Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  ‘It was your partner who was pretending to be Venetia, at the Commons.’

  ‘Right again.’

  ‘What d’you want?’ Aamir asked, for the second time.

  ‘To ask you a few questions.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘OK if I sit down?’ asked Strike, doing so without waiting for permission. He noticed Aamir’s eyes drop to his leg, and stretched out the prosthesis ostentatiously, so that a glint of the metal ankle could be seen above his sock. To a man so considerate of Della’s disability, this might be sufficient reason not to ask Strike to get up again. ‘As I said, the family doesn’t think Jasper Chiswell killed himself.’

  ‘You think I had something to do with his death?’ asked Aamir, trying for incredulity and succeeding only in sounding scared.

  ‘No,’ said Strike, ‘but if you want to blurt out a confession, feel free. It’ll save me a lot of work.’

  Aamir didn’t smile.

  ‘The only thing I know about you, Aamir,’ said Strike, ‘is that you were helping Geraint Winn blackmail Chiswell.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ said Aamir at once.

  It was the automatic, ill-considered denial of a panicked man.

  ‘You weren’t trying to get hold of incriminating photographs to use against him?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘The press are trying to break your bosses’ super-injunction. Once the blackmail’s out in the public domain, your part in it won’t remain hidden for long. You and your friend Christopher—’

  ‘He’s not my friend!’

  Aamir’s vehemence interested Strike.

  ‘D’you own this house, Aamir?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just seems a big place for a twenty-four-year-old on what can’t be a big salary—’

  ‘It’s none of your business who owns this—’

  ‘I don’t care, personally,’ said Strike, leaning forwards, ‘but the papers will. You’ll look beholden to the owners if you aren’t paying a fair rent. It could seem like you owed them something, like you’re in their pocket. The tax office will also consider it a benefit in kind if it’s owned by your employers, which could cause problems for both—’

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’ Aamir demanded.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t easy,’ Strike admitted. ‘You don’t have much of an online life, do you? But in the end,’ he said, reaching for a sheaf of folded paper in the inside pocket of his jacket, and unfolding them, ‘I found your sister’s Facebook page. That is your sister, right?’

  He laid the piece of paper, on which he had printed the Facebook post, on the coffee table. A plumply pretty woman in a hijab beamed up out of the poor reproduction of her photograph, surrounded by four young children. Taking Aamir’s silence for assent, Strike said:

  ‘I went back through a few years’ worth of posts. That’s you,’ he said, laying a second printed page on top of the first. A younger Aamir stood smiling in academic robes, flanked by his parents. ‘You took a first in politics and economics at LSE. Very impressive . . .

  ‘And you got onto a graduate training programme at the Foreign Office,’ Strike continued, placing a third sheet down on top of the first two. This showed an official, posed photograph of a small group of smartly dressed young men and women, all black or from other ethnic minorities, standing around a balding, florid-faced man. ‘There you are,’ said Strike, ‘with senior civil servant Sir Christopher Barrowclough-Burns, who at that time was running a diversity recruitment drive.’

  Aamir’s eye twitched.

  ‘And here you are again,’ said Strike, laying down the last of his four printed Facebook pages, ‘just a month ago, with your sister in that pizza place right opposite Della’s house. Once I identified where it was and realised how close it was to the Winns’ place, I thought it might be worth coming to Bermondsey to see whether I could spot you in the vicinity.’

  Aamir stared down at the picture of himself and his sister. She had taken the selfie. Southwark Park Road was clearly visible behind them, through the window.

  ‘Where were you at 6 a.m. on the thirteenth of July?’ Strike asked Aamir.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Could anyone corroborate that?’

  ‘Yes. Geraint Winn.’

  ‘Had he stayed the night?’

  Aamir advanced a few steps, fists raised. It could not have been plainer that he had never boxed, but nevertheless, Strike tensed. Aamir looked close to breaking point.

  ‘All I’m saying,’ said Strike, holding up his hands pacifically, ‘is that 6 a.m. is an odd time for Geraint Winn to be at your house.’

  Aamir slowly lowered his fists, then, as though he did not know what else to do with himself, he backed away to sit down on the edge of the seat of the nearest armchair.

  ‘Geraint came round to tell me Della had had a fall.’

  ‘Couldn’t he have phoned?’

  ‘I suppose so, but he didn’t,’ said Aamir. ‘He wanted me to help him persuade Della to go to casualty. She’d slipped down the last few stairs and her wrist was swelling up. I went round there – they only live round the corner – but I couldn’t persuade her. She’s stubborn. Anyway, it turned out to be only a sprain, not a break. She was fine.’

  ‘So you’re Geraint’s alibi for the time Jasper Chiswell died?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And he’s yours.’

  ‘Why would I want Jasper Chiswell dead?’ asked Aamir.

  ‘That’s a good question,’ said Strike.

  ‘I barely knew the man,’ said Aamir.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really.’

  ‘So what made him quote Catullus at you, and mention Fate, and intimate in front of a room full of people that he knew things about your private life?’

  There was a long pause. Again, Aamir’s eye twitched.

  ‘That didn’t happen,’ he said.

  ‘Really? My partner—’

  ‘She’s lying. Chiswell didn’t know anything about my private life. Nothing.’

  Strike heard the numb drone of a hoover next door. He had been right. The walls were not thick.

  ‘I’ve seen you once before,’ Strike told Mallik, who looked more frightened than ever. ‘Jimmy Knight’s meeting in East Ham, couple of months ago.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Mallik. ‘You’ve mistaken me for someone else.’ Then, unconvincingly, ‘Who’s Jimmy Knight?’

  ‘OK, Aamir,’ said Strike, ‘if that’s how you want to play it, there’s no point going on. Could I use your bathroom?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Need a pee. Then I’ll clear out, leave you in peace.’

  Mallik clearly wanted to refuse, but seemed unable to find a reason to do so.

  ‘All right,’ said Aamir. ‘But—’

  A thought seemed to have occurred to him.

  ‘—wait. I need to move – I was soaking some socks in the sink. Stay here.’

  ‘Right you are,’ said Strike.

  Aamir left the room. Strike wanted an excuse to poke around upstairs for clues to the entity or activity that might have caused animal noises loud enough to disturb the neighbours, but the sound of Aamir’s footsteps told him that the bathroom lay beyond the kitchen on the ground floor.

  A couple of minutes later, Aamir returned.

  ‘It’s through here.’

  He led Strike down the hall, through a nondescript, bare kitchen, and pointed him into the bathroom.

  Strike entered, closed and locked the door, then placed his hand at the bottom of the sink. It was dry. The walls of the bathroom were pink and matched the pink bathroom suite. Grab rails beside the toilet and a floor-to-ceiling rail at the end of the bath suggested that this had been, some time in the recent past, the home of a frail or disabled person.

  What was it that Aamir had wanted to remove or conceal before the detective entered? Strike opened the bathroom cabinet. I
t contained very little other than a young man’s basic necessities: shaving kit, deodorant and aftershave.

  Closing the cabinet, Strike saw his own reflection swing into view and, over his shoulder, the back of the door, where a thick navy towelling robe had been hung up carelessly, suspended from the arm hole rather than the loop designed for that purpose.

  Flushing the toilet to maintain the fiction that he was too busy to nose around, Strike approached the dressing gown and felt the empty pockets. As he did so, the precariously placed robe slid off the hook.

  Strike took a step backwards, the better to appreciate what had just been revealed. Somebody had gouged a crude, four-legged figure into the bathroom door, splintering the wood and paint. Strike turned on the cold tap, in case Aamir was listening, took a picture of the carving with his mobile, turned off the tap and replaced the towelling robe as he had found it.

  Aamir was waiting at the end of the kitchen.

  ‘All right if I take those papers with me?’ Strike asked, and without waiting for an answer he returned to the sitting room and picked up the Facebook pages.

  ‘What made you leave the Foreign Office, anyway?’ he asked casually.

  ‘I . . . didn’t enjoy it.’

  ‘How did it come about, you working for the Winns?’

  ‘We’d met,’ said Aamir. ‘Della offered me a job. I took it.’

  It happened, very occasionally, that Strike felt scruples about what he was driven to ask during an interview.

  ‘I couldn’t help noticing,’ he said, holding up the wad of printed material, ‘that you seemed to drop out of sight of your family for quite a long time after you left the Foreign Office. No more appearances in group shots, not even on your mother’s seventieth birthday. Your sister stopped mentioning you, for a long time.’

  Aamir said nothing.

  ‘It was as if you’d been disowned,’ said Strike.

  ‘You can get out, now,’ said Aamir, but Strike didn’t move.

  ‘When your sister posted this picture of the pair of you in the pizza place,’ Strike continued, unfolding the last sheet again, ‘the responses were—’

  ‘I want you to leave,’ repeated Aamir, more loudly.

  ‘“What you doing with that scumbag?” “Your dad know you still seeing him?”’ Strike read aloud from the messages beneath the picture of Aamir and his sister. ‘“If my brother permitted liwat—’”

  Aamir charged at him, sending a wild right-handed punch to the side of Strike’s head that the detective parried. But the studious-looking Aamir was full of the kind of blind rage that could make a dangerous opponent of almost any man. Tearing a nearby lamp from its socket he swung it so violently that had Strike not ducked in time, the lamp base could have shattered, not on the wall that half-divided the sitting room, but on his face.

  ‘Enough!’ bellowed Strike, as Aamir dropped the remnants of the lamp and came at him again. Strike fended off the windmilling fists, hooked his prosthetic leg around the back of Aamir’s leg, and threw him to the floor. Swearing under his breath, because this action had done his aching stump no good at all, Strike straightened up, panting, and said:

  ‘Any more and I’ll fucking deck you.’

  Aamir rolled out of Strike’s reach and got to his feet. His glasses were hanging from one ear. Hands shaking, he took them off and examined the broken hinge. His eyes were suddenly huge.

  ‘Aamir, I’m not interested in your private life,’ panted Strike, ‘I’m interested in who you’re covering up for—’

  ‘Get out,’ whispered Aamir.

  ‘—because if the police decide it’s murder, everything you’re trying to hide will come out. Murder inquiries respect no one’s privacy.’

  ‘Get out!’

  ‘All right. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  At the front door, Strike turned one last time to face Aamir, who had followed him into the hall, and braced himself as Strike came to a halt.

  ‘Who carved that mark on the inside of your bathroom door, Aamir?’

  ‘Out!’

  Strike knew there was no point persisting. As soon as he had crossed the threshold, the front door slammed behind him.

  Several houses away, the wincing Strike leaned up against a tree to take the weight off his prosthesis, and texted Robin the picture he had just taken, along with the message:

  Remind you of anything?

  He lit a cigarette and waited for Robin’s response, glad of an excuse to remain stationary, because quite apart from the pain in his stump, the side of his head was throbbing. In dodging the lamp he had hit it against the wall, and his back was aching because of the effort it had taken to throw the younger man to the floor.

  Strike glanced back at the turquoise door. If he was honest, something else was hurting: his conscience. He had entered Mallik’s house with the intention of shocking or intimidating him into the truth about his relationship with Chiswell and the Winns. While a private detective could not afford the doctor’s dictum ‘first, do no harm’, Strike generally attempted to extract truth without causing unnecessary damage to the host. Reading out the comments at the bottom of that Facebook post had been a low blow. Brilliant, unhappy, undoubtedly tied to the Winns by something other than choice, Aamir Mallik’s eruption into violence had been the reaction of a desperate man. Strike didn’t need to consult the papers in his pocket to recall the picture of Mallik standing proudly in the Foreign Office, about to embark on a stellar career with his first-class degree with his mentor, Sir Christopher Barrowclough-Burns, by his side.

  His mobile rang.

  ‘Where on earth did you find that carving?’ said Robin.

  ‘The back of Aamir’s bathroom door, hidden under a dressing gown.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘No. What does it look like to you?’

  ‘The white horse on the hill over Woolstone,’ said Robin.

  ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ said Strike, elbowing himself off the supporting tree and limping off along the street again. ‘I was worried I’d started hallucinating the bloody things.’

  47

  … I want to try and play my humble part in the struggles of life.

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  Robin emerged from Camden Town station at half past eight on Friday morning and set off for the jewellery shop where she was to have her day’s trial, furtively checking her appearance in every window that she passed.

  In the months following the trial of the Shacklewell Ripper, she had become adept at make-up techniques such as altering the shape of her eyebrows or over-painting her lips in vermillion, which made a significant difference to her appearance when coupled with wigs and coloured contact lenses, but she had never before worn as much make-up as today. Her eyes, in which she was wearing dark brown contact lenses, were heavily rimmed with black kohl, her lips painted pale pink, her nails a metallic grey. Having only one conventional hole in each earlobe, she had bought a couple of cheap ear cuffs to simulate a more adventurous approach to piercing. The short black second-hand dress she had bought at the local Oxfam shop in Deptford still smelled slightly fusty, even though she had run it through the washing machine the previous day, and she wore it with thick black tights and a pair of flat black lace-up boots in spite of the warmth of the morning. Thus attired, she hoped that she resembled the other goth and emo girls who frequented Camden, an area of London that Robin had rarely visited and which she associated mainly with Lorelei and her vintage clothes store.

  She had named her new alter ego Bobbi Cunliffe. When undercover, it was best to assume names with a personal association, to which you responded instinctively. Bobbi sounded like Robin, and indeed people had sometimes tried to abbreviate her name that way, most notably her long-ago flirt in a temporary office, and her brother, Martin, when he wished to annoy her. Cunliffe was Matthew’s surname.

  To her relief, he had left for work early that day, because he was auditing an office out in Barnet, leav
ing Robin free to complete her physical transformation without undermining remarks and displeasure that she was, again, going undercover. Indeed, she thought she might derive a certain pleasure from using her married name – the first time she had ever offered it as her own – while embodying a girl whom Matthew would instinctively dislike. The older he got, the more Matthew was aggravated by and contemptuous of people who did not dress, think or live as he did.

  The Wiccan’s jewellery shop, Triquetra, was tucked away in Camden Market. Arriving outside at a quarter to nine, Robin found the stallholders of Camden Lock Place already busy, but the store locked up and empty. After a five-minute wait, her employer arrived, puffing slightly. A large woman whom Robin guessed to be in her late fifties, she had straggly dyed black hair that showed half an inch of silver root, had the same savage approach to eyeliner as Bobbi Cunliffe and wore a long green velvet dress.