Lethal White

“Along with half a dozen others,” said Drummond.

“I had the impression that Mrs. Chiswell was particularly attached to that painting.”

“I don’t think his wife’s wishes were of much importance to him by the end… Oh dear,” sighed Drummond, “this is all very difficult. I really don’t wish to be responsible for telling the family something that I know will only cause hurt and anger. They’re already suffering.”

He tapped his teeth with a nail.

“I assure you,” he said, “that the reason for my call cannot have any bearing on Jasper’s death.”

Yet he seemed in two minds.

“You must speak to Raphael,” he said, clearly choosing his words with care, “because I think… possibly… I don’t like Raphael,” he said, as though he had not already made that perfectly clear, “but I think, actually, he did an honorable thing on the morning his father died. At least, I can’t see what he personally had to gain by it, and I think he’s keeping silent about it for the same reason as myself. Being in the family, he is better placed to decide what to do than I can be. Speak to Raphael.”

Strike had the impression that Henry Drummond would rather Raphael made himself unpopular with the family.

There was a knock on the office door. Blonde Lucinda put her head inside.

“Mrs. Ross isn’t feeling terribly well, Henry; she’s going to go, but she’d like to say goodbye.”

“Yes, all right,” said Drummond, getting to his feet. “I don’t think I can be of more use, I’m afraid, Mr. Strike.”

“I’m very grateful for you seeing me,” said Strike, also rising, though with difficulty, and picking up his walking stick again. “Could I ask one last thing?”

“Certainly,” said Drummond, pausing.

“Do you understand anything by the phrase ‘he put the horse on them’?”

Drummond appeared genuinely puzzled.

“Who put what horse… where?”

“You don’t know what that might mean?”

“I’ve really no idea. Terribly sorry, but as you’ve heard, I’ve got a client waiting.”

Strike had no alternative but to follow Drummond back into the gallery.

In the middle of the otherwise deserted gallery stood Lucinda, who was fussing over a dark, heavily pregnant woman sitting on a high chair, sipping water.

As he recognized Charlotte, Strike knew that this second encounter could not be a coincidence.

50

… you have branded me, once for all—branded me for life.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

“Corm,” she said weakly, gaping at him over the rim of her glass. She was pale, but Strike, who would have put nothing past her to stage a situation that she could use to her advantage, including skipping food or applying white foundation, merely nodded.

“Oh, you know each other?” said Drummond, surprised.

“I must go,” mumbled Charlotte, getting to her feet while the concerned Lucinda hovered. “I’m late, I’m meeting my sister.”

“Are you sure you’re well enough?” said Lucinda.

Charlotte gave Strike a tremulous smile.

“Would you mind walking me up the road? It’s only a block.”

Drummond and Lucinda turned to Strike, clearly delighted to offload responsibility for this wealthy, well-connected woman onto his shoulders.

“Not sure I’m the best person for the job,” said Strike, indicating his stick.

He felt Drummond and Lucinda’s surprise.

“I’ll give you plenty of warning if I think I’m actually going into labor,” said Charlotte. “Please?”

He could have said “No.” He might have said, “Why don’t you get your sister to meet you here?” A refusal, as she knew well, would make him appear churlish in front of people he might need to talk to again.

“Fine,” he said, keeping his voice just the right side of brusque.

“Thanks so much, Lucinda,” said Charlotte, sliding down from the chair.

She was wearing a beige silk trench coat over a black T-shirt, maternity jeans and sneakers. Everything she wore, even these casual things, was of fine quality. She had always favored monochrome colors, stark or classic designs, against which her remarkable beauty was thrown into relief.

Strike held open the door for her, reminded by her pallor of the occasion when Robin had turned white and clammy at journey’s end, after deftly steering a hire car out of what could have been a disastrous crash on black ice.

“Thank you,” he said to Henry Drummond.

“My pleasure,” said the art dealer formally.

“The restaurant’s not far,” Charlotte said, pointing up the slope as the gallery door swung shut.

They walked side by side, passersby perhaps assuming that he was responsible for her bulging stomach. He could smell what he knew was Shalimar on her skin. She had worn it ever since she was nineteen and he had sometimes bought it for her. Once again, he remembered walking this way towards the argument with her father in an Italian restaurant so many years ago.

“You think I arranged this.”

Strike said nothing. He had no desire to become enmeshed in disagreement or reminiscence. They had walked for two blocks before he spoke.

“Where is this place?”

“Jermyn Street. Franco’s.”

The moment she said the name, he recognized it as the very same one in which they had met Charlotte’s father all those years previously. The ensuing row had been short but exceedingly vicious, for a vein of incontinent spite ran right through every member of Charlotte’s aristocratic family, but then she and Strike had gone back to her flat and made love with an intensity and urgency that he now wished he could expunge from his brain, the memory of her crying even as she climaxed, hot tears falling onto his face as she shouted with pleasure.

“Ouch. Stop,” she said sharply.

He turned. Cradling her belly with both hands, she backed into a doorway, frowning.

“Sit down,” he said, resenting even having to make suggestions to help her. “On the step there.”

“No,” she said, taking deep breaths. “Just get me to Franco’s and you can go.”

They walked on.

The maître d’hôtel was all concern: it was clear that Charlotte was not well.

“Is my sister here?” Charlotte asked.

“Not yet,” said the maître d’ anxiously, and like Henry Drummond and Lucinda, he looked to Strike to share responsibility for this alarming and unsought problem.

Barely a minute later, Strike was sitting in Amelia’s seat at the table for two beside the window, and the waiter was bringing a bottle of water, and Charlotte was still taking deep breaths, and the maître d’ was putting bread down between them, saying uncertainly that Charlotte might feel better if she ate something, but also suggesting quietly to Strike that he could call an ambulance at any moment, if that seemed desirable.

At last they were left alone. Still, Strike did not speak. He intended to leave the moment her color improved, or her sister arrived. All around them sat well-heeled diners, enjoying wine and pasta amid tasteful wood, leather and glass, with black and white prints on the geometric white and red wallpaper.

“You think I arranged this,” mumbled Charlotte again.

Strike said nothing. He was keeping lookout for Charlotte’s sister, whom he had not seen for years and who doubtless would be appalled to find them sitting together. Perhaps there would be another tight-lipped row, hidden from their fellow diners, in which fresh aspersions would be cast upon his personality, his background and his motives in escorting his wealthy, pregnant, married ex-girlfriend to her dinner date.

Charlotte took a breadstick and began to eat it, watching him.

“I really didn’t know you were going to be there today, Corm.”

He didn’t believe it for a second. The meeting at Lancaster House had been chance: he had seen her shock when their eyes met, but this was far

too much of a coincidence. If he hadn’t known it to be impossible, he would even have supposed that she knew he had split up with his girlfriend that morning.

“You don’t believe me.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, still scanning the street for Amelia.

“I got a real shock when Lucinda said you were there.”

Bollocks. She wouldn’t have told you who was in the office. You already knew.

“This happens a lot lately,” she persisted. “They call them Braxton Hicks contractions. I hate being pregnant.”

He knew he had not disguised his immediate thought when she leaned towards him and said quietly:

“I know what you’re thinking. I didn’t get rid of ours. I didn’t.”

“Don’t start, Charlotte,” he said, with the sensation that the firm ground beneath his feet was starting to crack and shift.

“I lost—”

“I’m not doing this again,” he said, a warning note in his voice. “We’re not going back over dates from two years ago. I don’t care.”

“I took a test at my mother’s—”

“I said I don’t care.”

He wanted to leave, but she was if anything paler now, her lips trembling as she gazed at him with those horribly familiar, russet-flecked green eyes, now brimming with tears. The swollen belly still didn’t seem part of her. He would not have been entirely surprised had she lifted her T-shirt to show a cushion.

“I wish they were yours.”

“Fuck’s sake, Charlotte—”

“If they were yours, I’d be happy about it.”

“Don’t give me that. You didn’t want kids any more than I did.”

Tears now tipped over onto her cheeks. She wiped them away, her fingers shaking more violently than ever. A man at the next table was trying to pretend that he wasn’t watching. Always hyperaware of the effect that she was having on those around her, Charlotte threw the eavesdropper a look that made him return hurriedly to his tortellini, then tore off a piece of bread and put it in her mouth, chewing while crying. Finally she gulped water to help her swallow, then pointed at her belly and whispered:

“I feel sorry for them. That’s all I’ve got: pity. I feel sorry for them, because I’m their mother and Jago’s their father. What a start in life. In the beginning I tried to think up ways of dying without killing them.”

“Don’t be so fucking self-indulgent,” Strike said roughly. “They’re going to need you, aren’t they?”

“I don’t want to be needed, I never did. I want to be free.”

“To kill yourself?”

“Yes. Or to try and make you love me again.”

He leaned in towards her.

“You’re married. You’re having his children. We’re finished, it’s over.”

She leaned in, too, her tear-stained face the most beautiful he had ever seen. He could smell Shalimar on her skin.

“I’ll always love you better than anyone in this world,” she said, stark white and stunning. “You know that’s the truth. I loved you better than anyone in my family, I’ll love you better than my children, I’ll love you on my deathbed. I think about you when Jago and I—”

“Keep this up and I’m leaving.”

She leaned back in her seat again and stared at him as though he were an approaching train and she was tied to the tracks.

“You know it’s true,” she said hoarsely. “You know it is.”

“Charlotte—”

“I know what you’re going to say,” she said, “that I’m a liar. I am. I am a liar, but not on the big things, never on the big ones, Bluey.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“You didn’t love me enough—”

“Don’t you dare fucking blame me,” he said, in spite of himself. Nobody else did this to him: nobody even came close. “The end—that was all you.”

“You wouldn’t compromise—”

“Oh, I compromised. I came to live with you, like you wanted—”

“You wouldn’t take the job Daddy—”

“I had a job. I had the agency.”

“I was wrong about the agency, I know that now. You’ve done such incredible things… I read everything about you, all the time. Jago found it all on my search history—”

“Should have covered your tracks, shouldn’t you? You were a damn sight more careful with me, when you were screwing him on the side.”

“I wasn’t sleeping with Jago while I was with you—”

“You got engaged to him two weeks after we finished.”

“It happened fast because I made it happen fast,” she said fiercely. “You said I was lying about the baby and I was hurt, furious—you and I would be married now if you hadn’t—”

“Menus,” said a waiter suddenly materializing beside their table, handing one to each of them. Strike waved his away.

“I’m not staying.”

“Take it for Amelia,” Charlotte instructed him, and he pulled the menu out of the waiter’s hand and slapped it down on the table in front of him.

“We have a couple of specials today,” said the waiter.

“Do we look like we want to hear specials?” Strike growled. The waiter stood for a second, frozen in astonishment, then wound his way back through the crowded tables, his back view affronted.

“All this romantic bullshit,” Strike said, leaning in to Charlotte. “You wanted things I couldn’t give you. Every single fucking time, you hated the poverty.”

“I acted like a spoiled bitch,” she said, “I know I did, then I married Jago and I got all those things I thought I deserved and I want to fucking die.”

“It goes beyond holidays and jewelry, Charlotte. You wanted to break me.”

Her expression became rigid, as it so often had before the worst outbursts, the truly horrifying scenes.

“You wanted to stop me wanting anything that wasn’t you. That’d be the proof I loved you, if I gave up the army, the agency, Dave Polworth, every-bloody-thing that made me who I am.”

“I never, ever wanted to break you, that’s a terrible thing to—”

“You wanted to smash me up because that’s what you do. You have to break it, because if you don’t, it might fade away. You’ve got to be in control. If you kill it, you don’t have to watch it die.”

“Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve loved anyone, since, like you loved me.”

“No, I haven’t,” he said, “and thank fuck for that.”

“We had incredible times together—”

“You’ll have to remind me what they were.”

“That night on Benjy’s boat in Little France—”

“—your thirtieth? Christmas in Cornwall? They were a whole lot of fucking fun.”

Her hand fell to her belly. Strike thought he saw movement through the thin black T-shirt, and it seemed to him again that there was something alien and inhuman beneath her skin.

“Sixteen years, on and off, I gave you the best I had to give, and it was never enough,” he said. “There comes a point where you stop trying to save the person who’s determined to drag you down with them.”

“Oh, please,” she said, and suddenly, the vulnerable and desperate Charlotte vanished, to be replaced by somebody altogether tougher, cool-eyed and clever. “You didn’t want to save me, Bluey. You wanted to solve me. Big difference.”

He welcomed the reappearance of this second Charlotte, who was in every way as familiar as the fragile version, but whom he had far less compunction about hurting.

“I’m looking good to you now because I got famous and you married an arsehole.”

She absorbed the hit without blinking, though her face became a little pinker. Charlotte had always enjoyed a fight.

“You’re so predictable. I knew you’d say I came back because you’re famous.”

“Well, you do tend to resurface whenever there’s drama, Charlotte,” Strike said. “I seem to remember that the last time, I’d just got my

leg blown off.”

“You bastard,” she said, with a cool smile. “That’s how you explain me taking care of you, all those months afterwards?”

His mobile rang: Robin.

“Hi,” he said, turning away from Charlotte to look out of the window. “How’s it going?”

“Hi, just telling tha I can’t meet tha tonight,” said Robin, in a much thicker Yorkshire accent than usual. “I’m going out with a friend. Party.”

“I take it Flick’s listening?” said Strike.

“Yeah, well, why don’t you try calling your wife if you’re lonely?” said Robin.

“I’ll do that,” said Strike, amused in spite of Charlotte’s cool stare from across the table. “D’you want me to yell at you? Give this some credibility?”

“No, you fook off,” said Robin loudly, and she hung up.

“Who was that?” asked Charlotte, eyes narrowed.

“I’ve got to go,” said Strike, pocketing the mobile and reaching for his walking stick, which had slipped and fallen under the table while he and Charlotte argued. Realizing what he was after, she leaned sideways and succeeded in picking it up before he could reach it.

“Where’s the cane I gave you?” she said. “The Malacca one?”

“You kept it,” he reminded her.

“Who bought you this one? Robin?”

Amidst all of Charlotte’s paranoid and frequently wild accusations, she had occasionally made uncannily accurate guesses.

“She did, as a matter of fact,” said Strike, but instantly regretted saying it. He was playing Charlotte’s game and at once, she turned into a third and rare Charlotte, neither cold nor fragile, but honest to the point of recklessness.

“All that’s kept me going through this pregnancy is the thought that once I’ve had them, I can leave.”

“You’re going to walk out on your kids, the moment they exit the womb?”

“For another three months, I’m trapped. They all want the boy so much, they hardly let me out of their sight. Once I’ve given birth, it’ll be different. I can go. We both know I’ll be a lousy mother. They’re better off with the Rosses. Jago’s mother’s already lining herself up as a surrogate.”