She had woken with a yelp at 4 a.m., with the sensation of being still tangled in the nightmare in which she had been carrying a whole bag full of listening devices through darkened streets, knowing that men in masks were following her. The old knife wound on her arm had been gaping open and it was the trail of her spurting blood that her pursuers were following, and she knew she would never make it to the place where Strike was waiting for the bag of bugs . . .
‘What?’ Matthew had said groggily, half asleep.
‘Nothing,’ Robin had replied, before lying sleepless until seven, when she felt entitled to get up.
A scruffy young blond man had been lurking in Albury Street for the past two days. He barely bothered to conceal the fact that he was keeping their house under observation. Robin had discussed him with Strike, who was sure that he was a journalist rather than a private detective, probably a junior one, dispatched to keep tabs on her because Mitch Patterson’s hourly rate had become an unjustifiable expense.
She and Matthew had moved to Albury Street to escape the place where the Shacklewell Ripper had lurked. It was supposed to be a place of safety, yet it, too, had become contaminated by contact with unnatural death. Mid-morning, Robin had taken refuge in the bathroom before Matthew could realise she was hyperventilating again. Sitting on the bathroom floor, she had recourse to the technique she had learned in therapy, cognitive restructuring, which sought to identify the automatic thoughts of pursuit, pain and danger that sprang into her mind given certain triggers. He’s just some idiot who works for the Sun. He wants a story, that’s all. You’re safe. He can’t get at you. You’re completely safe.
When Robin emerged from the bathroom and went downstairs, she found her husband slamming kitchen doors and drawers as he threw together a sandwich. He did not offer to make one for her.
‘What are we supposed to tell Tom and Sarah, with that bastard staring through the windows?’
‘Why would we tell Tom and Sarah anything?’ asked Robin blankly.
‘We’re going to theirs for dinner tonight!’
‘Oh, no,’ groaned Robin. ‘I mean, yes. Sorry. I forgot.’
‘Well, what if the bloody journalist follows us?’
‘We ignore him,’ said Robin. ‘What else can we do?’
She heard her mobile ringing upstairs and, glad of the excuse to get out of Matthew’s vicinity, went to answer it.
‘Hi,’ said Strike. ‘Good news. Izzy’s hired us to look into Chiswell’s death. Well,’ he corrected himself, ‘what she actually wants is for us to prove Kinvara did it, but I managed to broaden the remit.’
‘That’s fantastic!’ whispered Robin, carefully closing the bedroom door and sitting down on the bed.
‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ said Strike. ‘Now, what we need for starters is a line on the police investigation, especially forensics. I’ve just tried Wardle, but he’s been warned not to talk to us. They seem to have guessed I’d still be sniffing around. Then I tried Anstis, but nothing doing, he’s full time on the Olympics and doesn’t know anyone on the case. So I was going to ask, is Vanessa back off compassionate leave?’
‘Yes!’ said Robin, suddenly excited. It was the first time she had had the useful contact, rather than Strike. ‘But even better than Vanessa – she’s dating a guy in forensics, Oliver, I’ve never met him, but—’
‘If Oliver would agree to talk to us,’ said Strike, ‘that would be fantastic. Tell you what, I’ll call Shanker, see whether he’ll sell me something we can offer in exchange. Call you back.’
He hung up. Though hungry, Robin did not go back downstairs, but stretched out on the smart mahogany bed, which had been a wedding gift from Matthew’s father. It was so cumbersome and heavy that it had taken the full complement of removal men, sweating and swearing under their breath, to haul it up the stairs in pieces and reassemble it in the bedroom. Robin’s dressing table, on the other hand, was old and cheap. Light as an orange crate without its drawers in, it had required only one man to pick it up and place it between the bedroom windows.
Ten minutes later, her mobile rang again.
‘That was quick.’
‘Yeah, we’re in luck. Shanker’s having a rest day. Our interests happen to coincide. There’s somebody he wouldn’t mind the police picking off. Tell Vanessa we’re offering information on Ian Nash.’
‘Ian Nash?’ repeated Robin, sitting up to grab pen and paper and make a note of the name. ‘Who exactly—?’
‘Gangster. Vanessa will know who he is,’ said Strike.
‘How much did it cost?’ asked Robin. The personal bond between Strike and Shanker, profound in its way, never interfered with Shanker’s rules of business.
‘Half the first week’s fee,’ said Strike, ‘but it’ll be money well spent if Oliver comes across with the goods. How’re you?’
‘What?’ said Robin, disconcerted. ‘I’m fine. Why d’you ask?’
‘Don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to you that I’ve got a duty of care, as your employer?’
‘We’re partners.’
‘You’re a salaried partner. You could sue for poor working conditions.’
‘Don’t you think,’ said Robin, examining the forearm where the eight-inch purple scar still stood out, livid, against her pale skin, ‘I’d’ve already done that, if I was going to? But if you’re offering to sort out the loo on the landing—’
‘I’m just saying,’ persisted Strike, ‘it’d be natural if you’d had a bit of reaction. Finding a body isn’t many people’s idea of fun.’
‘I’m absolutely fine,’ lied Robin.
I have to be fine, she thought, after they had bidden each other goodbye. I’m not losing everything, all over again.
40
Your starting-point is so very widely removed from his, you see.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
At six o’clock on Wednesday morning, Robin, who had again slept in the spare room, got up and dressed herself in jeans, T-shirt, sweatshirt and trainers. Her backpack contained a dark wig that she had bought online and which had been delivered the previous morning, under the very nose of the skulking journalist. She crept quietly downstairs, so as not to wake Matthew, with whom she had not discussed her plan. She knew perfectly well that he would disapprove.
There was a precarious peace between them, even though dinner on Saturday night with Tom and Sarah had been an awful affair: in fact, precisely because dinner had been so dreadful. It had started inauspiciously because the journalist had indeed followed them up the street. They had succeeded in shaking him off, largely due to Robin’s counter-surveillance training, which had led them to dodge unseen out of a crowded Tube compartment just before the doors closed, leaving Matthew aggravated by what he considered undignified, childish tricks. But even Matthew could not lay the blame for the rest of the evening at Robin’s door.
What had begun as light-hearted analysis over dinner of their failure to win the charity cricket match had turned suddenly nasty and aggressive. Tom had suddenly lashed out drunkenly at Matthew, telling him he was not half as good as he thought he was, that his arrogance had grated on the rest of the team, that, indeed, he was not popular in the office, that he put people’s backs up, rubbed them the wrong way. Rocked by the sudden attack, Matthew had tried to ask what he had done wrong at work, but Tom, so drunk that Robin thought he must have started on the wine long before their arrival, had taken Matthew’s hurt incredulity as provocation.
‘Don’t play the fucking innocent with me!’ he had shouted. ‘I’m not going to stand for it any more! Belittling me and fucking needling me—’
‘Was I?’ Matthew asked Robin, shaken, as they walked back towards the Tube in the darkness.
‘No,’ said Robin, honestly. ‘You didn’t say anything nasty to him at all.’
She added ‘tonight’ only in her head. It was a relief to be taking a hurt and bewildered Matthew home, rather than the man she usually lived with, and her sympathy and
support had won her a couple of days’ ceasefire at home. Robin was not about to jeopardise their truce by telling Matthew what she was planning this morning to throw the still-lurking journalist off her trail. She couldn’t afford to be followed to a meeting with a forensic pathologist, especially as Oliver, according to Vanessa, had needed a great deal of persuasion to meet Strike and Robin in the first place.
Letting herself quietly out of the French windows into the courtyard behind the house, Robin used one of the garden chairs to clamber onto the top of the wall that divided their garden from that of the house directly behind them, of which the curtains were, mercifully, closed. With a muffled, earthy thud, she slid off the wall onto the neighbours’ lawn.
The next part of her escape was a little trickier. She had first to drag a heavy ornamental bench in their neighbour’s garden several feet, until it stood plumb with the fence, then, balancing on the back of it, she climbed over the top of the creosoted panel, which swayed precariously as she dropped down into a flowerbed on the other side, where she staggered and fell. Scrambling up again, she hurried across the new lawn to the opposite fence, in which there was a door to the car park on the other side.
To Robin’s relief, the bolt opened easily. As she pulled the garden gate closed behind her, she thought ruefully of the footprints she had just left across the dewy lawns. If the neighbours woke early, it would be only too easy to discover whence had come the intruder who had invaded their gardens, shifted their garden furniture and squashed their begonias. Chiswell’s killer, if killer there was, had been far more adept at covering their tracks.
Crouching down behind a parked Skoda in the deserted car park that served the garage-less street, Robin used the wing mirror to adjust the dark wig she had taken out of her backpack, then walked off briskly along the street that ran parallel with Albury Street, until she turned right into Deptford High Street.
Other than a couple of vans making early morning deliveries and the proprietor of a newsagent raising the metal security roller door from his shop front, there was hardly anybody around. Glancing over her shoulder, Robin felt a sudden rush, not of panic, but of elation: nobody was following her. Even so, she didn’t remove her wig until she was safely on the Tube, giving the young man who had been eyeing her covertly over his Kindle something of a surprise.
Strike had chosen the Corner Café on Lambeth Road for its proximity to the forensics laboratory where Oliver Bargate worked. When Robin arrived, she found Strike standing outside, smoking. His gaze fell to the muddy knees of her jeans.
‘Rough landing in a flowerbed,’ she explained, as she came within earshot. ‘That journalist is still hanging around.’
‘Matthew give you a leg up?’
‘No, I used garden furniture.’
Strike ground out his cigarette on the wall beside him and followed her into the café, which smelled pleasantly of frying food. In Strike’s opinion, Robin looked paler and thinner than usual, but her manner was cheerful as she ordered coffee and two bacon rolls.
‘One,’ Strike corrected her. ‘One,’ he repeated regretfully to the man behind the counter. ‘Trying to lose weight,’ he told Robin, as they took a recently vacated table. ‘Better for my leg.’
‘Ah,’ said Robin. ‘Right.’
As he swept the crumbs from the table with his sleeve, Strike reflected, not for the first time, that Robin was the only woman he had ever met who had shown no interest in improving him. He knew that he could have changed his mind now and ordered five bacon rolls, and she would simply have grinned and handed them over. This thought made him feel particularly affectionate towards her as she joined him at the table in her muddy jeans.
‘Everything OK?’ he asked, salivating as he watched her put ketchup on her roll.
‘Yes,’ lied Robin, ‘all good. How is your leg?’
‘Better than it was. What does this bloke we’re meeting look like?’
‘Tall, black, glasses,’ said Robin thickly, through a mouthful of bread and bacon. Her early morning activity had made her hungrier than she had been in days.
‘Vanessa back on Olympics duty?’
‘Yeah,’ said Robin. ‘She’s badgered Oliver into meeting us. I don’t think he was that keen, but she’s after promotion.’
‘Dirt on Ian Nash will definitely help,’ said Strike. ‘From what Shanker told me, the Met’s been trying—’
‘I think this is him,’ whispered Robin.
Strike turned to see a lanky, worried-looking black man in rimless glasses standing in the doorway. He was holding a briefcase. Strike raised a hand in greeting and Robin slid her sandwich and coffee over to the next seat, to allow Oliver to sit opposite Strike.
Robin was not sure what she had expected: he was handsome, with his high-rise hairstyle and pristine white shirt, but seemed suspicious and disapproving, neither of which trait she associated with Vanessa. Nevertheless, he shook the hand Strike proffered and, turning to Robin, said:
‘You’re Robin? We’ve always missed each other.’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, shaking hands, too. Oliver’s spotless appearance was making her feel self-conscious about her dishevelled hair and muddy jeans. ‘Nice to meet you, at last. It’s counter service, shall I get you a tea or coffee?’
‘Er – coffee, yeah, that’d be good,’ said Oliver. ‘Thanks.’
As Robin went to the counter, Oliver turned back to Strike.
‘Vanessa says you’ve got some information for her.’
‘Might have,’ said Strike. ‘It all depends on what you’ve got for us, Oliver.’
‘I’d like to know exactly what you’re offering before we take this any further.’
Strike drew an envelope out of his jacket pocket and held it up.
‘A car registration number and a hand-drawn map.’
Apparently this meant something to Oliver.
‘Can I ask where you got this?’
‘You can ask,’ said Strike cheerfully, ‘but that information’s not included in the deal. Eric Wardle will tell you my contact’s got a record of hundred per cent reliability, though.’
A group of workmen entered the café, talking loudly.
‘This’ll all be off the record,’ said Strike quietly. ‘No one’ll ever know you talked to us.’
Oliver sighed, then bent down, opened his briefcase and extracted a large notebook. As Robin returned with a mug of coffee for Oliver and sat back down at the table, Strike readied himself to make notes.
‘I’ve spoken to one of the guys on the team who did forensics,’ Oliver said, glancing at the workmen who were now bantering loudly at the next table, ‘and Vanessa’s had a word with someone who knows where the wider investigation’s going.’ He addressed Robin. ‘They don’t know Vanessa is friendly with you. If it gets out that we helped—’
‘They won’t hear it from us,’ Robin assured him.
Frowning slightly, Oliver opened his notebook and consulted the details he had jotted there in a small but legible hand.
‘Well, forensics are fairly clear-cut. I don’t know how much technical detail you want—’
‘Minimal,’ said Strike. ‘Give us the highlights.’
‘Chiswell had ingested around 500mg of amitriptyline, dissolved in orange juice, on an empty stomach.’
‘That’s a sizeable dose, isn’t it?’ asked Strike.
‘It could have been fatal on its own, even without the helium, but it wouldn’t have been as quick. On the other hand, he had heart disease, which would have made him more susceptible. Amitriptyline causes dysrhythmia and cardiac arrest in overdose.’
‘Popular suicide method?’
‘Yeah,’ said Oliver, ‘but it’s not always as painless as people hope. Most of it was still in his stomach. Very small traces in the duodenum. Suffocation is what actually killed him, on analysis of the lung and brain tissue. Presumably the amitriptyline was a back-up.’
‘Prints on the glass and the orange juice carton?’
&nbs
p; Oliver turned a page in his notebook.
‘The glass only had Chiswell’s prints on it. They found the carton in the bin, empty, also with Chiswell’s prints on, and others. Nothing suspicious. Just as you’d expect if it had been handled during purchase. Juice inside tested negative for drugs. The drugs went directly into the glass.’
‘The helium canister?’
‘That had Chiswell’s prints on it, and some others. Nothing suspicious. Same as the juice carton, like it had been handled during purchase.’
‘Does amitriptyline have a taste?’ asked Robin.
‘Yeah, it’s bitter,’ said Oliver.
‘Olfactory dysfunction,’ Strike reminded Robin. ‘After the head injury. He might not have tasted it.’
Lethal White Page 36
