A Banquet of Consequences (51 page)

Charlie came to her and she could see from his face that he felt no triumph at his successful interruption of her time with Nat, but only misery. He knew very well that his mother had manoeuvred him into this jaunt, and he hated this fact as much as did India. Still, he said, “I can’t be angry with her.”

India ran her hands back through her hair, felt its tangles from Nat’s caresses. She said, “Oh for God’s sake. What’s it going to take?”

“How can I be angry when she wants what she assumes is the best for me?”

“So it’s appropriate for her to lie to you? For her to invade my privacy in order to manufacture something designed to move you? This is all fine?”

“Of course it’s not fine.” Charlie indicated that she was to join him on the path and when she’d done so automatically, he began to walk in the direction Nat had taken. She followed him as the only course of action available at this point. He said, “I’m offended that she lied to me but I’m not offended at her intentions because they’re the same as mine. I want my wife back. I want my
life
back. Mum knows this and she wants to help me make that happen. Her approach is clumsy and stupid. This entire situation is clumsy and stupid. D’you think I actually wanted to stumble on you and him? To interrupt . . . whatever it was.”

“
She
wanted you to stumble upon us. She knew I was meeting him. God knows what she thought was going to happen between us in a building site but whatever she thought, she wanted you to be here to witness it. That’s cruel, Charlie, and if you don’t see that, I don’t know
what
will ever make you understand that your mother—”

“I understand,” he said sharply. “All right? I understand. Her. You. Nat. This entire bloody situation. What you two were up to when I came on the scene just now. I understand that. Perfectly.”

India felt like a balloon with the air released in one fell swoop. She so much longed for Nat to be there, for the taste of him and the touch
of him and the blessedly wonderful
normal
of him. She said to her husband, “I can’t do this. I’m bringing her back to you tonight.” She looked at her watch and evaluated how long it all would take: the trip to Camberwell, packing up Caroline, returning her to Charlie. She reckoned she could have her at the flat by eight o’clock and that was what she told her husband.

He said, “India, you know I have obligations.”

She said, “Then put her up at a hotel. You should have done that from the first. I should have insisted. I’m finished with this business.”

“Give me till tomorrow. I’ll get on the phone with Alastair and convince him to come to—”

“This is all
about
Alastair when it’s not about you,” India argued. “She’s run off from him in a ploy to get him away from Sharon and to get herself into London where she can mix herself into
our
lives. Which she’s doing quite well. I want her gone. I don’t care how you manage it but I want it to happen. Tonight.”

“I’ve the suicide hotline tonight, India.”

“Skip it.”

“You know that I can’t.”

“What time do you finish, then? I’ll have her packed and waiting by the front door. I’ll ring a taxi. I’ll hire a car and driver. Whatever it takes because I’ve reached my limit.”

He rubbed his brow, fingers so hard against his flesh that his nails turned pure white, speckled with small, angry blotches of red. “I’m on till two
A
.
M
., India. What would you have me do? Shall I come for her then?” He waited for her to see the impossibility of what she was demanding. After a moment, he went on. “Let me drive you home. Let’s find some takeaway and have a meal with her before I go to the hotline. I have time for that. I’ll have a word with her. Then tomorrow, I’ll arrange for her to return to Shaftesbury. I’ll phone Alastair, I’ll put her on a train, or I’ll drive her down myself. You have my promise. If you’ll just keep her with you one more night.”

“I don’t
want
—”

“I know. And after this”—he gestured at the line of cottages—“I quite understand. I’m sorry for what happened. I should have suspected or at least wondered, but I didn’t. And believe me, I intend to
speak with her at some length about what she’s manufactured here between us.”

India wondered about that. It seemed to her that one could speak and speak and speak to Caroline, and never did it make the slightest difference in whatever her intentions were. But she had Charlie’s promise and it was only for a night and he would make certain his mother knew how deep his displeasure ran when it came to what she’d done to him this day.

She said, “All right, then. But she’s gone tomorrow.”

He nodded. “Thank you,” he said. And then casually, “You’ve entirely misbuttoned your blouse, by the way. And I’m afraid you’ve somehow lost an earring as well.”

VICTORIA

LONDON

“Do you know what the hell
time
it is, whoever you are?” told Lynley that he’d probably awakened the man from sleep. He hadn’t a clue what time it was in Wellington, New Zealand, and having tracked Adam Sheridan down in the antipodes after spending considerable effort on the task, he’d rung the B & B that Sheridan and his wife operated in that town without dwelling upon the time change at all.

He said, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Sheridan. This
is
Adam Sheridan, isn’t it?”

“And who the hell am I speaking to?”

Lynley thought it was a strange way for the owner of a B & B to talk, no matter the hour of the day, since he could have been a potential customer ringing with an enquiry about a lengthy stay at Bay View Lodge. Nonetheless, he identified himself mildly to the man, who then said, “Scotland Yard? At . . . five in the morning . . .” And in the background a woman’s voice spoke, to which the man said in reply, “I don’t bloody know, do I?” and then into the phone to Lynley, “What’s this about?”

“A woman called Caroline Goldacre,” Lynley told him, “although you would have known her as Caroline Garza.”

There was a silence. Lynley could picture the man sorting through this bit of information as he swung himself to the side of the bed where his slippers lay with his dressing gown in a jumble on the floor. He would put them on—the dressing gown as well—and he would leave the bedroom to take their conversation elsewhere. He wouldn’t want his wife to hear what he had to say, Lynley reckoned. It wasn’t going to be a pretty story.

He said, “Are you still there, Mr. Sheridan?”

“Yeah. Hang on.”

A bit more silence, although this time it was broken by breathing whose stertorous nature suggested a life of heavy smoking or asthma or both. When after thirty seconds, Sheridan still hadn’t spoken again, Lynley said again, “Mr. Sheridan? Are you still there?”

“Yeah, yeah. Right. I c’n talk now. Shit. Raining. Wait. Let me . . .”

Finally the man situated himself both out of earshot and out of the rain. He said, “That’s a name I never expected to hear again. What’s this about then? What’s she done?”

Lynley wasn’t entirely surprised by the question since a phone call from New Scotland Yard at five in the morning did suggest that something untoward had occurred. But it was interesting that the man asked what Caroline Garza had
done
and not what might have happened to her.

Lynley told him that he was ringing to confirm the history that Sheridan shared with Caroline, one revealed to him by Mercedes Garza. He went directly to the heart of the matter: pregnancy, childbirth, adoption, and blackmail. Interestingly and contrary to what Mercedes Garza had told him about her confrontation with the man all those years ago, Sheridan did not deny any of it.

“A childminder. That’s what she was, more or less. She was a mate of our Rosie and what the wife and I thought was that, while Rosie was a bit too immature to mind the younger ones on her own when the wife and I went out, she and Caroline together might do quite well and save us money at the same time.”

His wife had thought at first that both of the girls were too young, Sheridan explained, but as Caroline seemed mature for her age in comparison to Rosie, they decided to give the plan a go. They liked their date nights—“Important to the relationship was how the wife
put it.” Sheridan said, “and I was happy to go along with it because we had four kids, and most days and nights we hadn’t the time or energy to say a word to each other”—and this looked a good way to have those nights more regularly than they would have been able to do had they been forced to pay an adult minder.

Caroline would generally spend the night with Rosie but occasionally—“early-morning dance lessons or something . . . can’t remember and don’t want to, frankly”—Sheridan would drive the girl home. It was on one of the drives that things heated up between them.

“She’d been giving me messages all along that I should’ve ignored,” Sheridan said. “But instead, like the bloody fool I was—in my thirties, this was, and overrun with testosterone—I crossed a line with her.”

“Perhaps more than one line,” Lynley noted.

“Yeah. Right. I admit to that. I was the adult. I was the responsible party. But I swear to you by all that’s holy and on my dead mother’s grave that she was . . . It was like she was in season. Look, I don’t really want to talk about this. It’s in the past and I paid.”

“You’ve served time? Her mother indicated that—”

Sheridan barked a laugh. “That would’ve been easier, believe me. No. I wasn’t stitched up for anything, was I? No word given to the coppers and all that. I denied everything when the girl’s mum confronted me and she let it all go for some reason. But I lost my wife and I lost my kids and to this day the kids’ll have nothing to do with me. Won’t even answer a Christmas card from me and their stepmum, will they. They’ve never met her. And all this despite the fact that I paid that little tart—”

“I understand she was fourteen years old, Mr. Sheridan,” Lynley cut in.

“That gash was never fourteen years old, Inspector. So yes, we had relations, her and me, with all the while her telling me she’s on the pill. Then she comes up pregnant. I start paying her to hold her tongue about who got her that way—I’m not proud of any of this, it sickens me to tell you, you understand?—and her mum somehow uncovers it all. She puts a stop to my paying the girl but the girl herself . . . ? She goes ahead and tells my wife. And I don’t blame her a bit for walking out on me and taking the kids with her because I deserved
it. And to this day, Inspector, I don’t know if there was a baby at all or if the girl was lying to get money off me.”

“There was a baby,” Lynley told him. “She’s long gone and the adoption was sealed.”

“So there’s an end to it. But you’ve not answered me. What’s she done? Why’re you ringing me about her?”

“Caroline? We think someone may have tried to kill her.”

Adam Sheridan said, “Tried? You mean without success?”

“That’s correct.”

“Bloody too bad, that. And what? You’re thinking it might’ve been me? Trotting up there from Wellington with blood on my mind?”

“We’re following every possible lead.”

“You can cross me off the list, then. I haven’t left New Zealand for fifteen years. Check if you like. I expect you lot can do that easy enough these days.”

Lynley believed the man. If he’d travelled anywhere out of the country of his present residence, Sheridan was correct in assuming that there would be records aplenty to show it.

He finished his phone call. It was, he decided, simply something that had needed crossing off his list. Another motive to have attempted to kill Caroline Goldacre, to be sure, but it was a nearly impossible feat for Adam Sheridan.

That was just the point, Lynley thought. The near impossibility of
anyone’s
being able to manage what had been managed to get the doctored toothpaste into the woman’s possession. There were motives aplenty. Turn over a stone and another one popped up. But with so few people with both access and opportunity . . . Were they—the police—being played for fools by Caroline Goldacre? For truly, what better way to eliminate someone was there than to do it in such a manner that the killer herself looked like the intended victim? But then they were back to the question of why Caroline might have wanted to kill Clare Abbott. Because she’d discovered that Clare had interviewed both her mother and her former husband? Because Clare had used a form of her name when meeting married men for sex? Where in that was the desperation that drove one person to kill another?

His mobile rang as he was pondering all this. He saw it was Havers. He took the call. She sounded lit up with excitement when she said his name. Then, “Everything was in the boot of her car. In Clare’s
car
, Inspector” told him what her excitement was all about.

FULHAM

LONDON

Rory had just bade farewell to her sister Heather and to her own assistant from the publishing house when DI Lynley arrived. Her assistant had come bearing flowers, cards, a stuffed animal, and well-wishes from everyone, beginning with the managing director and ending with the interns who sorted the post. Her sister had come bearing fresh pajamas, shampoo, and lotions. Together, the two women had got Rory out of bed for the first time and over to the window to look out at a blustery autumn day. And now she was longing to wash her hair and to have a shower, which she assumed was a good indication that she was fully mended, with no touch-and-go about it any longer. She also wanted Arlo, and she asked the inspector about him straightaway.

Lynley declared Arlo well and awaiting her. He reported the dog’s adventures at London Zoo, and he pulled a chair up next to her bed, crossed one well-trousered leg over the other. He spoke frankly, all the time with his gaze fastened on her face in a manner that told her he would be reading her every reaction. This belied the friendliness of his tone and put her on her guard at once.

He began by telling her that one of the two detective sergeants he’d sent to Shaftesbury had discovered a mass of data in the boot of Clare’s car. It had been hidden in the well for the spare tyre, he explained, and locked carefully into a strongbox to protect it. The box’s contents turned out to be transcripts of interviews with individuals associated with Caroline Goldacre as well as several hundred emails to Clare from the woman herself and a memory stick that suggested additional material might be contained upon it.