Lethal White

With a faint sense of celebration, Strike knocked on the door of Pratt’s.

A petite, motherly woman opened up. Her prominent bust and alert, bright-eyed mien put him in mind of a robin or a wren. When she spoke, he caught a trace of the West Country.

“You’ll be Mr. Strike. The minister’s not here yet. Come along in.”

He followed her across the threshold into a hall through which could be glimpsed an enormous billiard table. Rich crimsons, greens and dark wood predominated. The stewardess, who he assumed was Georgina, led him down a set of steep stairs, which Strike took carefully, maintaining a firm grip on the banister.

The stairs led to a cozy basement. The ceiling had sunk so low that it appeared partially supported by a large dresser on which sundry porcelain platters were displayed, the topmost ones half embedded into the plaster.

“We aren’t very big,” she said, stating the obvious. “Six hundred members, but we can only serve fourteen a meal at a time. Would you like a drink, Mr. Strike?”

He declined, but accepted an invitation to sit down in one of the leather chairs grouped around an aged cribbage board.

The small space was divided by an archway into sitting and dining areas. Two places had been set at the long table in the other half of the room, beneath small, shuttered windows. The only other person in the basement apart from himself and Georgina was a white-coated chef working in a minuscule kitchen a mere yard from where Strike sat. The chef bade Strike welcome in a French accent, then continued carving cold roast beef.

Here was the very antithesis of the smart restaurants where Strike tailed errant husbands and wives, where the lighting was chosen to complement glass and granite, and sharp-tongued restaurant critics sat like stylish vultures on uncomfortable modern chairs. Pratt’s was dimly lit. Brass picture lights dotted walls papered in dark red, which was largely obscured by stuffed fish in glass cases, hunting prints and political cartoons. In a blue and white tiled niche along one side of the room sat an ancient iron stove. The china plates, the threadbare carpet, the table bearing its homely load of ketchup and mustard all contributed to an ambience of cozy informality, as though a bunch of aristocratic boys had dragged all the things they liked about the grown-up world—its games, its drink and its trophies—down into the basement where Nanny would dole out smiles, comfort and praise.

Twelve o’clock arrived, but Chiswell did not. “Georgina,” however, was friendly and informative about the club. She and her husband, the chef, lived on the premises. Strike could not help but reflect that this must be some of the most expensive real estate in London. To maintain the little club, which, Georgina told him, had been established in 1857, was costing somebody a lot of money.

“The Duke of Devonshire owns it, yes,” said Georgina brightly. “Have you seen our betting book?”

Strike turned the pages of the heavy, leather-bound tome, where long ago wagers had been recorded. In a gigantic scrawl dating back to the seventies, he read: “Mrs. Thatcher to form the next government. Bet: one lobster dinner, the lobster to be larger than a man’s erect cock.”

He was grinning over this when a bell rang overhead.

“That’ll be the minister,” said Georgina, bustling away upstairs.

Strike replaced the betting book on its shelf and returned to his seat. From overhead came heavy footsteps and then, descending the stairs, the same irascible, impatient voice he had heard on Monday.

“—no, Kinvara, I can’t. I’ve just told you why, I’ve got a lunch meeting… no, you can’t… Five o’clock, then, yes… yes… yes!… Goodbye!”

A pair of large, black-shod feet descended the stairs until Jasper Chiswell emerged into the basement, peering around with a truculent air. Strike rose from his armchair.

“Ah,” said Chiswell, scrutinizing Strike from beneath his heavy eyebrows. “You’re here.”

Jasper Chiswell wore his sixty-eight years reasonably well. A big, broad man, though round-shouldered, he still had a full head of gray hair which, implausible though it seemed, was his own. This hair made Chiswell an easy target for cartoonists, because it was coarse, straight and rather long, standing out from his head in a manner that suggested a wig or, so the unkind suggested, a chimney brush. To the hair was added a large red face, small eyes and a protuberant lower lip, which gave him the air of an overgrown baby perpetually on the verge of a tantrum.

“M’wife,” he told Strike, brandishing the mobile still in his hand. “Come up to town without warning. Sulking. Thinks I can drop everything.”

Chiswell stretched out a large, sweaty hand, which Strike shook, then eased off the heavy overcoat he was wearing despite the heat of the day. As he did so, Strike noticed the pin on his frayed regimental tie. The uninitiated might think it a rocking horse, but Strike recognized it at once as the White Horse of Hanover.

“Queen’s Own Hussars,” said Strike, nodding at it as both men sat down.

“Yerse,” said Chiswell. “Georgina, I’ll have some of that sherry you gave me when I was in with Alastair. You?” he barked at Strike.

“No thanks.”

Though nowhere near as dirty as Billy Knight, Chiswell did not smell very fresh.

“Yerse, Queen’s Own Hussars. Aden and Singapore. Happy days.”

He didn’t seem happy at the moment. His ruddy skin had an odd, plaque-like appearance close up. Dandruff lay thick in the roots of his coarse hair and large patches of sweat spread around the underarms of his blue shirt. The minister bore the unmistakable appearance, not unusual in Strike’s clients, of a man under intense strain, and when his sherry arrived, he swallowed most of it in a single gulp.

“Shall we move through?” he suggested, and without waiting for an answer he barked, “We’ll eat straight away, Georgina.”

Once they were seated at the table, which had a stiff, snowy-white tablecloth like those at Robin’s wedding, Georgina brought them thick slices of cold roast beef and boiled potatoes. It was English nursery food, plain and unfussy, and none the worse for it. Only when the stewardess had left them in peace, in the dim dining room full of oil paintings and more dead fish, did Chiswell speak again.

“You were at Jimmy Knight’s meeting,” he said, without preamble. “A plainclothes officer there recognized you.”

Strike nodded. Chiswell shoved a boiled potato in his mouth, masticated angrily, and swallowed before saying:

“I don’t know who’s paying you to get dirt on Jimmy Knight, or what you may already have on him, but whoever it is and whatever you’ve got, I’m prepared to pay double for the information.”

“I haven’t got anything on Jimmy Knight, I’m afraid,” said Strike. “Nobody was paying me to be at the meeting.”

Chiswell looked stunned.

“But then, why were you there?” he demanded. “You’re not telling me you intend to protest against the Olympics?”

So plosive was the “p” of “protest” that a small piece of potato flew out of his mouth across the table.

“No,” said Strike. “I was trying to find somebody I thought might be at the meeting. They weren’t.”

Chiswell attacked his beef again as though it had personally wronged him. For a while, the only sounds were those of their knives and forks scraping the china. Chiswell speared the last of his boiled potatoes, put it whole into his mouth, let his knife and fork fall with a clatter onto his plate and said:

“I’d been thinking of hiring a detective before I heard you were watching Knight.”

Strike said nothing. Chiswell eyed him suspiciously.

“You have the reputation of being very good.”

“Kind of you to say so,” said Strike.

Chiswell continued to glare at Strike with a kind of furious desperation, as though wondering whether he dared hope that the detective would not prove yet another disappointment in a life beset with them.

“I’m being blackmailed, Mr. Strike,” he said abruptly. “Blackmailed by a pair of men who have come tog

ether in a temporary, though probably unstable, alliance. One of them is Jimmy Knight.”

“I see,” said Strike.

He, too, put his knife and fork together. Georgina appeared to know by some psychic process that Strike and Chiswell had eaten their fill of the main course. She arrived to clear away, reappearing with a treacle tart. Only once she had retired to the kitchen, and both men had helped themselves to large slices of pudding, did Chiswell resume his story.

“There’s no need for sordid details,” he said, with an air of finality. “All you need to know is that Jimmy Knight is aware that I did something that I would not wish to see shared with the gentlemen of the fourth estate.”

Strike said nothing, but Chiswell seemed to think his silence had an accusatory flavor, because he added sharply:

“No crime was committed. Some might not like it, but it wasn’t illegal at the—but that’s by the by,” said Chiswell, and took a large gulp of water. “Knight came to me a couple of months ago and asked for forty thousand pounds in hush money. I refused to pay. He threatened me with exposure, but as he didn’t appear to have any proof of his claim, I dared hope he would be unable to follow through on the threat.

“No press story resulted, so I concluded that I was right in thinking he had no proof. He returned a few weeks later and asked for half the former sum. Again, I refused.

“It was then, thinking to increase the pressure on me, I assume, that he approached Geraint Winn.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know who—?”

“Della Winn’s husband.”

“Della Winn, the Minister for Sport?” said Strike, startled.

“Yes, of course Della-Winn-the-Minister-for-Sport,” snapped Chiswell.

The Right Honorable Della Winn, as Strike knew well, was a Welshwoman in her early sixties who had been blind since birth. No matter their party affiliation, people tended to admire the Liberal Democrat, who had been a human rights lawyer before standing for Parliament. Usually photographed with her guide dog, a pale yellow Labrador, she had been much in evidence in the press of late, her current bailiwick being the Paralympics. She had visited Selly Oak while Strike had been in the hospital, readjusting to the loss of his leg in Afghanistan. He had been left with a favorable impression of her intelligence and her empathy. Of her husband, Strike knew nothing.

“I don’t know whether Della knows what Geraint’s up to,” said Chiswell, spearing a piece of treacle tart and continuing to speak while he chewed it. “Probably, but keeping her nose clean. Plausible deniability. Can’t have the sainted Della involved in blackmail, can we?”

“Her husband’s asked you for money?” asked Strike, incredulous.

“Oh no, no. Geraint wants to force me from office.”

“Any particular reason why?” said Strike.

“There’s an enmity between us dating back many years, rooted in a wholly baseless—but that’s irrelevant,” said Chiswell, with an angry shake of the head. “Geraint approached me, ‘hoping it isn’t true,’ and ‘offering me a chance to explain.’ He’s a nasty, twisted little man who’s spent his life holding his wife’s handbag and answering her telephone calls. Naturally he’s relishing the idea of wielding some actual power.”

Chiswell took a swig of sherry.

“So, as you can see, I’m in something of a cleft stick, Mr. Strike. Even if I were minded to pay off Jimmy Knight, I still have to contend with a man who wants my disgrace, and who may well be able to lay hands on proof.”

“How could Winn get proof?”

Chiswell took another large mouthful of treacle tart and glanced over his shoulder to check that Georgina remained safely in the kitchen.

“I’ve heard,” he muttered, and a fine mist of pastry flew from the slack lips, “that there may be photographs.”

“Photographs?” repeated Strike.

“Winn can’t have them, of course. If he had, it would all be over. But he might be able to find a way of getting hold of them. Yerse.”

He shoved the last piece of tart into his mouth, then said:

“Of course, there’s a chance the photographs don’t incriminate me. There are no distinguishing marks, so far as I’m aware.”

Strike’s imagination frankly boggled. He yearned to ask, “Distinguishing marks on what, Minister?” but refrained.

“It all happened six years ago,” continued Chiswell. “I’ve been over and over the damn thing in my head. There were others involved who might have talked, but I doubt it, I doubt it very much. Too much to lose. No, it’s all going to come down to what Knight and Winn can dig up. I strongly suspect that if he gets hold of the photographs, Winn will go straight to the press. I don’t think that would be Knight’s first choice. He simply wants money.

“So here I am, Mr. Strike, a fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi. I’ve lived with this hanging over me for weeks now. It hasn’t been enjoyable.”

He peered at Strike through his tiny eyes, and the detective was irresistibly put in mind of a mole, blinking up at a hovering spade that waited to crush it.

“When I heard you were at that meeting I assumed you were investigating Knight and had some dirt on him. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way out of this diabolical situation is to find something that I can use against each of them, before they get their hands on those photographs. Fight fire with fire.”

“Blackmail with blackmail?” said Strike.

“I don’t want anything from them except to leave me the hell alone,” snapped Chiswell. “Bargaining chips, that’s all I want. I acted within the law,” he said firmly, “and in accordance with my conscience.”

Chiswell was not a particularly likable man, but Strike could well imagine that the ongoing suspense of waiting for public exposure would be torture, especially to a man who had already endured his fair share of scandals. Strike’s scant research on his prospective client the previous evening had unearthed gleeful accounts of the affair that had ended his first marriage, of the fact that his second wife had spent a week in a clinic for “nervous exhaustion” and of the grisly drug-induced car crash in which his younger son had killed a young mother.

“This is a very big job, Mr. Chiswell,” said Strike. “It’ll take two or three people to thoroughly investigate Knight and Winn, especially if there’s time pressure.”

“I don’t care what it costs,” said Chiswell. “I don’t care if you have to put your whole agency on it.

“I refuse to believe there isn’t anything dodgy about Winn, sneaking little toad that he is. There’s something funny about them as a couple. She, the blind angel of light,” Chiswell’s lip curled, “and he, her potbellied henchman, always scheming and backstabbing and grubbing up every freebie he can get. There must be something there. Must be.

“As for Knight, Commie rabble rouser, there’s bound to be something the police haven’t yet caught up with. He was always a tearaway, a thoroughly nasty piece of work.”

“You knew Jimmy Knight before he started trying to blackmail you?” asked Strike.

“Oh, yes,” said Chiswell. “The Knights are from my constituency. The father was an odd-job man who did a certain amount of work for our family. I never knew the mother. I believe she died before the three of them moved into Steda Cottage.”

“I see,” said Strike.

He was recalling Billy’s anguished words, “I seen a child strangled and nobody believes me,” the nervous movement from nose to chest as he made his slipshod half-cross, and the prosaic, precise detail of the pink blanket in which the dead child had been buried.

“There’s something I think I should tell you before we discuss terms, Mr. Chiswell,” said Strike. “I was at the CORE meeting because I was trying to find Knight’s younger brother. His name’s Billy.”

The crease between Chiswell’s myopic eyes deepened a fraction.

“Yerse, I remember that there were two of them, but Jimmy was the elder by a considerable amount—a decade or more, I would guess. I haven’

t seen—Billy, is it?—in many years.”

“Well, he’s seriously mentally ill,” said Strike. “He came to me last Monday with a peculiar story, then bolted.”

Chiswell waited, and Strike was sure he detected tension.

“Billy claims,” said Strike, “that he witnessed the strangling of a small child when he was very young.”

Chiswell did not recoil, horrified; he did not bluster or storm. He did not demand whether he was being accused, or ask what on earth that had to do with him. He responded with none of the flamboyant defenses of the guilty man, and yet Strike could have sworn that to Chiswell, this was not a new story.

“And who does he claim strangled the child?” he asked, fingering the stem of his wine glass.

“He didn’t tell me—or wouldn’t.”

“You think this is what Knight is blackmailing me over? Infanticide?” asked Chiswell roughly.

“I thought you ought to know why I went looking for Jimmy,” said Strike.

“I have no deaths on my conscience,” said Jasper Chiswell forcefully. He swallowed the last of his water. “One cannot,” he added, replacing the empty glass on the table, “be held accountable for unintended consequences.”

10

I have believed that we two together would be equal to it.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

The detective and the minister emerged from 14 Park Place an hour later and walked the few yards that took them back to St. James’s Street. Chiswell had become less curmudgeonly and gnomic over coffee, relieved, Strike suspected, to have put in train some action that might lift from him what had clearly become an almost intolerable burden of dread and suspense. They had agreed terms and Strike was pleased with the deal, because this promised to be a better-paid and more challenging job than the agency had been given in a while.