Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  ‘A man called Jasper Chizzle, spelled “Chiswell” wants you to take on a job for him. He says it’s got to be you, nobody else.’ Robin screwed up her forehead in perplexity. ‘I know the name, don’t I?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘He’s Minister for Culture.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Robin, realisation dawning. ‘Of course! The big man with the weird hair!’

  ‘That’s him.’

  A clutch of vague memories and associations assailed Robin. She seemed to remember an old affair, resignation in disgrace, rehabilitation and, somewhat more recently, a fresh scandal, another nasty news story . . .

  ‘Didn’t his son get sent to jail for manslaughter not that long ago?’ she said. ‘That was Chiswell, wasn’t it? His son was stoned and driving and he killed a young mother?’

  Strike recalled his attention, it seemed, from a distance. He was wearing a peculiar expression.

  ‘Yeah, that rings a bell,’ said Strike.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘A few things, actually,’ said Strike, running a hand over his stubbly chin. ‘For starters: I tracked down Billy’s brother on Friday.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Long story,’ said Strike, ‘but turns out Jimmy’s part of a group that’s protesting against the Olympics. “CORE”, they call themselves. Anyway, he was with a girl, and the first thing she said when I told them I was a private detective was: “Chiswell’s sent him.”’

  Strike pondered this point while drinking his perfectly brewed tea.

  ‘But Chiswell wouldn’t need me to keep an eye on CORE,’ he went on, thinking aloud. ‘There was already a plainclothes guy there.’

  Though keen to hear what other things troubled Strike about Chiswell’s call, Robin did not prompt him, but sat in silence, allowing him to mull the new development. It was precisely this kind of tact that Strike had missed when she was out of the office.

  ‘And get this,’ he went on at last, as though there had been no interruption. ‘The son who went to jail for manslaughter isn’t – or wasn’t – Chiswell’s only boy. His eldest was called Freddie and he died in Iraq. Yeah. Major Freddie Chiswell, Queen’s Royal Hussars. Killed in an attack on a convoy in Basra. I investigated his death in action while I was still SIB.’

  ‘So you know Chiswell?’

  ‘No, never met him. You don’t meet families, usually . . . I knew Chiswell’s daughter years ago, as well. Only slightly, but I met her a few times. She was an old school friend of Charlotte’s.’

  Robin experienced a tiny frisson at the mention of Charlotte. She had a great curiosity, which she successfully concealed, about Charlotte, the woman Strike had been involved with on and off for sixteen years, whom he had been supposed to marry before the relationship ended messily and, apparently, permanently.

  ‘Pity we couldn’t get Billy’s number,’ said Strike, running a large, hairy-backed hand over his jaw again.

  ‘I’ll make sure I get it if he calls again,’ Robin assured him. ‘Are you going to ring Chiswell back? He said he was about to go into a meeting.’

  ‘I’m keen to find out what he wants, but the question is whether we’ve got room for another client,’ said Strike. ‘Let’s think . . . ’

  He put his hands behind his head, frowning up at the ceiling, on which many fine cracks were exposed by the sunlight. Screw that now . . . the office would soon be a developer’s problem, after all . . .

  ‘I’ve got Andy and Barclay watching the Webster kid. Barclay’s doing well, by the way. I’ve had three solid days’ surveillance out of him, pictures, the lot.

  ‘Then there’s old Dodgy Doc. He still hasn’t done anything newsworthy.’

  ‘Shame,’ said Robin, then she caught herself. ‘No, I don’t mean that, I mean good.’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘This job,’ she sighed. ‘It messes with your ethics. Who’s watching Dodgy today?’

  ‘I was going to ask you to do it,’ said Strike, ‘but the client called yesterday afternoon. He’d forgotten to tell me Dodgy’s at a symposium in Paris.’

  Eyes still on the ceiling, brow furrowed in thought, Strike said:

  ‘We’ve got two days at that tech conference starting tomorrow. Which do you want to do, Harley Street or a conference centre out in Epping Forest? We can swap over if you want. D’you want to spend tomorrow watching Dodgy, or with hundreds of stinking geeks in superhero T-shirts?’

  ‘Not all tech people smell,’ Robin reprimanded him. ‘Your mate Spanner doesn’t.’

  ‘You don’t want to judge Spanner by the amount of deodorant he puts on to come here,’ said Strike.

  Spanner, who had overhauled their computer and telephone system when the business had received its dramatic boost in business, was the younger brother of Strike’s old friend Nick. He fancied Robin, as she and Strike were equally aware.

  Strike mulled over options, rubbing his chin again.

  ‘I’ll call Chiswell back and find out what he’s after,’ he said at last. ‘You never know, it might be a bigger job than that lawyer whose wife’s sleeping around. He’s next on the waiting list, right?’

  ‘Him, or that American woman who’s married to the Ferrari dealer. They’re both waiting.’

  Strike sighed. Infidelity formed the bulk of their workload.

  ‘I hope Chiswell’s wife isn’t cheating. I fancy a change.’

  The sofa made its usual flatulent noises as Strike quit it. As he strode back to the inner office, Robin called after him:

  ‘Are you happy for me to finish up this paperwork, then?’

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ said Strike, closing the door behind him.

  Robin turned back to her computer feeling quite cheerful. A busker had just started singing ‘No Woman, No Cry’ in Denmark Street and for a while there, while they talked about Billy Knight and the Chiswells, she had felt as though they were the Strike and Robin of a year ago, before he had sacked her, before she had married Matthew.

  Meanwhile, in the inner office, Strike’s call to Jasper Chiswell had been answered almost instantly.

  ‘Chiswell,’ he barked.

  ‘Cormoran Strike here,’ said the detective. ‘You spoke to my partner a short while ago.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the Minister for Culture, who sounded as though he were in the back of a car. ‘I’ve got a job for you. Nothing I want to discuss over the phone. I’m busy today and this evening, unfortunately, but tomorrow would suit.’

  ‘Ob-observing the hypocrites . . . ’ sang the busker down in the street.

  ‘Sorry, no chance tomorrow,’ said Strike, watching motes of dust fall through the bright sunlight. ‘No chance until Friday, actually. Can you give me an idea what kind of job we’re talking about, Minister?’

  Chiswell’s response was both tense and angry.

  ‘I can’t discuss it over the phone. I’ll make it worth your while to meet me, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘It isn’t a question of money, it’s time. I’m solidly booked until Friday.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake—’

  Chiswell suddenly removed his phone from his mouth and Strike heard him talking furiously to somebody else.

  ‘—left here, you moron! Lef – for fuck’s sake! No, I’ll walk. I’ll bloody walk, open the door!’

  In the background, Strike heard a nervous man say:

  ‘I’m sorry, Minister, it was No Entry—’

  ‘Never mind that! Open this – open this bloody door!’

  Strike waited, eyebrows raised. He heard a car door slam, rapid footsteps and then Jasper Chiswell spoke again, his mouth close to the receiver.

  ‘The job’s urgent!’ he hissed.

  ‘If it can’t wait until Friday, you’ll have to find someone else, I’m afraid.’

  ‘My feet is my only carriage,’ sang the busker.

  Chiswell said nothing for a few seconds; then, finally:

  ‘It’s got to be you. I’ll explain when we meet, but – all right, if it has to be Fri
day, meet me at Pratt’s Club. Park Place. Come at twelve, I’ll give you lunch.’

  ‘All right,’ Strike agreed, now thoroughly intrigued. ‘See you at Pratt’s.’

  He hung up and returned to the office where Robin was opening and sorting mail. When he told her the upshot of the conversation, she Googled Pratt’s for him.

  ‘I didn’t think places like this still existed,’ she said in disbelief, after a minute’s reading off the monitor.

  ‘Places like what?’

  ‘It’s a gentleman’s club . . . very Tory . . . no women allowed, except as guests of club members at lunchtime . . . and “to avoid confusion”,’ Robin read from the Wikipedia page, ‘“all male staff members are called George”.’

  ‘What if they hire a woman?’

  ‘Apparently they did in the eighties,’ said Robin, her expression midway between amusement and disapproval. ‘They called her Georgina.’

  9

  It is best for you not to know. Best for us both.

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  At half past eleven the following Friday, a suited and freshly shaven Strike emerged from Green Park Tube station and proceeded along Piccadilly. Double-deckers rolled past the windows of luxury shops, which were capitalising on Olympics fever to push an eclectic mix of goods: gold-wrapped chocolate medals, Union Jack brogues, antique sporting posters and, over and again, the jagged logo that Jimmy Knight had compared to a broken swastika.

  Strike had allowed a generous margin of time to reach Pratt’s, because his leg was again aching after two days in which he had rarely been able to take the weight off his prosthesis. He had hoped that the tech conference in Epping Forest, where he had spent the previous day, might have offered intervals of rest, but he had been disappointed. His target, the recently fired partner of a start-up, was suspected of trying to sell key features of their new app to competitors. For hours, Strike had tailed the young man from booth to booth, documenting all his movements and his interactions, hoping at some point that he would tire and sit. However, between the coffee bar where customers stood at high tables, to the sandwich bar where everyone stood and ate sushi with their fingers out of plastic boxes, the target had spent eight hours walking or standing. Coming after long hours of lurking in Harley Street the day before, it was hardly surprising that the removal of his prosthesis the previous evening had been an uncomfortable affair, the gel pad that separated stump from artificial shin difficult to prise off. As Strike passed the cool off-white arches of the Ritz, he hoped Pratt’s contained at least one comfortable chair of generous proportions.

  He turned right into St James’s Street, which led him in a gentle slope straight down to the sixteenth-century St James’s Palace. This was not an area of London that Strike usually visited on his own account, given that he had neither the means nor the inclination to buy from gentlemen’s outfitters, long-established gun shops or centuries’ old wine dealers. As he drew nearer to Park Place, though, he was visited by a personal memory. He had walked this street more than ten years previously, with Charlotte.

  They had walked up the slope, not down it, heading for a lunch date with her father, who was now dead. Strike had been on leave from the army and they had recently resumed what was, to everyone who knew them, an incomprehensible and obviously doomed affair. On neither side of their relationship had there ever been a single supporter. His friends and family had viewed Charlotte with everything from mistrust to loathing, while hers had always considered Strike, the illegitimate son of an infamous rockstar, as one more manifestation of Charlotte’s need to shock and rebel. Strike’s military career had been nothing to her family, or rather, it had been just another sign of his plebeian unfitness to aspire to the well-bred beauty’s hand, because gentlemen of Charlotte’s class did not enter the Military Police, but Cavalry or Guards regiments.

  She had clutched his hand very tightly as they entered an Italian restaurant somewhere nearby. Its precise location escaped Strike now. All he remembered was the expression of rage and disapproval on Sir Anthony Campbell’s face as they had approached the table. Strike had known before a word was spoken that Charlotte had not told her father that she and Strike had resumed their affair, or that she would be bringing him with her. It had been a thoroughly Charlottian omission, prompting the usual Charlottian scene. Strike had long since come to believe that she engineered situations out of an apparently insatiable need for conflict. Prone to outbursts of lacerating honesty amid her general mythomania, she had told Strike towards the end of their relationship, that at least, while fighting, she knew she was alive.

  As Strike drew level with Park Place, a line of cream-painted townhouses leading off St James’s Street, he noted that the sudden memory of Charlotte clinging to his hand no longer hurt, and felt like an alcoholic who, for the first time, catches a whiff of beer without breaking into a sweat or having to grapple with his desperate craving. Perhaps this is it, he thought, as he approached the black door of Pratt’s, with its wrought iron balustrade above. Perhaps, two years after she had told him the unforgivable lie and he had left for good, he was healed, clear of what he sometimes, even though not superstitious, saw as a kind of Bermuda triangle, a danger zone in which he feared being pulled back under, dragged to the depths of anguish and pain by the mysterious allure Charlotte had held for him.

  With a faint sense of celebration, Strike knocked on the door of Pratt’s.

  A petite, motherly woman opened up. Her prominent bust and alert, bright-eyed mien put him in mind of a robin or a wren. When she spoke, he caught a trace of the West Country.

  ‘You’ll be Mr Strike. The minister’s not here yet. Come along in.’

  He followed her across the threshold into a hall through which could be glimpsed an enormous billiard table. Rich crimsons, greens and dark wood predominated. The stewardess, who he assumed was Georgina, led him down a set of steep stairs, which Strike took carefully, maintaining a firm grip on the banister.

  The stairs led to a cosy basement. The ceiling had sunk so low that it appeared partially supported by a large dresser on which sundry porcelain platters were displayed, the topmost ones half embedded into the plaster.

  ‘We aren’t very big,’ she said, stating the obvious. ‘Six hundred members, but we can only serve fourteen a meal at a time. Would you like a drink, Mr Strike?’

  He declined, but accepted an invitation to sit down in one of the leather chairs grouped around an aged cribbage board.

  The small space was divided by an archway into sitting and dining areas. Two places had been set at the long table in the other half of the room, beneath small, shuttered windows. The only other person in the basement apart from himself and Georgina was a white-coated chef working in a minuscule kitchen a mere yard from where Strike sat. The chef bade Strike welcome in a French accent, then continued carving cold roast beef.

  Here was the very antithesis of the smart restaurants where Strike tailed errant husbands and wives, where the lighting was chosen to complement glass and granite, and sharp-tongued restaurant critics sat like stylish vultures on uncomfortable modern chairs. Pratt’s was dimly lit. Brass picture lights dotted walls papered in dark red, which was largely obscured by stuffed fish in glass cases, hunting prints and political cartoons. In a blue and white tiled niche along one side of the room sat an ancient iron stove. The china plates, the threadbare carpet, the table bearing its homely load of ketchup and mustard all contributed to an ambience of cosy informality, as though a bunch of aristocratic boys had dragged all the things they liked about the grown-up world – its games, its drink and its trophies – down into the basement where Nanny would dole out smiles, comfort and praise.

  Twelve o’clock arrived, but Chiswell did not. ‘Georgina’, however, was friendly and informative about the club. She and her husband, the chef, lived on the premises. Strike could not help but reflect that this must be some of the most expensive real estate in London. To maintain the little club, which, Georgina to
ld him, had been established in 1857, was costing somebody a lot of money.

  ‘The Duke of Devonshire owns it, yes,’ said Georgina brightly. ‘Have you seen our betting book?’

  Strike turned the pages of the heavy, leather-bound tome, where long ago wagers had been recorded. In a gigantic scrawl dating back to the seventies, he read: ‘Mrs Thatcher to form the next government. Bet: one lobster dinner, the lobster to be larger than a man’s erect cock.’

  He was grinning over this when a bell rang overhead.

  ‘That’ll be the minister,’ said Georgina, bustling away upstairs.