So Caroline Goldacre hadn’t been lying when she’d claimed that she’d begun as an ’umble charwoman, Barbara thought. This was a mark in her favour, although it went no distance to explain why Clare had printed her emails and kept them locked away in the boot of her car.
Skipping ahead, Barbara found the first alteration in tone, some ten months later. Something was amiss in the housecleaning: A question about damage to the hob was met with a tart offer to “turn in my keys if my work is so lacking in what you’re looking for, Clare.” Clare had apparently responded in some unacceptable way not present in the collection Barbara was looking through, for what followed was a missive of the are-you-accusing-me-of-LYING variety, which was then followed by an excruciatingly long three thirty A.M. document in which Caroline—had she been drunk? drugged? hysterical? channeling Henry James?—banged on for three pages about her former husband, the suicide of her troubled son, the marriage of her older son and his “disgusting wife India,” and then back to her former husband for a revelation of his “failures as a man.” She wound herself up and launched from there into a comparison of herself to Clare Abbott with all her “bloody privileges and Oxford education and have you any idea how you intimidate people or do you just like to play with them as you’ve been playing with me” and on and on till Barbara’s head was swimming. This particular email had been highlighted here and there with yellow marking pen, and on its edge were written “Timms 164” and “Ferguson 610.”
If Clare had made any answer at all to this, there was no record. Indeed, thumbing through the emails, Barbara saw that answers—if there had been any—were not included. In the case of this particular email, what followed was something written less than twenty-four hours later by Caroline, apologising for having unceremoniously dumped her anxieties upon Clare. She’d been out of order in her previous email, she wrote, and her outburst had been stimulated not one whit by Clare’s reasonable question about the hob but rather by a phone call from “the perverse India” regarding Charlie, Caroline’s surviving son. India had declared her concerns about Charlie’s low spirits and his refusal to seek help for a depression that India believed might lead him to take his life as his brother had done. “It broke me. I’d only just spoken to her when I wrote to you,” Caroline explained to Clare. “Forgive me, please. Working for you has given me a way of not thinking about Will for a few hours each day, and I’m desperate for that.”
Barbara looked back at the earlier email sent at three thirty in the morning. Caroline had just spoken to India by phone? At three thirty in the morning? That hardly seemed credible.
Whether Clare had considered this fact, it was of no account, for within two emails Caroline was back to normal again. Oddly, although they saw each other nearly every day, Caroline wrote as if they were miles apart and playing at pen pals. She wrote to Clare daily, and the next fifty or so emails seemed to be innocuous until something set her off again. Caroline was, at this point, advancing in her employment. She’d gone from charwoman to housekeeper and cook, and a little delving indicated that Clare had transgressed by questioning a meal that Caroline had prepared. “The fish seemed a bit off” had apparently been what launched Caroline into two pages of “Let’s just have a look at how you use me, Clare, and at how you use other people as well because that’s really who you are isn’t it you’re just a user and haven’t I learned THAT and MORE about you.”
She’d been afire with indignation, creating a document in which she listed Clare Abbott’s sins, the mightiest of which appeared to be Clare’s relationship with a brother who’d turned to her for financial help but “oh you won’t help him will you because you can’t forgive him can you because you’re the ONLY one on the planet who was ever made to suffer aren’t you Clare. You act like you’re the FIRST person EVER to have a brother who CLIMBED INTO YOUR BED so let me ask you if you have any idea what it’s like to be RAPED by your own father because you don’t have any idea do you when your brother didn’t rape you but just stuck his FINGERS up into you and there you are like this is the worst thing that could ever happen to someone oh please.” She’d been subjected to repeated attacks by her own father, Caroline declared, and when she had gone to her mother, “do you know what it’s like when your OWN mother doesn’t believe you no I expect you don’t. So I make a mistake with some BLOODY fish and it’s all about you isn’t it Clare because you are such a narcissist only I didn’t know that and if I did I wouldn’t have ever come to work for you you selfish cow.”
Narcissist had been circled in black, and another name and number had been scrawled in the margin: “Cowley 242.” If Clare had made a reply to this rambling discourse, it, once again, was not in the folder. As before, however, a day later had come the apology. This one was along the lines of “I misunderstood what you meant when you said the fish was off. I’d bought it fresh and I thought you were saying to me that I didn’t know what fresh fish should be like while you knew better. I can’t explain why this got to me but I think it had to do with Francis and all of his refusals to help Will when it would only have taken a simple surgery. God, I can’t go there and write about Will. I think I’m going mad.”
At the conclusion of this one, Barbara blew out a breath slowly, considering not only the emails but also the notations in the margins. She could only imagine what her own future might have been like with the Met had she—in addition to her numerous transgressions—fired off a volley of provocative missives to her superior officers. She found it curious that Clare Abbott had not sacked the woman at some point but had instead not only kept her on but also increased her responsibilities and her access to the feminist’s life. The only inference Barbara could draw at the moment was that Caroline had the Just4Fun goods on Clare, which she threatened to reveal if she was ever sacked.
She flipped to the final few emails. She’d finished her chip butty and cheese toastie, and her ham salad had long since arrived. She requested tea and when it appeared with surprising alacrity, she doctored it with milk and sugar, asked if she could have the ham salad wrapped up for takeaway, downed a couple of gulps of tea, tucked into her pineapple upside-down cake, and read on. Alastair MacKerron, Caroline reported to Clare, was having an affair with “that slag Halsey who probably sucks his dick for a fiver because believe me he wouldn’t pay more for it,” and despite Caroline’s having caught them at it after hours on the bakery floor “with her on her knees and he’s leaning back just smiling and smiling because he’s USING her just like he used me in the days before I caught him with our CHILDMINDER for God’s sake nineteen years old she was and there was Will all alone in the kitchen and them in the larder and you do not even want to KNOW what my little boy told me he’d seen them up to in the past and him barely eight years old! I do not know why I don’t walk out on him because believe me NO ONE would ever want him, not permanently like I have the yob,” her husband had declared that he would “no more give up the BLOODY COW than would he have a limb removed. He said his arm but we know he meant his best friend which is his DICK.”
This section was once again heavily highlighted and annotated with names and numbers. Added now were penciled notes in, presumably, Clare Abbott’s hand. They were heavily dependent on some sort of shorthand abbreviations—del., abandon, grand s.o.s.—and because of these and the annotated names and numbers, for the first time, Barbara wondered if Clare had been actually encouraging Caroline to write to her, perhaps telling her to unburden herself. If nothing else from Caroline’s continuing emails, it did not seem that Clare had asked her to cease and desist.
“He’s drinking now, every night this is Clare,” began the final email that Barbara looked at, “and how he’s also managing to get up and do the baking without ruining everything he puts into the oven is a mystery to me because I assure you that I am NOT lending him a hand and I won’t till he gets RID of the cunt. Which of course he has no intention of ever doing. She’s expecting him to leave me for her but he knows I’l
l have him for EVERYTHING if he even tries it. I’ve given him my LIFE and this is how he says thank you which is how he’s always been by the way not two years into our marriage and there he was having girls to his SHOP in Whitecross Street and I discover this don’t I when I stop by with a lunch I’ve picked up for him specially and he’s locked the door and I know he’s there so I break it I smash the glass with my fist and you can bet he felt rotten after that with his trousers round his ankles and this little tart doing the business on him and his own WIFE spurting blood all over his precious floor. Told a real tale to the paramedics, he did. Made it She’s upset and she cut herself and could be she needs watching for a few days. During which time, naturally, he had the CHILDMINDER constantly. I can’t even remember her damn name but anyway she was in and out or hahaha it would be better to say that he was in and out wouldn’t it and when I got home and found the two of them doing it like dogs and with Will and Charlie actually WATCHING like this is something on the telly—”
Barbara stopped reading. She felt as if her eyeballs were on the verge of bleeding. The why of it all was ricocheting round her mind like the remaining ball in a pinball game. What prompted someone to blather on for pages like this, vomiting forth either personal details or a doctored version of them? And perhaps more important, considering what had ultimately happened, what prompted another person to receive these details in an endless stream without putting a halt to it all?
She could feel an answer developing to these questions as she started to put the files back into the strongbox. For beneath them all lay a memory stick, and Barbara knew enough about computers to understand its import at once. For the memory stick could be used to back up existing files that one was working upon on a computer. But it could also be used to contain the files in the first place, hiding them from the sight of someone with access to the computer upon which they might have otherwise been left once they were created.
She needed to get back to Shaftesbury. She needed to see what it was that was so important to Clare that she couldn’t risk leaving it in her house, just like the documents in these locked-away manila filing folders she’d just been reading.
SPITALFIELDS
LONDON
India was touched that Nat wanted her to see the site of his new project, so when he asked her if she had time to meet him there in the late afternoon, she said at once that she did. Her last client was at half past three. She had paperwork to do, but she decided to leave it for the next day as the fading daylight at this time of year meant that she needed to get over to the location of Nat’s terrace of cottages before five.
Getting there presented no difficulty as his directions were as straightforward as the man himself. She went by taxi as far as Shoreditch tube station and from there she walked to Hunton Street where the two terraces of cottages faced each other across a narrow path, with the northern half of them abutting a schoolyard. There, the sounds of children’s excited voices mingling with those of adults calling out to them indicated the end of a day of lessons.
The cottages were, she saw, ancient, tiny, and in sad disrepair: ramshackle from lack of care. They were formed from London brick which had gone unwashed for so many decades that the uniform colour of the place was like sludge, and India could see why a developer might look upon them and decide that buying the lot of them and clearing the site for a tower block would be far more profitable than rehabilitating the little residences, no matter their historical significance. With their dismal and nearly useless front gardens and their paintless front doors, with their roofs looking little better than sieves, it was difficult to imagine that anyone would ever want to live in the places.
Nat was standing in one of the front gardens in the company of a young woman. They both wore hard hats in a bow to what was essentially a construction site, although there didn’t seem to be any construction going on, at least not upon the exterior of the residences. Some of these appeared to be occupied still, for as India set off along the path between the cottages, a shalwar kameez–clad woman attempted to manoeuvre a pram through one of the front doors. Nat went to help her.
In doing so, he saw India approaching. He cocked his head with a smile and finished his business first with the pram and then with the young woman, whom he introduced as the architectural intern Victoria Price. She was very pretty, India thought, quite tall and very athletic looking. She also seemed rather more than a little attracted to Nat, if the looks and smiles she was directing towards him were anything to go by. They briefly conversed about their next meeting before Victoria removed her hard hat, released masses of glorious, sun-streaked hair that fell well below her shoulders, and took out her smartphone to make note of her follow-up appointment with Nat. She would, she told him, have the new drawings ready by then, and in the meantime should she bring on the garden designer? He would prefer to wait on that, Nat told her. He smiled, she beamed, she went on her way. She wore, India thought, completely unsuitable shoes for a work site: very high heels that would no doubt cripple her before she was forty. In the meantime, they made her legs look long and toothsome.
“She’s very pretty,” India told Nat when Victoria was out of earshot.
“She is,” he agreed. “I only wish she was the total package.”
India shot him a questioning look.
He said, “The creativity isn’t quite as good as the body. But she’s very nice all the same and she’s eager to do well, so I can’t complain as much as I’d like to.”
“Which, I expect, isn’t all that much.” She said it in a teasing fashion, but he didn’t react as she thought he might, with a dismissive chuckle.
Instead he said, “Let me show you round,” which he did much as he might have shown a newspaper reporter or a casual acquaintance. This was disquieting, but India reckoned he might merely be in work mode still. She herself would have probably shown him round the Wren Clinic in much the same manner.
Inside one of the abandoned cottages, however, Nat made it clear why he had actually asked her to come to the site. He escorted her round the gutted place and explained how it would look when its interior was completed, but when he was finished with what was a tour of five minutes’ length only, instead of returning to the exterior, he paused at the front door and said to her, “You’ve probably worked out that I’ve more than one reason for asking you to trek over here.”
She played it as an innocent, saying, “The only thing I’d worked out about why you’ve asked me here is that you want to share what you’re doing.”
“I do,” he said. “But there’s a bit more.”
“Victoria Price?”
He actually looked confused, which was gratifying. He took a moment and then said, “Oh. You mean as a love interest? God, no. She’s not my type.”
“I’d think she was any man’s type.”
“Not mine.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
He didn’t smile. She felt a corresponding chill come over her. It seemed to settle between them. He still didn’t open the door of the cottage but rather leaned against it—hips and shoulders with hands in his trouser pockets—and he said, “The thing is, India . . . I’m not sure how to say this so I’m just going to say it.”
She felt more chill and said, “Is something wrong?”
“Well, yes and no. But the thing is . . . I’d prefer not to have my heart broken. I’ve had a long think about everything, and I’ve decided it’s best if we cool things off between us for now.”
India frowned. The rug felt pulled out from beneath her of a sudden, and it didn’t take a great deal of thought for her to understand who was jerking the fringe. She said, “It’s Caroline. The fact that she was—that she is—staying with me.”
“That’s part of it, of course.”
“Nat, it’s not as if I want her there. It’s not as if I invited her. I’m only having her stay because Charlie—”
&nb
sp; “That’s just it,” he pointed out. “Charlie. I know you’re doing it for Charlie’s sake and it’s you and Charlie and everything involved with you and Charlie that’s forced me to come to terms with how things really are. Look, darling, it’s fairly clear that you’re not ready for what I’m offering you, and I don’t want to rush you into anything.”
“I don’t think you’re rushing me. Is this about Christmas? Asking me to come to Shropshire with you? The fact that I haven’t yet said yes?”
“It’s more than that.” He glanced away, to the window of the cottage which was covered with some sort of filmy material to protect it from what was going on inside the building. He gave a mighty sigh. “I’m in love with you, India, but the way isn’t clear. And if we keep on as we’ve been going, as things stand now it’s a good bet that I’m going to end up fairly devastated. Which, to be honest, I’d like to avoid.”
“What things?”
“Hmm?”
A Banquet of Consequences Page 45