynley that both the hotel manager and the staff at the reception desk during the day remembered Clare Abbott as the woman who’d died. They also remembered Clare Abbott’s assistant, who’d apparently caused a scene in the hotel’s garden that had required the intervention of first a waiter and then Mr. Fryer. As to what had been behind that scene, no one could say. But two men had been there as well as another woman and her dog.

  In the room Clare Abbott had occupied, Lynley found that a balcony overlooked the garden and the backs, and the Cam was well in view, flowing placidly not far from the garden’s low wall, its surface pockmarked with rain. He tested the lock on the balcony door, and while it wasn’t as substantial as it ought to have been, he saw that additional security had been provided by means of a rod that could be inserted into the track upon which the door slid.

  The furniture and other trappings were standard hotel fare, although this particular room adjoined the one next door by means of two doors, either of which could be locked from the inside to prevent intrusion. The second door was locked at the moment, but Lynley assumed the room it sheltered was identical to this one: a desk built into a wall’s alcove, a flat-screen television on the wall, a table and chairs set in front of the balcony doors, a bed with stands and lights on either side. Historic scenes of university life done in watercolours decorated the walls, heavily given to the bygone days in which students wore black gowns to their lectures.

  He tested the lock on the connecting door inside what had been Clare Abbott’s room, and he found it worked smoothly. He went next to the alcove desk, where lay the usual notebook of hotel information.

  The room service menu was what he was looking for, and there it was, along with the hours that meals could be ordered. This was at any time of day, he found, with a limited menu after eleven at night. So a cook or a chef would have been on duty, he reckoned.

  By the time the first of the night staff had arrived, Mr. Fryer had sorted a conference room for Lynley to use, the daytime kitchen staff had come up with refreshments for their nighttime counterparts, and Lynley had spoken to the waiter who’d put him into the picture as to the identity of the men who’d been in the garden with Clare Abbott’s assistant during the teatime row. Her husband and her son, he said. They’d come to fetch her home to Dorset as she’d been in no condition to get there on her own.

  Late at night, he learned, the kitchen staff comprised a single individual, orders for food being taken by whoever was manning the reception desk and these being sent along to the kitchen in due course. The night chef turned out to be a female pensioner from Queens’ College kitchen who’d returned to the workforce once she’d discovered that being alone with her husband on a twenty-four/seven basis was not contributing to their connubial bliss. He’d done the same, she confided, and now he worked part-time days and she worked full-time nights, and in this manner they reckoned they could sail on towards their golden anniversary without killing each other.

  Her time at Queens’ had developed her skill at remembering people, their faces, and their quirks. The fact that she worked nights alone in the kitchen had developed her propensity for chat as she had none at all most evenings and spent her time reading the complete works of Shakespeare—“seven down and a bloody big pile to go,” she told him—as she waited to be called upon by one resident or another of the hotel. Thus, despite being awakened from sleep and asked to come to the hotel for a chin-wag with the cops, as she put it, she was dead happy to be there and to be of help. Being served coffee and cakes made the event all the more special.

  She’d come into the conference room prepared for a lengthy interview. “Something to tell the grandkids,” she confided to Lynley as she settled herself and adjusted the cardigan of the twinset she wore. She’d never been spoken to by the police before, she said. And to have her first conversation with a policeman be with a detective from New Scotland Yard . . . ? Made her feel like a suspect on a television drama, it did.

  He was to give her a right proper grilling, she told him. “You have a right proper go at me, darling,” she concluded. Darling, Lynley thought, and his spirits sank. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been quite so taken with Daidre’s use of the word.

  He hated to disappoint the night cook, but as time was of the essence, he had little choice. He complimented her on having come well prepared and, seeing that she’d brought a record book with her, could she tell him if any orders for food had gone to the room occupied by Clare Abbott on the night of her death?

  Indeed, a late-night order had been made up for her. Two identical meals, as it happened. They were for tomato bisque soup—“my speciality, and I had it put on the menu straightaway when I came to work here, don’t you know”—followed by a nice crab salad, fresh rolls, and creamery butter. Two glasses of water. Two glasses of white wine. And she was pleased to report that plates and bowls had returned to the kitchen empty.

  To this information, the night porter—in charge of delivering meals—was able to add that two women were waiting for the food in Clare Abbott’s room. He remembered this quite well because one of the two women had made much of the fact that each of the two waters had ice in it as she’d been quite specific, she informed him, that one of the glasses was to contain no ice. “She went on a bit about it,” he told Lynley. “Th’other woman told her to stop being a ninny—those were her words—and to ‘bloody drink your wine and mine as well if that’s what it’ll take for you to ease up, for God’s sake.’”

  “Rather odd that you recall it,” Lynley pointed out, “as you must make room service deliveries frequently.”

  Oh aye, that was the case all right, the night porter admitted. But he remembered it well because one of the two women had died and because when he went back to the room much later to fetch the trolley, which had been rolled into the corridor, he heard both of the women shouting.

 
“Shouting?” Lynley asked, as it seemed extreme given that Clare Abbott and her assistant would have known they were in a hotel surrounded by other guests.

  “Well, p’rhaps not shouting but talking angry and loud,” the porter told him. He’d reported this to the local police when he’d been questioned along with the rest of the night staff post the death of the occupant of the room to which the delivery of food had been made. Because of this, he remembered what he’d overheard.

  “And this was?” Lynley asked him.

  “First one said, ‘We’re finished, you and I.’ Then th’other said ‘Not with what I know ‘bout you. We’ll never be finished.’ Or words like that. And dead angry, they both were when they was talking,” the porter said. “A door crashed shut directly the second one spoke.”

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  “’Course, it could’ve been someone else,” Barbara pointed out to Lynley. She’d brought him the photos and letters from Rory Statham’s flat. They’d looked through the first. Lynley had set the second aside for the moment. They were in his office in the late afternoon as the rain beat steadily against its single window. It felt a bit like old times to Barbara, and despite being saddled with a watchdog in Winnie, she found herself feeling rather nostalgic as she sat there with Lynley looking thoughtful and—as she knew by his expression—poised to disagree with her.

  “It could have been,” he said, “but the night receptionist reported that no one who was not a guest in the hotel came through reception while he was on duty, so it was probably Mrs. Goldacre the porter heard. He also had something of a run-in with her. The night receptionist, that is.”

  Caroline Goldacre had rung the reception desk round one in the morning, Lynley told her. She’d requested a traveller’s kit be brought up to her room. “You know the sort of thing, I expect,” Lynley said. “Guests forget something or their luggage gets lost in transit and the hotel can supply them with simple needs.”

  According to the night receptionist, however, there were no traveller’s kits available. They’d run out, they’d been reordered, they’d not yet been received. He’d explained this to Mrs. Goldacre, who then asked if their sundries shop was open. When he told her it wasn’t, she became quite angry. “She wanted to know what sort of hotel didn’t have emergency kits,” Lynley concluded, “and she demanded that someone go to the chemist’s for her.”

  “At one in the morning?”

  “Hmm. Yes. He said that he was incredulous someone would think a pharmacy would actually be open and he told her—politely, he stressed when he reported it to me, so I suppose we can assume he was running out of patience at this point—that really there was nothing to be done but could he possibly assist her with something else.”

  “And?”

  “She hung up on him. You’ve met her, haven’t you?”

  “Just in passing. She had a bit of a go at me when I bought Clare Abbott’s book, but that was it.” Barbara related the story of Caroline Goldacre, Clare’s business card, and Rory Statham.

  “A point of interest only, but why did Clare Abbott give you her card?” Lynley asked.

  “She was a fan.”

  “Of?”

  “You won’t approve.”

  “Of?” he persisted.

  “My tee-shirt. I was wearing the one about bacon. And don’t give me one of your looks, sir, as I hadn’t worn it to work.”

  “Ah. And was Mrs. Goldacre perhaps attempting to prevent Ms. Abbott from adopting your sartorial style?”

  “More like Mrs. Goldacre was attempting to prevent me from contacting Ms. Abbott.”

  “And the tee-shirt?”

  “Oh, I sent it along. It was clotted cream, though. Not bacon.”

  “I’m somehow relieved.”

  “More wholesome food group?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.” Lynley shifted a few of the manila folders on his desk and brought out the autopsy report. All things considered, it appeared that the sodium azide had been in the food that Clare Abbott had eaten or, perhaps more likely, in the wine.

  “Or,” Barbara said, “there was that bit about the ice water. One glass with ice and one without would’ve made them easy to tell apart, eh?”

  “There’s that as well,” Lynley said. “And a glass was also left overturned in the room, although I’m not sure that’s relevant.”

  “Why?”

  “If it had contained the sodium azide, someone else would have been exposed to it. The fact that no one else in Cambridge fell ill in the aftermath of Clare Abbott’s death suggests that she ingested all of it.” Lynley looked up from the report as Winston Nkata entered the office. He was carrying Rory’s mobile with him.

  “Messages and texts all seem on the up-and-up,” he said. “She’s got pictures ’s well. Last eleven ’f them got the Abbott woman in them and a boiling lot of people hanging about some garden having a champagne an’ tea, looks like.”

  He handed the mobile over to Lynley, who glanced at the pictures before handing it on to Barbara. “You’ve met some of this lot. Recognise anyone?” he asked her.

  Barbara looked at the pictures. They’d been taken, she saw, at a kind of ceremony, which appeared to be happening at a hillside water course in view of an expanse of countryside. She said, “It’s Dorset, I expect. One of Clare Abbott’s addresses was in Shaftesbury. That’s where I posted the tee-shirt.”

  In the photos a woman in the getup of a town mayor was speaking; then Clare Abbott was speaking; then a big stone was being revealed by Clare to Caroline Goldacre; then Caroline Goldacre was hugging Clare, followed by being embraced by an unattractive bloke with a potbelly, thinning hair, and gold-rimmed specs. There was a close shot of the stone as well, with a bronze plaque on it. A memorial, she saw.

  William Goldacre was written upon it, along with what appeared to be a poem and the dates of his birth and death. She did the maths. Twenty-six years old when he’d died.

  Got to be the son, she said to herself, and then she identified Caroline Goldacre for Lynley as the only person aside from Clare whom she recognised. Someone had also been given Rory’s phone to snap a few shots of Rory and Clare together, she saw. This was in another garden—Clare’s own possibly?—where the tea and champagne spoken about by Nkata were being served along with sandwiches. Barbara identified Rory and then said to Lynley, “Looks like summer in the photos, sir. Dedication of a memorial stone?”

  “And as the stone is apparently for Mrs. Goldacre’s son, she must live nearby.”

  “They got her in common,” Nkata said. He was leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed in his habitual manner.

  “Rory probably saw her the day before I found her in her flat,” Barbara added. “She left me a message here. I’d rung her about the autopsy and asked to meet with her, and she was ringing back. She said—this was in her message—that she’d only just got back from Clare’s funeral, where, I expect, she saw Caroline Goldacre as well.”

  “Two women seeing Caroline Goldacre and getting themselves poisoned d’rectly,” Nkata said.

  “Let’s keep the horse where it belongs,” Lynley noted dryly. “A motive would be a very fine thing before we start pointing fingers at someone.”

  “Shall I track her down?” Barbara asked.

  “Begin with a phone call,” Lynley said. “If she’s in Shaftesbury, both of you go.”

  “But sir, wouldn’t it make more sense for Winnie—”

  Lynley gave her what Barbara was coming to think of as The Look.

  She scowled. “I’ll make the phone call,” she groused. “Pack your jammies, Winnie. I expect we’re having a holiday in Dorset.”

  SHAFTESBURY

  DORSET

  Because Alastair MacKerron had to sleep in two shifts in order to see to the early-morning baking, he’d only just finished his afternoon kip and showe
r when his wife burst in upon him. He was in the midst of examining himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door and not particularly liking what he was seeing. He’d gone to seed. He’d never been much to look at in his youth, but in his London days at least he’d kept fit on his bicycle and in his kayak on the Thames. All of that had passed with the advent of Caroline and her boys into his life, and for a very long time their presence had been more important to him than seeing to the daily upkeep of his body. In the ensuing years since they’d met, he’d let vanity go in the cause of taking care of those three escapees from an unhappy marriage, and the only bit of pride of appearance he’d held onto was connected to keeping his thin, curly hair from greying. A monthly application of dye had taken care of this, and he liked to think of it as his little secret. So when Caroline burst into the bathroom, he was caught out because the box in which the dye had been sold was still sitting on the bathroom vanity unit.

  She didn’t see it. She almost didn’t notice that he was starkers, either, which he supposed was just as well since his potbelly had nearly become more than he could suck in and even Sharon’s kind “Don’t worry about it so, Alastair” had not made him feel better about his girth. Sharon said she liked him just as he was, and she proved it to him with what was quite a surprising creativity in bed. Beneath that retiring exterior of hers, she was wonderfully imaginative. But truth was, she explained to him, she was just in love. “Love makes one want to please the other” was how she put it. “Are you not used to being pleased?”