A Banquet of Consequences (45 page)

They all watched her. Whatever she was feeling, her expression was of a woman considering the ramifications of having in her possession and then giving to another what had apparently been the means of that other’s death. She said, “You do see what happened, don’t you? I’m the only person who was ever meant to die.”

THORNFORD

DORSET

A
lastair reached Sharon’s house at seven forty, when the sun was just beginning to strike the outlying fields so that their heavy-topped grasses coruscated like diamonds as the dew that bent them was hit by the daylight. For the very first time he’d left the job of loading up the bakery’s delivery vans to his assistant and to the three drivers who’d then deliver fresh goods to his shops. But despite this, he was suffering from not a single moment of guilt. Instead his arrival at the farmhouse tucked so neatly among the terraces and cottages in Church Road felt completely natural.

He allowed himself a mad fantasy as he approached the front door. He was a husband coming home to a wife who was waiting for him with breakfast cooking. She was a wife who’d risen at half past six to lay his place at table and who was now, even as he inserted his key in the lock, anticipating his footsteps coming along the stone floor.

He’d phoned the moment Caroline had stormed off from Shaftesbury. He’d told her that Caroline had gone to London, and he tried not to sound anticipatory, hopeful, or anything else that might make her think he presumed. She’d said, “Has something happened, Alastair? Are you at odds with Caroline?”

“When are we not at odds?” he said. “She’s gone to Charlie. For protection is what she said.”

“Are you not her protection?”

“Doesn’t seem that way.”

“What are you meant to do now?”

“I’m meant to be with you.”

She’d not said anything at first, and Alastair thought he’d gone too far. In his hours alone he’d dwelt too much on a future he was daily more determined to have with her.

Finally, she said, “But surely, she’s not gone off forever. This is just a bump in the road.”

“I’m sick and tired of bumps in the road,” he told her.

“I do wish I could smooth them for you, my dear.”

He let the
my dear
reach into him. He could feel it touch the heart of who he was truly meant to be.

She said, “Would you like to come to dinner, Alastair?”

“I would.” So he’d gone to her and after they’d eaten, they went to bed. He’d risen at half past one in order to get to the bakery by two, and he was bleary-eyed because he’d slept so little because he had not wanted to sleep.

She’d not slept either, not more than two hours. She’d come to the door with him and had sent him off with a flask of hot coffee to get him going. And now here he was, back in Thornford, where she was no doubt in bed trying to catch up on a few hours’ kip.

He couldn’t help himself. He yearned—that was indeed the word for it—to feel her hand on the back of his neck, the lightest caress as he sat at table, waiting for the breakfast she would cook him. Or just the touch, the touch itself, no breakfast at all because it was, truthfully, only the touch that he wanted.

He entered the house. At once, he smelled coffee. He went to the kitchen, and there he saw that two places were laid on the table with a shaft of sunlight falling upon them. At each place a half of a grapefruit glistened, and these were joined by a box of cornflakes, a jug of milk, a bowl of sugar. On the work top across from the table, two slices of his bakery’s wholemeal bread were upright in the toaster, and a bowl in front of this held four eggs, companions to the half dozen or more rashers of bacon that lay neatly in a pan on the hob.

It was like an advert for marital bliss. The blessed woman meant
to cook him breakfast, but he decided he would set about it himself and surprise her with a tray brought to her bedside.

He broke the eggs into the bowl and went for the rubbish to toss the shells. That was when he saw her through the window, up and about already and fully dressed for the day. She was sitting beneath the laburnum tree in one of the two colourful lawn chairs. It was leafless now—that elegant tree, so long safely unplanted till her children were older—and it wept its thin and deadly brown pods onto the lawn beneath it. Sharon was fingering one of these pods as she looked beyond her garden and out into the fields of the farm behind it where the sheep were grazing.

He was surprised to see her at repose like this, so clearly thoughtful and dwelling on something that he could only hope was himself. In the times they’d been together, she’d always been at work: sewing a button onto his shirt, ironing table napkins worn thin with age, folding laundry, cutting spent flowers from the herbaceous border that fringed the lawn and formed an undulating motley against the house. She still wrote letters, and when her chores were done, she sat at a narrow secretaire in the sitting room and penned them in her neat handwriting to her children. No email for her, she told him. A letter lasts, she explained. A letter could be saved, collected, and bound with a ribbon to send onward to the next generation. An email could not. True, one had to
wait
for a letter, but she was a patient woman, and she’d taught her two children to be likewise. One has to learn to wait for what’s important, she explained.

Perhaps, he thought now, that was what she was doing outside in the morning light. Not thinking or dwelling at all. Merely waiting for what was coming.

Since she did not know he was in her house, he continued to watch her. He was taken with how the morning sunlight struck her hair. Caroline called it mousy, he recalled. Thin and baby fine and straight and “You can hardly call it hair at all,” she’d scoffed, but he could see in this light that blonde worked its way through it in strands so subtle that you wouldn’t notice them if you were not looking.

She seemed to realise that she was being observed, for she turned in her chair and at that point he knocked upon the window. She didn’t
look at all surprised to see him, but her expression did seem pleased. She got to her feet and came across the lawn in his direction, tossing the laburnum pod to one side and running her fingers back through her hair as if to neaten it. She wore her gardening clogs, he saw, the bright red of them a pleasing contrast to the equally bright green of the lawn. He heard them hit the back step with a
thunk
as she removed them, and then the door opened and she was with him.

He’d turned the burner on beneath the bacon, and he’d lowered the bread into the toaster. She saw this and said, “I’m meant to be doing that for you,” to which he replied, “How’d you know I’d be back?”

“I didn’t.” She’d paused at the door to put on her indoor shoes. She didn’t come farther into the kitchen but instead observed him for a moment, saying, “But I hoped.”

He had started whipping the eggs with a fork, but the way she’d said that final word made him pause. It had seemed to come from within her chest, like something deeply felt but only reluctantly spoken. The tone of it prompted him to ask her, “And if I’d not come . . . ?”

“My life would go on. Life has a way of doing that.”

He could feel his face alter despite his attempt to keep it from doing so. It hadn’t been the answer he’d hoped for. She apparently saw this change in him, for she came to him and said, “Alastair, have I hurt you?”

He shook his head. “Bloody stupid is all.”

She brushed her fingers against his thinning curls. Her look was fond. “Are you caught up in wanting what you already have? I’m yours, my dear. I’m no one else’s, and I’ve no intention of things changing. Now, do step aside and let me cook. I love cooking for you and looking over my shoulder and seeing you with that way you have of watching me. Like what you really want is not related to food at all.”

Christ but he started to harden at that. What
was
it about her? He said, “There’s the truth of it.” He took her hand and pressed it to his groin.

“Naughty,” she said. But her fingers squeezed and released, and made him catch his breath. She gently pushed him out of the way,
though, and she went on with, “I’m due this morning at the Swanage site. I’ve just time for breakfast and then I must be off. Will you sleep here? Once we’ve eaten, I mean. You must be dead on your feet. Did you sleep at all last night?”

“Enough,” he lied. “But it’s no matter as it wasn’t sleep I wanted.”

She adjusted the flame beneath the bacon. She took over whipping up the eggs and added some milk to them, some salt, some freshly ground pepper. She said to him, “That’ll fade, you know. You best be prepared for that, or you’ll be very disappointed. It always fades.”

“What’s that, then?”

She gestured between them with her whipping fork. “This hunger we have for each other. It doesn’t stay the same. It can’t. What you want just now—this you-and-me thing of it with nothing else on our minds but climbing the stairs or me just taking my knickers off here in the kitchen—it doesn’t last.”

“I know what I want,” he told her huskily. “This’s way bigger than lust between you and me.” And when she shot him a look of sceptical amusement, “I don’t deny the lust is there. You feel it as well, and you got to say it.”

She smiled. “Your hands in my knickers would tell you the truth of it,
but
”—as he approached her—“I c’n only attend to the one hunger just now. We can’t let things fall apart in our lives. You’ve a business to run and—”

“Curse me if I care about the business.”

“You
must
care. You’ve built it up—”

“’Cause of you.”

“Rubbish. I’ve only suggested this and that. So let’s not forget what’s truly important cos no one lives on . . . well . . .” He could see her blushing and he loved this about her. “What you ’n’ me’ve been up to? No one lives on that. Now be a good lad and sit at table and wait for me to cook you this meal. Have some cornflakes. Eat your grapefruit. I reckon both of us need to keep up our strength.”

SHAFTESBURY

DORSET

When Lynley finally rang her, Barbara was mightily cheesed off. She’d been waiting for him to give her the word about his interview with Caroline Goldacre and when he’d not rung her by nine o’clock on the previous evening, she’d begun to ring him. If the prints on that tube of doctored toothpaste were Caroline’s, it had seemed to Barbara that matters should have been to give the bloody cow her rights and cart her off to the nick. But ringing Lynley from nine until midnight had got her no information, so she’d finally dropped into bed with a “Where the bloody hell are you and what the bloody hell is happening?” and seethed for a good three more hours before she’d finally fallen asleep. His phone call awakened her at seven, and she punched the mobile in answer and barked, “Why the hell didn’t you ring me back when you knew I was waiting for word?”

“Good God. Are you always this cheerful in the morning?” he asked pleasantly. “Have you not had your coffee?”

“
Why
didn’t you ring me? What did you expect we were going to do without word from you?”

“I expected you’d have dinner and make an early night of it. I had to take Arlo back to Daidre, Sergeant. I didn’t leave Camberwell to do that till nearly ten.”

“You could’ve rung me on the way to North London.”

“And violate the law regarding driving and using one’s mobile? Hardly.”

“Then at Daidre’s. You could’ve rung me then. Oh, I get she was probably mad for you, ripping off your kit directly you stepped inside the place, eh? But seems to me you could’ve fought her off long enough to—”

“It’s your leisure reading, Sergeant,” Lynley said. “Time to elevate it, I think. Although . . . aren’t the men doing the clothes-ripping in romances? No. Don’t answer that. As it was, Daidre was asleep.”

“And you didn’t tiptoe to her bedside—shoes in hand—to lower yourself gently onto her comfortable mattress and breathe seductively onto the back of her neck?”

“Alas. It’s a sleeping bag on a camp bed. She likes to rough it.”

“Oh, I bet she does.”

“Amusing,” he said.

“Where are you now?”

“Walking to the car. In Belgravia, by the way. Having spent the night on my own extremely comfortable mattress, breathing onto my pillow’s neck, should pillows have necks. Now that we’ve established all that, shall we get down to business?”

In short order, he brought her into the picture, and it was a game changer, if Caroline Goldacre was to be believed. The killing tube of toothpaste was hers, and according to Lynley’s questioning of her, she hadn’t packed Clare’s suitcase for the trip to Cambridge so she didn’t plant the toothpaste within it.

“Clare forgot hers, and Caroline handed her own over,” Lynley said.

“So she
says
. She could’ve packed Clare’s bag and conveniently ‘forgotten’ the toothpaste. No one’s ever going to know the truth of that one.”

“I’m not blind to that.” Needing some toothpaste later on in the evening and after their argument, Lynley went on, Caroline had rung down to reception in an attempt to acquire a tube so that she wouldn’t have to speak to Clare again. “All of this was mentioned to me earlier by the night receptionist, by the way,” Lynley said. “She wasn’t pleasant to him when there was no toothpaste to be had.”

“
That’s
convenient,” Barbara noted.

“The unpleasantness making her phone call memorable?” Lynley enquired. “Certainly. I see how all of this conveniently underscores Caroline’s declaration of herself as the true target, Sergeant. On the other hand, a motive for her actually
wanting
to kill her employer would be welcome. As to the third set of fingerprints on the tube? They were hers, so that rather supports her story. She’s not a fool, after all. If she poisoned the toothpaste, she’d hardly have left her prints on the tube.”

“But that works both ways, sir, the motive bit. Who would have had a motive to kill
her
? Oh. Never mind. I’ve met the minge bag and made a note of her predilection for blackmail.”

“Piquant as always,” Lynley said. “But it turns out that the present husband has been having a relationship with a woman who works for him, someone called Sharon. The son told me this. And they’ve been an item for a few months now, according to Caroline. So that wants looking into.”

“S’pose there’s that ASBO as well,” Barbara said, filling him in on what she knew at the moment about Lily Foster, much of which she discovered he’d already learned from Caroline Goldacre’s son. “We’ll be getting onto Lily Foster today.”