A Banquet of Consequences (33 page)

From her home, Lynley had discovered, Mercedes Garza ran a quite successful housecleaning business. Calling it The Cleaning Queens,
she had over the years built her clientele to such an extent that she now employed fifty-seven individuals to do the work.

When Lynley arrived, he found Mercedes doing the monthly billing. With fifty-seven people working two or three to a house, some of them doing two houses a day . . . There was a lot of maths to contend with. But Mercedes appeared up to the challenge, he discovered, as she sat at her computer with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and a plume of its smoke snaking into the air.

She put her work aside after a member of her cleaning team answered the door and led him into her sitting room/office. They had to dodge a bucket and mop that stood in the corridor leading to the back of the house. The same cleaner who’d come to the door was seeing to the place’s weekly scrubbing, it appeared.

Mercedes slapped her hands on her desk and rose to greet him. Lynley knew from speaking to Francis that the woman was from Colombia and sixty-eight years old, but although he might have guessed the former—or at least somewhere in South or Central America—he wouldn’t have known the latter. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t look her age, but rather it was her overall devil-may-care appearance. She dressed in an aggressively ageless manner out of line with her years: An orange cowl-necked tunic hung over purple leggings, and on her feet were beautifully polished knee-high brown boots of the type worn by officers during World War I. Her spectacles’ frames were lime green, and the headscarf holding back black-coffee hair threaded with grey was bright yellow. Somehow, it all worked upon her. Lynley reckoned it was the woman’s confidence, which she appeared to have by the bucketful.

She shook his hand firmly. She talked past the cigarette bobbing between her lips. “Francis, he rings me when you leave.” She spoke rough English with a heavy accent. “You don’t to think that means nothing. Just courtesy on his part. You want coffee? Tea? Water?” She smiled. “Or you like whiskey?” She blew cigarette smoke into the air. She stubbed the cigarette out in the perfect saucer of a Georgian pattern that Lynley recognised from his Cornwall home. He thought of his forebears spinning in their graves at such a misuse of fine china.

He demurred on all offers of refreshment as Mercedes lit another
cigarette. She told him to sit and he took a place in the bay window. Then, she did not sit herself, and he felt an immediate discomfort associated with his meticulous upbringing. When he started to rise, she said, “Stay. I sit all day and my piles act up. I give them a break.” She laughed at his expression. “Didn’t expect me to say that,
sí
? People need to be real.
Ahora.
What do I do for you, Inspector? Not wanting your house cleaned, I expect. Since you see Francis and now you come here, it’s probably about Carolina, I think. She’s the only thing we have in common, me and Francis.”

“There’re problems between you?”

“Me and Francis? Not a whit, as you Brits say.” She took off her glasses and went to the desk, where she excavated for a cleaning rag. She used this upon the lenses vigorously. “
Verdad?
I couldn’t work out why he married her. ’Course, when she tells me she is two months pregnant, it all gets clear.”

“Did you speak to Clare Abbott about her by any chance?”

Mercedes nodded. She flicked ash into the room’s small fireplace, took another deep drag, and spoke through the smoke. “We don’t seen each other in years, so at first I can’t understand why this woman wants to talk to me. We were . . . Carolina and me . . . oh, I forget the word sometimes . . . can you help? We are not talking to each other?”

“You were estranged?” Lynley asked,

“Yes, is it. We don’t see each other p’rhaps . . . ten years? No, more. Back then, I ask her . . . no, I tell her . . . I am at my limit with her. I have other children, see, and I ask her to stay away from all of us till she can control what she says.”

“To the other children? About the other children?”

Mercedes used one hand to massage the small of her back and then made an adjustment to her yellow headscarf. “I get tired of being accused of . . . how do you say this word? . . .
mal
-something. Bad behaviours, this is.”

“Malefactions.”

“These are acts of cruelty she says I have to done to her life. I bring her to London, you see, when she has two years and what she wants to believe is that back in Colombia she would be happy with my
mother.” Mercedes chuckled past her cigarette. “My mother? She does a nice thing for Carolina one time. She gives her a kitten. And ’course, we can’t bring this animal to England when we come. The rabies, you know. And the aeroplane. But Carolina, she dwells on this and makes it something big in her mind. It’s all very stupid because—this I tell you in honesty—I would be happy to leave Carolina with my mother if it was possible. To be free and twenty-one years in London? How nice that would be, eh? But my mama tells me that Carolina is my ‘little consequence’ and daily I must be reminded of my sin.” Mercedes made an adjustment to an ornament on the fireplace mantel, a figurine of a woman in a bathing costume of the 1930s. There was a collection of them, all in different costumes and in various poses. She admired them for a moment. “Catholics,” she said, more to herself than to him. “Purgatory, hell, heaven, and so on. We live in the past. To stay in present, this is impossible. You are a Catholic, Inspector?”

“I’m not.”

“You are lucky. Me, I still try to recover from being Catholic. My sins, you see.”

“Having a child at nineteen? That was the sin?”

“I was not married to the papa.” Mercedes seemed to gauge him for a reaction to this, but as women having children outside of marriage was the rule and not the exception these days, there was hardly a point to his having one. “This is a grave sin to my mother,” she said, “and I pay for it those first two years with Carolina at home in Bogotá. Then I come here and I work and I am not afraid of hard work, ever. I clean other people’s houses and because I have a head for business, I make a big success. Carolina has pretty dresses, she has a special toy now and then, she eats well, she sleeps in her own bedroom, she goes to school. This is not a bad life, I think.”

“I take it she thought otherwise?”

“I marry when she is sixteen,
sí
? This she doesn’t expect. I have three more children. This she also does not expect.” From her desk next to the computer she’d been working on when he’d entered the room, Mercedes fetched a framed photo. Twin boys, by the look of them, along with a girl. It was an older picture, the children in it long
since grown. Mercedes proudly told him that one boy was a hedge fund manager, the other a solicitor, while the girl was a graduate student in nuclear physics. She was understandably delighted with their success. Carolina, she informed, was not.

“And your husband?” he asked her.

“A locksmith,” she told him. Like her, he had his own company. Like her, he’d begun with nothing. “Not even an education,” she said. “Neither of us. But we know how to work. I try to build this in Carolina . . . with determination you can achieve much, eh? But here, I fail.”

Mercedes went on, unbidden, to confirm much of what Francis Goldacre had told Lynley about how he and Caroline Garza had met, about their marriage, about her disappointment in her husband’s choices regarding his career. She finished with, “She decides to stay at home and raise their boys—Guillermo and Carlos—and this should work, no? But Guillermo is born with this . . . this bad ear and Carolina makes so much of it.” Mercedes shook her head. “She is like . . . she swarms him. Like bees.”

“Is this why Clare Abbott wanted to speak with you? Was it about William?” Lynley told her of the memorial that Clare had arranged for Caroline Goldacre’s son.

Mercedes said that, no, Clare Abbott wanted to talk only about Carolina. She had a notepad with her, Mercedes revealed, along with a recording she’d made on her smartphone. This she played for Mercedes, and it bore the sound of Carolina talking about her childhood. Clare Abbott had explained to her that she’d made the recording on the sly. She’d said she didn’t want Carolina to know she was recording her because she didn’t want the fact of a recording “to influence” what Carolina had to say. It seemed, from listening to it, that they were in a restaurant or perhaps just having a meal together because the sound of cutlery was clear.

“Did she tell you why she wanted you to hear the tape?” Lynley asked.

Having finished her cigarette, Mercedes lit another. She had a way of drawing in on the tobacco that put Lynley in mind of a young Lauren Bacall although there the similarity ended. She rested against
the fireplace mantel and went on to explain. “There is story Carolina is telling on the recording, and Clare wishes me to hear it so that I make comments. And this story . . .” For the first time, Mercedes seemed affected by the tale she was telling. Her eyes grew cloudy. She was silent for a moment as out in the corridor the cleaner began to slosh water on the floor.

Lynley gave her a moment. When still she said nothing, he prompted her with, “Anything regarding Clare Abbott might be helpful. Did Francis tell you she was murdered?”

She nodded. When she went on, her voice was altered. A heaviness had replaced the prior frankness. “What she says on this recording . . . There are lies I know Carolina has said in the past about Torin, my husband. How he breaks her nose in a rage one night when she comes home late, how he only allows her clothes from Oxfam till she has money to buy her own, how he will have no holidays in this house . . . No Christmas, no Easter. These things I hear before, from what my other children tell me that Carolina has said.”

“But on this recording there’s something else? Is that what you’re saying?”

She went on in a lower tone, and Lynley had to lean forward to hear her. “She has said things to Clare about what I am as a mother. I have many men during her childhood, she has said, and this is true. I admit. I have a liking for men and till I found Torin, I had them. But I do not leave her for a week with one of the cleaners each time I meet a new man so that he and I can . . . you know, in bed. But this is what she tells Clare. And she says I awaken her in the middle of the night to accuse her of this and of that . . . and I allow Torin . . . when I am heavy with the babies . . . to do what he wishes on her. This is what she has said.”

“On the recording,” Lynley clarified.

She shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “All of this she has reported over time to Clare Abbott, but this recording, it is something more. And for me to say it . . .” Her eyes filled with tears. She coughed mightily. She did not appear to be a woman who allowed herself the luxury of weeping about things over which she had no power.

Lynley said to encourage her, “Francis told me that Caroline sometimes has trouble with the truth.”

Mercedes gave a broken laugh. “She tells Clare that in the dark of night when she is small I come into her room. I force her to . . . I use a Coca-Cola bottle on her. This is what she says. She says she tells her teacher about this and then it is very bad for me.”

“This is on the recording Clare played for you?”

“It is on the recording. She is placed in care, she says, and there is an investigation. I am held in gaol for a time, but no one is willing to believe her story, she says, because she can’t remember enough of the details, and they change—these details—this way and that. Because of this, I am released and she is returned to me and I seek my revenge when I am able.”

“How old did she say she was when this occurred?”

“She has eight years, she says.”

“And are you saying that none of what she said to Clare was true?”

“I say this,
sí.
None of it is true. I did nothing and she did not ever accuse me of nothing and there was no investigation and none of this happened. Everything, this is her fantasy. Clare Abbott, she has suspected this and that is why she has come to have me listen to the recording. She tells me she has already checked many records from the police so she has decided the story isn’t true but what she wants to know is why.”

“Why she told the story in the first place?”

“And why she lies. And this is something I do not know, Inspector. Me, I would think it was an evil she had inherited if I did not have other children. But I do have other children and they are not liars. I would think, too, it was because I bring her to London and tear her from the granny who loved her, but this granny did not wish her to remain behind and made this very clear. So I have no real reason to offer and this is what I tell Clare Abbott. And what I think when we are finished together—Clare Abbott and me—is that she wants to have a collection of reasons to sack her and maybe lying is one of the reasons.”

Mercedes pulled some tissues from a pocket of her tunic and used them beneath her eyes. She stubbed her cigarette out and blew her nose as Lynley considered everything she had said. She was right, of course. Had she been accused of child abuse, questioned, and held in
gaol for a period of time during an investigation, there would be records of this and they wouldn’t be difficult to track down. One wondered, though, why Clare Abbott had gone to such trouble.

He said, “You mentioned something about seeking revenge. You said Caroline reported on you getting your revenge when you were able to do so after she made her accusations.”

“She would think my revenge was the child.”

“What child?”

At fourteen, Mercedes said, Carolina had fallen pregnant. Her mother had insisted that the child—delivered when the girl was just fifteen—be placed for adoption, for what fifteen-year-old girl should be allowed to raise a child? “I could have raised her on my own—”

“It was a daughter?”

“
Sí.
And I could have raised it, but I was not willing and this is, I think, the sin she holds against me. This, I think, is what she means when she says I got my revenge.”

“The father? Who was it?”

Mercedes laughed shortly. “She says it is a man I was seeing, but this turns out not to be the case. Then she says it is the father of one of her school friends. But as she lied before, I do not know if this is the man. Then I find a bank book, with much money put in, and this bank book, it is in her name.”