A Banquet of Consequences (66 page)

Isabelle
, Barbara thought sourly. Isabelle, Isabelle, bloody sodding Isabelle.

—that this entire venture was a waste of the Met’s valuable resources. Then, of course, there was the question of why it was still on the digital recorder at all.

“Because she hadn’t yet transcribed it,” Barbara said.

“Still and all,” Lynley began.

She cut him off with, “Look, sir. You
know
how unlikely it is that there’s going to be hard evidence. But when we link things up—and we’re going to do that—that recording’s going to make the chain unbreakable.”

“
When
you link things up,” Lynley told her.

He also told her he’d made his dutiful report to the superintendent, who’d agreed on another twenty-four hours. But that was it, she’d told him. If Sergeants Havers and Nkata had nothing sewn up by that time, they were to hand over what they had to the Dorset police and be on the road back to London before she had to enquire as to their whereabouts.

Thus Barbara was more than a little worried. She’d thought the recording was going to be their smoking gun, and she didn’t like learning that Lynley considered it a water pistol. She continued her search through Clare’s office. She was still searching to absolutely no avail when Nkata rang from Dorset Police Headquarters with an announcement that immediately cheered her.

“Got it,” he said. “Trail of bread crumbs, Barb. We got a search for poison, we got a zeroing in on four of ’em and sodium azide’s one, and we got an order for it. All been deleted, ’course, but tha’s nothing for these blokes at headquarters.”

“Yes!” was Barbara’s reaction and she wanted to ring Lynley immediately. The hour was growing late, the twenty-four-hour clock was
ticking, and they had to move. “We need to bring her in,” she told Nkata. She brought him up to the minute on the recording she’d found and said, “That’s motive in a sandwich, you ask me. I’ll fetch her from the house and take her to the nick. If you c’n meet me there in, say, an hour, we c’n—”

“Little problem,” he told her.

God, she thought. What?
What?
She said, “What sort of problem, then?”

“It’s both computers.”

“What’s both computers?”

“What we found. It’s Alastair’s computer and Caroline’s been used. And there’s something more. It’s ’bout Lily Foster. Look, I’m heading back there now. I’ll ’xplain when I get there.”

She wanted to demand that he explain
now
. But she needed time to regroup. Both computers? Lily Foster as well? Barbara had a very bad feeling about it all.

So she smoked and paced and smoked again. She did her pacing round Clare’s house: kitchen to sitting room to sunroom. She did her smoking in the front garden away from the wind. Nkata was coming from south Dorset, and like every route to any place in the county, there was no direct way to make the journey from there to Shaftesbury unless one sprouted wings. So while she waited, she had plenty of time to examine not only what they had on Caroline Goldacre but also her own predilection for pinning guilt upon the woman.

It wasn’t pleasant to consider she might be blindly stumbling towards disaster merely because she disliked Clare’s assistant. Caroline had declared herself the actual target of a killer, and wasn’t the reality that it could still be the truth?

When Winston finally arrived, Barbara had smoked so much that her eyeballs felt raw. She also, she reckoned, smelled like an afternoon in Wigan circa 1860 if Winston’s expression was anything to go by. His comment of “D’you
ever
give it a rest, Barb?” sent her up the stairs to search out some mouthwash, but at that point, it did little good as the rest of her—hair, clothing, and probably skin—was permeated with smoke.

She made coffee and toast while Winston did them some scrambled eggs. They’d neither of them had dinner, so a quick after-hours
high tea was going to have to do. As they cooked and then ate, Winston went over the details. Barbara had to admit that it was going to be difficult to massage them into anything impressive in the guilt department.

Winston referred to his notebook. First, Alastair’s computer, he said. It contained the search for the poison. Phenmetrazine hydrochloride had been choice number one: It caused, among other things, tachycardia—

“There’s the heart,” Barbara pointed out.

—circulatory collapse, and coma. Possibly rejected by the killer as death wasn’t a certainty. Next was chloral hydrate, which depressed the central nervous system. Probably rejected because it took too long for the victim to succumb to all the respiratory problems it caused. Then came amitriptyline, which could bring on heart attack. Rejected, no doubt, because of the difficulty involved in putting one’s hand on it as it was a prescription medication. And then, at last, sodium azide. Quick, effective, and available over the Internet.

“The inspector told me to let you know about that Internet bit,” Barbara said. “Sorry. I forgot.”

No matter, he told her, because the order for sodium azide hadn’t been difficult to find. It was on Caroline’s laptop. Deleted, of course, buried as well as it could be buried without taking the hard drive out, smashing it to pieces, and having the laptop rebuilt with another hard drive in it. The order appeared to use her credit card number as well.

“So Bob’s your uncle.” Barbara breathed in relief.

“Tha’s where things get dodgy,” Nkata said.

For although the delivery address was indeed the address of the bakery and the home of Caroline Goldacre, the person whose name had been given as the recipient was Lily Foster.

“Bloody hell,” Barbara said. “Can I count the ways that doesn’t make sense?”

“She has motive, Barb,” Nkata pointed out. “Has done from the first, innit?”

“Christ, but how is she supposed to have done it? Sneaked into the house in the dead of night? Sneaked into the bakery as well? Used Alastair’s computer to lay a trail there and then the same on Caroline’s?
And how’d she put her mitts on Caroline’s credit card? Better yet, how did she manage it all without getting caught? That beggars belief. Makes more sense to me that Caroline’s the one who’s laying false trails left, right, and centre. Does the search on Alastair’s computer to sink him once she declares herself the intended victim: ‘He meant to kill me ’cause of his lady love’ and all that. And she hates Lily as much as Lily hates her, so if she could make it seem that Lily was after her just in case the Alastair bit didn’t work . . . Win, it
does
start to make sense if you look at it that way. Caroline wants Clare gone because Clare was going to talk to Charlie about what she’d done to Will. She wants Lily gone because she blames her for Will’s death. And on the chance we
don’t
work it all out the way she intends, if we settle on Alastair as our boy, she takes care of him and his affair. No matter how it worked out, it’s a win for her.”

“If tha’s how it happened.” Nkata’s voice was slow, though, so Barbara knew he was thinking. When he next spoke, he made his thinking clear. “Charlie,” he said.

“What about him?”

“He could’ve done it all, Barb. He comes down from London to see them, yeah? That gives him opportunity to mess about with the computers much ’s he wants. When Alastair’s having a kip middle of the day, he uses his. When Caroline’s asleep dead of night, he uses hers. He c’n put his hands on her credit card easy, too. He’d’ve had a good idea where she keeps it.”

“Then why the Lily Foster bit? Why have the poison sent to Caroline’s digs but in Lily’s name?”

Nkata admitted that that was where things got tricky. With an ASBO hanging over her, Lily couldn’t exactly linger round the bakery and the house to receive a package sent to her there. There was far too much risk involved. Yet if she hadn’t been there to receive it and if it had fallen into the hands of either Alastair or Caroline, what would they have made of a package sent to their address but to Lily’s name?

“They’d’ve taken it d’rec’ly to the police,” Nkata said slowly. “’Less, of course, they were meant to open it. They open it, have a whiff, and you know the rest.”

“Which they’d never have done. Not with what had happened already between them and her. They’d have been dead mad to do that.”

“So it’s all back on again,” Nkata said.

“Let’s ring the inspector,” Barbara suggested. She told him about the limit of twenty-four hours, and then she said, “We need more time, and I think the computer trail’s going to give it to us.”

That, however, did not turn out to be the case. When Barbara had Lynley on his mobile, she put hers on speaker and let Nkata do the honours. He went through the information he’d just given to Barbara: Alastair’s computer, Caroline’s computer, the bakery’s address, Lily Foster’s name as recipient of the sodium azide. Barbara added her bit about the manner in which the information could be interpreted: with the logical conclusion that the person who could have managed all this with the most ease being Caroline Goldacre.

Lynley sounded deeply unimpressed. More, Lynley sounded exasperated. He said, “This is ice so thin we’re all about to fall through it, Barbara.”

“By itself, yeah. I see that, sir. But when you put it with everything else we’ve got—”

“You know as well as I that we can’t hand over a mountain of supposition to the CPS.”

Barbara rolled her eyes and exchanged a look with Nkata as Lynley went on. She could practically see the inspector ticking the list off on his fingers.

“A conversation overheard in Cambridge, a hidden book being written, an Internet adultery site being used, score of emails printed up and—”

“Hundreds of
her
emails, Inspector.”

“—annotated with references to various psychology books. Interviews with people significant in her life that she
might
have heard or whose transcriptions she
might
have read. An overnight case that she
might
have packed. Toothpaste that she
might
have doctored. Without a single witness, without definitive evidence of some sort that actually
is
definitive evidence and not something we conveniently
declare
definitive evidence . . . We’ve got sod all unless you manage to wrest a confession out of the Goldacre woman.”

Barbara looked at Winston. His expression was regretful. It seemed to be saying, along with Lynley, that the time had come for them to pack their bags. But returning to London without something to show the superintendent for the time she’d allowed Barbara to spend in Dorset was not an option. So Barbara said, “So that’s what it’ll be, Inspector.”

Winston frowned. Barbara had little doubt that up in London Lynley was frowning as well. He said, “What?”

“Caroline Goldacre’s going to confess. And she’s going to confess to me. It’ll be on tape. It’ll be transcribed. It’ll be initialed on every page. And it’ll be signed.”

“That’s not very likely, is it?” Lynley asked.

“You said twenty-four hours, didn’t you? Twenty-two now, to be exact. That’s plenty of time for me to question her. She’s going to confess. Depend on it.”

She rang off. She knew there was very little chance that she could persuade Lynley into believing she could get a confession out of Caroline Goldacre. Truth was, there was very little chance that she could persuade herself into believing it. But given the options of producing a confession or returning to London in defeat, she didn’t see any other choice.

SHAFTESBURY

DORSET

Alastair knew he should have been abed at least two hours earlier, and he’d made the attempt but, finding he couldn’t sleep, he’d given it up. He hadn’t heard from Sharon. He’d rung her, both her house and her mobile, and he’d attempted to explain himself . . . only, he hadn’t known quite what to say. He hadn’t
really
believed that Sharon could have harmed anyone, and that was how he began his message at first. The problem, of course, was that he
had
believed in Sharon’s guilt, no matter that there were indications to the contrary and the biggest indication was Sharon herself. She’d been as consistent as the rising and setting sun, straight from the day he’d met her. Yet he’d actually
thought . . . And that was the point, wasn’t it? What he’d thought was the whole bloody point. He’d thought she was someone who could poison another person for what was truly an ill-defined gain. It was little wonder that she wanted nothing more to do with him.

He lectured himself as he tossed in his bed. He tried out various means of earning Sharon’s forgiveness. He had mental conversations with her and more mental conversations with Caro. He stared at the dark ceiling of his room; he stared at the shadows thrown by the wardrobe against the wall; he stared at the closed bedroom door.

Through it he could hear the blare of Caro’s television. It was so loud that he could even tell what she was watching, some kind of mad programme on plastic surgery, a bloody stupid bloke who’d decided he needed to have his willy made larger and had gone to a hack in South America to have it done. Disaster with accompanying photos. Pause for a commercial even louder than the programme itself.

She was watching the telly in her retreat, and the thought of this retreat that he’d fashioned for her put Alastair in mind of everything else he’d done to this house they lived in, all of it at Caro’s request, accomplished because he’d sought to please her. A new kitchen, new bathrooms, an extra bedroom so that each of the boys could have his own room as they’d had in London. The house had had enough bedrooms when they’d purchased it, but one of them, she’d decided, was meant to be her personal retreat. This was, she’d told him, essential to her peace of mind. But the reality was that there was no peace of mind for Caro, and a personal retreat had not provided it for her. In time, she’d altered it to her bedroom. “We keep such different hours” had been her excuse. “You do want me to be able to sleep, don’t you? I need my sleep. It’s not unreasonable. And really, Alastair, it’s for the boys, after all.”

Stupidly, he’d thought it would change when the boys left home. She’d be more of a wife to him then, he reckoned.