A Banquet of Consequences

by Elizabeth George

  Lynley sounded deeply unimpressed. More, Lynley sounded exasperated. He said, “This is ice so thin we’re all about to fall through it, Barbara.”

  “By itself, yeah. I see that, sir. But when you put it with everything else we’ve got—”

  “You know as well as I that we can’t hand over a mountain of supposition to the CPS.”

  Barbara rolled her eyes and exchanged a look with Nkata as Lynley went on. She could practically see the inspector ticking the list off on his fingers.

  “A conversation overheard in Cambridge, a hidden book being written, an Internet adultery site being used, score of emails printed up and—”

  “Hundreds of her emails, Inspector.”

  “—annotated with references to various psychology books. Interviews with people significant in her life that she might have heard or whose transcriptions she might have read. An overnight case that she might have packed. Toothpaste that she might have doctored. Without a single witness, without definitive evidence of some sort that actually is definitive evidence and not something we conveniently declare definitive evidence . . . We’ve got sod all unless you manage to wrest a confession out of the Goldacre woman.”

  Barbara looked at Winston. His expression was regretful. It seemed to be saying, along with Lynley, that the time had come for them to pack their bags. But returning to London without something to show the superintendent for the time she’d allowed Barbara to spend in Dorset was not an option. So Barbara said, “So that’s what it’ll be, Inspector.”

  Winston frowned. Barbara had little doubt that up in London Lynley was frowning as well. He said, “What?”

  “Caroline Goldacre’s going to confess. And she’s going to confess to me. It’ll be on tape. It’ll be transcribed. It’ll be initialed on every page. And it’ll be signed.”

  “That’s not very likely, is it?” Lynley asked.

  “You said twenty-four hours, didn’t you? Twenty-two now, to be exact. That’s plenty of time for me to question her. She’s going to confess. Depend on it.”

  She rang off. She knew there was very little chance that she could persuade Lynley into believing she could get a confession out of Caroline Goldacre. Truth was, there was very little chance that she could persuade herself into believing it. But given the options of producing a confession or returning to London in defeat, she didn’t see any other choice.

  SHAFTESBURY

  DORSET

  Alastair knew he should have been abed at least two hours earlier, and he’d made the attempt but, finding he couldn’t sleep, he’d given it up. He hadn’t heard from Sharon. He’d rung her, both her house and her mobile, and he’d attempted to explain himself . . . only, he hadn’t known quite what to say. He hadn’t really believed that Sharon could have harmed anyone, and that was how he began his message at first. The problem, of course, was that he had believed in Sharon’s guilt, no matter that there were indications to the contrary and the biggest indication was Sharon herself. She’d been as consistent as the rising and setting sun, straight from the day he’d met her. Yet he’d actually thought . . . And that was the point, wasn’t it? What he’d thought was the whole bloody point. He’d thought she was someone who could poison another person for what was truly an ill-defined gain. It was little wonder that she wanted nothing more to do with him.

  He lectured himself as he tossed in his bed. He tried out various means of earning Sharon’s forgiveness. He had mental conversations with her and more mental conversations with Caro. He stared at the dark ceiling of his room; he stared at the shadows thrown by the wardrobe against the wall; he stared at the closed bedroom door.

  Through it he could hear the blare of Caro’s television. It was so loud that he could even tell what she was watching, some kind of mad programme on plastic surgery, a bloody stupid bloke who’d decided he needed to have his willy made larger and had gone to a hack in South America to have it done. Disaster with accompanying photos. Pause for a commercial even louder than the programme itself.

  She was watching the telly in her retreat, and the thought of this retreat that he’d fashioned for her put Alastair in mind of everything else he’d done to this house they lived in, all of it at Caro’s request, accomplished because he’d sought to please her. A new kitchen, new bathrooms, an extra bedroom so that each of the boys could have his own room as they’d had in London. The house had had enough bedrooms when they’d purchased it, but one of them, she’d decided, was meant to be her personal retreat. This was, she’d told him, essential to her peace of mind. But the reality was that there was no peace of mind for Caro, and a personal retreat had not provided it for her. In time, she’d altered it to her bedroom. “We keep such different hours” had been her excuse. “You do want me to be able to sleep, don’t you? I need my sleep. It’s not unreasonable. And really, Alastair, it’s for the boys, after all.”

  Stupidly, he’d thought it would change when the boys left home. She’d be more of a wife to him then, he reckoned.

  He rose from his bed. As he did so, he considered how many nights he’d only slept fitfully because of the noise from Caro’s telly programmes. He realised he’d never once asked her to turn the sound lower, instead merely pointing out to her that “it’s a bit loud for me to be able to sleep, love,” a veiled request that she blithely ignored. Sharon, he told himself, would not have done this. Indeed, Sharon wouldn’t have been watching the telly into the wee hours of the morning at all. She’d’ve been in his bed, having adapted her hours to his hours so that they could be together, going to bed at eight and rising not at two in her case but perhaps at four because she, too, had a full day of work ahead of her and it wouldn’t do for her to be driving round the county without having had a decent night’s sleep. But Caro? It hadn’t been like that. Nothing with Caro had been the way life might’ve been with Sharon.

  He could list the differences: how Caro hadn’t wanted more children despite his longing for just one child of his own; how she hadn’t taken his name because she’d wanted to keep the last name of “her boys”; how they were always “her boys” and never “our boys” no matter the father he was to them; how, most of all, they’d begun their relationship on a lie and one lie or another had carried them through all these years till he’d finally had enough.

  He fumbled for the light on the bedside table and just as he was about to switch it on, he heard the sound of a car outside. He saw the headlamps beam through his bedroom window. Then the lights were extinguished, two doors opened and slammed smartly shut, and that was when he went to see what was going on.

  A full moon was shining silver everywhere, and in its light he could see the police: the woman detective and the black again. They paused at the entrance to Will’s garden and exchanged a few words. Then they came across and rang the bell.

  With her telly roaring, Caroline wouldn’t hear it, Alastair reckoned. He idly thought about ignoring the whole thing. What could they do if he didn’t answer? Ram the door down? He didn’t think so and he was so bloody miserably tired and—

  Caroline’s telly went off. The bell rang again. This time it was held down, so there was no real pretending that the noise it made wasn’t enough to wake one from sleep. And even if it hadn’t been loud enough to alert the fire brigade, Caroline came out of her room. She didn’t descend the stairs, however. Instead she opened his door and said, “Probably for you, don’t you think? Little miss hot pants coming to claim her man. Ah. I see you’re ready to leave with her. Up and dressed and all the rest, hmmm?”

  He said, “It’s the cops.”

  Her expression altered. She entered his bedroom and went to the window. The ringing continued. She said, “I have no intention in the middle of the goddamn night . . .” and then she left him. He could hear her pound down the stairs. In a moment, he could hear their voices: the cops’ quiet, Caro’s loud and outraged. Her sleep disrupted. Did they know what time . . . ?
What the hell did they . . . ? Her solicitor at once. And all the rest.

  He went to the stairs, and he could hear her more clearly. He descended slowly and listened to his wife.

  “Do you know how many hours it took me to put my house back together once you lot had your way with it? And I do not appreciate it that you’ve taken personal effects of mine with you. D’you want me to believe you actually need my face powder? What for, unless this one intends to improve her appearance, which, let me tell you, could do with improvement.”

  Alastair reached the bottom of the stairs. The two detectives saw him. The woman cop said, “Mr. MacKerron. Sorry to disturb. We need a word.”

  “Call the Khan woman,” Caroline said over her shoulder.

  “Can do,” the black detective said. “But you might want to have a listen first, innit.”

  “A listen? To what?”

  Here the female—Sergeant Havers, Alastair reminded himself—brought something out of her pocket, which without his specs he could not quite make out. Caroline assisted with, “You intend to record me, do you? Then I’ll want my solicitor. Now.”

  “Happens it’s Clare Abbott’s,” the black said.

  “What’s she done, then? Recorded the name of her imaginary killer?”

  The two detectives shared a look. “Matter of fact,” said the black.

  “Like I said. You might want to have a listen,” this from Sergeant Havers, “before you make any decisions about the solicitor. ’Course, it’s up to you and I can see why you might not want to take my advice. On the other hand, no skin off your nose to have a listen first.”

  “Oh fine,” Caroline snapped. “I can tell you’re not about to be gone until I hear whatever nonsense you’ve come up with.”

  She stepped back from the door and admitted them into the house. They knew where the sitting room was, of course, and they took themselves to it. Caroline followed but she did not sit. Alastair brought up the rear.

  “Just let me make sure you understand that I am well aware that I have no obligation to speak to you,” Caroline said.

  “Winnie,” Sergeant Havers said to the black.

  Astoundingly, he gave Caroline what Alastair—from years of television viewing at the side of his wife when those years had been good ones—knew was the caution: She didn’t have to speak, but what she said could be held against her and all the rest. Caroline’s reaction to hearing this was, “You’re joking. This is absolute rubbish. You’ve taken virtually everything from my house. You can’t tell me you’ve found something because there’s nothing to find. So what am I supposed to have done now?”

  “We’ve got a nice trail of research into poisons off one of your computers, Mrs. Goldacre,” Sergeant Havers said. “We’ve got a website where one poison in particular can be ordered. Sodium azide, it’s called. And we’ve got an order for it sent to this address.”

  “You’re lying,” she said. “You’re trying to trick me by—”

  “Winston here and some very talented blokes at police headquarters found everything. The whole A to Z of it. More than one computer was used, which was quite a nice touch, but everything’s there.”

  “And I’m supposed to have ordered it? I’m supposed to have wanted Clare dead? Let me ask you this. When are you going to come round to the fact that I had no reason to want her dead whereas it’s fairly clear that there’s someone standing right here in this room who, along with his pathetic bit of skirt, would’ve been only too happy to see me gone for good?”

  Alastair took all of this in: not only what Caroline was announcing, which he considered par for the course at this point, but also what the cops were saying about the computers and what had been found on them. He could see that Caro’s colour had gone high, two bright streaks in particular shooting up her face from her neck.

  “As to someone wanting someone else dead . . . ,” Sergeant Havers said, “well, let’s all sit and get at it straightaway.” She did so, and she placed the recorder on the coffee table in front of her. Alastair sat opposite, the other detective sat next to the sergeant on the sofa, but Caroline remained standing. The sergeant shrugged and said, “Batteries were dead in this thing and I didn’t twig at first. Thought it didn’t work. Silly me. I put batteries in and had a listen and . . . well, you’ll be able to sort out the rest.”

  Alastair watched as the detective sergeant switched the recorder on and Clare Abbott’s voice—it was unmistakable, more like a man’s than a woman’s, he reckoned—came into the room. He saw Caroline flinch. He reckoned the cops saw this as well.

  Clare was speaking to Caroline on the thing. He could tell it was a letter. But he couldn’t work out how it could be important since all it had to do with was Clare’s response to an invitation to speak somewhere.

  Caroline’s response to this was, “What on earth is this supposed to prove?” which she made with an angry gesture in the direction of the recorder. “She was too lazy to write her own letters. I wrote them for her. So what?”

  “I had a listen just like you,” Sergeant Havers said. “Then I saw that if you hit another button on this thing, it switches to another track. I skipped to it—just like we’re about to do—and I heard this.”

  She picked up the recorder, did whatever one had to do to switch to another track, hit play, and there was Clare’s voice another time, saying, “I’ve just left Sumalee Goldacre, and I want to get this down before I forget any of the details.”

  At this, Caroline approached the coffee table. The black man stood and positioned himself between her and the recorder. As Clare continued speaking, he left Caro no alternative but to sit. She couldn’t get past him.

  “. . . walked in on him and caught him masturbating over some pornographic pictures of women. She backed out of the room fast as she could, she said, but not before he saw her, which also happened to be the same moment he ejaculated. So here’s the first question: Is she telling the truth and, if not, has she reason to lie?”

  “What is this thing?” Caroline’s voice was less assured than it had been.

  “I expect you know,” Sergeant Havers said as the recording continued to play.

  “I have no idea. Who is she talking about?”

  The black said, “Pretty obvious, innit?”

  The tape had gone on: “. . . all sorts of ways in which this crosses the line, but can it be called abuse or just an appalling lack of boundaries and an equally appalling invasion of privacy? It seems abusive to me, but is this just my natural aversion to what went on? If it went on and if Will wasn’t lying to her, then—”

  “Will?” Caroline cried.

  Alastair looked in her direction. He swallowed and his throat was dry as cold toast. He felt distinctly as if something very big and very ugly was hanging above their heads, about to crash upon the room and envelop them all.

  Clare was saying, “. . . was telling the truth, where does it fit in? Evidently, Will showed no embarrassment when he told her about it, just said that his mother had helped him and that she enjoyed watching him do it. Except it was in the present tense. She enjoys, he said.”

  “What is this twaddle?” Alastair said, having managed to swallow and to find his voice.

  “It’s about the Wording,” Caroline said to him, speaking over the recording. Her tone was anxious. Sentences began to tumble from her. “It was how he learned to control it. To stop it before it became unstoppable. He’d begin to word . . . one of his seizures . . . and if he . . . if he did this to himself, it redirected him. That’s what he was talking about.”

  Alastair said, “How’d you know that, then? He said you watched. He said you helped him. Helped him? Bloody hell, Caro, he said you enjoyed—”

  “He was lying. What else was he going to do? There she was interrupting him in the midst of something clearly private and . . . Why would I watch him? I didn’t watch him. I wouldn’t
have watched him. He’s saying that—”

  “. . . said it felt like defiance on his part, a sort of hitting her in the face with something to see what she would do about it.” They turned back to the coffee table. Sergeant Havers had increased the volume and Clare’s voice was relentless among them, although from that point forward Alastair picked up only the occasional word or phrase, so loudly was the blood rushing through his head and pounding like a snare drum inside his ears. “. . . best not mentioned again . . . fourteen or fifteen at the time . . . present tense and she was certain about that . . . this whole extended grief of hers with no end in sight . . . whenever his name is brought up? . . . Check Ferguson again . . .”

  And then like the trumpets at Jericho: “. . . Additional note to myself: I must speak to Charlie about all this. 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? If Charlie—”

  Caroline leapt. The black detective was quick, and he grabbed her arm. Caroline cried, “Make it stop!”

  Sergeant Havers did so, saying, “We call this a motive, Mrs. Goldacre. I expect you didn’t much want Charlie to hear the tale, did you? Mum watching his little brother, making sure it was all done right and proper, eh? Mum helping his little brother ’s well when he was . . . what? Maybe ten years old? And doing what . . . hmmm? What did she do? Try something new when he was in the middle of his problem with words, p’rhaps? Get him to lower his trousers? No. Can’t be that. He’d be into his words so he wouldn’t take note of what she said, so she would’ve had to lower them herself, those trousers. She’d’ve had to take his hand . . . or p’rhaps she used her own. Or p’rhaps not her hand at all but something more effective that would show him what a little proper stimulation—”

  “Stop it! You’re filthy! You’re—”

  “If Caroline came to believe,” Clare’s voice now said as Sergeant Havers played more of the tape, “that a sexual distraction would alleviate Will’s vocalising of obscenities, which was proving embarrassing both to him and to anyone he was around when it happened, does it follow that she brought on board the pornography as well? What I mean is that as the obscenities heightened in offensiveness—assuming they did—would he need to be exposed to something that also heightened in offensiveness? And would he have reached a point where the pictures weren’t enough for him, like a drug addict needing more and more of the drug? Obviously, this means that if he was fixating verbally on something particular when his words went off . . . say . . . fellatio or cunnilingus—”