A Banquet of Consequences

by Elizabeth George

  India moved past her. There was little enough room to do so, both because of Caroline’s girth and because of the size of the entry. She scooped up the post on her way and carried it into the kitchen, Caroline following her and continuing to speak. “Forgive me, India. I’m at the point of I don’t know what. If it hadn’t been for Charlie and his willingness to take me in—and your own willingness, of course, my dear—I wouldn’t have known where to turn. And I do understand why Charlie needed me out of his hair. He can’t have his mum lurking round while he’s doing whatever it is he does with his clients.”

  India had been thinking about tea, but she switched to the idea of wine. She had a bottle of Orvieto in the fridge, and she brought it out. Caroline, she saw, had already uncorked it.

  “I would have cooked us something for dinner,” Caroline told her, “But I didn’t know and Charlie didn’t say what time you’d be home. And I have so little appetite myself. But can I get you something, dear? You must be exhausted. On your feet all day. Poking people with needles and having to listen to their stories of their aches and pains. I don’t know how you do it.”

  As she poured herself some wine, India saw that the answer phone was blinking. She went to it. She said over her shoulder, “I’ll make us some pasta in a while. Do have some wine, Caroline. Some more wine, that is.”

  “Oh my dear, I hope it was all right that I opened it? I thought . . . My nerves . . . I’ve been on the brink, India. That’s your dad on the phone, by the way. I didn’t pick up, of course, but I heard the message. And the young man you were supposed to see after work? He’s phoned as well. Nat, he’s called, isn’t he? Charlie told me his name.”

  India set her jaw. She entertained a very clear image of Caroline rushing into the kitchen when the phone rang in order to hear the message being left. Determinedly, she pushed the button to her father’s voice saying, “Your mum has told me about this new bloke, India. Well done. You listen to your old dad when it comes to this. Only a fool decides to fold when there’s a chance of a royal flush if he takes another card.”

  The message from Nat followed, with him declaring, “Darling, it’s me. We’ve only just rung off, but I want this message waiting for you when you get home. I’m completely serious about Christmas. And I forgot to mention the soot. Dad does himself up with soot in the beard as well. So far the grandkids haven’t noticed that the fire is gas and the chimney wouldn’t accommodate a gnome. They might this year, though. You don’t want to miss that. We’ll speak later, I hope. Happy laundering, by the way.”

  India took a large gulp of the Orvieto before she turned to face Caroline. Caroline was sipping her own wine, but her eyes were fixed on India’s face, taking in the colour that India could feel in her cheeks. She had no reason to be embarrassed or guilty or ashamed, India told herself. But she still felt . . . something. And this rankled her. She turned back to the work top, where she’d deposited the post. She began to look through it.

  Behind her, Caroline said, “After Will’s suicide, do you really want to do this to Charlie? You’re breaking his heart.”

  India said nothing. She divided the post into bills, useless adverts, and a greeting card-sized envelope with handwriting that she recognised as Nat’s. The bills she opened: phone bill, council tax. The adverts she binned. Nat’s card she slipped into her shoulder bag for opening later, once Caroline and she weren’t occupying the same room.

  She decided that now was the moment to make that happen, so she took her things and went upstairs to the second bedroom, where what went for her office occupied a space in a corner opposite to that which was devoted to a small television, a sound system, and a DVD player. She saw that Caroline had been on the computer. She realised at once how easy it would have been for her mother-in-law to delve into her personal life. Her computer was set to remember every single one of her passwords. More the fool I, she said to herself.

  Behind her once again, Caroline spoke, having followed her up the stairs. She said, “You didn’t answer me, dear.”

  “I’m going to change out of my work clothes” was what India settled on saying to Caroline. “I’ll meet you back downstairs and then we can talk. But I won’t talk about Charlie, so you’re going to have to pick a different topic.”

  Caroline regarded her, head cocked to one side. It was an evaluative look: the sort one gives to a recalcitrant child while one decides upon the best mode of disciplining her. She said nothing more but merely turned, and wineglass in hand, went back down the stairs. Ten minutes later—which was as much as India could stretch out her changing from workday clothes to leggings, ballet flats, and a tunic-sized sweater—India found her at the kitchen table, pouring herself another glass of wine. When Caroline opened her mouth to speak, India saw at once what her mistake had been. She’d said she wouldn’t speak about Charlie. She hadn’t said as much about Nat.

  Caroline flicked her fingers in the direction of the phone. “I suppose he had an idyllic childhood, complete with a loving father present every day. Just as you had, which makes you right for each other to your way of thinking, doesn’t it? You’ve decided that he’s solid and reliable, that he comes from an excellent family with no skeletons emerging from cupboards at inopportune times. And certainly no skeletons of the type—”

  “I’ve told you, Caroline,” India cut in. “I’m not going to talk about Charlie or anything relating to Charlie.”

  “But tell me, please . . .” And here Caroline’s tone altered. It was no longer arch as it had been, but instead pained, presumably with a mother’s love which, if she had to be honest with herself, India did not doubt Caroline possessed for both of her sons. “What is it that went wrong for you? Because there has to be a way to mend this. He wants to mend it, India. He’ll do nearly anything to have you back. He understands that, from the first, he should have . . . I don’t know . . . asserted himself more. And I’m at fault here. I’m intrusive. I always wanted the best for my boys in their childhood because God knows their father provided them with less than nothing in the way of nurturing and because of this, I hovered too much. And then I found it impossible to stop the hovering because I’d become so used to it and because no one told me just to stop. Someone should have said that to me. No one did. But now . . . India, if you give him another chance, you’ll see—”

  “What part of my not being willing to talk about Charlie do you not understand?” India demanded. As she spoke, she set her wineglass on the work top with a click against the tiles that was so forceful she was surprised the stem of the glass didn’t snap in two. “Do you not listen when someone speaks to you or do you just disregard what they have to say?”

  Caroline appeared to consider this, and for a moment India thought she’d got through to her mother-in-law. When she next spoke, however, Caroline’s tone of supplication had altered, but not to apology or to acquiescence. She said tartly, “You’ve changed entirely. It’s not just your appearance. It’s the heart of you. It’s gone, isn’t it? Or is it just that the heart of you was never even there?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I expect you’ve convinced yourself that you’re in love with this whoever he is, with his Christmas and his chimneys and his soot in the beard and all the adorable grandkids. You’ve told yourself that this—whatever it is that you’re feeling, India, if you can feel at all—is what real love is like when you don’t know the first thing about love. Love isn’t a momentary obsession with some bloke you may have met in a bar. Love is devotion. It’s being willing to stand at the side of someone when he’s at his worst and support him, keep him in one piece, do what it takes to make his life a beautiful thing, be his lover, his confidante, his friend, his life’s companion, his—”

  “Is that what you do for Alastair?” India could feel her heart pounding all the way to her toes, and she could feel her face burning as if it had been branded. “Would that be why he’
s taken a lover, Caroline? Because you’ve made his life such a beautiful thing?”

  Caroline gulped and clapped a hand over her mouth. She said from behind her fingers, “You’re a monster . . . You’re utterly selfish. This . . . It’s all about you, isn’t it? This . . . this thing with Mr. Christmas that you’ve got. This rejection of my son whose only sin was to fall apart when his brother . . . when Will . . .”

  She pushed away from the table and got to her feet. She swung round, stumbled against the doorjamb, righted herself, and left the room. India heard her climbing the stairs and she expected the next sound to be the slamming of her bedroom door, the door to the room she’d given up so that her mother-in-law could sleep in comfort. But no slam came. Instead, India heard the quiet closing of the door, following by the snick of the lock being turned to bar anyone from entrance.

  Thank God for small favours was what India thought.

  SHAFTESBURY

  DORSET

  It was the third ringing of the doorbell that awakened Alastair MacKerron from his kip. He’d dimly heard the first two rings, but he’d assimilated them into the dream he’d been having, which involved trying to find a way out of what seemed to be a medieval castle of the type that lay in ruins round the country. Only this castle wasn’t a ruin at all but the real thing: dark and dreary and cold within as he tried one corridor and then another, all the time knowing that he was looking anxiously for someone whom he could not find. It seemed to be Sharon, but it could have been his wife. She was always just out of reach so that the longing he felt to see her grew and yet remained unresolved.

  He woke with a start and a sense of sorrow. He reckoned it had indeed been Sharon whom he was seeking because, alone and with Caroline fled to London, he wanted to do what was impossible just now: to move Sharon into the house so that they might begin their life together.

  The bell went a fourth time, and on this occasion someone leaned upon it. Alastair groaned and rolled out of bed in his underpants. It hadn’t been his regular time for kipping, not this late in the day, but he hadn’t slept a wink the previous night, what with worrying what to make of Caroline’s decamping to London, so when he’d had the chance for a lie-down, he’d taken it, only to fall deeply asleep and now to stand groggily at this bedside, wondering what event would occur next to shatter his life.

  At the window, he saw that next event at the same moment as the infernal ringing ceased. It comprised the woman who’d come earlier with the black detective from New Scotland Yard. The black wasn’t in sight, and the woman herself had stepped off the porch and was now gazing at the front of the house. She clocked Alastair at the window and she beckoned him down.

  He held up one finger to indicate he would need a moment. He struggled into his jeans and his pullover, but he didn’t bother with socks or shoes. Nor did he comb his hair. Better she should see she’d disrupted his sleep, he reckoned.

  He couldn’t remember her name. He told her this when he opened the door. She walked inside, unbeckoned to do so, and said she was DS Havers. Was the wife about? she wanted to know.

  “What’s this, then?” he asked her. She was making her way to the sitting room, tugging a ragged bag off her shoulder and depositing it on the sofa, where she also deposited herself. She opened the thing and began to root through it.

  “Official bit of work needing to be taken care of,” she told him. “Orders from London.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Fingerprints,” she told him. “I need your beloved’s dabs, Mr. MacKerron.” She brought out some sort of device and set it on the coffee table among the magazines, the teacups, and the remains of a cheese-and-pickle sandwich that he should have binned the previous afternoon.

  He felt groggy still. “You’re wanting Caro’s fingerprints? Is she s’posed to have committed a crime?”

  DS Havers shot him a look, friendly as the dickens. She said pleasantly, “Well, two crimes’ve been committed, haven’t they? Thinking of it, I need your dabs as well. What this is here . . . ?” She indicated her device. “It’ll run your prints through the system to see if we’ve got ourselves the match we’re looking for. It’ll do the same for your wife, fast as anything. No more pouring over whorls and spaces and the like, this is. Amazing what technology can do, eh?”

  He looked past her to the garden, which he could see from the sitting room window. He could think of nothing else to say other than “Where’s the other one, the African?”

  “I expect you’re talking about DS Nkata” was her reply. “He’s ’bout as African as I am, but let’s not make that matter. You and your wife didn’t run him off back to London, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s carrying on with another line of enquiry. So . . . as to the wife . . . You want to fetch her for me or should I just start yodeling and hope she hears?”

  Alastair said, “Might be I need to ring a solicitor.”

  “Could do, ’course,” DS Havers said cheerfully. “But all I want is your wife’s dabs and yours to clear you of suspicion and as that’ll take us something less than five minutes while it’ll take your solicitor an age to get here, I expect you’d rather I was out of your hair than making myself a home in it.”

  “Suspicion of what?” he asked.

  “Murder and attempted murder. Mr. MacKerron, I could go at this with a trip to the local magistrate and a warrant, which they’re going to grant as easy as my buying myself a pork pie for dinner. But it’d be quicker—not to mention a hell of a lot more efficient—if you’ll give me your dabs and then fetch your wife so I can take hers.”

  “She’s not here,” he said. “You c’n have my prints for all the good it’ll do you, but Caro’s gone up to London.”

  DS Havers didn’t look surprised at this, but she did look like someone considering her options. She seemed to reach a fairly quick conclusion about her next move because she then said, “Sorry to hear that. If you can give me chapter and verse on where she is—an address would be nice, phone number as well—then we can send someone over to collect her dabs. As for yours . . . ? Why don’t you step right up and let me show you some magic. I expect you don’t get to see this sort of thing every day.” She tapped on the device, and said exactly what the coppers always said: If he’d done nothing, he had nothing to fear.

  Alastair had his doubts about that.

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  “I thought we had reached an understanding about that animal, Inspector.”

  Lynley winced. The doors to the lift had only just opened upon his return from having taken Arlo for his late-afternoon walkies. Lynley had expected it to be a simple matter of spiriting the dog down to reception and then outside and across the street to the smallish green on the corner, followed by a quick jaunt back to work and a depositing of him beneath his desk. But it had taken Arlo longer than Lynley had anticipated to do his business, accompanied as it was by much olfactory examining of the environment. And while Isabelle Ardery had been safely out of the way at a meeting in Tower Block when he’d gone on his way, now here she was, carrying a black institutional three-ring notebook that told him her meeting had just ended.

  She moved to the side of the corridor to allow others to exit her lift. Lynley did the same. She said to him, “Had we not reached a friendly, mutual accord?”

  “We had,” he said to the superintendent, joining her and ignoring two civilian secretaries who cried, “A dog!” and “What a sweetheart!” and wished to give Arlo attention, which would, he knew, cause the guv’s own hackles to rise. He went on with, “This is only a temporary measure, guv. I’d taken him to hospital—”

  “Please don’t tell me now he’s got ill,” Isabelle said wearily.

  “He’s completely fit. I took him to see his owner. Or his mistress. Or his person. Or whatever is the politically correct expression for someone living with an animal these days. I can’t quite keep up with all
of the linguistic changes that seem to come up yearly in our society.”

  “Don’t be amusing. I want him gone. And what sort of hospital allows visiting hours for animals?”

  “He wore his vest. That’s what he’s got on, by the way. It explains he’s an assistance dog so—”

  “All right, all right.” Isabelle shifted the black notebook, holding it more like a shield than a container for a sheaf of papers.

  “I thought it might help her to see him,” Lynley said. “And it did. She recalled how she came to have in her possession toothpaste that contained the same substance that killed her friend.”

  Isabelle cast an eye down on Arlo, who was looking at her in his most appealing fashion. She said, “And how was this?”

  Lynley explained how it had come about: the sight of Arlo triggering Rory’s memory of her hasty leave-taking from Shaftesbury without being in possession of the suitcase which contained her things, toothpaste included. Isabelle listened, her eyes narrowed, her gaze fixed on the dog. When Lynley had completed the tale, she said, “Why’s he doing that? What does he want?”

  Lynley glanced down. Arlo was sitting obediently next to him, his tail sweeping the floor like a toppled metronome, his gaze on the superintendent. “He’s a dog, Isabelle,” Lynley explained. “He wants you to love him. Or at least to act as if you don’t wish to hurl him from the nearest window.”

  She rolled her eyes. “The twins,” she said. “They were absolutely mad for a dog.”

  “And . . . ?” he asked.

  “Bob wanted one as well. I was the ‘bad guy,’ as they say. Of course now he and Sandra have two dogs, four cats, and God only knows what else. Ferrets, I think, Guinea pigs? It could even be rats. I’ve no idea. Just that they’re everywhere. I think they all sleep together in some bizarre version of the family bed. It’s all gone overboard and Bob’s become quite smug about it. ‘Another hedgehog to add to the crew,’ he says like a martyred saint when the truth is he’s as mad as she is and even if he weren’t, it’s such a joy for him to rub my face in . . . in the piles of excrement they no doubt leave round the house. This is the animals, I mean. Not Bob, Sandra, or the boys. I assume all of them are housebroken.”