A Banquet of Consequences (32 page)

“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.”

“Why?” It was, Lynley thought, a most complicated picture of a marriage and family. Tolstoy, he decided, and not for the first time, had been right.

Goldacre rose and went to a table beneath the room’s bay window. From the plethora of photos arranged there, he selected one far at the back. He handed it to Lynley, who saw that the picture depicted the darker of his two sons with his Richard III haircut. While Lynley gazed at this and wondered what he was meant to be seeing, Goldacre rustled in the table’s centre drawer and after a moment found another photo, this one a snapshot taken of an infant’s head, his face turned in profile to the camera as he rested on his mother’s shoulder. The baby, Lynley saw, had no ear, just a hole and a miserly flap of skin.

Goldacre said, “Caroline wanted surgery for him directly. Days after he was born. She simply could not come to grips with the fact that it had to wait. Giving him surgery as an infant would require an infant-sized ear and, as he grew, another ear after that, and another after that. I tried to explain this to her, but she wouldn’t have my explanation, and she carted the poor child all over London to other surgeons who told her the same thing. It was better to wait. This, unfortunately, made her so overprotective of the poor boy that she ended up making more of the deformity than he ever would have made of it himself. It became a case of constantly telling him he was fine, he was beautiful, he was talented, he was clever, he was whatever came into her mind. And of course, the boy knew that at least some of this wasn’t true.”

“This led to your divorce?”

“Alastair MacKerron led to that. She left me for him, although she apparently told Clare that I left
her
for Sumalee. Truth told, I’ve always been grateful to poor Alastair for having taken Caroline off my hands. I did miss the boys. But over time, Caroline made it so difficult to see them, and as I’ve always travelled so much for my work . . . Frankly, I allowed Alastair to take up the reins of fatherhood. I’m not proud of that. It’s led to all sorts of difficulties with the boys. Well, with Charlie now that William is gone. We’re not close. And he despises Sumalee.”

Lynley considered all this. A phone rang somewhere in the house,
but Goldacre made no move to answer. After six double rings, a disembodied voice that was Sumalee’s asked the caller to leave a message. No one did.

Lynley said, “So all of this is what Clare wanted to talk to you about?”

“That and what she referred to as Caroline’s ‘relationship with the truth.’ Evidently, she’d caught her out in a number of lies.”

“Was her job in jeopardy?”

“I suppose it could be argued that having a liar working for one is disconcerting, so Clare may have been looking for a way to sack her, but she didn’t indicate that. Just that she wanted to talk about Caroline and her relationship with the truth as she’d told Clare some . . .” He smiled as he looked for the word he wanted. “What do children say? Whoppers?”

“Beyond your marriage, you mean?”

“It seems over time she gave Clare quite an earful about her entire life, but in the way of pathological liars, she began to contradict herself. Clare wanted to check with someone to learn if there was any truth in what Caroline was claiming.”

“You could have lied to Clare as well,” Lynley pointed out.

“Indeed I could have done. So I suggested she speak with Caroline’s mum and with other people—women in particular—who’ve had the experience of knowing her.”

“But not with men?”

Goldacre laughed ruefully. “Inspector, Caroline has always been perfectly capable of charming the trousers off any man. I can attest to that and I expect Alastair MacKerron can as well.”

SHAFTESBURY

DORSET

“So he suggested that Clare arrange to speak with a woman called Mercedes Garza.” Lynley’s voice broke up for a moment. He was on his mobile, Barbara reckoned. He said, “Hang on, I’ve got to . . .” And then after a moment, “Sorry. I was wrestling with my car keys.
Mercedes Garza is Caroline Goldacre’s mother. Have you any indication that Clare Abbott interviewed her?”

MG, Barbara thought. The initials were there in Clare’s diary. She told him this.

The front bell rang assertively, three times in quick succession. Barbara walked to the window and looked out on a rainy day. On the front step stood Caroline Goldacre.

“She’s here,” she told Lynley.

“Caroline Goldacre?”

“Large as life with a cardboard box on her hip.”

“Bringing you something of Clare Abbott’s?”

“Haven’t a clue. What’re you onto next?”

“Mercedes Garza.”

“Anything from SO7 yet?”

“Not a whisper.”

Outside, Barbara saw that Caroline Goldacre had clocked her through the window. Her eyes narrowed and she gestured to the cardboard box. She rang the bell another time, more insistently, and she turned to the door as Winston opened it. Barbara listened to the ensuing conversation with one ear as Lynley spoke into her other ear.

“’Fraid not, Missus Goldacre,” came from Winston.

“Whyever not?” from Caroline Goldacre. “Look here, Sergeant . . . What was your name? This is ridiculous.”

Her voice grew louder, and from the window Barbara saw her elbow her way into the house as Nkata said, “A police investigation means—”

“Really, my personal effects have
no
bearing on a police investigation. Do step out of my way.”

“Can’t do that.”

“Am I going to have to ring your . . . your superiors or whatever they are?”

“ . . . about Lily Foster,” Lynley was saying.

“Say what, sir?” Barbara asked him. “C’n you hang on? Something’s going on with Winnie and the Goldacre woman.”

Mobile in hand, Barbara left Clare’s office and went out into the entry area of the house where Winston had managed to block
Caroline Goldacre’s access. They were doing a bizarre dance together, consisting of you step one way and I follow your lead. Winnie obviously did not want to put his hands on the woman.

Barbara said, “You can’t be here, Ms. Goldacre.”

“I’ve come for my property,” Caroline said. “I have no intention of stealing one of Clare’s baubles if that’s what you’re worried about. This . . . This
policeman
here is preventing me from—”

“Like he’s supposed to do,” Barbara said.

“I want to speak with whoever is in charge,” Caroline said.

Barbara extended her mobile to the woman. “Have a go, then. He’s called DI Lynley.”

She turned on her heel and went back to the office. Lily Foster, she was thinking. Lynley said something about a Lily Foster. She looked at Clare’s diary and there it was, not long before Clare’s trip to Cambridge: LF and a date and a time.

While Caroline was speaking to Lynley—who, Barbara could only pray, was using the Voice upon her—Barbara went back to the files displaying the Christian names and the surname initials of the two men. It was time to take a deeper look at these, and she opened the first of them to the questionnaire. She began to read as Caroline Goldacre’s arguing voice came from the other room.

In short order, Barbara understood that Clare Abbott had indeed been speaking to married men about assignations they’d been having with women met over the Internet, and for their part, the men appeared to have been quite frank. The how, when, where, and why of it all revealed that for Bob T, it was “for laughs,” “for a bit of fun,” and “to get away from the ball and chain,” and for John S it was “because the wife won’t do what these birds’re willing to” and “because I’m not getting enough at home” and “because how many bloody headaches can one woman have in a month.” Both men indicated that having kids had put paid to romance, and for these reasons they had logged onto two different websites on which married individuals sought out other married individuals for no-questions-asked sex in hotels, in the open air, in the back of cars, in the ladies’ toilet of a Dorchester pub, in a relative’s house, in a garden shed, in a holiday caravan, and—in one case—in a pew at St. Peter’s Church here in Shaftesbury.

Caroline Goldacre came into the room. Stiffly, she handed the mobile to Barbara. She said, “I could have come earlier. I could have come directly Clare died and cleared out my belongings.”

“And you didn’t because . . . ?” Barbara said.

“I assumed that I would be needed to continue my work here till everything regarding Clare’s career and her death was handled.”

Barbara nodded. “Good of you, that.” And then into the mobile, “Sir?”

Lynley’s smooth baritone replied with, “I suggested a court order although I cautioned her that it’s not likely she’d be granted one in the midst of a police investigation inside the very premises she wishes to invade.”

“Used that lingo, did we?” Barbara asked. “That lovely sentence structure of yours and all the rest?”

“I do what I can. As to this Lily Foster . . .” He went on to explain that this individual had played a trick upon Caroline concerning a memorial service dedicated to her dead son William. “You might want to enquire about that,” he said.

They rang off and Barbara turned to Caroline Goldacre, saying, “One Lily Foster, Ms. Goldacre. Can you enlighten me about her?”

HESTON

MIDDLESEX

Mercedes Garza lived not far from the magnificent neoclassical mansion of Osterley Park which had once, during the time that Robert Adam transformed it from a redbrick Tudor dwelling of the sixteenth century to the grand palace it became, rested deep in the countryside. Now it lay in the flight path of Heathrow Airport, and around its spacious grounds the suburbs of London consumed the once open land. The Garza home was in one of these suburbs not far from the park. It sat across the street from a collection of allotments in a state of autumnal disrepair.