Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  ‘Would it have made him groggy?’ Robin asked Oliver.

  ‘Probably, especially if he wasn’t used to taking it, but people can have unexpected reactions. He might’ve become agitated.’

  ‘Any sign of how or where the pills were crushed up?’ asked Strike.

  ‘In the kitchen. There were traces of powder found on the pestle and mortar there.’

  ‘Prints?’

  ‘His.’

  ‘D’you know whether they tested the homeopathic pills?’ asked Robin.

  ‘The what?’ said Oliver.

  ‘There was a tube of homeopathic pills on the floor. I trod on them,’ Robin explained. ‘Lachesis.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about them,’ said Oliver, and Robin felt a little foolish for mentioning them.

  ‘There was a mark on the back of his left hand.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Oliver, turning back to his notes. ‘Abrasions to face and a small mark on the hand.’

  ‘On the face, too?’ said Robin, freezing with her sandwich in her hand.

  ‘Yes,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Any explanation?’ asked Strike.

  ‘You’re wondering whether the bag was forced over his head,’ said Oliver; it was a statement, not a question. ‘So did MI5. They know he didn’t make the marks himself. Nothing under his own nails. On the other hand, there was no bruising to the body to show force, nothing disarranged in the room, no signs of a struggle—’

  ‘Other than the bent sword,’ said Strike.

  ‘I keep forgetting you were there,’ said Oliver. ‘You know all this.’

  ‘Marks on the sword?’

  ‘It had been cleaned recently, but Chiswell’s prints were on the handle.’

  ‘What time of death are we looking at?’

  ‘Between 6 and 7 a.m.,’ said Oliver.

  ‘But he was fully dressed,’ mused Robin.

  ‘From what I’ve heard about him, he was quite literally the kind of bloke who wouldn’t have been caught dead in pyjamas,’ said Oliver drily.

  ‘Met’s inclining to suicide, then?’ asked Strike.

  ‘Off the record, I think an open verdict is quite likely. There are a few discrepancies that need explaining. You know about the open front door, of course. It’s warped. It won’t close unless you shut it with force, but it sometimes jumps back open again if you slam it too hard. So it could have been accidental, the fact that it was open. Chiswell might not have realised he’d left it ajar, but equally, a killer might not have known the trick to closing it.’

  ‘You don’t happen to know how many keys to the door there were?’ asked Strike.

  ‘No,’ said Oliver. ‘As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, Van and I had to sound only casually interested, asking all these questions.’

  ‘He’s a dead government minister,’ said Strike. ‘Surely you didn’t have to sound too casual?’

  ‘I know one thing,’ said Oliver. ‘He had plenty of reasons to kill himself.’

  ‘Such as?’ enquired Strike, pen poised over his notebook.

  ‘His wife was leaving him—’

  ‘Allegedly,’ said Strike, writing.

  ‘—they’d lost a baby, his eldest son died in Iraq, the family say he was acting strangely, drinking heavily and so on, and he had serious money problems.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Strike. ‘Like what?’

  ‘He was almost wiped out in the 2008 crash,’ said Oliver. ‘And then there was . . . well, that business you two were investigating.’

  ‘D’you know where the blackmailers were, at the time of—?’

  Oliver made a swift, convulsive movement that nearly knocked over his coffee. Leaning towards Strike he hissed:

  ‘There’s a super-injunction out, in case you haven’t—’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve heard,’ said Strike.

  ‘Well, I happen to like my job.’

  ‘OK,’ said Strike, unperturbed, but lowering his voice. ‘I’ll rephrase my question. Have they looked into the movements of Geraint Winn and Jimmy—?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Oliver curtly, ‘and both have alibis.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘The former was in Bermondsey with—’

  ‘Not Della?’ blurted Robin, before she could stop herself. The idea of his blind wife being Geraint’s alibi had struck her, somehow, as indecent. She had formed the impression, whether naively or not, that Della stood apart from Geraint’s criminal activity.

  ‘No,’ said Oliver tersely, ‘and do we have to use names?’

  ‘Who, then?’ asked Strike.

  ‘Some employee. He claims he was with the employee and the bloke confirmed it.’

  ‘Were there other witnesses?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Oliver, with a trace of frustration. ‘I assume so. They’re happy with the alibi.’

  ‘What about Ji – the other man?’

  ‘He was in East Ham with his girlfriend.’

  ‘Was he?’ said Strike, making a note of it. ‘I saw him being marched off to a police van, the night before Chiswell died.’

  ‘He was let off with a caution. But,’ Oliver said quietly, ‘blackmailers don’t generally kill their victims, do they?’

  ‘Not if they’re getting money out of them,’ said Strike, still writing. ‘But Knight wasn’t.’

  Oliver looked at his watch.

  ‘Couple more things,’ said Strike equably, his elbow still planted on the envelope containing Ian Nash’s details. ‘Does Vanessa know anything about a phone call to his son that Chiswell made on the morning of his death?’

  ‘Yeah, she said something about that,’ said Oliver, flicking backwards and forwards through his notebook to find the information. ‘Yeah, he made two calls just after 6 a.m. First to his wife, then to his son.’

  Strike and Robin looked at each other again.

  ‘We knew about the call to Raphael. He called his wife as well?’

  ‘Yeah, he called her first.’

  Oliver seemed to read their reaction correctly, because he said:

  ‘The wife’s totally in the clear. She was the first person they investigated, once they were satisfied it wasn’t politically motivated, obviously.

  ‘A neighbour saw her go into the house on Ebury Street the evening before and come out shortly afterwards with a bag, two hours before her husband came back. A taxi driver picked her up halfway down the street and took her to Paddington. She was caught on camera on the train back to wherever she lives – is it Oxfordshire? – and apparently there was someone at the house when she got home, who can vouch for the fact that she arrived there before midnight and never left again until the police came round to tell her Chiswell was dead. Multiple witnesses to her whole journey.’

  ‘Who was at the house with her?’

  ‘That, I don’t know.’ Oliver’s eyes moved to the envelope still lying beneath Strike’s elbow. ‘And that really is everything I’ve got.’

  Strike had asked everything he had wanted to know, and had gained a couple of bits of information he had not expected, including the abrasions to Chiswell’s face, his poor finances and the phone call to Kinvara in the early morning.

  ‘You’ve been a big help,’ he told Oliver, sliding the envelope across the table. ‘Much appreciated.’

  Oliver appeared relieved that the encounter was over. He stood up and, with one more hasty handshake and a nod to Robin, departed the café. Once Oliver had stridden out of sight, Robin sat back in her chair and sighed.

  ‘What’s that glum expression for?’ asked Strike, draining his mug of tea.

  ‘This is going to be the shortest job on record. Izzy wants us to prove it was Kinvara.’

  ‘She wants the truth about her father’s death,’ said Strike, but he grinned at Robin’s sceptical expression, ‘and, yeah, she’s hoping it was Kinvara. Well, we’ll have to see whether we can break all those alibis, won’t we? I’m going to Woolstone on Saturday. Izzy’s invited me over to Chiswell House, so I can meet her sist
er. Are you in? I’d rather not drive, the state my leg’s in at the moment.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Robin immediately.

  The idea of getting out of London with Strike, even for a day, was so appealing that she did not bother to consider whether she and Matthew had plans, but surely, in the glow of their unexpected rapprochement, he would raise no difficulties. After all, she had not worked for a week and a half. ‘We can take the Land Rover. It’ll be better on country roads than your BMW.’

  ‘You might need diversionary tactics if that hack’s still watching you,’ said Strike.

  ‘I think I could probably throw them off more easily in a car than on foot.’

  ‘Yeah, you probably could,’ said Strike.

  Robin was in possession of an advanced driving qualification. Though he had never told her so, Robin was the only person by whom he would willingly be driven.

  ‘What time are we supposed to be at Chiswell House?’

  ‘Eleven,’ said Strike, ‘but plan to be away for the whole day. I fancy taking a look at the Knights’ old place while we’re there.’ He hesitated. ‘I can’t remember whether I told you . . . I kept Barclay undercover with Jimmy and Flick.’

  He was braced for annoyance that he had not discussed it with her, resentment that Barclay had been working when she wasn’t, or, perhaps most justifiably, a demand to know what he was playing at, given the state of the agency’s finances, but she simply said, with more amusement than rancour:

  ‘You know you didn’t tell me. Why did you keep him there?’

  ‘Because I’ve got a gut feeling there’s a lot more to the Knight brothers than meets the eye.’

  ‘You always tell me to mistrust gut feelings.’

  ‘Never claimed not to be a hypocrite, though. And brace yourself,’ Strike added, as they got up from the table, ‘Raphael’s not happy with you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Izzy says he fell for you. Quite upset you turned out to be an undercover detective.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Robin. A faint pink blush spread over her face. ‘Well, I’m sure he’ll bounce back fast enough. He’s that type.’

  41

  I was thinking of what brought us together from the first, what links us so closely to one another . . .

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  Strike had spent many hours of his life trying to guess what he had done to cause the sullen silence of a woman in his vicinity. The best that could be said for the prolonged sulk in which Lorelei spent most of Friday evening was that he knew exactly how he had offended her, and was even prepared to concede that her displeasure was, to some extent, justified.

  Within five minutes of his arrival at her flat in Camden, Izzy had called his mobile, partly to tell him about a letter that she had received from Geraint Winn, but mainly, he knew, to talk. She was not the first of his clients to assume that they had purchased, along with detective services, a mixture of father-confessor and therapist. Izzy gave every sign that she was settling in to spend her entire Friday evening talking to Strike, and the flirtatiousness that had been apparent in the knee touching of their last encounter was even more pronounced by phone.

  A tendency to size Strike up as a potential lover was not uncommon in the sometimes fragile and lonely women he dealt with in his professional life. He had never slept with a client, in spite of occasional temptation. The agency meant too much to him, but even had Izzy held attraction for him, he would have been careful to keep his manner on the antiseptic side of professional, because she would be forever tainted in his mind by association with Charlotte.

  In spite of his genuine desire to cut the call short – Lorelei had cooked, and was looking particularly lovely in a silky sapphire blue dress that resembled nightwear – Izzy had displayed the persistent adhesiveness of a teasel. It took Strike nearly three-quarters of an hour to disentangle himself from his client, who laughed long and loudly at even his mildest jokes, so that Lorelei could hardly fail to know that it was a woman who was at the end of the line. Hardly had he got rid of Izzy and begun to explain to Lorelei that she was a grief-stricken client, than Barclay had called with an update on Jimmy Knight. The mere fact that he had taken the second call, considerably briefer though it was, had, in Lorelei’s eyes, compounded his original offence.

  This was the first time he and Lorelei had met since she had retracted her declaration of love. Her wounded and affronted demeanour over dinner confirmed him in the unwilling belief that, far from wanting their no-strings arrangement to continue, she had clung to the hope that if she stopped pressuring him, he would be free to reach the realisation that he was, in fact, deeply in love with her. Talking on the phone for the best part of an hour, while dinner slowly shrivelled in the oven, had dashed her hopes of a perfect evening, and the reset of their relationship.

  Had Lorelei only accepted his sincere apology, he might have felt like sex. However, by half-past two in the morning, at which time she finally burst into tears of mingled self-recrimination and self-justification, he was too tired and bad-tempered to accept physical overtures which would, he feared, assume an importance in her mind that he did not want to give them.

  This has to end, he thought, as he rose, hollow-eyed and dark-jawed, at six o’clock, moving as quietly as possible in the hope that she would not wake before he made his way out of her flat. Forgoing breakfast, because Lorelei had replaced the kitchen door with an amusingly retro bead curtain that rattled loudly, Strike made it all the way to the top of the stairs to the street before Lorelei emerged from the dark bedroom, sleep tousled, sad and desirable in a short kimono.

  ‘Weren’t you even going to say goodbye?’

  Don’t cry. Please don’t fucking cry.

  ‘You looked very peaceful. I’ve got to go, Robin’s picking me up at—’

  ‘Ah,’ said Lorelei. ‘No, you wouldn’t want to keep Robin hanging around.’

  ‘I’ll call you,’ said Strike.

  He thought he caught a sob as he reached the front door, but by making a noisy business of opening it, he could credibly claim not to have heard.

  Having left in plenty of time, Strike made a detour to a handy McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin and a large coffee, which he consumed at an unwiped table, surrounded by other early Saturday risers. A young man with a boil on the back of his neck was reading the Independent right ahead of Strike, who read the words ‘Sports Minister in Marriage Split’ over the youth’s shoulder before he turned a page.

  Drawing out his phone, Strike Googled ‘Winn marriage’. The news stories popped up immediately: ‘Minister for Sport Splits from Husband: Separation “Amicable”’, ‘Della Winn Calls Time on Marriage’, ‘Blind Paralympics Minister to Divorce’.

  The stories from major newspapers were all factual and on the short side, a few padded out with details of Della’s impressive career within politics and outside. The press’s lawyers would, of course, be particularly careful around the Winns just now, with their super-injunction still in place. Strike finished his McMuffin in two bites, jammed an unlit cigarette in his mouth and limped out of the restaurant. Out on the pavement he lit up, then brought up the website of a well-known and scurrilous political blogger on his phone.

  The brief paragraph had been written only a few hours previously.

  Which creepy Westminster couple known to share a predilection for youthful employees are rumoured to be splitting at last? He is about to lose access to the nubile political wannabes on whom he has preyed so long, but she has already found a handsome young ‘helper’ to ease the pain of separation.

  Less than forty minutes later, Strike emerged from Barons Court Tube station to lean up against the pillar-box in front of the entrance. Cutting a solitary figure beneath the Art Nouveau lettering and open segmented pediment of the grand station behind him, he took out his phone again and continued to read about the Winns’ separation. They had been married over thirty years. The only couple he knew who had been together that
long were the aunt and uncle back in Cornwall, who had served as surrogate parents to Strike and his sister during those regular intervals when his mother had been unwilling or unable to care for them.

  A familiar roar and rattle made Strike look up. The ancient Land Rover that Robin had taken off her parents’ hands was trundling towards him. The sight of Robin’s bright gold head behind the wheel caught the tired and faintly depressed Strike off-guard. He experienced a wave of unexpected happiness.

  ‘Morning,’ said Robin, thinking that Strike looked terrible as he opened the door and shoved in a holdall. ‘Oh, sod off,’ she added, as a driver behind her slammed on his horn, aggravated by the time Strike was taking to get inside.