Lethal White

He answered within a couple of rings, sounding grumpy. In the background, a presenter was wondering aloud what the forthcoming Olympic closing ceremony would be like.

“Yah, hello?”

Robin hung up. Tom wasn’t playing five-a-side football. She continued to sit, motionless, her phone in her hand, on the heavy matrimonial bed that had been so difficult to move up the narrow stairs of this lovely rented house, while her mind moved back over the clear signs that she, the detective, had willfully ignored.

“I’m so stupid,” Robin said quietly to the empty, sunlit room. “So bloody stupid.”

54

Your gentle and upright disposition, your polished mind, your unimpeachable honor, are known to and appreciated by everyone…

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Though the early evening was still bright, Della’s front garden lay in shadow, which gave it a placid, melancholy air in contrast to the busy, dusty road that ran beyond the gates. As Strike rang the doorbell, he noted two large dog turds on the otherwise immaculate front lawn and he wondered who was helping Della with such mundane tasks now that her marriage was over.

The door opened, revealing the Minister for Sport in her impenetrable black glasses. She was wearing what Strike’s elderly aunt back in Cornwall would have called a housecoat, a knee-length purple fleece robe that buttoned to the high neck, giving her a vaguely ecclesiastic air. The guide dog stood behind her, looking up at Strike with dark, mournful eyes.

“Hi, it’s Cormoran Strike,” said the detective, without moving. Given that she could neither recognize him by sight nor examine any of the identification he carried, the only way she could know whom she was admitting to her house was by the sound of his voice. “We spoke on the phone earlier and you asked me to come and see you.”

“Yes,” she said, unsmiling. “Come in, then.”

She stepped back to let him pass, one hand on the Labrador’s collar. Strike entered, wiping his feet on the doormat. A swell of music, loud strings and woodwind instruments, cut through by the pounding of a kettle drum, issued from what Strike assumed was the sitting room. Strike, who had been raised by a mother who listened mainly to metal bands, knew very little about classical music, but there was a looming, ominous quality about this music that he didn’t particularly care for. The hall was dark, because the lights hadn’t been turned on, and otherwise nondescript, with a dark brown patterned carpet that, while practical, was rather ugly.

“I’ve made coffee,” said Della. “I’ll need you to carry the tray into the sitting room for me, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“No problem,” said Strike.

He followed the Labrador, which padded along at Della’s heels, its tail wagging vaguely. The symphony grew louder as they passed the sitting room, the doorframe of which Della touched lightly as she passed, feeling for familiar markers to orient herself.

“Is that Beethoven?” asked Strike, for something to say.

“Brahms. Symphony Number One, C Minor.”

The edges of every surface in the kitchen were rounded. The knobs on the oven, Strike noticed, had raised numbers stuck to them. On a cork noticeboard was a list of phone numbers headed IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, that he imagined were for the use of a cleaner or home help. While Della crossed to the worktop opposite, Strike extracted his mobile from his coat pocket and took a picture of Geraint Winn’s number. Della’s outstretched hand reached the rim of the deep ceramic sink, and she moved sideways, where a tray sat already laden with a mug and a cafetière of freshly brewed coffee. Two bottles of wine stood beside it. Della felt for both of these, turned and held them out to Strike, still unsmiling.

“Which is which?” she asked.

“Châteauneuf-du-Pape, 2010, in your left hand,” said Strike, “and Château Musar, 2006, in your right.”

“I’ll have a glass of the Châteauneuf-du-Pape if you wouldn’t mind opening the bottle and pouring it for me. I assumed that you wouldn’t want a drink, but if you do, help yourself.”

“Thanks,” said Strike, picking up the corkscrew she had laid beside the tray, “coffee will be fine.”

She set off silently for the sitting room, leaving him to follow with the tray. As he entered the room he caught the heavy scent of roses and was fleetingly reminded of Robin. While Della grazed furniture with her fingertips, feeling her way towards an armchair with wide wooden arms, Strike saw four large bunches of flowers positioned in vases around the room and punctuating the overall drabness with their vivid colors, red, yellow and pink.

Aligning herself by pressing the backs of her legs against the chair, Della sat down neatly, then turned her face towards Strike as he set the tray on the table.

“Would you put my glass here, on my right chair arm?” she said, patting it, and he did so, while the pale Labrador, which had flopped down beside Della’s chair, watched him out of kind, sleepy eyes.

The strings of the violins in the symphony swooped and fell as Strike sat down. From the fawn carpet to the furniture, all of which might have been designed in the seventies, everything seemed to be in different shades of brown. Half of one wall was covered in built-in shelves holding what he thought must be at least a thousand CDs. On a table to the rear of the room was a stack of Braille manuscripts. A large, framed photograph of a teenage girl sat on the mantelpiece. It occurred to Strike that her mother could not even enjoy the bittersweet solace of looking at Rhiannon Winn every day, and he found himself filled with inconvenient compassion.

“Nice flowers,” he commented.

“Yes. It was my birthday a few days ago,” said Della.

“Ah. Many happy returns.”

“Are you from the West Country?”

“Partly. Cornwall.”

“I can hear it in your vowels,” said Della.

She waited while he dealt with the cafetière and poured himself coffee. When the sounds of clinking and pouring had ceased, she said:

“As I said on the phone, I’m very worried about Aamir. He’ll still be in London, I’m sure, because it’s all he’s ever known. Not with his family,” she added, and Strike thought he heard a trace of contempt. “I’m extremely concerned about him.”

She felt carefully for the wine glass next to her and took a sip.

“When you’ve reassured him that he isn’t in any kind of trouble, and that anything Chiswell told you about him will go no further, you must tell him to contact me—urgently.”

The violins continued to screech and whine in what, to the untutored Strike, was a dissonant expression of foreboding. The guide dog scratched herself, her paw thudding off the carpet. Strike took out his notebook.

“Have you got the names or contact details of any friends Mallik might have gone to?”

“No,” said Della. “I don’t think he has many friends. Latterly he mentioned someone from university but I don’t remember a name. I doubt it was anyone particularly close.”

The thought of this distant friend seemed to make her uneasy.

“He studied at the LSE, so that’s an area of London he knows well.”

“He’s on good terms with one of his sisters, isn’t he?”

“Oh, no,” said Della, at once. “No, no, they all disowned him. No, he’s got nobody, really, other than me, which is what makes this situation so dangerous.”

“The sister posted a picture on Facebook of the two of them fairly recently. It was in that pizza joint opposite your house.”

Della’s expression betrayed not merely surprise, but displeasure.

“Aamir told me you’d been snooping online. Which sister was it?”

“I’d have to ch—”

“But I doubt he’d be staying with her,” said Della, talking over him. “Not with the way the family as a whole has treated him. He might have contacted her, I suppose. You might see what she knows.”

“I will,” said Strike. “Any other ideas about where he might go?”

“He really doesn’t have anyone else,” s

he said. “That’s what worries me. He’s vulnerable. It’s essential I find him.”

“Well, I’ll certainly do my best,” Strike promised her. “Now, you said on the phone that you’d answer a few questions.”

Her expression became slightly more forbidding.

“I doubt I can tell you anything of interest, but go on.”

“Can we start with Jasper Chiswell, and your and your husband’s relationship with him?”

By her expression, she managed to convey that she found the question both impertinent and slightly ludicrous. With a cold smile and raised eyebrows, she responded:

“Well, Jasper and I had a professional relationship, obviously.”

“And how was that?” asked Strike, adding sugar to his coffee, stirring it and taking a sip.

“Given,” said Della, “that Jasper hired you to try and discover disreputable information about us, I think you already know the answer to that question.”

“You maintain that your husband wasn’t blackmailing Chiswell, then, do you?”

“Of course I do.”

Strike knew that pushing on this particular point, when Della’s super-injunction had already shown what lengths she would go to in her own defense, would only alienate her. A temporary retreat seemed indicated.

“What about the rest of the Chiswells? Did you ever run across any of them?”

“Some,” she said, a little warily.

“And how did you find them?”

“I barely know them. Geraint says Izzy was hardworking.”

“Chiswell’s late son was on the junior British fencing team with your daughter, I think?”

The muscles of her face seemed to contract. He was reminded of an anemone shutting in on itself when it senses a predator.

“Yes,” she said.

“Did you like Freddie?”

“I don’t think I ever spoke to him. Geraint was the one who ferried Rhiannon around to her tournaments. He knew the team.”

The shadow stems of the roses closest to the window stretched like bars across the carpet. The Brahms symphony crashed stormily on in the background. Della’s opaque lenses contributed to a feeling of inscrutable menace and Strike, though wholly unintimidated, was put in mind of the blind oracles and seers that peopled ancient myths, and the particular supernatural aura attributed by the able-bodied to this one particular disability.

“What was it that made Jasper Chiswell so eager to find out things to your disadvantage, would you say?”

“He didn’t like me,” said Della simply. “We disagreed frequently. He came from a background that finds anything that deviates from its own conventions and norms to be suspect, unnatural, even dangerous. He was a rich white Conservative male, Mr. Strike, and he felt the corridors of power were best populated exclusively by rich white Conservative males. He sought, in everything, to restore a status quo he remembered in his youth. In pursuit of that objective, he was frequently unprincipled and certainly hypocritical.”

“In what way?”

“Ask his wife.”

“You know Kinvara, do you?”

“I wouldn’t say I ‘know’ her. I had an encounter with her a while ago that was certainly interesting in the light of Chiswell’s public proclamations about the sanctity of marriage.”

Strike had the impression that beneath the lofty language, and in spite of her genuine anxiety about Aamir, Della was deriving pleasure from saying these things.

“What happened?” Strike asked.

“Kinvara turned up unexpectedly late one afternoon at the ministry, but Jasper had already left for Oxfordshire. I think it was her aim to surprise him.”

“When was this?”

“I should say… a year ago, at least. Shortly before Parliament went into recess, I think. She was in a state of great distress. I heard a commotion outside and went to find out what was going on. I could tell by the silence of the outer office that they were all agog. She was very emotional, demanding to see her husband. Initially I thought she must have had dreadful news and perhaps needed Jasper as a source of comfort and support. I took her into my office.

“Once it was just the two of us, she broke down completely. She was barely coherent, but from the little I could understand,” said Della, “she’d just found out there was another woman.”

“Did she say who?”

“I don’t think so. She may have done, but she was—well, it was quite disturbing,” said Della austerely. “More as though she had suffered a bereavement than the end of a marriage. ‘I was just part of his game,’ ‘He never loved me’ and so forth.”

“What game did you take her to mean?” asked Strike.

“The political game, I suppose. She spoke of being humiliated, of being told, in so many words, that she had served her purpose…

“Jasper Chiswell was a very ambitious man, you know. He’d lost his career once over infidelity. I imagine he cast around quite clinically for the kind of new wife who’d burnish his image. No more Italian fly-by-nights now he was trying to get back into the cabinet. He probably thought Kinvara would go down very well with the county Conservatives. Well-bred. Horsey.

“I heard, later, that Jasper had bundled her off into some kind of psychiatric clinic not long afterwards. That’s how families like the Chiswells deal with excessive emotion, I suppose,” said Della, taking another sip of wine. “Yet she stayed with him. Of course, people do stay, even when they’re treated abominably. He talked about her within my hearing as though she was a deficient, needy child. I remember him saying Kinvara’s mother would be ‘babysitting’ her for her birthday, because he had to be in Parliament for a vote. He could have paired his vote, of course—found a Labor MP and struck a deal. Simply couldn’t be bothered.

“Women like Kinvara Chiswell, whose entire self-worth is predicated on the status and success of marriage, are naturally shattered when everything goes wrong. I think all those horses of hers were an outlet, a substitute and—oh yes,” said Della, “I’ve just remembered—the very last thing she said to me that day was that in addition to everything else, she now had to go home to put down a beloved mare.”

Della felt for the broad, soft head of Gwynn, who was lying beside her chair.

“I felt very sorry for her, there. Animals have been an enormous consolation to me in my life. One can hardly overstate the comfort they give, sometimes.”

The hand that caressed the dog still sported a wedding ring, Strike noticed, along with a heavy amethyst ring that matched her housecoat. Somebody, he supposed Geraint, must have told her that it was the same color and again, he felt an unwelcome pang of pity.

“Did Kinvara tell you how or when she’d found out that her husband had been unfaithful?”

“No, no, she simply gave way to an almost incoherent outpouring of rage and grief, like a small child. Kept saying, ‘I loved him and he never loved me, it was all a lie.’ I’ve never heard such a raw explosion of grief, even at a funeral or a deathbed. I never spoke to her again except for hello. She acted as though she had no memory of what had passed between us.”

Della took another sip of wine.

“Can we return to Mallik?” Strike asked.

“Yes, of course,” she said at once.

“The morning that Jasper Chiswell died—the thirteenth—you were here, at home?”

There was a lengthy silence.

“Why are you asking me that?” Della said, in a changed tone.

“Because I’d like to corroborate a story I’ve heard,” said Strike.

“You’re mean, that Aamir was here with me, that morning?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, that’s quite true. I’d slipped downstairs and sprained my wrist. I called Aamir and he came over. He wanted me to go to casualty, but there was no need. I could still move all my fingers. I simply needed some help managing breakfast and so on.”

“You called Mallik?”

“What?” she said.

It was the

age-old, transparent “what?” of the person who is afraid they’ve made a mistake. Strike guessed that some very rapid thinking was going on behind the dark glasses.

“You called Aamir?”

“Why? What does he say happened?”

“He says your husband went in person to fetch him from his house.”

“Oh,” said Della and then, “of course, yes, I forgot.”

“Did you?” asked Strike gently. “Or are you backing up their story?”

“I forgot,” Della repeated firmly. “When I said I ‘called’ him I wasn’t talking about the telephone. I meant that I called ‘on’ him. Via Geraint.”

“But if Geraint was here when you slipped, couldn’t he have helped you with your breakfast?”

“I think Geraint wanted Aamir to help persuade me to go to casualty.”

“Right. So it was Geraint’s idea to go to Aamir, rather than yours?”

“I can’t remember now,” she said, but then, contradicting herself, “I’d fallen rather heavily. Geraint has a bad back, naturally he wanted help and I thought of Aamir, and then the pair of them nagged me to go to A&E, but there was no need. It was a simple sprain.”

The light was now fading beyond the net curtains. Della’s black lenses reflected the neon red of the dying sun above the rooftops.

“I’m extremely worried about Aamir,” she said again, in a strained voice.

“A couple more questions and I’m done,” Strike replied. “Jasper Chiswell hinted in front of a roomful of people that he knew something disreputable about Mallik. What can you tell me anything about that?”

“Yes, well, it was that conversation,” said Della quietly, “that first made Aamir think about resigning. I could feel him pulling away from me after it happened. And then you finished the job, didn’t you? You went to his house, to taunt him further.”

“There was no taunting, Mrs. Winn—”

“Liwat, Mr. Strike, did you never learn what that meant all the time you were in the Middle East?”

“Yeah, I know what it means,” said Strike matter-of-factly. “Sodomy. Chiswell seemed to be threatening Aamir with exposure—”