Raphael and Izzy were both staring at their father. Aamir stood for a few seconds as though he had forgotten what he had come for, then stalked out of the room.
‘A little Classics education for everyone,’ said Chiswell, turning to watch him go with what appeared to be malicious satisfaction. ‘We are never too old to learn, eh, Raff?’
Robin’s mobile vibrated on her desk. Strike had texted. They had agreed not to contact each other during working hours unless it was urgent. She slid the phone into her bag.
‘Where’s my signing pile?’ Chiswell asked Izzy. ‘Have you finished that letter for Brenda Bloody Bailey?’
‘Printing it now,’ said Izzy.
While Chiswell scribbled his signature on a stack of letters, breathing like a bulldog in the otherwise quiet room, Robin muttered something about needing to get going, and hurried out into the corridor.
Wanting to read Strike’s text without fear of interruption, she followed a wooden sign to the crypt, hastened down the narrow stone staircase indicated and found, at the bottom, a deserted chapel.
The crypt was decorated like a medieval jewel casket, every inch of gold wall embellished with motifs and symbols, heraldic and religious. There were jewel-bright saints’ pictures above the altar and the sky-blue organ pipes were wrapped in gold ribbon and scarlet fleurs-de-lys. Robin hurried into a red velvet pew and opened Strike’s text.
Need a favour. Barclay’s done a 10-day stretch on Jimmy Knight, but he’s just found out his wife’s got to work over the weekend & he can’t get anyone else to look after the baby. Andy leaves for a week in Alicante with the family tonight. I can’t tail Jimmy, he knows me. CORE are joining an anti-missile march tomorrow. Starts at 2, in Bow. Can you do it?
Robin contemplated the message for several seconds, then let out a groan that echoed around the crypt.
It was the first time in over a year that Strike had asked her to work extra hours at such short notice, but this was her anniversary weekend. The pricey hotel was booked, the bags packed and ready in the car. She was supposed to be meeting Matthew after work in a couple of hours. They were to drive straight to Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. Matthew would be furious if she said she couldn’t go.
In the gilded hush of the crypt, the words Strike had said to her when he had agreed to give her detective training came back to her.
I need someone who can work long hours, weekends . . . you’ve got a lot of aptitude for the job, but you’re getting married to someone who hates you doing it . . .
And she had told him that it didn’t matter what Matthew thought, that it was up to her what she did.
Where did her allegiance lie now? She had said that she would stay in the marriage, promised to give it a chance. Strike had had many hours of unpaid overtime out of her. He could not claim that she was workshy.
Slowly, deleting words, replacing them, overthinking every syllable, she typed out a response.
I’m really sorry, but it’s my anniversary weekend. We’ve got a hotel booked, leaving this evening.
She wanted to write more, but what was there to say? ‘My marriage isn’t going well, so it’s important I celebrate it’? ‘I’d much rather disguise myself as a protestor and stalk Jimmy Knight’? She pressed ‘send’.
Sitting waiting for his response, feeling as though she were about to get the results of medical tests, Robin’s eyes followed the course of twisting vines that covered the ceiling. Strange faces peered down at her out of the moulding, like the wild Green Man of myth. Heraldic and pagan imagery mingled with angels and crosses. It was more than a place of God, this chapel. It harked back to an age of superstition, magic and feudal power.
The minutes slid by and still Strike hadn’t answered. Robin got up and walked around the chapel. At the very back she found a cupboard. Opening it, she saw a plaque to suffragette Emily Davison. Apparently, she had slept there overnight so that she could give her place of residence as the House of Commons on the census of 1911, seven years before women were given the vote. Emily Davison, she could not help but feel, would not have approved of Robin’s choice to place a failing marriage above freedom to work.
Robin’s mobile buzzed again. She looked down, afraid of what she was going to read. Strike had answered with two letters:
OK
A lead weight seemed to slide from her chest to her stomach. Strike, as she was well aware, was still living in the glorified bedsit over the office and working through weekends. The only unmarried person at the agency, the boundary between his professional and private lives was, if not precisely non-existent, then flexible and porous, whereas hers, Barclay’s and Hutchins’ were not. And the worst of it was that Robin could think of no way of telling Strike that she was sorry, that she understood, that she wished things were different, without reminding both of them of that hug on the stairs at her wedding, now so long unmentioned that she wondered whether he even remembered it.
Feeling utterly miserable, she retraced her steps out of the crypt, still holding the papers she had been pretending to deliver.
Raphael was alone in the office when she returned, sitting at Izzy’s PC and typing at a third of her speed.
‘Izzy’s gone with Dad to do something so tedious it just bounced off my brain,’ he said. ‘They’ll be back in a bit.’
Robin forced a smile, returned to her desk, her mind on Strike.
‘Bit weird, that poem, wasn’t it?’ Raphael asked.
‘What? Oh – oh, that Latin thing? Yes,’ said Robin. ‘It was, a bit.’
‘It was like he’d memorised it to use on Mallik. Nobody’s got that at their fingertips.’
Reflecting that Strike seemed to know strange bits of Latin off by heart, too, Robin said, ‘No, you wouldn’t think so.’
‘Has he got it in for that Mallik, or something?’
‘I really don’t know,’ lied Robin.
Running out of ways to occupy her time at the desk, she shuffled papers again.
‘How long are you staying, Venetia?’
‘I’m not sure. Until Parliament goes into recess, probably.’
‘You seriously want to work here? Permanently?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think it’s interesting.’
‘What were you doing before this?’
‘PR,’ said Robin. ‘It was quite fun, but I fancied a change.’
‘Hoping to bag an MP?’ he said, with a faint smile.
‘I can’t say I’ve seen anyone round here I’d like to marry,’ said Robin.
‘Hurtful,’ said Raphael, with a mock sigh.
Afraid that she had blushed, Robin tried to cover up by bending down to open a drawer and taking a few objects out at random.
‘So, is Venetia Hall seeing anyone?’ he persisted, as she straightened up.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘His name’s Tim. We’ve been together a year now.’
‘Yeah? What does Tim do?’
‘He works at Christie’s,’ said Robin.
She had got the idea from the men she had seen with Sarah Shadlock in the Red Lion: immaculate, suited public-school types of the kind she imagined Chiswell’s goddaughter would know.
‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Izzy said something—’
‘At the gallery?’ said Raphael, cutting her off. ‘That was nothing. She was too young for me. Her parents have sent her to Florence now, anyway.’
He had swung his chair around to face her, his expression grave and searching, contemplating her as though he wanted to know something that common conversation would not yield. Robin broke their mutual gaze. Holding a look that intense was not compatible with being the contented girlfriend of the imaginary Tim.
‘D’you believe in redemption?’
The question caught Robin totally by surprise. It had a kind of gravity and beauty, like the gleaming jewel of the chapel at the foot of a winding stair.
‘I . . . yes, I do,’ she said.
He had picked up a pencil from Izzy’s de
sk. His long fingers turned it over and over as he watched her intently. He seemed to be sizing her up.
‘You know what I did? In the car?’
‘Yes,’ she answered.
The silence that unspooled between them seemed to Robin to be peopled with flashing lights and shadowy figures. She could imagine Raphael bloody at the steering wheel, and the broken figure of the young mother on the road, and the police cars and the incident tape and the gawpers in passing cars. He was watching her intently, hoping, she thought, for some kind of benison, as though her forgiveness mattered. And sometimes, she knew, the kindness of a stranger, or even a casual acquaintance, could be transformative, something to cling to while those closest to you dragged you under in their efforts to help. She thought of the elderly steward in the Members’ Lobby, uncomprehending but immensely consoling, his hoarse, kindly words a thread to hold on to, which would lead her back to sanity.
The door opened again. Both Robin and Raphael jumped as a curvy redhead entered the room, a visitor’s pass hanging around her neck on a lanyard. Robin recognised her at once from online photographs as Jasper Chiswell’s wife, Kinvara.
‘Hello,’ said Robin, because Kinvara was merely staring blankly at Raphael, who had swung hastily back to his computer and began typing again.
‘You must be Venetia,’ said Kinvara, switching her clear golden gaze onto Robin. She had a high-pitched, girlish voice. Her eyes were catlike in a slightly puffy face. ‘Aren’t you pretty? Nobody told me you were so pretty.’
Robin had no idea how to respond to this. Kinvara dropped down into the sagging chair where Raff usually sat, took off the designer sunglasses holding her long red hair off her face and shook it loose. Her bare arms and legs were heavily freckled. The top buttons of her sleeveless green shirt-dress were straining across her heavy bust.
‘Whose daughter are you?’ asked Kinvara with a trace of petulance. ‘Jasper didn’t tell me. He doesn’t tell me anything he doesn’t have to tell me, actually. I’m used to it. He just said you’re a goddaughter.’
Nobody had warned Robin that Kinvara did not know who she really was. Perhaps Izzy and Chiswell had not expected them to come face to face.
‘I’m Jonathan Hall’s daughter,’ said Robin nervously. She had come up with a rudimentary background for Venetia-the-goddaughter, but had never expected to have to elaborate for the benefit of Chiswell’s own wife, who presumably knew all Chiswell’s friends and acquaintances.
‘Who’s he?’ asked Kinvara. ‘I should probably know, Jasper’ll be cross I haven’t paid attention—’
‘He’s in land management up in—’
‘Oh, was it the Northumberland property?’ interrupted Kinvara, whose interest had not seemed particularly profound. ‘That was before my time.’
Thank God, thought Robin.
Kinvara crossed her legs and folded her arms across her large chest. Her foot bounced up and down. She shot Raphael a hard, almost spiteful look.
‘Aren’t you going to say hello, Raphael?’
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Jasper told me to meet him here, but if you’d rather I waited in the corridor I can,’ Kinvara said in her high, tight voice.
‘Of course not,’ muttered Raphael, frowning determinedly at his monitor.
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to interrupt anything,’ said Kinvara, turning from Raphael to Robin. The story of the blonde in the art gallery bathroom swam back into Robin’s mind. For a second time she pretended to be searching for something in a drawer and it was with relief that she heard the sounds of Chiswell and Izzy coming along the corridor.
‘ . . . and by ten o’clock, no later, or I won’t have time to read the whole bloody thing. And tell Haines he’ll have to talk to the BBC, I haven’t got time for a bunch of idiots talking about inclu – Kinvara.’
Chiswell stopped dead in the office door and said, without any trace of affection, ‘I told you to meet me at DCMS, not here.’
‘And it’s lovely to see you, too, Jasper, after three days apart,’ said Kinvara, getting to her feet and smoothing her crumpled dress.
‘Hi, Kinvara,’ said Izzy.
‘I forgot you said DCMS,’ Kinvara told Chiswell, ignoring her stepdaughter. ‘I’ve been trying to call you all morning—’
‘I told you,’ growled Chiswell, ‘I’d be in meetings till one, and if it’s about those bloody stud fees again—’
‘No, it isn’t about the stud fees, Jasper, actually, and I’d have preferred to tell you in private, but if you want me to say it in front of your children, I will!’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Chiswell blustered. ‘Come away, then, come on, we’ll find a private room—’
‘There was a man last night,’ said Kinvara, ‘who – don’t look at me like that, Isabella!’
Izzy’s expression was indeed conveying naked scepticism. She raised her eyebrows and walked into the room, acting as though Kinvara had become invisible to her.
‘I said you can tell me in a private room!’ snarled Chiswell, but Kinvara refused to be deflected.
‘I saw a man in the woods by the house last night, Jasper!’ she said, in a loud, high-pitched voice that Robin knew would be echoing all the way along the narrow corridor. ‘I’m not imagining things – there was a man with a spade in the woods, I saw him, and he ran when the dogs chased him! You keep telling me not to make a fuss, but I’m alone in that house at night and if you’re not going to do anything about this, Jasper, I’m going to call the police!’
22
… don’t you feel called upon to undertake it, for the sake of the good cause?
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Strike was in a thoroughly bad temper.
Why the fuck, he asked himself, as he limped towards Mile End Park the following morning, was he, the senior partner and founder of the firm, having to stake out a protest march on a hot Saturday morning, when he had three employees and a knackered leg? Because, he answered himself, he didn’t have a baby who needed watching, or a wife who’d booked plane tickets or broken her wrist, or a fucking anniversary weekend planned. He wasn’t married, so it was his downtime that had to be sacrificed, his weekend that became just two more working days.
Everything that Robin feared Strike to be thinking about her, he was, in fact, thinking: of her house on cobbled Albury Street versus his draughty two rooms in a converted attic, of the rights and status conferred by the little gold ring on her finger, set against Lorelei’s disappointment when he had explained that lunch and possibly dinner would now be impossible, of Robin’s promises of equal responsibility when he had taken her on as a partner, contrasted with the reality of her rushing home to her husband.
Yes, Robin had worked many hours of unpaid overtime in her two years at the agency. Yes, he knew that she had gone way beyond the call of duty for him. Yes, he was, in theory, fucking grateful to her. The fact remained that today, while he was limping along the street towards hours of probably fruitless surveillance, she and her arsehole of a husband were speeding off to a country hotel weekend, a thought that made his sore leg and back no easier to bear.
Unshaven, clad in an old pair of jeans, a frayed, washed-out hoodie and ancient trainers, with a carrier bag swinging from his hand, Strike entered the park. He could see the massing protestors in the distance. The risk of Jimmy recognising him had almost decided Strike to let the march go unwatched, but the most recent text from Robin (which he had, out of sheer bad temper, left unanswered) had changed his mind.
Kinvara Chiswell came into the office. She claims she saw a man with a spade in the woods near their house last night. From what she said, Chiswell’s been telling her not to call the police about these intruders, but she says she’s going to do it unless he does something about them. Kinvara didn’t know Chiswell’s called us in, btw, she thought I really was Venetia Hall. Also, there’s a chance the charity commission’s investigating the Level Playing Field. I’m trying to get more details.
This communication had served only to aggravate Strike. Nothing short of a concrete piece of evidence against Geraint Winn would have satisfied him right now, with the Sun on Chiswell’s case and their client so tetchy and stressed.
According to Barclay, Jimmy Knight owned a ten-year-old Suzuki Alto, but it had failed its MOT and was currently off the road. Barclay could not absolutely guarantee that Jimmy wasn’t sneaking out under cover of darkness to trespass in Chiswell’s gardens and woods seventy miles away, but Strike thought it unlikely.
On the other hand, he thought it just possible that Jimmy might have sent a proxy to intimidate Chiswell’s wife. He probably still had friends or acquaintances in the area where he grew up. An even more disturbing idea was that Billy had escaped from the prison, real or imaginary, in which he had told Strike he was being held, and decided to dig for proof that the child lay in a pink blanket by his father’s old cottage or, gripped by who knew what paranoid fantasy, to slash one of Kinvara’s horses.
Lethal White Page 22
