Lethal White

She and Matthew had just eaten a takeaway curry off their knees while watching the news. He had arrived home late and tired; she didn’t need another argument.

Picking up the mobile, she headed out through the French doors onto the patio that had served as the smoking area for the party. After making sure that the doors were completely closed, she answered.

“Hi. Everything OK?”

“Fine. All right to talk for a moment?”

“Yes,” said Robin, leaning against the garden wall, and watching a moth banging fruitlessly against the bright glass, trying to enter the house. “How did it go with Dawn Clancy?”

“Nothing usable,” said Strike. “I thought I might have a lead, some Jewish ex-boss Jimmy had a vendetta against, but I rang the company and the poor bloke died of a stroke last September. Then I got a call from Chiswell just after I left her. He says the Sun’s sniffing around.”

“Yes,” said Robin. “They called his wife.”

“We could’ve done without that,” said Strike, with what Robin felt was considerable understatement. “I wonder who’s tipped off the papers?”

“I’d bet on Winn,” said Robin, remembering the way that Geraint had talked that afternoon, the name-dropping, the self-importance. “He’s just the type to hint to a journalist that there’s a story on Chiswell, even if he hasn’t got proof of it yet. Seriously,” she said again, with no real hope of an answer, “what d’you think Chiswell did?”

“Be nice to know, but it doesn’t really matter,” said Strike, who sounded tired. “We aren’t being paid to get the goods on him. Speaking of which—”

“I haven’t been able to plant the bug yet,” said Robin, anticipating the question. “I hung around as late as possible, but Aamir locked the door after they both left.”

Strike sighed.

“Well, don’t get overeager and balls it up,” he said, “but we’re up against it if the Sun’s involved. Anything you can do. Get in early or something.”

“I will, I’ll try,” said Robin. “I did get something odd about the Winns today, though,” and she told him about the confusion Della had made between herself and one of Chiswell’s real goddaughters, and the story of Rhiannon on the fencing team. Strike seemed only distantly interested.

“Doubt that explains the Winns wanting Chiswell out of office. Anyway—”

“—means before motive,” she said, quoting Strike’s own, oft-repeated words.

“Exactly. Listen, can you meet me after work tomorrow, and we’ll have a proper debrief?”

“All right,” said Robin.

“Barclay’s doing good work, though,” said Strike, as though the thought of it cheered him up. “He’s already well in with Jimmy.”

“Oh,” said Robin. “Good.”

After telling her that he would text the name of a convenient pub, Strike rang off, leaving Robin alone and pensive in the quiet dark of the yard, while stars grew pin-bright overhead.

Barclay’s doing good work, though.

As opposed to Robin, who had found out nothing but an irrelevancy about Rhiannon Winn.

The moth was still fluttering desperately against the sliding doors, frantic to get at the light.

Idiot, Robin thought. It’s better out here.

The ease with which the lie about Vanessa being on the phone had slid out of her mouth ought, she reflected, to have made her feel guilty, but she was merely glad that she had got away with it. As she watched the moth continuing to bang its wings hopelessly against the brilliant glass, Robin remembered what her therapist had said to her during one of the sessions when Robin had dwelled at length on her need to discern where the real Matthew ended and her illusions about him began.

“People change in ten years,” the therapist had responded. “Why does it have to be a question of you being mistaken in Matthew? Perhaps it’s simply that you’ve both changed?”

The following Monday would mark their first wedding anniversary. At Matthew’s suggestion, they were going to spend next weekend at a fancy hotel near Oxford. In a funny kind of way, Robin was looking forward to it, because she and Matthew seemed to get along better these days with a change of scene. Being surrounded by strangers nudged them out of their tendency to bicker. She had told him the story of Ted Heath’s bust turning green, along with several other (to her) interesting facts about the House of Commons. He had maintained a bored expression through all of them, determined to signal his disapproval of the whole venture.

Reaching a decision, she opened the French window and the moth fluttered merrily inside.

“What did Vanessa want?” asked Matthew, his eyes on the news as Robin sat down again. Sarah Shadlock’s stargazer lilies were sitting on a table beside her, still in bloom ten days after they had arrived in the house, and Robin could smell their heady scent even over the curry.

“I picked up her sunglasses by mistake last time we went out,” said Robin, feigning exasperation. “She wants them back, they’re Chanel. I said I’ll meet her before work.”

“Chanel, eh?” said Matthew, with a smile that Robin found patronizing. She knew that he thought he had discovered a weakness in Vanessa, but perhaps he liked her better to think that she valued designer labels and wanted to make sure she got them back.

“I’ll have to leave at six,” said Robin.

“Six?” he said, annoyed. “Christ, I’m knackered, I don’t want to wake up at—”

“I was going to suggest I sleep in the spare room,” Robin said.

“Oh,” said Matthew, mollified. “Yeah, OK. Thanks.”

19

I do not do it willingly—but, enfin—when needs must—Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Robin left the house at a quarter to six the next morning. The sky was a faint blush pink and the morning already warm, justifying her lack of jacket. Her eyes flickered towards the single carved swan as she passed their local pub, but she forced her thoughts back onto the day ahead and not the man she had left behind.

On arrival in Izzy’s corridor an hour later, Robin saw that Geraint’s office door was already open. A swift peek inside showed her an empty room, but Aamir’s jacket hanging on the back of his chair.

Running to Izzy’s office, Robin unlocked it, dashed to her desk, pulled one of the listening devices from the box of Tampax, scooped up a pile of out-of-date agendas as an alibi, then ran back out into the corridor.

As she approached Geraint’s office, she slid off the gold bangle that she had worn for this purpose, and threw it lightly so that it rolled into Geraint’s office.

“Oh damn,” she said out loud.

Nobody responded from inside the office. Robin knocked on the open door, said “hello?” and put her head inside. The room was still empty.

Robin dashed across the room to the double power point just above the skirting board beside Geraint’s desk. Kneeling, she took the listening device out of her bag, unplugged the fan on his desk, pressed the device into place over the dual socket, reinserted the fan’s plug, checked that it worked, then, panting as though she had just sprinted a hundred yards, looked around for her bangle.

“What are you doing?”

Aamir was standing in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, a fresh tea in his hand.

“I did knock,” Robin said, sure that she was bright pink. “I dropped my bangle and it rolled—oh, there it is.”

It was lying just beneath Aamir’s computer chair. Robin scrambled to pick it up.

“It’s my mother’s,” she lied. “I wouldn’t be popular if that went missing.”

She slid the bangle back over her wrist, picked up the papers she had left on Geraint’s desk, smiled as casually as she could manage, then walked out of the office past Aamir, whose eyes, she saw out of the corner of her own, were narrowed in suspicion.

Jubilant, Robin re-entered Izzy’s office. At least she would have some good news for Strike when they met in the pub that evening. Barclay was no longer the only one doing good work. So abs

orbed was she in her thoughts that Robin didn’t realize that there was somebody else in the room until a man said, right behind her: “Who are you?”

The present dissolved. Both of her attackers had lunged at her from behind. With a scream, Robin spun around, ready to fight for her life: the papers flew into the air and her handbag slipped off her shoulder, fell to the floor and burst open, scattering its contents everywhere.

“Sorry!” said the man. “Christ, I’m sorry!”

But Robin was finding it hard to draw breath. There was a thundering in her ears and sweat had broken out all over her body. She bent down to scoop everything back up, trembling so much that she kept dropping things.

Not now. Not now.

He was talking to her, but she couldn’t understand a word. The world was fragmenting again, full of terror and danger, and he was a blur as he handed her eyeliner and a bottle of drops to moisten her contact lenses.

“Oh,” Robin gasped at random. “Great. Excuse me. Bathroom.”

She stumbled to the door. Two people were coming towards her down the corridor, their voices fuzzy and indistinct as they greeted her. Hardly knowing what she responded, she half-ran past them towards the Ladies.

A woman from the Secretary for Health’s office greeted her from the sink where she was applying lipstick. Robin blundered blindly past, locking the cubicle door with fumbling fingers.

It was no use trying to suppress the panic: that only made it fight back, trying to bend her to its will. She must ride it out, as though the fear was a bolting horse, easing it onto a more manageable course. So she stood motionless, palms pressed against the partition walls, speaking to herself inside her head as though she were an animal handler, and her body, in its irrational terror, a frantic prey creature.

You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe…

Slowly, the panic began to ebb, though her heart was still leaping erratically. At last, Robin removed her numb hands from the walls of the cubicle and opened her eyes, blinking in the harsh lights. The bathroom was quiet.

Robin peered out of the cubicle. The woman had left. There was nobody there except her own pale reflection in the mirror. After splashing cold water on her face and patting it dry with paper towels, she readjusted her clear-lensed glasses and left the bathroom.

An argument seemed to be in progress in the office she had just left. Taking a deep breath, she re-entered the room.

Jasper Chiswell turned to glare at her, his wiry mass of gray hair sticking out around his pink face. Izzy was standing behind her desk. The stranger was still there. In her shaken state, Robin would have preferred not to be the focus of three pairs of curious eyes.

“What just happened?” Chiswell demanded of Robin.

“Nothing,” said Robin, feeling cold sweat erupting again under her dress.

“You ran out of the room. Did he—” Chiswell pointed at the dark man, “—do something to you? Make a pass?”

“Wha—? No! I didn’t realize he was in here, that’s all—he spoke and I jumped. And,” she could feel herself blushing harder than ever, “then I needed the loo.”

Chiswell rounded on the dark man.

“So why are you here so early, eh?”

Now, at last, Robin realized that this was Raphael. She had known from the pictures she had found online that this half-Italian was an exotic in a family that was otherwise uniformly blond and very English in appearance, but had been wholly unprepared for how handsome he was in the flesh. His charcoal-gray suit, white shirt and a conventional dark blue spotted tie were worn with an air that none of the other men along the corridor could muster. So dark-skinned as to appear swarthy, he had high cheekbones, almost black eyes, dark hair worn long and floppy, and a wide mouth that, unlike his father’s, had a full upper lip that added vulnerability to his face.

“I thought you liked punctuality, Dad,” he said, raising his arms and letting them fall in a slightly hopeless gesture.

His father turned to Izzy. “Give him something to do.”

Chiswell marched out. Mortified, Robin headed for her desk. Nobody spoke until Chiswell’s footsteps had died away, then Izzy spoke.

“He’s under all kinds of stress just now, Raff, babes. It isn’t you. He’s honestly going berserk about the smallest things.”

“I’m so sorry,” Robin forced herself to say to Raphael. “I completely overreacted.”

“No problem,” he replied, in the kind of accent that is routinely described as “public school.” “For the record, I’m not, in fact, a sex offender.”

Robin laughed nervously.

“You’re the goddaughter I didn’t know about? Nobody tells me anything. Venetia, yeah? I’m Raff.”

“Um—yes—hi.”

They shook hands and Robin retook her seat, busying herself with some pointless paper shuffling. She could feel her color fluctuating.

“It’s just crazy at the moment,” Izzy said, and Robin knew that she was trying, for not entirely unselfish reasons, to persuade Raphael that their father wasn’t as bad to work with as he might appear. “We’re understaffed, we’ve got the Olympics coming up, TTS is constantly going off on Papa—”

“What’s going off on him?” asked Raphael, dropping down into the sagging armchair, loosening his tie and crossing his long legs.

“TTS,” Izzy repeated. “Lean over and put on the kettle while you’re there, Raff, I’m dying for a coffee. TTS. It stands for Tinky the Second. It’s what Fizz and I call Kinvara.”

The many nicknames of the Chiswell family had been explained to Robin during her office interludes with Izzy. Izzy’s older sister Sophia was “Fizzy,” while Sophia’s three children rejoiced in the pet names of “Pringle,” “Flopsy” and “Pong.”

“Why ‘Tinky the Second’?” asked Raff, unscrewing a jar of instant coffee with long fingers. Robin was still very aware of all his movements, though keeping her eyes on her supposed work. “What was Tinky the First?”

“Oh, come on, Raff, you must have heard about Tinky,” said Izzy. “That ghastly Australian nurse Grampy married last time round, when he was getting senile. He blew most of the money on her. He was the second silly old codger she’d married. Grampy bought her a dud racehorse and loads of horrible jewelry. Papa nearly had to go to court to get her out of the house when Grampy died. She dropped dead of breast cancer before it got really expensive, thank God.”

Startled by this sudden callousness, Robin looked up.

“How d’you take it, Venetia?” Raphael asked as he spooned coffee into mugs.

“White, no sugar, please,” said Robin. She thought it best if she maintained a low profile for a while, after her recent incursion into Winn’s office.

“TTS married Papa for his dosh,” Izzy plowed on, “and she’s horse-mad like Tinky. You know she’s got nine now? Nine!”

“Nine what?” said Raphael.

“Horses, Raff!” said Izzy impatiently. “Bloody uncontrollable, bad-mannered, hot-blooded horses that she mollycoddles and keeps as child substitutes and spends all the money on! God, I wish Papa would leave her,” said Izzy. “Pass the biscuit tin, babes.”

He did so. Robin, who could feel him looking at her, maintained the pretense of absorption in her work.

The telephone rang.

“Jasper Chiswell’s office,” said Izzy, trying to prize off the lid of the biscuit tin one-handed, the receiver under her chin. “Oh,” she said, suddenly cool. “Hello, Kinvara. You’ve just missed Papa…”

Grinning at his half-sister’s expression, Raphael took the biscuits from her, opened them and offered the tin to Robin, who shook her head. A torrent of indistinguishable words was pouring from Izzy’s earpiece.

“No… no, he’s gone… he only came over to say hello to Raff…”

The voice at the end of the phone seemed to become more strident.

“Back at DCMS, he’s got a meeting at ten,” said Izzy. “I can’t—well, because he’s very busy, you know, the Olymp—yes?

?? goodbye.”

Izzy slammed the receiver down and struggled out of her jacket.

“She should take another rest cure. The last one doesn’t seem to have done her much good.”

“Izzy doesn’t believe in mental illness,” Raphael told Robin.

He was contemplating her, still slightly curious and, she guessed, trying to draw her out.

“Of course I believe in mental illness, Raff!” said Izzy, apparently stung. “Of course I do! I was sorry for her when it happened—I was, Raff—Kinvara had a stillbirth two years ago,” Izzy explained, “and of course that’s sad, of course it is, and it was quite understandable that she was a bit, you know, afterwards, but—no, I’m sorry,” she said crossly, addressing Raphael, “but she uses it. She does, Raff. She thinks it entitles her to everything she wants and—well, she’d have been a dreadful mother, anyway,” said Izzy defiantly. “She can’t stand not being the center of attention. When she’s not getting enough she starts her little girl act—don’t leave me alone, Jasper, I get scared when you’re not here at night. Telling stupid lies… funny phone calls to the house, men hiding in the flowerbeds, fiddling with the horses.”

“What?” said Raphael, half-laughing, but Izzy cut him short.

“Oh, Christ, look, Papa’s left his briefing papers.”

She hurried out from behind her desk, snatched a leather folder off the top of the radiator and called over her shoulder, “Raff, you can listen to the phone messages and transcribe them for me while I’m gone, OK?”

The heavy wooden door thudded shut behind her, leaving Robin and Raphael alone. If she had been hyperaware of Raphael before Izzy had gone, now he seemed to Robin to fill the entire room, his olive dark eyes on her.

He took Ecstasy and ran his car into a mother of a four-year-old. He barely served a third of his sentence and now his father’s put him on the taxpayer’s payroll.

“How do I do this, then?” asked Raphael, moving behind Izzy’s desk.

“Just press play, I expect,” Robin muttered, sipping her coffee and pretending to make notes on a pad.