Lethal White

A waiter brought over Robin’s wine. She took a large slug.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was just thinking about my husband. I left him last night.”

As she watched Raphael freeze in surprise with the bottle at his lips, Robin knew herself to have crossed an invisible boundary. In her whole time at the agency, she had never used truths about her private life to gain another’s confidence, never blended the private and the professional to win another person over. In turning Matthew’s infidelity into a device to manipulate Raphael, she knew that she was doing something that would appall and disgust her husband. Their marriage, he would have thought, ought to be sacrosanct, a world apart from what he saw as her seedy, ramshackle job.

“Seriously?” said Raphael.

“Yes,” said Robin, “but I don’t expect you to believe me, not after all the crap I told you when I was Venetia. Anyway,” she took her notebook out of her handbag, “you said you were OK with me asking some questions?”

“Er—yeah,” he said, apparently unable to decide whether he was more amused or disconcerted. “Is this real? Your marriage broke up last night?”

“Yes,” said Robin. “Why are you looking so shocked?”

“I don’t know,” said Raphael. “You just seem so… Girl Guidey.” His eyes moved over her face. “It’s part of the appeal.”

“Could I just ask my questions?” said Robin, determinedly unfazed.

Raphael drank some beer and said:

“Always busy with the job. Turns a man’s thoughts to what it would take to distract you.”

“Seriously—”

“Fine, fine, questions—but let’s order first. Fancy some dim sum?”

“Whatever’s good,” said Robin, opening her notebook.

Ordering food seemed to cheer Raphael up.

“Drink up,” he said.

“I shouldn’t be drinking at all,” she replied, and indeed, she hadn’t touched the wine since her first gulp. “OK, I wanted to talk about Ebury Street.”

“Go on,” said Raphael.

“You heard what Kinvara said about the keys. I wondered whether—”

“—I ever had one?” asked Raphael with equanimity. “Guess how many times I was ever in that house.”

Robin waited.

“Once,” said Raphael. “Never went there as a kid. When I got out of—you know—Dad, who hadn’t visited me once while I was inside, invited me down to Chiswell House to see him, so I did. Brushed my hair, put on a suit, got all the way down to that hellhole and he didn’t bother turning up. Detained by a late vote at the House or some crap. Picture how happy Kinvara was to have me on her hands for the night, in that bloody depressing house that I’ve had bad dreams about ever since I was a kid. Welcome home, Raff.

“I took the early train back to London. Following week, no contact from Dad until I get another summons, this time to go to Ebury Street. I considered just not bloody turning up. Why did I go?”

“I don’t know,” said Robin. “Why did you?”

He looked directly into her eyes.

“You can bloody hate someone and still wish they gave a shit about you and hate yourself for wishing it.”

“Yes,” said Robin quietly, “of course you can.”

“So round I trot to Ebury Street, thinking I might get—not a heart to heart, I mean, you met my father—but maybe, you know, some human emotion. He opened the door, said ‘There you are,’ shunted me into the sitting room and there was Henry Drummond and I realized I was there for a job interview. Drummond said he’d take me on, Dad barked at me not to fuck it up and shoved me back out onto the street. First and last time I was ever inside the place,” said Raphael, “so I can’t say I’ve got fond associations with it.”

He paused to consider what he’d just said, then let out a short laugh.

“And my father killed himself there, of course. I was forgetting that.”

“No key,” said Robin, making a note.

“No, among the many things I didn’t get that day were a spare key and an invitation to let myself in whenever I fancied it.”

“I need to ask you something that might seem as though it’s slightly out of left field,” said Robin cautiously.

“This sounds interesting,” said Raphael, leaning forwards.

“Did you ever suspect that your father was having an affair?”

“What?” he said, almost comically taken aback. “No—but—what?”

“Over the last year or so?” said Robin. “While he was married to Kinvara?”

He seemed incredulous.

“OK,” said Robin, “if you don’t—”

“What on earth makes you think he was having an affair?”

“Kinvara was always very possessive, very concerned about your father’s whereabouts, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah,” said Raphael, now smirking, “but you know why that was. That was you.”

“I heard that she broke down months before I went to work in the office. She told somebody that your father had cheated on her. She was distraught, by all accounts. It was around the time her mare was put down and she—”

“—hit Dad with the hammer?” He frowned. “Oh. I thought that was because of her not wanting the horse put down. Well, I suppose Dad was a ladies’ man when he was younger. Hey—maybe that’s what he was up to, the night I went down to Chiswell House and he stayed up in London? Kinvara was definitely expecting him back and she was furious when he cried off at the last minute.”

“Yes, maybe,” said Robin, making a note. “Can you remember what date that was?”

“Er—yeah, as a matter of fact, I can. You don’t tend to forget the day you’re released from jail. I got out on Wednesday the sixteenth of February last year, and Dad asked me to go down to Chiswell House on the following Saturday, so… the nineteenth.”

Robin made a note.

“You never saw or heard signs there was another woman?”

“Come on,” said Raphael, “you were there, at the Commons. You saw how little I had to do with him. Was he going to tell me he was playing around?”

“He told you about seeing the ghost of Jack o’Kent roaming the grounds at night.”

“That was different. He was drunk then, and—morbid. Weird. Banging on about divine retribution… I don’t know, I suppose he could’ve been talking about an affair. Maybe he’d grown a conscience at last, three wives down the line.”

“I didn’t think he married your mother?”

Raphael’s eyes narrowed.

“Sorry. Momentarily forgot I’m the bastard.”

“Oh, come on,” said Robin gently, “you know I didn’t mean—”

“All right, sorry,” he muttered. “Being touchy. Being left out of a parent’s will does that to a person.”

Robin remembered Strike’s dictum about inheritance: It is the money, and it isn’t, and in an uncanny echo of her thoughts, Raphael said:

“It isn’t the money, although God knows I could use the money. I’m jobless, and I don’t think old Henry Drummond’s going to give me a reference, do you? And now my mother looks like she’s going to settle permanently in Italy, so she’s talking about selling the London flat, which means I’ll be homeless. It’ll come to this, you know,” he said bitterly. “I’ll end up as Kinvara’s bloody stable boy. No one else will work for her and no one else’ll employ me…

“But it’s not just the money. When you’re left out of the will… well, left out, that says it all. The last statement of a dead man to his family and I didn’t rate a single mention and now I’ve got fucking Torquil advising me to piss off to Siena with my mother and ‘start again.’ Tosser,” said Raphael, with a dangerous expression.

“Is that where your mother lives? Siena?”

“Yeah. She’s shacked up with an Italian count these days, and believe me, the last thing he wants is her twenty-nine-year-old son moving in. He’s showing no sign of wanting to marry her and she’s starting to worry about her

old age, hence the idea of flogging the flat here. She’s getting a bit long in the tooth to pull the trick she did on my father.”

“What d’you—?”

“She got pregnant on purpose. Don’t look so shocked. My mother doesn’t believe in shielding me from the realities of life. She told me the story years ago. I’m a gamble that didn’t come off. She thought he’d marry her if she got pregnant, but as you’ve just pointed out—”

“I said I’m sorry,” said Robin. “I am. It was really insensitive and—and stupid.”

She thought perhaps Raphael was about to tell her to go to hell, but instead he said quietly:

“See, you are sweet. You weren’t entirely acting, were you? In the office?”

“I don’t know,” said Robin. “I suppose not.”

Feeling his legs shift under the table, she moved very slightly backwards again.

“What’s your husband like?” Raphael asked.

“I don’t know how to describe him.”

“Does he work for Christie’s?”

“No,” said Robin. “He’s an accountant.”

“Christ,” said Raphael, appalled. “Is that what you like?”

“He wasn’t an accountant when I met him. Can we go back over your father calling you on the morning he died?”

“If you like,” said Raphael, “but I’d much rather talk about you.”

“Well, why don’t you tell me what happened that morning and then you can ask me whatever you like,” said Robin.

A fleeting smile passed over Raphael’s face. He took a swig of beer and said:

“Dad called me. Told me he thought Kinvara was about to do something stupid and told me to go straight down to Woolstone and stop it. I did ask why it had to be me, you know.”

“You didn’t tell us that at Chiswell House,” said Robin, looking up from her notes.

“Of course I didn’t, because the others were there. Dad said he didn’t want to ask Izzy. He was quite rude about her on the phone… he was an ungrateful shit, really he was,” said Raphael. “She worked her fingers to the bloody bone and you saw how he treated her.”

“What do you mean, rude?”

“He said she’d shout at Kinvara, upset her and make it worse or something. Pot and bloody kettle, but there you are. But the truth is,” said Raphael, “that he saw me as a kind of upper servant and Izzy as proper family. He didn’t mind me getting my hands dirty and it didn’t matter if I pissed off his wife by barging into her house and stopping her—”

“Stopping her what?”

“Ah,” said Raphael, “food.”

The dim sum placed on the table before them, the waitress retreated.

“What did you stop Kinvara doing?” Robin repeated. “Leaving your father? Hurting herself?”

“I love this stuff,” said Raphael, examining a prawn dumpling.

“She left a note,” persisted Robin, “saying she was leaving. Did your father send you down there to persuade her not to go? Was he afraid Izzy would egg her on to leave him?”

“D’you seriously think I could persuade Kinvara to stay in the marriage? Never having to lay eyes on me again would’ve been one more incentive to go.”

“Then why did he send you to her?”

“I’ve told you,” said Raphael. “He thought she was going to do something stupid.”

“Raff,” said Robin, “you can keep playing silly buggers—”

He corpsed.

“Christ, you sound Yorkshire when you say that. Say it again.”

“The police think there’s something fishy about your story of what you were up to that morning,” said Robin. “And so do we.”

That seemed to sober him up.

“How do you know what the police are thinking?”

“We’ve got contacts on the force,” said Robin. “Raff, you’ve given everyone the impression that your father was trying to stop Kinvara hurting herself, but nobody really buys that. The stable girl was there. Tegan. She could have prevented Kinvara from hurting herself.”

Raphael chewed for a while, apparently thinking.

“All right,” he sighed. “All right, here it is. You know how Dad had sold off everything that would raise a few hundred quid, or given it to Peregrine?”

“Who?”

“All right, Pringle,” said Raphael, exasperated. “I prefer not to use their stupid bloody nicknames.

“He didn’t sell off everything of value,” said Robin.

“What d’you mean?”

“That picture of the mare and foal is worth five to eight—”

Robin’s mobile rang. She knew from the ringtone that it was Matthew.

“Aren’t you going to get that?”

“No,” said Robin.

She waited until the phone had stopped ringing, then took it out of her bag.

“‘Matt,’” said Raphael, reading the name upside down. “That’s the accountant, is it?”

“Yes,” said Robin, silencing the phone, but it immediately began to vibrate in her hand instead. Matthew had called back.

“Block him,” suggested Raphael.

“Yes,” said Robin, “good idea.”

All that was important to her right now was keeping Raphael cooperative. He seemed to enjoy watching her block Matthew. She put the mobile back in her bag and said:

“Go on about the paintings.”

“Well, you know how Dad had offloaded all the valuable ones through Drummond?”

“Some of us think five thousand pounds worth of picture is quite valuable,” said Robin, unable to help herself.

“Fine, Ms. Lefty,” said Raphael, suddenly nasty. “You can keep sneering about how people like me don’t know the value of money—”

“Sorry,” said Robin quickly, cursing herself. “I am, seriously. Look, I’ve—well, I’ve been trying to find a room to rent this morning. Five thousand pounds would change my life right now.”

“Oh,” said Raphael, frowning. “I—OK. Actually, if it comes to that I’d leap at the chance of five grand in my pocket right now, but I’m talking about seriously valuable stuff, worth tens and hundreds of thousands, things that my father wanted to keep in the family. He’d already handed them on to little Pringle to avoid death duties. There was a Chinese lacquer cabinet, an ivory workbox and a couple of other things, but there was also the necklace.”

“Which—?”

“It’s a big ugly diamond thing,” said Raphael, and with the hand not spearing dumplings he mimed a thick collar. “Important stones. It’s come down through five generations or something and the convention was that it went to the eldest daughter on her twenty-first, but my father’s father, who as you might have heard was a bit of a playboy—”

“This is the one who married Tinky the nurse?”

“She was his third or fourth,” said Raphael, nodding. “I can never remember. Anyway, he only had sons, so he let all his wives wear the thing in turn, then left it to my father, who kept the new tradition going. His wives got to wear it—even my mother got a shot—and he forgot about the handing on to the daughter on her twenty-first bit, Pringle didn’t get it and he didn’t mention it in his will.”

“So—wait, d’you mean it’s now—?”

“Dad called me up that morning and told me I had to get hold of the bloody thing. Simple job, kind of thing anyone would enjoy,” he said, sarcastically. “Bust in on a stepmother who hates my guts, find out where she’s keeping a valuable necklace, then steal it from under her nose.”

“So you think your father believed that she was leaving him, and was worried that she was going to take it with her?”

“I suppose so,” said Raphael.

“How did he sound on the phone?”

“I told you this. Groggy. I thought it was a hangover. After I heard he’d killed himself,” Raphael faltered, “… well.”

“Well?”

“To tell you the truth,” said Raphael, “I couldn’t get it out of my head that

the last thing Dad wanted to say to me in this life was, ‘run along and make sure your sister gets her diamonds.’ Words to treasure forever, eh?”

At a loss for anything to say, Robin took another sip of wine, then asked quietly:

“Do Izzy and Fizzy realize the necklace is Kinvara’s now?”

Raphael’s lips twisted in an unpleasant smile.

“Well, they know it is legally, but here’s the really funny thing: they think she’s going to hand it over to them. After everything they’ve said about her, after calling her a gold-digger for years, slagging her off at every possible opportunity, they can’t quite grasp that she won’t hand the necklace over to Fizzy for Flopsy—damn it—Florence—because,” he affected a shrill upper-class voice, “‘Darling, even TTS wouldn’t do that, it belongs in the family, she must realize she can’t sell it.’

“Bullets would bounce off their self-regard. They think there’s a kind of natural law in operation, where Chiswells get what they want and lesser beings just fall into line.”

“How did Henry Drummond know you were trying to stop Kinvara keeping the necklace? He told Cormoran you went to Chiswell House for noble reasons.”

Raphael snorted.

“Cat’s really out of the bag, isn’t it? Yeah, apparently Kinvara left a message for Henry the day before Dad died, asking where she could get a valuation on the necklace.”

“Is that why he phoned your father that morning?”

“Exactly. To warn him what she was up to.”

“Why didn’t you tell the police all this?”

“Because once the others find out she’s planning to sell it, the whole thing’s going to turn nuclear. There’ll be an almighty row and the family’ll go to lawyers and expect me to join them in kicking the shit out of Kinvara, and meanwhile I’m still treated like a second-class citizen, like a fucking courier, driving all the old paintings up to Drummond in London and hearing how much Dad was getting for them, and not a penny of that did I ever see—I’m not getting caught up in the middle of the great necklace scandal, I’m not playing their bloody game. I should’ve told Dad to stuff it, the day he phoned,” said Raphael, “but he didn’t sound well, and I suppose I felt sorry for him, or something, which only goes to prove they’re right, I’m not a proper bloody Chiswell.”