A Banquet of Consequences

by Elizabeth George

  It did. She slid the drawer open to see within a neat collection of manila folders arranged in sets within green hanging files. The first set had tabs that named their contents as life insurance, car insurance, house insurance, bank statements, investments, all fairly standard stuff. Behind these were a group pertaining to Caroline Goldacre’s employment, and Barbara removed these from the drawer and gave them a look.

  They comprised records of the woman’s mileage, for which she was paid, along with tax documents related to her employment. They also comprised what appeared to be a set of demands with which she’d presented Clare Abbott at the end of her first and then her second year of employment. Increased pay, increased holiday time, private medical insurance, two personal emergency days every month, additional pay for what she referred to as “going beyond the call of duty” but otherwise left undefined. Next to most of these demands, someone—presumably Clare—had written either OK or Rubbish. Next to “going beyond the call of duty,” she had applied a heavy black exclamation point and the sketch of a stick figure sicking up into a toilet.

  Barbara placed these folders on the corner of the desk and dug back into the drawer to find a set bearing on their tabs the Christian names of two men, followed by what she reckoned was the initial of their surnames: Bob T and John S. Inside these two folders were three sheets of paper apiece, appearing to comprise a questionnaire, and the handwriting on each was the same as the writing on the folders’ tabs, which Barbara again assumed to be Clare’s. So Clare had . . . interviewed them? Barbara wondered. She read through the questions, and the penny dropped. These were two anonymous Internet adultery blokes whom Clare had somehow unearthed.

  At the farthest reach of the drawer, a final hanging folder bore no identification. Barbara gave a look inside and found no documents. Rather a very small manila envelope comprised the sole contents, and she removed this. It was unsealed, merely paper-clipped closed, so she removed the paper clip and upended the envelope into her palm. A small key fell out.

  Barbara flipped the key back and forth, considering the possibilities. The fact that the key had been locked away suggested that the contents of whatever the key unlocked had to be important. She wondered if banks still had safe deposit boxes, but she abandoned this wondering when she realised that the key had no identifying number engraved upon it and surely a safe deposit box would have a number, wouldn’t it?

  There were four filing cabinets in the room, and she considered these, only to note that none of them had locks, so they were nonstarters. She thought about a gym locker somewhere in town or a padlocked chest in the loft or cellar. Either was a possibility, and as she was in Clare Abbott’s house, she would have a look round for something safely locked. At least that was a place to start.

  She was on her way to the stairs to see if the house even had a loft when Nkata called to her from the dining room. He was still beavering away at Clare’s mobile and he said to her, “The FG in her diary, Barb?” he looked up. She saw that he was still wearing his running clothes, but he’d removed the hooded sweatshirt to reveal a blindingly white tee-shirt beneath it, which did not even have the courtesy to be marred by the sweat of his earlier run.

  “Yeah?”

  “I reckon it’s Francis Goldacre.” He held up the phone. “She’s got him in here: name, address, mobile. She’s also got five calls going to and coming from him.” He rose, going into the kitchen from where Barbara heard him say, “Now why d’you expect she talked to Francis Goldacre?”

  “That’s a bloody good question,” Barbara replied.

  BRONDESBURY PARK

  LONDON

  Lynley was surprised at the humble nature of Francis Goldacre’s home. He knew that Goldacre did an impressive amount of charity work as a surgeon. Prior to leaving Victoria Street to speak with the man, he’d done his homework. But he’d also assumed that in addition to charity work, the surgeon would have an income that rose from the kind of elective surgeries upon women always delicately referred to as “having a bit of work done.” So he’d had it in mind that a plastic surgeon would be likely to showcase his successful career through the purchase of a pricey London property.

  This was not the case. Instead of a mansion in Hampstead, Highgate, or Holland Park, he lived in an ordinary semidetached in a street of similar residences. It was tree-lined and at this time of year the leaves were glorious, but that was the extent of its beauties.

  Barbara Havers had rung Lynley shortly after his arrival in Victoria Street. She’d been hot on the topic of Francis Goldacre and some conversations that she believed Clare Abbott had had with him. Someone needed to speak with the man, she declared. As she and Nkata were in Shaftesbury, and as Lynley and Francis Goldacre—one assumed—were in London, could he . . . ?

  Lynley felt cautious. Barbara sounded excited, and he well knew that her enthusiasm sometimes got the better of her common sense. But as this represented the very first time since her unauthorised trip to Italy that she’d actually offered an idea that wasn’t carefully laundered in advance, he agreed to make the journey to Brondesbury Park where—according to Winston’s research on the Internet—he would find Francis Goldacre’s home. His surgery was in central London in Hinde Street not far from Manchester Square, if that was helpful, Nkata had said.

  Lynley had rung Goldacre in advance. The surgeon, he discovered, was preparing for a working trip to India on the following day, so he was at home. He voiced surprise that a Scotland Yard detective wished to speak with him, but as he would be at his residence for the entire day, Lynley was welcome to come along if he wished to do so. Thus Lynley found himself ringing the front bell at ten forty-five that morning.

  Goldacre answered, a beaky-faced man in his fifties whose seriously cratered face indicated a score of skin cancers having been removed, leaving his complexion a collection of divots. Lynley’s first thought as they introduced themselves to each other was that as a plastic surgeon Goldacre would have had many resources to improve his appearance. He had to wonder why the surgeon had not done so.

  Goldacre appeared to read his mind because he shrugged in an affable fashion. He ran his hand back over his skull to smooth thin hair of a faded straw colour that suggested it had once been ginger and he said, “I suppose I could ask you as well.”

  “What?” Lynley stepped into the house’s entry, a small square anteroom ambitiously tiled on the floor and halfway up the walls by a Victorian craftsman who had known his trade. One side of this contained a battered coat rack with a collection of similarly battered umbrellas and wellies placed beneath it.

  “Why you haven’t had that scar on your upper lip seen to,” Goldacre said. “It wouldn’t be difficult, whereas for me”—he gestured to his face—“it would take some doing, and I don’t have the time or the inclination.”

  “Ah,” Lynley said. In reference to his scar, he went on with, “It reminds me of what an idiot I was at sixteen. If I had some sort of repair, I might forget.”

  “Interesting point. Do come in, Inspector.”

  Through the entry and into the body of the house, a sitting room lay to the left and a stairway climbed to a second floor directly in front of them. Goldacre indicated the sitting room, and once inside offered food and drink. Lynley accepted a coffee and Goldacre was about to leave him in order to sort this out when an exotically beautiful Asian woman came into the room to tell the surgeon she was heading out to work. She was dressed as a medical person, and Goldacre kissed her fondly in farewell before introducing her as his wife Sumalee.

  She was many years younger than the plastic surgeon, and she comprised what Lynley wryly thought of as every white woman’s nightmare: some five feet four inches tall, shapely where she needed to be shapely, glossy hair falling to her waist, perfect olive skin, large dark almond eyes, lovely white teeth, and full unpainted lips. It happened that she was a surgical nurse, he discovered, and Francis Goldacre had met her in P
huket when he’d gone there on one of his charity missions.

  Although she was heading out for the hospital, she wouldn’t be assisting in the operating theatre today. Her arm was in a cast although a certain griminess suggested she’d worn it for some weeks. “Three days more,” she told Lynley when she caught him glancing at the arm. “I had a rather bad fall.”

  “You were pushed,” her husband said. And then to Lynley, “We had an unfortunate run-in with my elder son at a memorial service for his brother. We’d been invited by William’s partner—a girl called Lily Foster—but we’d no clue the invitation was a trick played on my former wife. So we turned up and got into it with Charlie and this”—he touched the cast on Sumalee’s arm—“was the unfortunate result.”

  “Charlie didn’t intend to hurt me,” Sumalee said mildly to her husband. “He wanted to get me out of the way of what was going on.”

  Goldacre said to Lynley, “What was going on was a brawl. Our appearance at the memorial did not go down well.”

  “That’s in the past now,” Sumalee said. “And the arm is healing.” Then, “I must be off, Francis. Have you finished your packing? Do you have everything?”

  “I’ll be getting to it all. Don’t be a mother hen.”

  She smiled, raised her eyebrows at Lynley, and said, “He’ll forget his passport if I don’t check.”

  They made their farewells to each other, which seemed authentically fond on both their parts and not the perfunctory peck of an indifferent couple. When Sumalee then left them, Lynley asked the logical question. Had they been married long?

  “Twelve years,” Goldacre told him.

  “Have you children?”

  “She isn’t able, I’m afraid.”

  “Ah. I’m sorry.”

  Goldacre looked broodingly at a photo on a table next to the room’s small fireplace. He handed it over to Lynley. It depicted a very large Thai family group: paterfamilias, mother, and eleven children. Lynley saw a much younger Sumalee among them, perhaps seventeen years old and as beautiful then as she was now. Goldacre said, “She fell pregnant twice when she was a teenager—once at fifteen and once at seventeen. This was at the hands of the same man each time, her uncle. She wouldn’t name him, so her father required her to have abortions. The second one was accompanied by a tubal ligation. Botched, unfortunately, and irreversible.”

  Lynley handed the photo back to Goldacre. “I’m terribly sorry.”

  “What savagery men do” was Goldacre’s only comment.

  “Is that why Clare Abbott had an appointment with you? She interviewed you, didn’t she? As a feminist, I expect she would have been outraged by your wife’s story.”

  “I hope anyone would be outraged by it,” Francis declared. “But Sumalee never came up between us. Clare wanted to speak about my first wife.”

  “Caroline.”

  “Yes.” He studied Lynley for a moment during which he appeared to be evaluating for the first time the various reasons a detective had shown up on his doorstep. He said, “Let me get you that coffee, Inspector Lynley,” and he went off to do so.

  Lynley took the time to look at the other photos in the room, some on the fireplace mantel, others on tables. Among them he saw pictures of Francis with two young boys—and then young men—who were, presumably, his sons. One was fair like Francis and the other dark. The fair one had Goldacre’s height and his aquiline features. The other was short, with hair always worn long, no matter his age or the style at the time. It was fashioned in a pageboy vaguely reminiscent of Richard III’s portrait, a cut that achieved nothing to enhance his features. The hairstyle and the contrast between the brothers put Lynley in mind of that winter of discontent and of the difference between those two Plantagenets.

  When Goldacre returned, he carried a plastic tray holding a cafetiere, two mugs, sugar, and milk. He indicated a sagging sofa in front of which a narrow table held newspapers in various stages of being read, along with magazines and unopened post. Without ceremony Goldacre set the tray on top of it all. He sat and Lynley joined him. They faced an unlit fire.

  “Did Clare Abbott give you a reason for wanting to talk to you about your former wife?” Lynley asked.

  Goldacre stirred the brew he’d concocted, pushed the plunger on the cafetiere, poured them both a cup. He didn’t answer the question, rather saying, “I saw in the paper that she passed away unexpectedly. Does this”—he indicated Lynley’s presence in his house with a gesture that took in both Lynley and the room itself—“have anything to do with her death?”

  “You ask that because . . . ?”

  “Because after your saying that you’d come to see me about Caroline, I can come up with no other reason for this interview.”

  “Clare Abbott was murdered,” Lynley told him.

  Goldacre had been in the process of adding milk to his coffee, but he stopped with the jug in midair and the single remark of “Good Lord.” Then he set the jug down and went on with, “I’d no idea. In the papers, there was no mention of anything . . .”

  “A second autopsy was performed. The first didn’t catch the cause of death accurately. It’s become necessary to sort the matter out. Do you know that your former wife was with her?”

  “When she died? I didn’t know. You aren’t assuming Caroline harmed her, I hope.” Goldacre went back at this point to ministering to his coffee, and he seemed deeply thoughtful. He finished up with the milk and sugar and said, “Inspector, sometimes the woman’s mad as a hatter. I can’t lie and say I wasn’t thoroughly delighted to see the last of her—as much as anyone can ever see the last of a woman with whom one has had children—but even so, it doesn’t seem remotely possible that she could be a murderer.”

  “We’re not assuming anything at the moment,” Lynley told him. “While Caroline was in the next room when Clare Abbott died and while she discovered the body the following morning, that’s all we know. Since Clare was her employer and since Caroline didn’t apparently benefit from her death, it’s difficult to see why she might have killed her. But once your name came up as someone Clare had spoken to in advance of her death . . . You can see our interest, I expect.”

  “I hope you’re not thinking I might have had something to do with her murder.”

  Lynley smiled thinly and took up his own coffee. “Tell me about her visit to you.”

  Goldacre looked reflective, coffee mug in hand. “At first I thought she wanted a consultation about surgery. I reckoned she knew I was a plastic surgeon and was perhaps thinking of having some work done. I don’t do that sort of thing, but she wouldn’t have known that, so when she rang me, I gave her my specifics to set her straight. She had quite a laugh at the idea that she would have surgery. Since she was a feminist writer, I then thought she was creating a piece about the kinds of surgeries women expose themselves to, trying to look youthful into their eighties. That seemed right up her alley. But she told me it was on another matter altogether and would I agree to meet her?”

  “She didn’t tell you the purpose of the meeting?”

  “She didn’t.” He took a sip of coffee and put the mug down on a magazine whose cover featured before and after photos of children with cleft palates. “What she did tell me—and I thought this rather odd—was that she wanted to meet me on ‘neutral ground.’”

  “What did she mean by that?”

  “Exactly what I asked her. She merely told me she didn’t want anything to influence her, and my home or my surgery might colour her conclusions. I asked her then what this was all about, and she told me it was part of a study she was engaging in as she sorted out what kind of book she intended to write next.”

  “You remember that quite well.”

  He shrugged. “It’s to do with how things turned out. I agreed to meet her and we had lunch at the Wallace Collection. It’s not far from my surgery and it seemed quite neutral enough.” />
  “And your conversation?”

  “She wanted to talk about my marriage to Caroline. Frankly, I was more than a little irritated by this, and I told her so. I reckoned she’d got me to lunch on false pretences and I wasn’t happy about that. As it happened, the conversation was a bit of he said/she said although I didn’t know at first. Clare told me afterwards.”

  “Your story of the marriage differed from your former wife’s?”

  “Evidently, over time, Caroline had done some talking to Clare about our marriage. The problem is that she’s always had trouble with the truth.”

  All things about Clare Abbott’s death considered, Lynley thought, this was a rather telling point. He said, “In what way?”

  Goldacre took up his coffee again. “I don’t mean to speak ill of her, but marriage to Caroline was rather like a sojourn in a circle of the Inferno, and apparently she’d told Clare a lorryful of rubbish about it all: myself caught between untreated clinical depression—God knows where she came up with that—and what she referred to as ‘sexual inertia,’ by which I reckon she meant I didn’t perform as often as she liked; herself heroically coping with my periods of depressed inactivity, with my lack of interest in her and the boys . . . But the truth was rather different, as I explained to Clare.”

  “What was it, exactly?”

  “That even on a good day, Caroline could drive any man directly into a monastery, Inspector. Essentially, she was very unhappy that my career took the turn that it did.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “We married shortly after I completed my training. She’d assumed that I’d be bringing in buckets of cash doing elective surgeries. She’d no clue that I’d never intended to use my skills operating upon celebrities, trophy wives, and wealthy widows. Once I qualified, I chose to work with birth defects, burn victims, terrorist victims, wounded soldiers, that sort of thing. I spent—and still do—a considerable amount of time away from home in other countries, and that didn’t help the marriage, as you can imagine. And then, of course, there was the matter of William. Clare asked especially about him because of his suicide and Caroline’s apparent belief that it was down to me that he killed himself.”