Lethal White

And next she understood that it was Chiswell himself who sat in the chair, and that his thick mass of gray hair was pressed flat against his face in the vacuum created by the bag, and that the gaping mouth had sucked the plastic into itself, which was why it gaped so darkly.

35

… the White Horse! In broad daylight!

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Somewhere in the distance, outside the house, a man shouted. He sounded like a workman, and in some part of her brain Robin knew that that was who she had heard when she was expecting to hear “come in.” Nobody had invited her into the house. The door had simply been left ajar.

Now, when it might have been expected, she didn’t panic. There was no threat here, however horrifying the sight of that awful dummy, with the turnip head and the tube, this poor lifeless figure could not hurt her. Knowing that she must check that life was extinct, Robin approached Chiswell and gently touched his shoulder. It was easier, not being able to see his eyes, because of the coarse hair that obscured them like a horse’s forelock. The flesh felt hard beneath his striped shirt and cooler than she had expected.

But then she imagined the gaping mouth speaking, and took several quick steps backwards, until her foot landed with a crunch on something hard on the carpet and she slipped. She had cracked a pale blue plastic tube of pills lying on the carpet. She recognized them as the sort of homeopathic tablets sold in her local chemist.

Taking out her mobile, she called 999 and asked for the police. After explaining that she had found a body and giving the address, she was told that someone would be with her shortly.

Trying not to focus on Chiswell, she took in the frayed curtains, which were of an indeterminate dun color, trimmed with sad little bobbles, the antiquated TV in its faux wood cladding, the patch of darker wallpaper over the mantelpiece where a painting had once hung, and the silver-framed photographs. But the shrink-wrapped head, the rubber piping and the cold glint of the canister seemed to turn all of this everyday normality into pasteboard. The nightmare alone was real.

So Robin turned her mobile onto its camera function and began to take photographs. Putting a lens between herself and the scene mitigated the horror. Slowly and methodically, she documented the scene.

A glass sat on the coffee table in front of the body, with a few millimeters of what looked like orange juice in it. Scattered books and papers lay beside it. There was a piece of thick cream writing paper headed with a red Tudor rose, like a drop of blood, and the printed address of the house in which Robin stood. Somebody had written in a rounded, girlish hand.

Tonight was the final straw. How stupid do you think I am, putting that girl in your office right under my nose? I hope you realize how ridiculous you look, how much people are laughing at you, chasing a girl who’s younger than your daughters.

I’ve had enough. Make a fool of yourself, I don’t care anymore, it’s over.

I’ve gone back to Woolstone. Once I’ve made arrangements for the horses, I’ll clear out for good. Your bloody horrible children will be happy, but will you, Jasper? I doubt it, but it’s too late.

K

As Robin bent to take a picture of the note, she heard the front door snap shut, and with a gasp, she spun around. Strike was standing on the threshold, large, unshaven, still in the suit he had worn to the reception. He was staring at the figure in the chair.

“The police are on their way,” said Robin. “I just called them.”

Strike moved carefully into the room.

“Holy shit.”

He spotted the cracked tube of pills on the floor, stepped over them, and scrutinized the tubing and the plastic-covered face.

“Raff said he was behaving strangely,” said Robin, “but I don’t think he ever dreamed…”

Strike said nothing. He was still examining the body.

“Was that there yesterday evening?”

“What?”

“That,” said Strike, pointing.

There was a semi-circular mark on the back of Chiswell’s hand, dark red against the coarse, pallid skin.

“I can’t remember,” said Robin.

The full shock of what had happened was starting to hit her and she was finding it hard to arrange her thoughts, which floated, unmoored and disconnected, through her head: Chiswell barking through the car window to persuade the police to let Strike into last night’s reception, Chiswell calling Kinvara a stupid bitch, Chiswell demanding that they meet him here this morning. It was unreasonable to expect her to remember the backs of his hands.

“Hmm,” said Strike. He noticed the mobile in Robin’s hand. “Have you taken pictures of everything?”

She nodded.

“All of this?” he asked, waving a hand over the table. “That?” he added, pointing at the cracked pills on the carpet.

“Yes. That was my fault. I trod on them.”

“How did you get in?”

“The door was open. I thought he’d left it on the latch for us,” said Robin. “A workman shouted in the street and I thought it was Chiswell saying ‘come in.’ I was expecting—”

“Stay here,” said Strike.

He left the room. She heard him climbing the stairs and then his heavy footsteps on the ceiling above, but she knew that there was nobody there. She could feel the house’s essential lifelessness, its flimsy cardboard unreality, and, sure enough, Strike returned less than five minutes later, shaking his head.

“Nobody.”

He walked past her through a door that led off the sitting room and, hearing his footsteps hit tile, Robin knew that it was the kitchen.

“Completely empty,” Strike said, re-emerging.

“What happened last night?” Robin asked. “You said something funny happened.”

She wanted to discuss a subject other than the awful form that dominated the room in its grotesque lifelessness.

“Billy called me. He said people were trying to kill him—chasing him. He claimed to be in a phone box in Trafalgar Square. I went to try and find him, but he wasn’t there.”

“Oh,” said Robin.

So he hadn’t been with Charlotte. Even in this extremity, Robin registered the fact, and was glad.

“The hell?” said Strike quietly, looking past her into a corner of the room.

A buckled sword was leaning against the wall in a dark corner. It looked as though it had been forced or stood on and deliberately bent. Strike walked carefully around the body to examine it, but then they heard the police car pulling up outside the house and he straightened up.

“We’ll tell them everything, obviously,” said Strike.

“Yes,” said Robin.

“Except the surveillance devices. Shit—they’ll find them in your office—”

“They won’t,” said Robin. “I took them home yesterday, in case we decided I needed to clear out because of the Sun.”

Before Strike could express admiration for this clear-eyed foresight, somebody rapped hard on the front door.

“Well, it’s been nice while it’s lasted, hasn’t it?” Strike said, with a grim smile, as he moved towards the hall. “Being out of the papers?”

PART TWO

36

What has happened can be hushed up—or at any rate can be explained away…

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

The Chiswell case maintained its singular character even when their client was no more.

As the usual cumbersome procedures and formalities enveloped the corpse, Strike and Robin were escorted from Ebury Street to Scotland Yard, where they were separately interviewed. Strike knew that a tornado of speculation must be whirling through the newsrooms of London at the death of a government minister, and sure enough, by the time they emerged from Scotland Yard six hours later, the colorful details of Chiswell’s private life were being broadcast across TV and radio, while opening the internet browsers on their phones revealed brief news items from news sites, as a tangle of baroque theories spread across

blogs and social media, in which a multitude of cartoonish Chiswells died at the hand of myriad nebulous foes. As he rode in a taxi back to Denmark Street, Strike read how Chiswell the corrupt capitalist had been murdered by the Russian mafia after failing to pay back interest on some seedy, illegal transaction, while Chiswell the defender of solid English values had surely been dispatched by vengeful Islamists after his attempts to resist the rise of sharia law.

Strike returned to his attic flat only to collect his belongings, and decamped to the house of his old friends Nick and Ilsa, respectively a gastroenterologist and a lawyer. Robin, who at Strike’s insistence had taken a taxi directly home to Albury Street, was given a peremptory hug by Matthew, whose tissue-thin pretense of sympathy was worse, Robin felt, than outright fury.

When he heard that Robin had been summoned back to Scotland Yard for further interrogation the next day, Matthew’s self-control crumbled.

“Anyone could have seen this coming!”

“Funny, it seemed to take most people by surprise,” Robin said. She had just ignored her mother’s fourth call of the morning.

“I don’t mean Chiswell killing himself—”

“—it’s pronounced ‘Chizzle’—”

“—I mean you getting yourself into trouble for sneaking around the Houses of Parliament!”

“Don’t worry, Matt. I’ll make sure the police know you were against it. Wouldn’t want your promotion prospects compromised.”

But she wasn’t sure that her second interviewer was a policeman. The softly spoken man in a dark gray suit didn’t reveal whom he worked for. Robin found this gentleman far more intimidating than yesterday’s police, even though they had, at times, been forceful to the point of aggression. Robin told her new interviewer everything she had seen and heard in the Commons, omitting only the strange conversation between Della Winn and Aamir Mallik, which had been captured on the second listening device. As the interaction had taken place behind a closed door after normal working hours, she could only have heard it by using surveillance equipment. Robin assuaged her conscience by telling herself that this conversation could not possibly have anything to do with Chiswell’s death, but squirming feelings of guilt and terror pursued her as she left the building for the second time. So consumed was she by what she hoped was paranoia by this brush with the security services, that she called Strike from a payphone near the Tube, instead of using her mobile.

“I’ve just had another interview. I’m pretty sure it was MI5.”

“Bound to happen,” said Strike, and she took solace from his matter-of-fact tone. “They’ve got to check you out, make sure you are who you claim to be. Isn’t there anywhere you can go, other than home? I can’t believe the press aren’t onto us yet, but it must be imminent.”

“I could go back to Masham, I suppose,” Robin said, “but they’re bound to try there if they want to find me. That’s where they came after the Ripper stuff.”

Unlike Strike, she had no friends of her own into whose anonymous homes she felt she could vanish. All her friends were Matthew’s, too, and she had no doubt that, like her husband, they would be scared of harboring anybody who was of interest to the security services. At a loss as to what to do, she went back to Albury Street.

Yet the press didn’t come for her, even though the newspapers were hardly holding back on the subject of Chiswell. The Mail had already run a double-page spread on the various tribulations and scandals that had plagued Jasper Chiswell’s life. “Once mentioned as a possible prime minister,” “sexy Italian Ornella Serafin, with whom he had the affair that broke up his first marriage,” “voluptuous Kinvara Hanratty, who was thirty years his junior,” “Lieutenant Freddie Chiswell, eldest son, died in the Iraq war his father had staunchly supported,” “youngest child Raphael, whose drug-filled joy ride ended in the death of a young mother.”

Broadsheets contained tributes from friends and colleagues: “a fine mind, a supremely able minister, one of Thatcher’s bright young men,” “but for a somewhat tumultuous private life, there were no heights he might not have reached,” “the public persona was irascible, even abrasive, but the Jasper Chiswell I knew at Harrow was a witty and intelligent boy…”

Five days of lurid press coverage passed, yet still, the press’s mysterious restraint on the subject of Strike and Robin’s involvement held, and still, nobody had printed a word about blackmail.

On the Friday morning following the discovery of Chiswell’s body, Strike was sitting quietly at Nick and Ilsa’s kitchen table, sunlight pouring through the window behind him.

His host and hostess were at work. Nick and Ilsa, who had been trying for some years to have a baby, had recently adopted a pair of kittens whom Nick had insisted on calling Ossie and Ricky, after the two Spurs players he had revered in his teens. The cats, who had only recently consented to sit on the knees of their adoptive parents, had not appreciated the arrival of the large and unfamiliar Strike. Finding themselves alone with him, they had sought refuge on top of a kitchen wall cabinet. He was currently conscious of the scrutiny of four pale green eyes, which followed his every movement from on high.

Not that he was currently moving a great deal. Indeed, for much of the past half an hour he had been almost motionless, as he pored over the photographs that Robin had taken in Ebury Street, which he had printed out in Nick’s study for convenience. Finally, causing Ricky to jump up in a flurry of upended fur, Strike isolated nine of the photographs and put the rest in a pile. While Strike scrutinized his selected images, Ricky settled back down, the tip of a black tail swaying as he awaited the detective’s next move.

The first photograph that Strike had selected showed a close-up of the small, semi-circular puncture mark on Chiswell’s left hand.

The second and third pictures showed different angles of the glass that had sat on the coffee table in front of Chiswell. A powdery residue was visible on the sides, above an inch of orange juice.

The fourth, fifth and sixth photographs Strike laid together side by side. Each showed a slightly different angle of the body, with slices of the surrounding room caught within its frame. Once again, Strike studied the ghostly outline of the buckled sword in the corner, the dark patch over the mantelpiece where a picture had previously hung and, beneath this, barely noticeable against the dark wallpaper, a pair of brass hooks spaced nearly a yard apart.

The seventh and eighth photographs, when placed side by side, showed the entirety of the coffee table. Kinvara’s farewell letter sat on top of a number of papers and books, of which only a sliver of one letter was visible, signed by “Brenda Bailey.” Of the books, Strike could see nothing but a partial title on an old cloth edition—“CATUL”—and the lower part of a Penguin paperback. Also in shot was the upturned corner of the threadbare rug beneath the table.

The ninth and final picture, which Strike had enlarged from yet another shot of the body, showed Chiswell’s gaping trouser pocket, in which something shiny and golden had been caught in the flash of Robin’s camera. While he was still contemplating this gleaming object, Strike’s mobile rang. It was his hostess, Ilsa.

“Hi,” he said, standing up and grabbing the packet of Benson & Hedges and lighter that lay on the side behind him. With an eruption of claws on wood, Ossie and Ricky streaked along the top of the kitchen cabinets, in case Strike was about to start throwing things at them. Checking to see that they were too far away to make a break for the garden, Strike let himself outside and swiftly closed the back door. “Any news?”

“Yes. Looks like you were right.”

Strike sat down on a wrought iron garden chair and lit up.

“Go on.”

“I’ve just had coffee with my contact. He can’t speak freely, given the nature of what we’re talking about, but I put your theory to him and he said ‘That sounds very plausible.’ Then I said, ‘Fellow politician?’ and he said that sounded very likely, too, and I said I supposed that in that situation, the press would appeal, and he sai

d, yes, he thought so, too.”

Strike exhaled.

“I owe you, Ilsa, thanks. The good news is, I’ll be able to get out of your hair.”

“Corm, we don’t mind you staying, you know that.”

“The cats don’t like me.”

“Nick says they can tell you’re a Gooner.”

“The comedy circuit lost a shining light when your husband decided on medicine. Dinner’s on me tonight and I’ll clear out afterwards.”

Strike then rang Robin. She picked up on the second ring.

“Everything OK?”

“I’ve found out why the press aren’t all over us. Della’s taken out a super-injunction. The papers aren’t allowed to report that Chiswell hired us, in case it breaks the blackmail story. Ilsa’s just met her High Court contact and he confirmed it.”

There was a pause, while Robin digested this information.

“So Della convinced a judge that Chiswell made up the blackmail?”

“Exactly, that he was using us to dig dirt on enemies. I’m not surprised the judge swallowed it. The whole world thinks Della’s whiter than white.”

“But Izzy knew why I was there,” protested Robin. “The family will have confirmed that he was being blackmailed.”

Strike tapped ash absentmindedly into Ilsa’s pot of rosemary.

“Will they? Or will they want it all hushed up, now he’s dead?”

He took her silence as reluctant agreement.

“The press will appeal the injunction, won’t they?”

“They’re already trying, according to Ilsa. If I were a tabloid editor, I’d be having us watched, so I think we’d better be careful. I’m going back to the office tonight, but I think you should stay home.”

“For how long?” said Robin.

He heard the strain in her voice and wondered whether it was entirely due to the stress of the case.