Lethal White

He had run out of breath. Two couples had joined them in the restaurant now. Robin watched in the mirror as a well-groomed blonde did a double take at Raphael as she sat down with her florid, overweight companion.

“So, why did you leave Matthew?” Raphael asked.

“He cheated,” said Robin. She didn’t have the energy to lie.

“Who with?”

She had the impression he was seeking to redress some kind of power balance. However much anger and contempt he had displayed during the outburst about his family, she had heard the hurt, too.

“With a friend of his from university,” said Robin.

“How did you find out?”

“A diamond earring, in our bed.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” said Robin.

She felt a sudden wave of depression and fatigue at the idea of traveling all the way back to that hard sofa in Wembley. She had not yet called her parents to tell them what had happened.

“Under normal circumstances,” said Raphael, “I’d be putting the moves on you. Well, not right now. Not tonight. But give it a couple of weeks…

“Trouble is, I look at you,” he raised a forefinger, and pointed first to her, and then to an imaginary figure behind her, “and I see your one-legged boss looming over your shoulder.”

“Is there any particular reason you feel the need to mention him being one-legged?”

Raphael grinned.

“Protective, aren’t you?”

“No, I—”

“It’s all right. Izzy fancies him, too.”

“I never—”

“Defensive, too.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Robin, half-laughing, and Raphael grinned.

“I’m having another beer. Drink that wine, why don’t you?” he said, indicating her glass, which was still two-thirds full.

When he had procured another bottle, he said with a malevolent grin, “Izzy’s always liked bits of rough. Did you notice the charged look from Fizzy to Izzy when Jimmy Knight’s name was mentioned?”

“I did, actually,” said Robin. “What was that about?”

“Freddie’s eighteenth birthday party,” said Raphael, smirking. “Jimmy crashed it with a couple of mates and Izzy—how do I put this delicately?—lost something in his company.”

“Oh,” said Robin, astonished.

“She was blind drunk. It’s passed into family legend. I wasn’t there. I was too young.

“Fizzy’s so amazed at the idea that her sister could have slept with the estate carpenter’s son that she thinks he must have some sort of supernatural, demonic sex appeal. That’s why she thinks Kinvara was slightly on his side, when he turned up asking for money.”

“What?” said Robin sharply, reaching for her notebook again, which had fallen closed.

“Don’t get too excited,” said Raphael, “I still don’t know what he was blackmailing Dad about, I never did. Not a full member of the family, you see, so not to be fully trusted.

“Kinvara told you this at Chiswell House, don’t you remember? She was alone at home, the first time Jimmy turned up. Dad was in London again. From what I’ve pieced together, when she and Dad first talked it over, she argued Jimmy’s case. Fizzy thinks that’s down to Jimmy’s sex appeal. Would you say he’s got any?”

“I suppose some people might think he has,” said Robin indifferently, who was making notes. “Kinvara thought your father should pay Jimmy his money, did she?”

“From what I understand,” said Raphael, “Jimmy didn’t frame it as blackmail on the first approach. She thought Jimmy had a legitimate claim and argued for giving him something.”

“When was this, d’you know?”

“Search me,” said Raphael, shaking his head. “I think I was in jail at the time. Bigger things to worry about…

“Guess,” he said, for the second time, “how often any of them have asked me what it was like in jail?”

“I don’t know,” said Robin cautiously.

“Fizzy, never. Dad, never—”

“You said Izzy visited.”

“Yeah,” he acknowledged, with a tip of the bottle to his sister. “Yeah, she did, bless her. Good old Torks has made a couple of jokes about not wanting to bend over in the shower. I suggested,” said Raphael, with a hard smile, “that he’d know all about that kind of thing, what with his old pal Christopher sliding his hand between young men’s legs at the office. Turns out it’s serious stuff when some hairy old convict tries it, but harmless frolics for public schoolboys.”

He glanced at Robin.

“I suppose you know now why Dad was taunting that poor bloke Aamir?”

She nodded.

“Which Kinvara thought was a motive for murder,” said Raphael, rolling his eyes. “Projection, pure projection—they’re all at it.

“Kinvara thinks Aamir killed Dad, because Dad had been cruel to him in front of a room full of people. Well, you should have heard some of the things Dad was saying to Kinvara by the end.

“Fizzy thinks Jimmy Knight might’ve done it because he was angry about money. She’s bloody angry about all the family money that’s vanished, but she can’t say that in so many words, not when her husband’s half the reason it’s gone.

“Izzy thinks Kinvara must have killed Dad because Kinvara felt unloved and sidelined and disposable. Dad never thanked Izzy for a damn thing she did for him, and didn’t give a toss when she said she was leaving. You get the picture?

“None of them have got the guts to say that they all felt like killing Dad at times, not now he’s dead, so they project it all onto someone else. And that,” said Raphael, “is why none of them are talking about Geraint Winn. He gets double protection, because Saint Freddie was involved in Winn’s big grudge. It’s staring them in the face that he had a real motive, but we’re not supposed to mention that.”

“Go on,” said Robin, her pen at the ready. “Mention.”

“No, forget it,” said Raphael, “I shouldn’t have—”

“I don’t think you say much accidentally, Raff. Out with it.”

He laughed.

“I’m trying to stop fucking over people who don’t deserve it. It’s all part of the great redemption project.”

“Who doesn’t deserve it?”

“Francesca, the little girl I—you know—at the gallery. She’s the one who told me. She got it from her older sister, Verity.”

“Verity,” repeated Robin.

Sleep-deprived, she struggled to remember where she had heard that name. It was very like “Venetia,” of course… and then she remembered.

“Wait,” she said, frowning in her effort to concentrate. “There was a Verity on the fencing team with Freddie and Rhiannon Winn.”

“Right in one,” said Raphael.

“You all know each other,” said Robin wearily, unknowingly echoing Strike’s thought as she started writing again.

“Well, that’s the joy of the public school system,” said Raphael. “In London, if you’ve got the money, you meet the same three hundred people everywhere you go… Yeah, when I first arrived at Drummond’s gallery, Francesca couldn’t wait to tell me that her big sister had once dated Freddie. I think she thought that made the pair of us predestined, or something.

“When she realized I thought Freddie was a bit of a shit,” said Raphael, “she changed tack and told me a nasty story.

“Apparently, at his eighteenth, Freddie, Verity and a couple of others decided to mete out some punishment to Rhiannon for having dared to replace Verity on the fencing team. In their view she was—I don’t know—a bit common, a bit Welsh?—so they spiked her drink. All good fun. Sort of stuff that goes on the dorm, you know.

“But she didn’t react too well to neat vodka—or maybe, from their point of view, she reacted really well. Anyway, they managed to take some nice pictures of her, to pass around among themselves… this was in the early days of the internet. These days I suppose half a

million people would have viewed them in the first twenty-four hours, but Rhiannon only had to endure the whole fencing team and most of Freddie’s mates having a good gloat.

“Anyway,” said Raphael, “about a month later, Rhiannon killed herself.”

“Oh my God,” said Robin quietly.

“Yeah,” said Raphael. “After little Franny told me the story, I asked Izzy about it. She got very upset, told me not to repeat it, ever—but she didn’t deny it. I got lots of ‘nobody kills themselves because of a silly joke at a party’ bluster and she told me I mustn’t talk about Freddie like that, it would break Dad’s heart…

“Well, the dead don’t have hearts to break, do they? And personally, I think it’s about time somebody pissed on Freddie’s eternal flame. If he hadn’t been born a Chiswell, the bastard would’ve been in borstal. But I suppose you’ll say I can talk, after what I did.”

“No,” said Robin gently. “That isn’t what I was going to say.”

The pugnacious expression faded from his face. He checked his watch.

“I’m going to have to go. I’ve got to be somewhere at nine.”

Robin raised her hand to signal for the bill. When she turned back to Raphael, she saw his eyes moving in routine fashion over both the other women in the restaurant, and in the mirror she saw how the blonde tried to hold his gaze.

“You can go,” she said, handing over her credit card to the waitress. “I don’t want to make you late.”

“No, I’ll walk you out.”

While she was still putting her credit card back into her handbag, he picked up her coat and held it up for her.

“Thank you.”

“No problem.”

Out on the pavement, he hailed a taxi.

“You take this one,” he said. “I fancy a walk. Clear my head. I feel as though I’ve had a bad therapy session.”

“No, it’s all right,” said Robin. She didn’t want to charge a taxi all the way back to Wembley to Strike. “I’m going to get the Tube. Goodnight.”

“’Night, Venetia,” he said.

Raphael got into the taxi, which glided away, and Robin pulled her coat more tightly around herself as she walked off in the opposite direction. It had been a chaotic interview, but she had managed to get much more than she had expected out of Raphael. Taking out her mobile again, she phoned Strike.

59

We two go with each other…

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

When he saw Robin was calling him, Strike, who had taken his notebook out to the Tottenham for a drink, pocketed the former, downed the remainder of his pint in one and took the call out onto the street.

The mess that building works had made of the top of Tottenham Court Road—the rubble-strewn channel where a street had been, the portable railings and the plastic barricades, the walkways and planks that enabled tens of thousands of people to continue to pass through the busy junction—were so familiar to him now that he barely noticed them. He had not come outside for the view, but for a cigarette, and he smoked two while Robin relayed everything that Raphael had told her.

Once the call was over, Strike returned his mobile to his pocket and absentmindedly lit himself a third cigarette from the tip of the second and continued to stand there, thinking deeply about everything she had said and forcing passersby to navigate around him.

A couple of things that Robin had told him struck the detective as interesting. Having finished his third cigarette and flicked it into the open abyss in the road, Strike retreated inside the pub and ordered himself a second pint. A group of students had now taken his table, so he headed into the back, where high bar stools sat beneath a stained-glass cupola whose colors were dimmed by night. Here, Strike took out his notebook again and re-examined the list of names over which he had pored in the early hours of Sunday, while he sought distraction from thoughts of Charlotte. After gazing at it again in the manner of a man who knows something is concealed there, he turned a few pages to reread the notes he had made of his interview with Della.

Large, hunch-backed and motionless but for the eyes flicking along the lines he had scribbled in the blind woman’s house, Strike unknowingly repelled a couple of timid backpackers who had considered asking whether they might share his table and take the weight off their blistered feet. Fearing the consequences of breaking his almost tangible concentration, they retreated before he noticed them.

Strike turned back to the list of names. Married couples, lovers, business partners, siblings.

Pairs.

He flicked further backwards to the pages to find the notes he had made during the interview with Oliver, who had taken them through the forensic findings. A two-part killing, this: amitriptyline and helium, each potentially fatal on its own, yet used together.

Pairs.

Two victims, killed twenty years apart, a strangled child and a suffocated government minister, the former buried on the latter’s land.

Pairs.

Strike turned thoughtfully to a blank page and made a new note for himself.

Francesca—confirm story

60

… you really must give me some explanation of your taking this matter—this possibility—so much to heart.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

The following morning, a carefully worded official statement about Jasper Chiswell appeared in all the papers. Along with the rest of the British public, Strike learned over his breakfast that the authorities had concluded that no foreign power or terrorist organization had been involved in the untimely death of the Minister for Culture, but that no other conclusion had yet been reached.

The news that there was no news had been greeted online with barely a ripple of interest. The local postboxes of Olympic winners were still being painted gold, and the public was basking in the satisfied afterglow arising from a triumphant games, its unspent enthusiasm for all things athletic now concentrated on the imminent prospect of the Paralympics. Chiswell’s death had been filed away in the popular mind as the vaguely inexplicable suicide of a wealthy Tory.

Keen to know whether this official statement indicated that the Met investigation was close to concluding, Strike called Wardle to find out what he knew.

Unfortunately, the policeman was no wiser than Strike himself. Wardle added, not without a certain irritability, that he had not had a single day off in three weeks, that the policing of the capital while the city heaved under the weight of millions of extra visitors was complex and onerous past Strike’s probable understanding, and that he didn’t have time to go ferreting for information on unrelated matters on Strike’s behalf.

“Fair enough,” said Strike, unfazed. “Only asking. Say hello to April for me.”

“Oh yeah,” said Wardle, before Strike could hang up. “She wanted me to ask you what you’re playing at with Lorelei.”

“Better let you go, Wardle, the country needs you,” said Strike, and he hung up on the policeman’s grudging laugh.

In the absence of information from his police contacts, and with no official standing to secure him the interviews he desired, Strike was temporarily stymied at a crucial point in the case, a frustration no more pleasant for being familiar.

A few phone calls after breakfast informed him that Francesca Pulham, Raphael’s sometime colleague and lover from Drummond’s gallery, was still studying in Florence, where she had been sent to remove her from his pernicious influence. Francesca’s parents were currently on holiday in Sri Lanka. The Pulhams’ housekeeper, who was the only person connected with the family that Strike was able to reach, refused point blank to give him telephone numbers for any of them. From her reaction, he guessed the Pulhams might be the kind of people who’d run for lawyers at the very idea of a private detective calling their house.

Having exhausted all possible avenues to the holidaying Pulhams, Strike left a polite request for an interview on Geraint Winn’s voicemail, the fourth he had made that week, but the day wore on and Winn didn’t ca

ll back. Strike couldn’t blame him. He doubted that he would have chosen to be helpful, had he been in Winn’s shoes.

Strike had not yet told Robin that he had a new theory about the case. She was busy in Harley Street, watching Dodgy Doc, but on Wednesday she called the office with the welcome news that she had arranged an interview with Tegan Butcher on Saturday at Newbury Racecourse.

“Excellent!” said Strike, cheered by the prospect of action, and striding through to the outer office to bring up Google Maps on Robin’s computer. “OK, I think we’re going to be looking at an overnighter. Interview Tegan, then head over to Steda Cottage once it gets dark.”

“Cormoran, are you serious about this?” said Robin. “You genuinely want to go digging in the dell?”

“That sounds like a nursery rhyme,” said Strike vaguely, examining B roads on the monitor. “Look, I don’t think there’s anything there. In fact, as of yesterday, I’m sure of it.”

“What happened yesterday?”

“I had an idea. I’ll tell you when I see you. Look, I promised Billy I’d find out the truth about his strangled child. There’s no other way to be totally sure, is there, other than digging? But if you’re feeling squeamish, you can stay in the car.”

“And what about Kinvara? We’ll be on her property.”

“We’ll hardly be digging up anything important. That whole area’s waste ground. I’m going to get Barclay to meet us there, after dark. I’m not much good for digging. Will Matthew be OK if you’re away overnight Saturday?”

“Fine,” said Robin, with an odd inflection that made Strike suspect that he wouldn’t be fine about it at all.

“And you’re OK to drive the Land Rover?”

“Er—is there any chance we could take your BMW instead?”

“I’d rather not take the BMW up that overgrown track. Is there something wrong with the—?”

“No,” said Robin, cutting across him. “That’s fine, OK, we’ll take the Land Rover.”

“Great. How’s Dodgy?”

“In his consulting rooms. Any news on Aamir?”