Lethal White

“What did you carve into the door, Billy?”

“I really did that, then, did I? Carved the white horse on the door? Because afterwards I didn’t know if I really did that or not.”

“Yeah, you did it,” said Strike. “I’ve seen the door. It was a good carving.”

“Yeah,” said Billy, “well, I used to—do some of that. Carving. For my dad.”

“What did you carve the horse onto?”

“Pendants,” said Billy, surprisingly. “On little circles of wood with leather through ’em. For tourists. Sold them in a shop over in Wantage.”

“Billy,” said Strike, “can you remember how you ended up in that bathroom? Did you go there to see someone, or did somebody take you there?”

Billy’s eyes roamed around the pink walls again, a deep furrow between his eyes as he thought.

“I was looking for a man called Winner… no…”

“Winn? Geraint Winn?”

“Yeah,” said Billy, again surveying Strike with astonishment. “You know everything. How do you know all this?”

“I’ve been looking for you,” said Strike. “What made you want to find Winn?”

“Heard Jimmy talking about him,” said Billy, gnawing at his nail again. “Jimmy said Winn was going to help find out all about the kid who was killed.”

“Winn was going to help find out about the child who was strangled?”

“Yeah,” said Billy, nervously. “See, I thought you were one of the people trying to catch me and lock me up, after I saw you. Thought you were trying to trap me and—I get like that, when I’m bad,” he said hopelessly. “So I went to Winner—Winn—instead. Jimmy had a phone number and address for him written down, so I went to find Winn and then I got caught.”

“Caught?”

“By the—brown-skinned bloke,” mumbled Billy, with a half-glance back at the female psychiatrist. “I was scared of him, I thought he was a terrorist and he was going to kill me, but then he told me he was working for the government, so I thought the government wanted me kept there in his house and the doors and windows were wired with explosives… but I don’t think they were, really. That was just me. He probably didn’t want me in his bathroom. Probably wanted to get rid of me all along,” said Billy, with a sad smile. “And I wouldn’t go, because I thought I’d get blown up.”

His right hand crept absently back to his nose and chest.

“I think I tried to call you again, but you didn’t answer.”

“You did call. You left a message on my answering machine.”

“Did I? Yeah… I thought you’d help me get out of there… sorry,” said Billy, rubbing his eyes. “When I’m like that, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“But you’re sure you saw a child strangled, Billy?” asked Strike quietly.

“Oh yeah,” said Billy bleakly, raising his face. “Yeah, that never goes away. I know I saw it.”

“Did you ever try and dig where you thought—?”

“Christ, no,” said Billy. “Go digging right by my dad’s house? No. I was scared,” he said weakly. “I didn’t want to see it again. After they buried her, they let it grow over, nettles and weeds. I used to have dreams like you wouldn’t believe. That she climbed up out of the dell in the dark, all rotting, and tried to climb in my bedroom window.”

The psychiatrists’ pens moved scratchily across their papers.

Strike moved down to the category of “Things” that he had written on his notebook. There were only two questions left.

“Did you ever put a cross in the ground where you saw the body buried, Billy?”

“No,” said Billy, scared at the very idea. “I never went near the dell if I could avoid it, I never wanted to.”

“Last question,” Strike said. “Billy, did your father do anything unusual for the Chiswells? I know he was a handyman, but can you think of anything else he—?”

“What d’you mean?” said Billy.

He seemed suddenly more frightened than he had seemed all interview.

“I don’t know,” said Strike carefully, watching his reaction. “I just wondered—”

“Jimmy warned me about this! He told me you were snooping around Dad. You can’t blame us for that, we had nothing to do with it, we were kids!”

“I’m not blaming you for anything,” said Strike, but there was a clatter of chairs: Billy and the two psychiatrists had got to their feet, the female’s hand hovering over a discreet button beside the door that Strike knew must be an alarm.

“Has this all been to get me to talk? You trying to get me and Jimmy in trouble?”

“No,” said Strike, hoisting himself to his feet, too. “I’m here because I believe you saw a child strangled, Billy.”

Agitated, mistrustful, Billy’s unbandaged hand touched his nose and chest twice in quick succession.

“So why’re you asking what Dad did?” he whispered. “That’s not how she died, it was nothing to do with that! Jimmy’ll fucking tan me,” he said in a broken voice. “He told me you were after him for what Dad did.”

“Nobody’s going to tan anyone,” said the male psychiatrist firmly. “Time’s up, I think,” he said briskly to Strike, pushing open the door. “Go on, Billy, out you go.”

But Billy didn’t move. The skin and bone might have aged, but his face betrayed the fear and hopelessness of a small, motherless child whose sanity had been broken by the men who were supposed to protect him. Strike, who had met countless rootless and neglected children during his rackety, unstable childhood, recognized in Billy’s imploring expression a last plea to the adult world, to do what grown-ups were meant to do, and impose order on chaos, substitute sanity for brutality. Face to face, he felt a strange kinship with the emaciated, shaven-headed psychiatric patient, because he recognized the same craving for order in himself. In his case, it had led him to the official side of the desk, but perhaps the only difference between the two of them was that Strike’s mother had lived long enough, and loved him well enough, to stop him breaking when life threw terrible things at him.

“I’m going to find out what happened to the kid you saw strangled, Billy. That’s a promise.”

The psychiatrists looked surprised, even disapproving. It was not part of their profession, Strike knew, to make definitive statements or guarantee resolutions. He put his notebook back into his pocket, moved from behind the desk and held out his hand. After a few long moments’ consideration, the animosity seemed to seep out of Billy. He shuffled back to Strike, took his proffered hand and held it overlong, his eyes filling with tears.

In a whisper, so that neither of the doctors could hear, he said:

“I hated putting the horse on them, Mr. Strike. I hated it.”

57

Have you the courage and the strength of will for that, Rebecca?

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Vanessa’s one-bedroomed flat occupied the ground floor of a detached house a short distance from Wembley Stadium. Before leaving for work that morning, she had given Robin a spare key to her flat, along with a kindly assurance that she knew that it would take Robin longer than a couple of days to find a new place to live, and that she didn’t mind her staying until she managed to do so.

They had sat up late drinking the night before. Vanessa had told Robin the full story of finding out that her ex-fiancé had cheated on her, a story full of twists and counter-twists that Vanessa had never told before, which included the setting up of two fake Facebook pages as bait for both her ex and his lover, which had resulted, after three months of patient coaxing, in Vanessa receiving nude pictures from both of them. As impressed as she was shocked, Robin had laughed as Vanessa reenacted the scene in which she passed her ex the pictures, hidden inside the Valentine card she had handed across a table for two in their favorite restaurant.

“You’re too nice, girl,” said Vanessa, steely-eyed over her Pinot Grigio. “At a bare minimum I’d have kept her bleeding earring and turned it into a pend

ant.”

Vanessa was now at work. A spare duvet sat neatly folded at the end of the sofa on which Robin was sitting, with her laptop open in front of her. She had spent the entire afternoon scanning available rooms in shared properties, which were all she could possibly afford on the salary that Strike was paying her. The memory of the bunk bed in Flick’s flat kept recurring as she scanned the adverts in her price range, some of which featured stark, barrack-like rooms with multiple beds inside them, others with photographs that looked as though they ought to feature attached to news stories about reclusive hoarders discovered dead by neighbors. Last night’s laughter seemed remote now. Robin was ignoring the painful, hard lump in her throat that refused to dissolve, no matter how many cups of tea she consumed.

Matthew had tried to contact her twice that day. Neither time had she picked up and he hadn’t left a message. She would need to contact a lawyer about divorce soon, and that would cost money she didn’t have, but her first priority had to be finding herself a place to live and continuing to put in the usual number of hours on the Chiswell case, because if Strike had cause to feel she wasn’t pulling her weight she would be endangering the only part of her life that currently had worth.

You bailed out on uni. Now you’re bailing out on us. You even bailed on your therapist. You’re a fucking flake.

The photographs of grim rooms in unknown flats kept dissolving before her eyes as she pictured Matthew and Sarah in the heavy mahogany bed that her father-in-law had bought, and when this happened Robin’s insides seemed to turn to liquid lead and her self-control threatened to melt away and she wanted to phone Matthew back and scream at him, but she didn’t, because she refused to be what he wanted to make her, the irrational, incontinent, uncontrolled woman, the fucking flake.

And anyway, she had news for Strike, news she was keen to impart once he had finished his interview with Billy. Raphael Chiswell had answered his mobile at eleven o’clock that morning and, after some initial coldness, had agreed to talk to her, but only at a place of his choosing. An hour later, she had received a call from Tegan Butcher, who had not required much persuasion to agree to an interview. Indeed, she seemed disappointed to be talking to the famous Strike’s partner rather than the man himself.

Robin copied down the details of a room in Putney (live-in landlady, vegetarian household, must like cats), checked the time and decided to change into the only dress she had brought with her from Albury Street, which was hanging, ironed and ready, from the top of Vanessa’s kitchen door. It would take her over an hour to get from Wembley to the restaurant in Old Brompton Road, where she and Raphael had agreed to meet, and she feared that she needed more time than usual to make herself presentable.

The face staring out of Vanessa’s bathroom mirror was white, with eyes still puffy with lack of sleep. Robin was still trying to paint out the shadows with concealer when her mobile rang.

“Cormoran, hi,” said Robin, switching to speakerphone. “Did you see Billy?”

His account of the interview with Billy took ten minutes, during which time Robin finished her makeup, brushed her hair and pulled on the dress.

“You know,” Strike finished, “I’m starting to wonder whether we shouldn’t do what Billy wanted us to do in the first place: dig.”

“Mm,” said Robin, and then, “Wait—what? You mean… literally?”

“It might come to that,” said Strike.

For the first time all day, Robin’s own troubles were entirely eclipsed by something else, something monstrous. Jasper Chiswell’s had been the first body she had seen outside the comforting, sanitized context of the hospital and the funeral parlor. Even the memory of the shrink-wrapped turnip head with its dark, gasping cavity for a mouth paled beside the prospect of earth and worms, a decaying blanket and a child’s rotting bones.

“Cormoran, if you think there’s genuinely a child buried in the dell, we should be telling the police.”

“I might, if I thought Billy’s psychiatrists would vouch for him, but they won’t. I had a long talk with them after the interview. They can’t say one hundred percent that the child strangling didn’t happen—the old impossible-to-prove-a-negative problem—but they don’t believe it.”

“They think he’s making it up?”

“Not in the normal sense. They think it’s a delusion or, at best, that he misinterpreted something he saw when he was very young. Maybe even something on TV. It would be consistent with his overall symptoms. I think myself there’s unlikely to be anything down there, but it would be good to know for sure.

“Anyway, how’s your day been? Any news?”

“What?” Robin repeated numbly. “Oh—yes. I’m meeting Raphael for a drink at seven o’clock.”

“Excellent work,” said Strike. “Where?”

“Place called Nam something… Nam Long Le Shaker?”

“The place in Chelsea?” said Strike. “I was there, a long time ago. Not the best evening I’ve ever had.”

“And Tegan Butcher rang back. She’s a bit of a fan of yours, by the sound of it.”

“Just what this case needs, another mentally disturbed witness.”

“Tasteless,” said Robin, trying to sound amused. “Anyway, she’s living with her mum in Woolstone and working at a bar at Newbury Racecourse. She says she doesn’t want to meet us in the village because her mum won’t like her getting mixed up with us, so she wonders whether we could come and see her at Newbury.”

“How far’s that from Woolstone?”

“Twenty miles or so?”

“All right,” said Strike, “how about we take the Land Rover out to Newbury to interview Tegan and then maybe swing by the dell, just for another look?”

“Um… yes, OK,” said Robin, her mind racing over the logistics of having to return to Albury Street for the Land Rover. She had left it behind because parking places required a permit on Vanessa’s street. “When?”

“Whenever Tegan can see us, but ideally this week. Sooner the better.”

“OK,” said Robin, thinking of the tentative plans she had made to view rooms over the next couple of days.

“Everything all right, Robin?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Ring me when you’ve spoken to Raphael then, OK?”

“Will do,” said Robin, glad to end the call. “Speak later.”

58

… I believe two different kinds of will can exist at the same time in one person.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Nam Long Le Shaker had the feeling of a decadent, colonial-era bar. Dimly lit, with leafy plants and assorted paintings and prints of beautiful women, the décor mixed Vietnamese and European styles. When Robin entered the restaurant at five past seven, she found Raphael leaning up against the bar, wearing a dark suit and tieless white shirt, already halfway down a drink and talking to the long-haired beauty who stood in front of a glittering wall of bottles.

“Hi,” said Robin.

“Hello,” he responded with a trace of coolness, and then, “Your eyes are different. Were they that color at Chiswell House?”

“Blue?” asked Robin, shrugging off the coat she had worn because she felt shivery, even though the evening was warm. “Yes.”

“S’pose I didn’t notice because half the bloody lightbulbs are missing. What are you drinking?”

Robin hesitated. She ought not to drink while conducting an interview, but at the same time, she suddenly craved alcohol. Before she could decide, Raphael said with a slight edge in his voice:

“Been undercover again today, have we?”

“Why d’you ask?”

“Your wedding ring’s gone again.”

“Were your eyes this sharp in the office?” asked Robin, and he grinned, reminding her why she had liked him, even against her will.

“I noticed your glasses were fake, remember?” he said. “I thought at the time you were trying to be taken seriously, because you were too pretty for politics. So these,”

he indicated his deep brown eyes, “may be sharp, but this,” he tapped his head, “not so much.”

“I’ll have a glass of red,” said Robin, smiling, “and I’ll pay, obviously.”

“If this is all on Mr. Strike, let’s have dinner,” said Raphael at once. “I’m starving and skint.”

“Really?”

After a day of trawling through the available rooms for rent on her agency salary, she was not in the mood to hear the Chiswell definition of poverty again.

“Yeah, really, little though you might believe it,” said Raphael, with a slightly acid smile, and Robin suspected he knew what she had been thinking. “Seriously, are we eating, or what?”

“Fine,” said Robin, who had barely touched food all day, “let’s eat.”

Raphael took his bottle of beer off the bar and led her through to the restaurant where they took a table for two beside the wall. It was so early that they were the only diners.

“My mother used to come here in the eighties,” said Raphael. “It was well known because the owner liked telling the rich and famous to sod off if they weren’t dressed properly to come in, and they all loved it.”

“Really?” said Robin, her thoughts miles away. It had just struck her that she would never again have dinner with Matthew like this, just the two of them. She remembered the very last time, at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. What had he been thinking while he ate in silence? Certainly he had been furious at her for continuing to work with Strike, but perhaps he had also been weighing in his mind the competing attractions of Sarah, with her well-paid job at Christie’s, her endless fund of stories about other people’s wealth, and her no doubt self-confident performance in bed, where the diamond earrings her fiancé had bought her snagged on Robin’s pillow.

“Listen, if eating with me’s going to make you look like that, I’m fine with going back to the bar,” said Raphael.

“What?” said Robin, surprised out of her thoughts. “Oh—no, it isn’t you.”