“What I was going to say is that we’ve ended our relationship, Charlie,” India said. “What I was going on to say is that I want to come home.”
“You can’t mean that,” he told her. “It’s good of you to think it. I appreciate, even, what it implies about what you intend to do.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means you know it all now and you can do with me and with the information what you wish.”
“I know that, Charlie. And what I wish is to come home.”
“That’s mad.”
“I don’t say it isn’t. But I want to be with you. I want to try. I want to see if there’s any way—with what I know now and what you know now—that we can go on.”
“You and I,” he said as if he needed still to clarify. “I, the killer of Clare Abbott. I, the poisoner of her friend.”
“No. You, the man who failed his brother once and couldn’t bear to fail him another time.”
23 OCTOBER
MARYLEBONE
LONDON
When she arrived in Marylebone High Street—not a destination that had ever been high on her bucket list—Barbara Havers reckoned it was just the sort of place that Dorothea Harriman would aspire to make a regular haunt, if she wasn’t haunting it already. It featured a plethora of boutiques interspersed among trendy coffeehouses, upmarket restaurants, vintage clothing shops, and high-end retailers selling everything from must-have kitchenware to designer handbags the approximate size of dog kennels. A narrow thoroughfare, the street was reflective of the days when hansom cabs tilted along cobblestones—long since paved over by tarmac—to deposit well-dressed ladies and gentlemen in the vicinity of Regent’s Park. Now and at this late hour of the day, its pavements were teeming with the after-work crowd. They made for the wine bars, the restaurants, and the pubs, texting as they blindly walked, seeming oblivious to the commercial delights that surrounded them.
Barbara had not come to be part of this mix. Rather she had an appointment with Rory Statham who’d suggested they meet at a shop that, to Barbara’s chagrin, turned out to be a lingerie boutique. She had to pick something up after work, Rory told her, and as the shop was generally not crowded, there was little chance they’d miss each other in the mass of pretty young things seeking other pretty young things for casual hookups in the area. Since she’d only given Barbara the name of the place, Barbara had no clue what she was in for when she shouldered her way through the door into an embarrassing display of bustiers, suspender belts, corsets, suggestive albeit tasteful nightwear, and knickers of a design clearly meant to bring to life some bloke’s panting wet dream. Had Barbara not seen Rory at the shop counter paying for something being placed into a coy little bag with lots of tissue sprouting from it, she would have turned tail at once. She had, after all, her reputation to consider.
As it was, she sauntered to the back to join the other woman. Rory was signing a credit card receipt while the bustier-clad shop assistant at the till appeared to be doing her best to look welcoming of Barbara who was clearly not the sort of woman who frequented this sort of fancy-knickers establishment. She said brightly, “Be right with you, madam,” which caused Rory to look in Barbara’s direction. She smiled and said, “Ah. You’ve found me. Let me just finish this up and we can be off.”
The finishing up took very little time. Barbara spent it looking at a pair of knickers with matching brassiere and suspender belt—did one actually wear a suspender belt if one did not truly have to? she wondered—while doing her best not to gape at the astronomical cost of these bits of fabric. As a woman who bought her undergarments only at Marks & Spencer and only if the elastic on what she was wearing was irreversibly done for, Barbara found it impossible to embrace the idea that someone would quite happily pay more than five pounds (and that was in a sale) for—at least at M & S—an entire packet of knickers. But such appeared to be the case. She idly wondered if Dorothea Harriman knew about this shop and she made a mental note to tell her the next time they met up in one corridor or the other.
They’d done so, however briefly, upon her return from Dorset late that very morning. Barbara had only just undergone receiving what went for congratulations from Superintendent Ardery at the end of a job, as Ardery had put it, “adequately done, Sergeant Havers.” Along with, “I’m happy to know you and Sergeant Nkata got on well together,” she’d added, “and I hope I see more of this kind of work from you in the future,” as her parting shot. She’d offered no warm fuzzies, and she hadn’t ceremoniously ripped up Barbara’s transfer request. But Barbara hadn’t expected her to do so. Since that signed request—no matter how reluctantly she’d signed it—was guaranteed to keep Barbara on the very straight and the exceedingly narrow, Ardery would know pure madness lay in the direction of destroying the document. She still had Barbara where she wanted her. Pending a very unlikely miracle, she would keep her there.
Dorothea had seemed to understand this as Barbara had approached her along the corridor. Perhaps, Barbara thought, it was in her walk. She tried to look jaunty to avoid becoming corn in the rumour mill at the Met.
Coming abreast of her, Dorothea said, “I’ve heard you had a good result, Detective Sergeant Havers.” And to Barbara’s nod, she went on to say, “Onward. I do have to say this. I’m completely sorry.”
That, Barbara thought, seemed rather harsh: that Dorothea Harriman had wished failure upon her. She was about to make a remark destined for the regret-it-later pile heaping in the background of her life when Dorothea made matters clear by going on.
“Speed dating? It was a terrible idea. I shouldn’t have put you through it. I didn’t meet anyone that evening either although I did think at first there were several possibilities.” She shifted her weight to one hip, always a preparatory move on her part, signaling a proper natter was called for. “It’s the blokes who show up,” she went on. “It’s the fact that they lie about their ages and expect it won’t make a difference to a woman.”
“No worries,” Barbara told her. “Just another experience to spice up my autobiography when I finally write it, eh? Got to have ’em or the reading’s dull. That’s always been my motto. Or at least it is now.”
Harriman smiled. She looked, in fact, far too cheered upon hearing Barbara’s declaration. She said, “I’m so pleased because I’ve had a think about things. I’ve come up with tap dancing. What d’you say?”
“About tap dancing?” Barbara wondered if they were free-associating. Matches/fire, cowboys/Indians, gun/shoot. That sort of thing. She went with, “Fred Astaire comes to mind. I mean, obviously, there’ll be recent blokes as well, but somehow . . . Gene Kelly and that film about the rain? No. Fred Astaire. It’s definitely tap dancing/Fred Astaire.”
Dorothea frowned. “Actually, I meant in place of ballroom dancing. No partner needed. Not that you wouldn’t have a partner if you wanted one, of course. I don’t mean to imply that. But it seemed a good way to ease into a new activity since one can, obviously, tap-dance alone.” She considered this. “Come to think, one must tap-dance alone, yes? Your legs and feet would be all tangled up otherwise. ’Course, that doesn’t mean you can’t tap-dance at someone’s side, naturally. But that comes later. At first, it’s alone.”
Barbara narrowed her eyes. “What’s this all about, Dee?”
“Our next venture into the greater world, of course. Now, don’t say no. I can see you want to, and I understand. The shopping didn’t work out well and speed dating was a complete disaster. But consider the dual benefit of tap dancing before you say no: One meets an entirely new group of people, and one exercises at the same time.”
A steadying breath was called for. Barbara took one and said, “Do you actually see me with tap shoes on, Dee?”
“No more than I see myself,” she admitted. “But considering that autobiography, Detective Sergeant . . .”
“For God’s sake, I was joking.”
“I never saw you as a philosopher, Dee.”
“It’s just occurred to me,” she admitted. “I think there’s a point that I’ve been missing and . . . well, I have to say it. I think you might’ve been missing it as well. It’s an autobiography because we write it ourselves. I don’t write yours and you don’t write mine. So what I’m saying is that my autobiography is due to include tap dancing and I’m wondering if you’d like yours to do the same.”
“Can you see me tap dancing?” Barbara repeated.
“More to the point,” Dee countered, “can you see yourself? Or better said, do you want to see yourself with tap shoes on? Which is, let’s face it, another way of saying d’you want to see yourself as different from who you are now? No, no,” she added as Barbara opened her mouth to reply. “Don’t answer me yet. Have a think about it. You can tell me tomorrow.”
She fluttered her fingers and tapped in her stilettos in the direction of her desk. Barbara shook her head but it was, she admitted, in admiration and not dismissal.
Now, as Rory turned to her with her purchase, Barbara said, “What d’you think of tap dancing?”
“Excellent exercise,” she replied at once. “Are you considering it?”
“I hadn’t thought to.”
“Let me know if you decide to give it a go. I may want to join you. Now,”—with a nod of her head at the door and the street beyond—“shall we decamp to somewhere less . . .” She lowered her voice. “Less inclined to make one run screaming for the Darcy book? It’s all male fantasy, this. I’ve bought something for my mum. Her birthday, and Dad plans to take her to Italy. I thought a bit of whimsy”—she lifted the bag—“might be in order. Although the thought of my mum in a leather bustier . . .” She laughed. “Some things don’t bear imagining.”
“Well, it’s for your dad anyway, isn’t it?” Barbara asked.
“I suppose it is.”
They went back into the street, where a short jaunt took them to a restaurant in the modern minimalist style where the menu prices kept the faint at heart at bay. Rory told Barbara that she liked the bar here. It was on the top floor in the open air. As the evening was fine, they could have drinks and Barbara could tell her what she didn’t want to tell her over the phone.
This didn’t take long, and it had to be said that Rory Statham was not surprised by the revelation of Caroline Goldacre’s guilt. Nor was she surprised by the motive behind what the woman had confessed to doing. She had, Rory said, always thought there was something not right in Caroline’s excessive grieving over her younger son. It wasn’t that the grief was unceasing. One didn’t expect a mother to walk away easily or even at all from the suicide of her child. But it was the undiffering nature of Caroline’s grief that had caused Rory’s suspicions about the woman. And despite her words to the contrary, Rory went on, Clare must always have suspected that there was more at work behind that grief than Caroline’s reaction to a dreadful loss.
“Clare was setting Caroline up for . . . I s’pose we could call it double blackmail,” Barbara finished. “We think it went like this: ‘You decide to reveal anything about my catting round with married blokes, you even think about trying to stop me from writing a book my publisher’s waiting for, I ruin your life by letting it be known that you drove your son Will into flinging himself off a cliff.’ We’re fairly certain that’s what Clare intended. And once Caroline heard about Clare’s plans to speak to Charlie in order to check out Sumalee’s story, she had to go.”
“So Clare hadn’t yet spoken to Charlie?”
“Not a whisper of it anywhere. But she intended to. She’d already been trying to get something worthy from Francis, from Caroline’s mum, from women who knew her in town. But nothing they had was useful or good enough when it came to stopping Caroline in her tracks. It was only when Sumalee told her about Will that Clare saw she finally had what she needed to wrest control of her life away from Caroline.”
“I wish she’d told me everything,” Rory said. “We could have . . . I don’t know . . . done something?”
“What? The UK’s leading feminist was making the big nasty in hotels with married blokes she met on the Internet?” Barbara asked. “What were you lot supposed to make with that?”
“Declare it research for her book?” Rory seemed to ask herself the question rather than Barbara.
“Not bloody likely to go down a treat when it had to do with betraying her fellow females, eh?”
“There is that.” Rory sounded ineffably sad.
It came to Barbara then that there was no sign of Arlo, and she wondered about this. She’d never seen the other woman without her assistance dog. She asked what it meant that he was not at her side. “Nothing wrong with him, is there?” Barbara asked. “He’s quite a nice little bloke, that Arlo.”
No, no, there was nothing wrong with him, Rory said. He was, in fact, at present waiting for her in her car back at the publishing house. Rather anxious to see her walk off by herself, but he was adjusting to the idea. “I’ve been trying a bit each day to get along without him,” Rory told her. “I can’t depend on a dog forever just to be able to leave my flat. At some point I’m going to need to get on with life without assistance any longer.”
There was good sense in this, and Barbara saw that immediately. Seeing it, she was forced to wonder how Rory’s words applied to herself.
It wasn’t till half past nine that she reached Chalk Farm. She managed to find the miracle of a parking space in front of the church at the bottom of Eton Villas, and she paused for a moment on the pavement to listen to the music from a concert going on inside the building. It came to her that in addition to church services, these concerts had been taking place for all the time that she’d lived in the area. She wondered why she’d never bothered to attend one. She wondered if the moment had come when she ought to see what they were all about.
The music ended. It was followed by applause. The applause went on and someone inside called out, “Encore! Encore!,” a cry taken up by more than one person until the music began again. Barbara hadn’t a clue what was being played. If it wasn’t Buddy Holly, she had to admit that she was hopeless.
She headed up the street. Lights were on in the flats contained within the Edwardian villa behind which sat her tiny dwelling, all save within the ground-floor flat where darkness prevailed as it had done for months. The little path along the side of the building was lit, as always, by motion-detecting lights. They flashed on the moment Barbara headed in the direction of her hobbit-sized home. There was no additional light above her door since the bulb had long since burned out and she had long since failed to replace it, but she was used to wrangling with her keys and the door lock, so it was no difficult matter to get inside.
She was fairly knackered. She was also hungry but decidedly unwilling to cook something up. So she went for the cupboard where she stored her Pop-Tarts and rustled through the various boxes for a new flavour she’d found that had sounded intriguing: cupcake. With no one there to cast a disapproving eye upon her choice—namely Winston Nkata—she opened the package, scored two of the tarts, and deposited them within the toaster. She set the kettle to boil, dug the last sachet of PG Tips from its box, and gave a desultory look to the post that had been collected by her neighbour—the always turbaned Mrs. Silver—while she’d been gone.
It consisted of the usual collection of bills—she gave idle thought to not paying her television licence and then dismissed it since she was, after all, supposed to be a law-abiding member of society—along with three credit card offers, one recommendation that she buy private medical insurance posthaste so as to avoid putting herself in the hands of the NHS, and a greeting card with unfamiliar handwriti
ng upon it. She opened this.
A panda sitting under an umbrella was its cover. A note was inside:
Ciao, Barbara. I ask from Thomas Lynley your address. He gives it to me. You stay well, I hope. Also I. I come to London with Marco and Bianca four days when is Christmas. We practise English together. Bianca talks it well. I not much. If is enough time we would see you. Also Thomas we see and the sights of London. You write to me if you want to meet with us? You see here I learn English some since you are in Lucca.
It was signed only Salvatore. Lo Bianco was the rest of his name. Marco and Bianca were his children. She’d met them all during her folly-driven trip to Tuscany in the spring. It was largely down to Salvatore Lo Bianco that her friend Taymullah Azhar and his daughter Hadiyyah—former occupants of the darkened ground-floor flat at the front of the building behind which Barbara lived—had been able to make their escape to Pakistan. Whether they needed to remain there . . . ? Perhaps Salvatore Lo Bianco could tell her that.
She would definitely welcome the Italian and his children to London, she decided. She’d liked the bloke.
She wandered—newly toasted Pop-Tart in hand—to her answer phone, which was blinking to alert her to a message.
“Told Mum about that goulash you made me” was the first. “When she finally stopped laughing, she said you’re meant to come over here for some proper lessons in cooking, innit. Ring me, eh? She’s dead serious, Barb.”
And then, “I know, I know.” It was Dorothea’s voice. “I said have a think and then let me know but I did want to tell you that I’ve found a tap class. It’s in Southall of all places, so it’s a bit of a slog, but consider the multicultural experiences we’ll have if we decide to take it on. Plus curry. God knows there’ll be masses of curry. Guiltless curry as well because we’ll have all that massive exercise before we sit down and tuck in. There. I’ve said enough. Think about it. The autobiography and all.”
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