A Banquet of Consequences (41 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I expect you’ve convinced yourself that you’re in love with this whoever he is, with his Christmas and his chimneys and his soot in the beard and all the adorable grandkids. You’ve told yourself that this—
whatever
it is that you’re feeling, India, if you can feel at all—is what real love is like when you don’t know the first thing about love. Love isn’t a momentary obsession with some bloke you may have met in a bar. Love is devotion. It’s being willing to stand at the side of someone when he’s at his worst and support him, keep him in one piece, do what it takes to make his life a beautiful thing, be his lover, his confidante, his friend, his life’s companion, his—”

“Is that what you do for Alastair?” India could feel her heart pounding all the way to her toes, and she could feel her face burning as if it had been branded. “Would that be why he’s taken a lover, Caroline? Because you’ve made his life such a beautiful thing?”

Caroline gulped and clapped a hand over her mouth. She said from behind her fingers, “You’re a monster . . . You’re utterly selfish. This . . . It’s all about you, isn’t it? This . . . this thing with Mr. Christmas that you’ve got. This rejection of my son whose
only
sin was to fall apart when his brother . . . when Will . . .”

She pushed away from the table and got to her feet. She swung round, stumbled against the doorjamb, righted herself, and left the room. India heard her climbing the stairs and she expected the next sound to be the slamming of her bedroom door, the door to the room she’d given up so that her mother-in-law could sleep in comfort. But no slam came. Instead, India heard the quiet closing of the door, following by the
snick
of the lock being turned to bar anyone from entrance.

Thank God for small favours was what India thought.

SHAFTESBURY

DORSET

It was the third ringing of the doorbell that awakened Alastair MacKerron from his kip. He’d dimly heard the first two rings, but he’d assimilated them into the dream he’d been having, which involved trying to find a way out of what seemed to be a medieval castle of the type that lay in ruins round the country. Only this castle wasn’t a ruin at all but the real thing: dark and dreary and cold within as he tried one corridor and then another, all the time knowing that he was looking anxiously for someone whom he could not find. It
seemed
to be Sharon, but it could have been his wife. She was always just out of reach so that the longing he felt to see her grew and yet remained unresolved.

He woke with a start and a sense of sorrow. He reckoned it had indeed been Sharon whom he was seeking because, alone and with Caroline fled to London, he wanted to do what was impossible just now: to move Sharon into the house so that they might begin their life together.

The bell went a fourth time, and on this occasion someone leaned upon it. Alastair groaned and rolled out of bed in his underpants. It hadn’t been his regular time for kipping, not this late in the day, but he hadn’t slept a wink the previous night, what with worrying what to make of Caroline’s decamping to London, so when he’d had the chance for a lie-down, he’d taken it, only to fall deeply asleep and now to stand groggily at this bedside, wondering what event would occur next to shatter his life.

At the window, he saw that next event at the same moment as the infernal ringing ceased. It comprised the woman who’d come earlier with the black detective from New Scotland Yard. The black wasn’t in sight, and the woman herself had stepped off the porch and was now gazing at the front of the house. She clocked Alastair at the window and she beckoned him down.

He held up one finger to indicate he would need a moment. He struggled into his jeans and his pullover, but he didn’t bother with socks or shoes. Nor did he comb his hair. Better she should see she’d disrupted his sleep, he reckoned.

He couldn’t remember her name. He told her this when he opened the door. She walked inside, unbeckoned to do so, and said she was DS Havers. Was the wife about? she wanted to know.

“What’s this, then?” he asked her. She was making her way to the sitting room, tugging a ragged bag off her shoulder and depositing it on the sofa, where she also deposited herself. She opened the thing and began to root through it.

“Official bit of work needing to be taken care of,” she told him. “Orders from London.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Fingerprints,” she told him. “I need your beloved’s dabs, Mr. MacKerron.” She brought out some sort of device and set it on the coffee table among the magazines, the teacups, and the remains of a cheese-and-pickle sandwich that he should have binned the previous afternoon.

He felt groggy still. “You’re wanting Caro’s fingerprints? Is she s’posed to have committed a crime?”

DS Havers shot him a look, friendly as the dickens. She said pleasantly, “Well, two crimes’ve been committed, haven’t they? Thinking of it, I need your dabs as well. What this is here . . . ?” She indicated her device. “It’ll run your prints through the system to see if we’ve got ourselves the match we’re looking for. It’ll do the same for your wife, fast as anything. No more pouring over whorls and spaces and the like, this is. Amazing what technology can do, eh?”

He looked past her to the garden, which he could see from the sitting room window. He could think of nothing else to say other than “Where’s the other one, the African?”

“I expect you’re talking about DS Nkata” was her reply. “He’s ’bout as African as I am, but let’s not make that matter. You and your wife didn’t run him off back to London, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s carrying on with another line of enquiry. So . . . as to the wife . . . You want to fetch her for me or should I just start yodeling and hope she hears?”

Alastair said, “Might be I need to ring a solicitor.”

“Could do, ’course,” DS Havers said cheerfully. “But all I want is your wife’s dabs and yours to clear you of suspicion and as that’ll take
us something less than five minutes while it’ll take your solicitor an age to get here, I expect you’d rather I was out of your hair than making myself a home in it.”

“Suspicion of what?” he asked.

“Murder and attempted murder. Mr. MacKerron, I could go at this with a trip to the local magistrate and a warrant, which they’re going to grant as easy as my buying myself a pork pie for dinner. But it’d be quicker—not to mention a hell of a lot more efficient—if you’ll give me your dabs and then fetch your wife so I can take hers.”

“She’s not here,” he said. “You c’n have my prints for all the good it’ll do you, but Caro’s gone up to London.”

DS Havers didn’t look surprised at this, but she did look like someone considering her options. She seemed to reach a fairly quick conclusion about her next move because she then said, “Sorry to hear that. If you can give me chapter and verse on where she is—an address would be nice, phone number as well—then we can send someone over to collect her dabs. As for yours . . . ? Why don’t you step right up and let me show you some magic. I expect you don’t get to see this sort of thing every day.” She tapped on the device, and said exactly what the coppers always said: If he’d done nothing, he had nothing to fear.

Alastair had his doubts about that.

VICTORIA

LONDON

“I thought we had reached an understanding about that animal, Inspector.”

Lynley winced. The doors to the lift had only just opened upon his return from having taken Arlo for his late-afternoon walkies. Lynley had expected it to be a simple matter of spiriting the dog down to reception and then outside and across the street to the smallish green on the corner, followed by a quick jaunt back to work and a depositing of him beneath his desk. But it had taken Arlo longer than Lynley had anticipated to do his business, accompanied as it was by
much olfactory examining of the environment. And while Isabelle Ardery had been safely out of the way at a meeting in Tower Block when he’d gone on his way, now here she was, carrying a black institutional three-ring notebook that told him her meeting had just ended.

She moved to the side of the corridor to allow others to exit her lift. Lynley did the same. She said to him, “Had we not reached a friendly, mutual accord?”

“We had,” he said to the superintendent, joining her and ignoring two civilian secretaries who cried, “A dog!” and “What a sweetheart!” and wished to give Arlo attention, which would, he knew, cause the guv’s own hackles to rise. He went on with, “This is only a temporary measure, guv. I’d taken him to hospital—”

“Please don’t tell me now he’s got ill,” Isabelle said wearily.

“He’s completely fit. I took him to see his owner. Or his mistress. Or his person. Or whatever is the politically correct expression for someone living with an animal these days. I can’t quite keep up with all of the linguistic changes that seem to come up yearly in our society.”

“Don’t be amusing. I want him gone. And what sort of hospital allows visiting hours for animals?”

“He wore his vest. That’s what he’s got on, by the way. It explains he’s an assistance dog so—”

“All right, all right.” Isabelle shifted the black notebook, holding it more like a shield than a container for a sheaf of papers.

“I thought it might help her to see him,” Lynley said. “And it did. She recalled how she came to have in her possession toothpaste that contained the same substance that killed her friend.”

Isabelle cast an eye down on Arlo, who was looking at her in his most appealing fashion. She said, “And how was this?”

Lynley explained how it had come about: the sight of Arlo triggering Rory’s memory of her hasty leave-taking from Shaftesbury without being in possession of the suitcase which contained her things, toothpaste included. Isabelle listened, her eyes narrowed, her gaze fixed on the dog. When Lynley had completed the tale, she said, “Why’s he doing that? What does he want?”

Lynley glanced down. Arlo was sitting obediently next to him, his
tail sweeping the floor like a toppled metronome, his gaze on the superintendent. “He’s a dog, Isabelle,” Lynley explained. “He wants you to love him. Or at least to act as if you don’t wish to hurl him from the nearest window.”

She rolled her eyes. “The twins,” she said. “They were absolutely mad for a dog.”

“And . . . ?” he asked.

“Bob wanted one as well. I was the ‘bad guy,’ as they say. Of course now he and Sandra have two dogs, four cats, and God only knows what else. Ferrets, I think, Guinea pigs? It could even be rats. I’ve no idea. Just that they’re everywhere. I think they all sleep together in some bizarre version of the family bed. It’s all gone overboard and Bob’s become quite smug about it. ‘Another hedgehog to add to the crew,’ he says like a martyred saint when the truth is he’s as mad as she is and even if he weren’t, it’s such a joy for him to rub my face in . . . in the piles of excrement they no doubt leave round the house. This is the animals, I mean. Not Bob, Sandra, or the boys. I assume all of them are housebroken.”

Lynley smiled. She caught him doing so. She said, “Why are you smirking? I don’t like you smirking, Inspector Lynley.”

“Because,” he told her, “you’re not very good at hiding who you really are. He’d like you to pat his head, by the way. Arlo, not Bob.”

“I’m sure he would. I don’t want to see him here tomorrow. Are we on the same page?”

“We are.” His mobile rang. He looked at it, said, “It’s Havers,” and Isabelle said, “You’ve not given me a report about her yet. That’s not escaped my notice.”

Into the phone he said, “Hang on, Barbara,” and then to Isabelle, “It’s all going quite well at her end.”

“That’s hardly a report. Sergeant Nkata is filling you in daily, I hope?”

“Not enough time has passed for him to fill me in on anything. They’re taking the necessary actions and—”

“Don’t avoid, Inspector. By tomorrow morning, I’d like to be up to speed. And don’t give me that look of yours.”

“I wasn’t aware I had a ‘look.’”

“Oh, I’m sure of that. It’s your ‘Isabelle, you’re micromanaging’ look. But allow me to remind you that if anyone round here needs micromanaging, we both know who that person is.” She set off in the direction of her office at that. Arlo gave a little yip as she departed. She waved over her shoulder in acknowledgement and her parting shot was, “Tomorrow morning, Inspector. Either on my desk or in my email.”

“That was Ardery, wasn’t it?” were Havers’ first words. “The air temperature dropped straight through my mobile.”

“She’s concerned about how things are progressing at your end,” Lynley told her. “And as she’s
rightfully
concerned, let’s not discuss it. I’ve managed to avoid letting her know that you’ve set off without Winston, by the way, so whatever you’ve got to tell me, it had better be indicative of the wisdom of my agreeing to your working on your own instead of doing what I should have done, which is to blow the whistle on you at once.”

“She’s done a runner,” Havers said.

“Who?”

“Caroline Goldacre. She’s gone up to town. I went round to get her dabs, but her husband told me she’s scarpered.”

“Have we any idea where we might find her?”

“With the son. Charlie.” Havers recited an address and, Arlo’s lead looped over his wrist, Lynley took it down as the dog waited patiently for whatever was going to happen next.

“Can we assume that the husband will be phoning her with warning?” Lynley asked. “He can’t have been pleased to learn we’re after her fingerprints.”

“I don’t think we can assume anything, sir. He didn’t seem broken up by the fact that she’s gone, you ask me, but then I’m not a romantic so my antennae aren’t attuned to the finer indications of anguish when separated from one’s beloved.”

“Frankly, I doubt that,” Lynley told her. “But I’ll sort out the fingerprinting at this end, then. You carry on in Dorset.”

Sorting out the fingerprinting meant coming up with the sort of mobile fingerprinting unit that constables in the street used, which wasn’t a problem. Once that had been taken care of, Lynley fetched
Arlo, and checked the
A to Z
for the location of Leyden Street and Charlie Goldacre’s digs.