A twenty-minute Tube ride later, Robin emerged at Warwick Avenue underground station in a part of London she barely knew. She had always felt a vague curiosity about Little Venice, as her extravagant middle name, “Venetia,” had been given to her because she had been conceived in the real Venice. Doubtless she would henceforth associate this area with Matthew and the bitter, tense meeting she was sure awaited her, down by the canal.

She walked down a street named Clifton Villas, where plane trees spread leaves of translucent jade against square cream-colored houses, the walls of which glowed gold in the evening sun. The quiet beauty of this soft summer evening made Robin feel suddenly, overwhelmingly melancholy, because it recalled just such a night in Yorkshire, a decade previously, when she had hurried up the road from her parents’ house, barely seventeen years old and wobbling on her high heels, desperately excited about her first date with Matthew Cunliffe, who had just passed his driving test and would be taking her into Harrogate for the evening.

And here she was walking towards him again, to arrange the permanent disentanglement of their lives. Robin despised herself for feeling sad, for remembering, when it was preferable to concentrate on his unfaithfulness and unkindness, the joyful shared experiences that had led to love.

She turned left, crossed the street and walked on, now in the chilly shadow of the brick that bordered the right-hand side of Blomfield Road, parallel to the canal, and saw a police car speeding across the top of the street. The sight of it gave her strength. It felt like a friendly wave from what she knew now was her real life, sent to remind her what she was meant to be, and how incompatible that was with being the wife of Matthew Cunliffe.

A pair of high black wooden gates was set into the wall, gates that Matthew’s text had told her led to the canal-side bar, but when Robin pushed at them, they were locked. She glanced up and down the road, but there was no sign of Matthew, so she reached into her bag for her mobile, which, though muted was already vibrating with a call. As she took it out, the electric gates opened and she walked through them, raising the mobile to her ear as she did so.

“Hi, I’m just—”

Strike yelled in her ear.

“Get out of there, it isn’t Matthew—”

Several things happened at once.

The phone was torn out of her hand. In one frozen second, Robin registered that there was no bar in sight, only an untidy patch of canal bank beneath a bridge, hemmed by overgrown shrubs, and a dark barge, Odile, sitting squat and shabby in the water below her. Then a fist hit her hard in the solar plexus, and she jack-knifed, winded. Doubled over, she heard a splash as her phone was lobbed into the canal, then somebody grabbed a fistful of her hair and the waistband of her trousers and dragged her, while she still had no air in her lungs to scream, towards the barge. Thrown through the open doorway of the boat, she hit a narrow wooden table and fell to the floor.

The door slammed shut. She heard the scrape of a lock.

“Sit down,” said a male voice.

Still winded, Robin pulled herself up onto a wooden bench at the table, which was covered in a thin cushioned pad, then turned, to find herself looking into the barrel of a revolver.

Raphael lowered himself into the chair opposite her.

“Who just rang you?” he demanded and she deduced that in the physical effort to get her on the boat, and his terror that she might make a noise that the caller could hear, he had not had time or opportunity to check the screen on her mobile.

“My husband,” lied Robin in a whisper.

Her scalp was burning where he had pulled her hair. The pain in her midriff was such that she wondered whether he had cracked one of her ribs. Still fighting to draw air into her lungs, Robin seemed for a few disoriented seconds to see her predicament in miniature, from far away, encased in a trembling bead of time. She foresaw Raphael tipping her weighted corpse into the dark water by night, and Matthew, who had apparently lured her to the canal, being questioned and maybe accused. She saw the distraught faces of her parents and her brothers at her funeral in Masham, and she saw Strike standing at the back of the church, as he had at her wedding, furious because the thing he had feared had come to pass, and she was dead due to her own failings.

But as each gasp re-inflated Robin’s lungs, the illusion that she was watching from afar dissolved. She was here, now, on this dingy boat, breathing in its fusty smell, trapped within its wooden walls, with the dilated pupil of the revolver staring at her, and Raphael’s eyes above it.

Her fear was a real, solid presence in the galley, but it must stand apart from her, because it couldn’t help, and would only hinder. She must stay calm, and concentrate. She chose not to speak. It would give her back some of the power he had just taken from her if she refused to fill the silence. This was the trick of the therapist: let the pause unspool; let the more vulnerable person fill it.

“You’re very cool,” Raphael said finally. “I thought you might get hysterical and scream. That’s why I had to punch you. I wouldn’t have done that otherwise. For what it’s worth, I like you, Venetia.”

She knew that he was trying to re-impersonate the man who had charmed her against her will at the Commons. Clearly, he thought the old mixture of ruefulness and remorse would make her forgive, and soften, even with her burning scalp, and her bruised ribs, and the gun in her face. She said nothing. His faint, imploring smile disappeared and he said bluntly:

“I need to know how much the police know. If I can still blag my way out of what they’ve got, then I’m afraid you,” he raised the gun a fraction to point directly at Robin’s forehead (and she thought of vets and the one clean shot that the horse in the dell had been denied) “are done for. I’ll muffle the shot in a cushion and put you overboard once it’s dark. But if they already know everything, then I’ll end it, here, tonight, because I’m never going back to prison. So you can see how it’s in your best interests to be honest, can’t you? Only one of us is getting off this boat.”

And when she didn’t speak, he said fiercely:

“Answer me!”

“Yes,” she said. “I understand.”

“So,” he said quietly, “were you really just at Scotland Yard?”

“Yes.”

“Is Kinvara there?”

“Yes.”

“Under arrest?”

“I think so. She’s in an interrogation room with her solicitor.”

“Why have they arrested her?”

“They think the two of you are having an affair. That you were behind everything.”

“What’s ‘everything’?”

“The blackmail,” said Robin, “and the murder.”

He advanced the gun so that it was pressing against her forehead. Robin felt the small, cold ring of metal pressing into her skin.

“Sounds like a crock of shit to me. How’re we supposed to have had an affair? She hated me. We were never alone together for two minutes.”

“Yes, you were,” said Robin. “Your father invited you down to Chiswell House, right after you got out of jail. The night he was detained in London. You and she were alone together, then. That’s when we think it started.”

“Proof?”

“None,” said Robin, “but I think you could seduce anyone if you really put your—”

“Don’t try flattery, it won’t work. Seriously, ‘that’s when we think it started’? Is that all you’ve got?”

“No. There were other signs of something going on.”

“Tell me the signs. All of them.”

“I’d be able to remember better,” said Robin steadily, “without you pressing a gun into my forehead.”

He withdrew it, but still pointing the revolver at her face, he said:

“Go on. Quickly.”

Part of Robin wanted to succumb to her body’s desire to dissolve, to carry her off into blissful unconsciousness. Her hands were numb, her muscles felt like soft wax. The place where Raphael had pressed the gun into her skin felt cold, a ring of white fire for a third eye. He hadn’t turned on the lights in the boat. They were facing each other in the deepening darkness and perhaps, by the time he shot her, she would no longer be able to see him clearly…

Focus, said a small, clear voice through the panic. Focus. The longer you keep him talking, the more time they’ll have to find you. Strike knows you were tricked.

She suddenly remembered the police car speeding across the top of Blomfield Road and wondered whether it had been circling, looking for her, whether the police, knowing that Raphael had lured her to the area, had already dispatched officers to search for them. The fake address had been some distance away along the canal bank, reached, so Raphael’s texts had said, through the black gates. Would Strike guess that Raphael was armed?

She took a deep breath.

“Kinvara broke down in Della Winn’s office last summer and said that someone had told her she’d never been loved, that she was used as part of a game.”

She must speak slowly. Don’t rush it. Every second might count, every second that she could keep Raphael hanging on her words, was another second in which somebody might come to her aid.

“Della assumed she was talking about your father, but we checked and Della can’t remember Kinvara actually saying his name. We think you seduced Kinvara as an act of revenge towards your father, kept the affair going for a couple of months, but when she got clingy and possessive, you ditched her.”

“All supposition,” said Raphael harshly, “and therefore bullshit. What else?”

“Why did Kinvara go up to town on the day her beloved mare was likely to be put down?”

“Maybe she couldn’t face seeing the horse shot. Maybe she was in denial about how sick it was.”

“Or,” said Robin, “maybe she was suspicious about what you and Francesca were up to in Drummond’s gallery.”

“No proof. Next.”

“She had a kind of breakdown when she got back to Oxfordshire. She attacked your father and was hospitalized.”

“Still grieving her stillborn, excessively attached to her horses, generally depressed,” Raphael rattled off. “Izzy and Fizzy will fight to take the stand and explain how unstable she is. What else?”

“Tegan told us that one day Kinvara was manically happy again, and she lied when asked why. She said your father had agreed to put her other mare in foal to Totilas. We think the real reason was that you’d resumed the affair with her, and we don’t think the timing was coincidental. You’d just driven the latest batch of paintings up to Drummond’s gallery for valuation.”

Raphael’s face became suddenly slack, as though his essential self had temporarily vacated it. The gun twitched in his hand and the fine hairs on Robin’s arms lifted gently as though a breeze had rippled over them. She waited for Raphael to speak, but he didn’t. After a minute, she continued:

“We think that when you loaded up the paintings for valuation, you saw ‘Mare Mourning’ close up for the first time and realized that it might be a Stubbs. You decided to substitute a different painting of a mare and foal for valuation.”

“Evidence?”

“Henry Drummond’s now seen the photograph I took of ‘Mare Mourning’ on the spare bed at Chiswell House. He’s ready to testify that it wasn’t among the pictures he valued for your father. The painting he valued at five to eight thousand pounds was by John Frederick Herring, and it showed a black and white mare and foal. Drummond’s also ready to testify that you’re sufficiently knowledgable about art to have spotted that ‘Mare Mourning’ might be a Stubbs.”

Raphael’s face had lost its mask-like cast. Now his near-black irises swiveled fractionally from side to side, as though he were reading something only he could see.

“I must’ve accidentally taken the Frederick Herring inste—”

A police siren sounded a few streets away. Raphael’s head turned: the siren wailed for a few seconds, then, as abruptly as it had started, was shut off.

He turned back to face Robin. He didn’t seem overly worried by the siren now it had stopped. Of course, he thought that it had been Matthew on the phone when he grabbed her.

“Yeah,” he said, regaining the thread of his thought. “That’s what I’ll say. I took the painting of the piebald to be valued by mistake, never saw ‘Mare Mourning,’ had no idea it might be a Stubbs.”

“You can’t have taken the piebald picture by mistake,” said Robin quietly. “It didn’t come from Chiswell House and the family’s prepared to say so.”

“The family,” said Raphael, “don’t notice what’s under their fucking noses. A Stubbs has been hanging in a damp spare bedroom for nigh on twenty years and nobody noticed, and you know why? Because they’re such fucking arrogant snobs… ‘Mare Mourning’ was old Tinky’s. She inherited it from the broken-down, alcoholic, gaga old Irish baronet she married before my grandfather. She had no idea what it was worth. She kept it because it was horsey and she loved horses.

“When her first husband died, she hopped over to England and pulled the same trick, became my grandfather’s expensive private nurse and then his even more expensive wife. She died intestate and all her crap—it was mostly crap—got absorbed into the Chiswell estate. The Frederick Herring could easily have been one of hers and nobody noticed it, stuck away in some filthy corner of that bloody house.”

“What if the police trace the piebald picture?”

“They won’t. It’s my mother’s. I’ll destroy it. When the police ask me, I’ll say my father told me he was going to flog it now he knew it was worth eight grand. ‘He must’ve sold it privately, officer.’”

“Kinvara doesn’t know the new story. She won’t be able to back you up.”

“This is where her well-known instability and unhappiness with my father works in my favor. Izzy and Fizzy will line up to tell the world that she never paid much attention to what he was up to, because she didn’t love him and was only in it for the money. Reasonable doubt is all I need.”

“What’s going to happen when the police put it to Kinvara that you only restarted the affair because you realized she might be about to become fantastically wealthy?”

Raphael let out a long, slow hiss.

“Well,” he said quietly, “if they can make Kinvara believe that, I’m fucked, aren’t I? But right now, Kinvara believes her Raffy loves her more than anything in the world, and she’s going to take a lot of convincing that’s not true, because her whole life’s going to fall apart otherwise. I drilled it into her: if they don’t know about the affair, they can’t touch us. I virtually had her reciting it while I fucked her. And I warned her they’d try and turn us against each other if either one of us was suspected. I’ve got her very well-schooled and I said, when in doubt, cry your eyes out, tell them nobody ever tells you anything and act bloody confused.”

“She’s already told one silly lie to try and protect you, and the police know about it,” said Robin.

“What lie?”

“About the necklace, in the early hours of Sunday morning. Didn’t she tell you? Maybe she realized you’d be angry.”

“What did she say?”

“Strike told her he didn’t buy the new explanation for you going down to Chiswell House the morning your father died—”

“What d’you mean, he didn’t buy it?” said Raphael, and Robin saw outraged vanity mingled with his panic.

“I thought it was convincing,” she assured him. “Clever, to tell a story that you’d appear to give up only unwillingly. Everyone’s always more disposed to believe something they believe they’ve uncovered for themsel—”

Raphael raised the gun so that it was close to her forehead again and even though the cold ring of metal had not yet touched her skin again, she felt it there.

“What lie did Kinvara tell?”

“She claimed you came to tell her that your mother removed diamonds from the necklace and replaced them with fakes.”

Raphael appeared horrified.

“What the fuck did she say that for?”

“Because she’d had a shock, I suppose, finding Strike and me in the grounds when you were hiding upstairs. Strike said he didn’t believe the necklace story, so she panicked and made up a new version. The trouble is, this one’s checkable.”

“The stupid cunt,” said Raphael quietly, but with a venom that made the back of Robin’s neck prickle. “That stupid, stupid cunt… why didn’t she just stick to our story? And… no, wait…” he said, with the air of a man suddenly making a welcome connection, and to Robin’s mingled consternation and relief, he withdrew the gun from where it had been almost touching her, and laughed softly. “That’s why she hid the necklace on Sunday afternoon. She gave me some fucking guff about not wanting Izzy or Fizzy to sneak in and take it… well, she’s stupid, but she’s not hopeless. Unless someone checks the stones, we’re still in the clear… And they’ll have to take apart the stable block to find it. OK,” he said, as though talking to himself, “OK, I think all of that’s recoverable.

“Is that it, Venetia? Is that all you’ve got?”

“No,” said Robin. “There’s Flick Purdue.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Yes, you do. You picked her up months ago, and fed her the truth about the gallows, knowing she’d pass the information to Jimmy.”

“What a busy boy I’ve been,” said Raphael lightly. “So what? Flick won’t admit to shagging a Tory minister’s son, especially if Jimmy might find out. She’s as besotted with him as Kinvara is with me.”

“That’s true, she didn’t want to admit it, but somebody must have spotted you creeping out of her flat next morning. She tried to pretend you were an Indian waiter.”

Robin thought she saw a minute wince of surprise and displeasure. Raphael’s amour propre was wounded at the thought that he could have been so described.

“OK,” he said, after a moment or two, “OK, let’s see… what if it was a waiter Flick shagged, but she’s maliciously claiming it was me because of her class warrior bullshit and the grudge her boyfriend’s got against my family?”

“You stole her flatmate’s credit card out of her bag in the kitchen.”

She could tell by the tightening of his mouth that he had not expected this. Doubtless he had thought that given Flick’s lifestyle, suspicion would fall on anyone passing through her tiny, overcrowded flat, and perhaps especially Jimmy.

“Proof?” he said again.

“Flick can provide the date you were at her flat and if Laura testifies her credit card went missing that night—”

“But with no firm evidence I was ever there—”

“How did Flick find out about the gallows? We know she told Jimmy about them, not the other way around.”

“Well, it can’t have been me, can it? I’m the only member of the family who never knew.”

“You knew everything. Kinvara had the full story from your father, and she passed it all to you.”

“No,” said Raphael, “I think you’ll find Flick heard about the gallows from the Butcher brothers. I’m reliably informed that one of them lives in London now. Yeah, I think I’ve heard a rumor one of them shagged their mate Jimmy’s girlfriend. And believe me, the Butcher brothers aren’t going to come over well in court, pair of shifty oiks driving gallows around under cover of darkness. I’m going to look a lot more plausible and presentable than Flick and the Butchers if this comes to court, I really am.”

“The police have got phone records,” Robin persisted. “They know about an anonymous call to Geraint Winn, which was made around the time Flick found out about the gallows. We think you tipped off Winn anonymously about Samuel Murape. You knew Winn had a grudge against the Chiswells. Kinvara told you everything.”

“I don’t know anything about that phone call, Your Honor,” said Raphael, “and I’m very sorry that my late brother was a prize cunt to Rhiannon Winn, but that’s nothing to do with me.”

“We think you made that threatening call to Izzy’s office, the first day you were there, talking about people pissing themselves as they die,” said Robin, “and we think it was your idea for Kinvara to pretend she kept hearing intruders in the grounds. Everything was designed to create as many witnesses as possible to the fact that your father had reason to be anxious and paranoid, that he might crack under extreme pressure—”

“He was under extreme pressure. He was being blackmailed by Jimmy Knight. Geraint Winn was trying to force him out of his job. Those aren’t lies, they’re facts and they’re going to be pretty sensational in a courtroom, especially once the Samuel Murape story gets out.”

“Except that you made stupid, avoidable mistakes.”

He sat up straighter and leaned forwards, his elbow sliding a few inches, so that the nozzle of the gun grew larger. His eyes, which had been smudges in the shadow, became clearly defined again, onyx black and white. Robin wondered how she had ever thought him handsome.

“What mistakes?”

As he said it, Robin saw, out of the corner of her eye, a flashing blue light glide over the bridge just visible through the window to her right, which was blocked from Raphael’s view by the side of the boat. The light vanished and the bridge was reabsorbed by the deepening darkness.

“For one thing,” said Robin carefully, “it was a mistake to keep meeting Kinvara in the lead-up to the murder. She kept pretending she’d forgotten where she was meeting your father, didn’t she? Just to get a couple of minutes with you, just to see you and check up on you—”

“That’s not proof.”

“Kinvara was followed to Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons on her birthday.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Who by?”

“Jimmy Knight. Flick’s confirmed it. Jimmy thought your father was with Kinvara and wanted to confront him publicly about not giving him his money. Obviously, your father wasn’t there, so Jimmy went home and wrote an angry blog about how High Tories spend their money, mentioning Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons by name.”

“Well, unless he saw me sneaking into Kinvara’s hotel suite,” said Raphael, “which he didn’t, because I took fucking good care to make sure nobody did, that’s all supposition, too.”

“All right,” said Robin, “what about the second time you were overheard having sex in the gallery bathroom? That wasn’t Francesca. You were with Kinvara.”

“Prove it.”

“Kinvara was in town that day, buying lachesis pills and pretending she was angry that your father was still seeing you, which was all part of the cover story that she hated you. She rang your father to check that he was having lunch elsewhere. Strike overheard that call. What you and Kinvara didn’t realize was that your father was having lunch only a hundred yards away from where you were having sex.

“When your father forced his way into the bathroom, he found a tube of lachesis pills on the floor. That’s why he nearly had a heart attack. He knew that’s what she’d come to town for. He knew who’d just been having sex with you in the bathroom.”

Raphael’s smile was more of a grimace.

“Yeah, that was a fuck-up. The day he came into our office, talking about Lachesis—‘knows when everyone’s number’s up’—I realized later, he was trying to put the frighteners on me, wasn’t he? I didn’t know what the hell he was on about at the time. But when you and your crippled boss mentioned the pills at Chiswell House, Kinvara twigged: they fell out of her pocket while we were screwing. We hadn’t known what first tipped him off… it was only after I heard he was ringing Le Manoir about Freddie’s money clip that I knew he must have realized something was going on. Then he invited me over to Ebury Street and I knew he was about to confront me about it, and we needed to get a move on, killing him.”

The entirely matter-of-fact way he discussed patricide chilled Robin. He might have been talking about wallpapering a room.

“He must’ve been planning to produce those pills during his big ‘I know you’re fucking my wife’ speech… why didn’t I spot them on the floor? I tried to put the room straight afterwards, but they must’ve rolled out of his pocket or something… it’s harder than you’d think,” said Raphael, “tidying up around a corpse you’ve just dispatched. I was surprised, actually, how much it affected me.”

She had never heard his narcissism so clearly. His interest and sympathy was entirely for himself. His dead father was nothing.

“The police have taken statements from Francesca and her parents, now,” Robin said. “She absolutely denies being in the bathroom with you that second time. Her parents never believed her, but—”

“They didn’t believe her because she’s even fucking dumber than Kinvara.”

“The police are combing through security camera footage from the shops she says she was in, while you and Kinvara were in the bathroom.”

“OK,” said Raphael, “well, worst comes to the worst, and they can prove she wasn’t with me, I might have to come clean about the fact that it was another young lady I was with in the bathroom that day, whose reputation I’ve been chivalrously trying to defend.”

“Will you really be able to find a woman to lie for you, in court, on a murder charge?” asked Robin, in disbelief.

“The woman who owns this houseboat is mad for me,” said Raphael softly. “We had a thing going before I went inside. She visited me in jail and everything. She’s in rehab right now. Crazy bitch, loves drama. Thinks she’s an artist. She drinks too much, she’s a real pain in the arse, actually, but she fucks like a rabbit. She never bothered taking the spare key to this place off me, and she keeps a key to her mummy’s house in that drawer over there—”

“It wouldn’t happen to be her mother’s house where you had the helium, tubing and gloves delivered, would it?” asked Robin.

Raphael blinked. He hadn’t expected that.

“You needed an address that didn’t seem connected to you. You made sure it was delivered while the owners were away, or at work, then you could let yourself in, collect the failed delivery card…”

“Pick it up, disguised and get it couriered it off to dear old Dad’s house, yeah.”

“And Flick took delivery and Kinvara made sure she hid it from your father until it was time to kill him?”

“That’s right,” said Raphael. “You pick up a lot of tips in jail. Fake IDs, vacant buildings, empty addresses, you can do a hell of a lot with them. Once you’re dead—” Robin’s scalp prickled—“nobody’s going to connect me with any of the addresses.”

“The owner of this barge—”

“Is going to be telling everyone she was having sex with me in Drummond’s bathroom, remember? She’s on my team, Venetia,” he said quietly, “so it’s not looking good for you, is it?”

“There were other mistakes,” said Robin, her mouth dry.

“Like?”

“You told Flick your father needed a cleaner.”

“Yeah, because it makes her and Jimmy look fishy as hell, that she wheedled her way into my father’s house. The jury’ll be focused on that, not how she found out he wanted a cleaner. I’ve already told you, she’s going to look like a grubby little tart with a grudge in the dock. That’s just one more lie.”

“But she stole a note from your father, a note he wrote while he was trying to check Kinvara’s story with Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. I found it in her bathroom. She’d lied, told him her mother was going to the hotel with her. They’d never normally give out information about guests, but he was a government minister and he’d previously been there, so we think he managed to trick them into agreeing that they could remember the family vehicle there and that it was a shame her mother hadn’t made it. He made a note of the suite Kinvara was in, probably pretending he’d forgotten it, and he was trying to get hold of the bill, to see whether there was any sign of two lots of breakfast or dinner, I suppose. When the prosecution produce the note and the bill in court—”

“You found that note, did you?” said Raphael.

Robin’s stomach turned over. She had not meant to give Raphael another reason to shoot her.

“I knew I’d underestimated you after that dinner we had, at Nam Long Le Shaker,” said Raphael. It wasn’t a compliment. His eyes were narrowed, his nostrils flared in dislike. “You were a mess, but you were still asking fucking inconvenient questions. You and your boss were cozier with the police than I expected, too. And even after I tipped off the Mail—”

“That was you,” said Robin, wondering how she had never realized. “You put the press and Mitch Patterson back on us…”

“I told them you’d left your husband for Strike, but that he was still shagging his ex. Izzy had given me that bit of gossip. I thought you needed slowing down, you two, because you kept poking away at my alibi… but after I’ve shot you,”—an icy chill ran the length of Robin’s body—“your boss’ll be busy answering the press’s questions about how your body ended up in a canal, won’t he? I think that’s called killing two birds with one stone.”

“Even if I’m dead,” said Robin, her voice as steady as she could make it, “there’ll still be your father’s note and the hotel’s testimony—”

“OK, so he was worried about what Kinvara was doing at Le Manoir,” said Raphael roughly. “I’ve just told you, nobody saw me on the premises. The stupid cow did ask for two glasses with the champagne, but she could’ve been with someone else.”

“You aren’t going to have any opportunity to cook up a new story with her,” said Robin, her mouth drier than ever, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth as she tried to sound calm and confident. “She’s in custody now, she isn’t as clever as you—and you made other mistakes,” Robin rushed on, “stupid ones, because you had to enact the plan in a hurry once you realized your father was onto you.”

“Like?”

“Like Kinvara taking away the packaging on the amitriptyline, after she’d doctored the orange juice. Kinvara forgetting to tell you the trick to closing the front door properly. And,” said Robin, aware that she was playing her very last card, “her throwing the front door key to you, at Paddington.”

In the wordless space that now stretched between them, Robin thought she heard footsteps close at hand. She didn’t dare look out of the window in case she alerted Raphael, who appeared too appalled by what she had just said to take in anything else.

“‘Throwing the front door key to me?’” repeated Raphael, with fragile bravado. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The keys to Ebury Street are restricted, almost impossible to copy. The pair of you only had access to one: hers, because your father was suspicious of you both by the time he died, and he’d made sure the spare was out of your reach.

“She needed the key to get into the house and doctor the orange juice and you needed it to go in early next morning and suffocate him. So you cobbled together a plan at the last minute: she’d pass you the key at a prearranged spot at Paddington, where you’d be disguised as a homeless person.

“You were caught on camera. The police have got people enlarging and clarifying the image right now. They think you must have bought things from a charity shop in haste, which might produce another useful witness. The police are now combing CCTV footage for your movements from Paddington onwards.”

Raphael said nothing at all for nearly a minute. His eyes were moving fractionally from left to right, as he tried to find a loophole, an escape.

“That’s… inconvenient,” he said finally. “I didn’t think I was on camera, sitting there.”

Robin thought she could see hope slipping away from him now. Quietly, she continued, “As per your plan, Kinvara arrived home in Oxfordshire, called Drummond and left a message that she wanted the necklace valued, to set up that whole back-up story.

“Early next morning, another burner phone was used to call both Geraint Winn and Jimmy Knight. Both were lured out of their houses, presumably with a promise of information on Chiswell. That was you, making sure they were in the frame if murder was suspected.”

“No proof,” muttered Raphael automatically, but still his eyes darted this way and that, searching for invisible lifelines.

“You let yourself into the house very early in the morning, expecting to find your father almost comatose after his early morning orange juice, but—”

“He was out of it, at first,” said Raphael. His eyes had become glazed, and Robin knew that he was remembering what had happened, watching it, inside his head. “He was slumped on the sofa, very groggy. I walked straight past him into the kitchen, opened my box of toys—”

For a sliver of a second, Robin saw again the shrink-wrapped head, the gray hair pressed around the face so that only the gaping black hole of the mouth was visible. Raphael had done that; Raphael, who currently had a gun pointing at her face.

“—but while I’m arranging everything, the old bastard wakes up, sees me fixing the tubing onto the helium canister and comes back to fucking life. He staggers up, grabs Freddie’s sword off the wall and tries to fight, but I got it off him. Bent the blade doing it. Forced him down into the chair—he was still struggling—and—”

Raphael mimed putting the bag over his father’s head.

“Caput.”

“And then,” said Robin, her mouth still dry, “you made those phone calls from his phone that were supposed to establish your alibi. Kinvara had told you his passcode, of course. And you left, without closing the door properly.”

Robin didn’t know whether she was imagining movement out of the porthole to her left. She kept her eyes fixed on Raphael, and the slightly wavering gun.

“Loads of this is circumstantial,” he muttered, eyes still glazed. “Flick and Francesca have both got motives for lying about me… I didn’t end it well with Francesca… I might still have a chance… I might…”

“There’s no chance, Raff,” said Robin. “Kinvara isn’t going to lie for you much longer. When they tell her the truth about ‘Mare Mourning,’ she’s going to put everything together for the first time. I think you insisted she move it into to the drawing room, to protect it from the damp in the spare room. How did you manage that? Did you make up some rubbish about it reminding you of her dead mare? Then she’s going to realize you started up the affair again once you knew its true value, and that all the dreadful things you said to her when you ended it were true. And worst of all,” said Robin, “she’s going to realize that when the two of you heard intruders in the grounds—real ones, this time—you let the woman you were supposedly madly in love with walk out into the grounds in the dark, in her nightdress, while you stayed behind to protect—”

“All right!” he shouted suddenly and he advanced the gun nozzle until it pressed into her forehead again. “Stop fucking talking, will you?”

Robin sat quite still. She imagined how it would feel when he pressed the trigger. He had said he would shoot her through a cushion to muffle the sound, but perhaps he had forgotten, perhaps he was about to lose control.

“D’you know what it’s like in jail?” he asked.

She tried to say “no,” but the sound wouldn’t come.

“The noise,” he whispered. “The smell. The ugly, dumb people—like animals, some of them. Worse than animals. I never knew there were people like it. The places they make you eat and shit. Watching your back all the time, waiting for violence. The clanging, the yelling and the fucking squalor. I’d rather be buried alive. I won’t do it again…

“I was going to have a dream life. I was going to be free, totally free. I’d never have to kowtow to the likes of fucking Drummond again. There’s a villa on Capri I’ve had my eye on for a long time. View out over the Gulf of Naples. Then I’d have a nice pad in London… new car, once my fucking ban’s lifted… imagine walking along and knowing you could buy anything, do anything. A dream life…

“Couple of little problems to get out of the way before I was completely sorted… Flick, easy: late night, dark road, knife in the ribs, victim of street crime.

“And Kinvara… once she’d made a will in my favor, after a few years, she’d have broken her neck riding an unsuitable horse or drowned out in Italy… she’s a terrible swimmer…

“And then all of them could fuck themselves, couldn’t they? The Chiswells, my whore of a mother. I’d need nothing from anyone. I’d have everything…

“But that’s all gone,” he said. Dark-skinned though he was, she saw that he had turned ashen, the dark shadows beneath his eyes hollow in the half-light. “It’s all gone. You know what, Venetia? I’m going to blow your fucking brains out, because I’ve decided I don’t like you. I think I’d like to see your fucking head explode before mine comes off—”

“Raff—”

“Raff… Raff… ” he bleated, imitating her, “why do women all think they’re different? You’re not different, none of you.”

He was reaching for the limp cushion beside him.

“We’ll go together. I’d like to arrive in hell with a sexy girl on my ar—”

With a great splintering of wood, the door crashed open. Raphael spun around, pointing a gun at the large figure that had just fallen inside. Robin launched herself over the table to grab his arm, but Raphael knocked her backwards with his elbow and she felt blood spurt as her lip split.

“Raff, no, don’t—don’t!”

He had stood up, stooped in the cramped space, the barrel of the gun in his mouth. Strike, who had shouldered in the door, stood panting feet away from him, and behind Strike was Wardle.

“Go on and do it, then, you cowardly little fuck,” said Strike.

Robin wanted to protest, but couldn’t make a noise.

There was a small, metallic click.

“Took out the bullets at Chiswell House, you stupid bastard,” said Strike, hobbling forwards and smacking the revolver out of Raphael’s mouth. “Not half as clever as you thought you were, eh?”

There was a great ringing in Robin’s ears. Raphael was spitting oaths in English and Italian, screaming threats, thrashing and twisting as Strike helped bend him over the table for Wardle to cuff him, but she stumbled away from the group as though in a dream, backwards towards the kitchen area of the galley, where pots and pans were hanging and white kitchen roll sat, ludicrously ordinary, beside a tiny sink. She could feel her lip swelling where Raphael had hit her. She tore off some kitchen roll, ran it under the cold tap and pressed it to her bleeding mouth, while through the porthole she watched uniformed officers hurrying through the black gates, taking possession of the gun and of the struggling Raphael, whom Wardle had just dragged onto the bank.

She had just been held at gunpoint. Nothing seemed real. Now the police were stomping in and out of the barge, but it was all noise and echo, and now she realized that Strike was standing beside her, and he seemed the only person with any reality.

“How did you know?” she asked thickly, through the cold wodge of tissue.

“Twigged five minutes after you left. The last three digits on that number you showed me on those supposed texts from Matthew were the same as one of the burner phone numbers. Went after you but you were already gone. Layborn sent panda cars out and I’ve been calling you nonstop ever since. Why didn’t you pick up?”

“My phone was on silent in my bag. Now it’s in the canal.”

She craved a stiff drink. Maybe, she thought vaguely, there really was a bar somewhere nearby… but of course, she wouldn’t be allowed to go to a bar. She was facing hours back at New Scotland Yard. They would need a long statement. She would have to relive the last hour in detail. She felt exhausted.

“How did you know I was here?”

“Called Izzy and asked if Raphael knew anyone in the vicinity of that fake address he was trying to get you to. She told me he’d had some posh druggie girlfriend who owned a barge. He was running out of places to go. The police have been watching his flat for the last two days.”

“And you knew the gun was empty?”

“I hoped it was empty,” he corrected her. “For all I knew, he’d checked it and reloaded.”

He groped in his pocket. His fingers shook slightly as he lit a cigarette. He inhaled, then said:

“You did bloody well to keep him talking that long, Robin, but next time you get a call from an unknown number, you bloody well call it back and check who’s on the other end. And don’t you ever—ever—tell a suspect anything about your personal life again.”

“Would it be OK if I have two minutes,” she asked, pressing the cold kitchen roll against her swollen and bleeding lip, “to enjoy not being dead, before you start?”

Strike blew out a jet of smoke.

“Yeah, fair enough,” he said, and pulled her clumsily into a one-armed hug.