Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  ‘Which means that either Chiswell didn’t have a passcode on his mobile, or that Raphael knew it.’

  ‘Good point. That needs checking.’

  Clicking out the nib of his pen, Strike made a note on his pad. As he did it, he wondered whether Robin’s husband, who had previously deleted her call history without her knowledge, knew her current passcode. These small matters of trust were often powerful indicators of the strength of a relationship.

  ‘There’s another logistical problem if Raphael was the killer,’ Robin said. ‘He didn’t have a key, and if his father let him in, it would mean Chiswell was awake and conscious while Raphael pounded up anti-depressants in the kitchen.’

  ‘Another good point,’ said Strike, ‘but the pounding up of the pills has to be explained away with all of our suspects.

  ‘Take Flick. If she was posing as the cleaner, she probably knew the house in Ebury Street better than most of the family. Loads of opportunities to poke around, and she had a restricted key for a while. They’re hard to get copied, but let’s say she managed it, so she could still let herself in and out of the house whenever she fancied.

  ‘She creeps in in the early hours to doctor the orange juice, but crushing pills in a pestle and mortar is a noisy job—’

  ‘—unless,’ said Robin, ‘she brought the pills already crushed up, in a bag or something, and dusted them around the pestle and mortar to make it look as though Chiswell had done it.’

  ‘OK, but we still need to explain why there were no traces of amitriptyline in the empty orange juice carton in the bin. Raphael could plausibly have handed his father a glass of juice—’

  ‘—except that Chiswell’s prints were the only ones on there—’

  ‘—but would Chiswell not find it odd to come downstairs in the morning to a pre-poured glass of juice? Would you drink a glass of something you hadn’t poured, and which appeared mysteriously in what you thought was an empty house?’

  Down in Denmark Street, a group of young women’s voices rose over the constant swish and rumble of traffic, singing Rihanna’s ‘Where Have You Been?’

  ‘Where have you been? All my life, all my life . . . ’

  ‘Maybe it was suicide,’ said Robin.

  ‘That attitude won’t get the bills paid,’ said Strike, tapping his cigarette ash onto his plate. ‘Come on, people who had the means to get into Ebury Street that day: Raphael, Flick—’

  ‘—and Jimmy,’ said Robin. ‘Everything that applies to Flick applies to him, because she would’ve been able to give him all the information she had about Chiswell’s habits and his house, and given him her copied key.’

  ‘Correct. So those are three people we know could have got in that morning,’ said Strike, ‘but this took much more than simply being able to get in through the door. The killer also had to know which anti-depressants Kinvara was taking, and arrange for the helium canister and rubber tubing to be there, which suggests close contact with the Chiswells, access to the house to get the stuff inside, or insider knowledge of the fact that the helium and tubing were already in there.’

  ‘As far as we know, Raphael hadn’t been in Ebury Street lately and wasn’t on terms with Kinvara to know what pills she was taking, though I suppose his father might have mentioned it to him,’ said Robin. ‘Judged on opportunity alone, the Winns and Aamir seem to be ruled out . . . so, assuming she was the cleaner, Jimmy and Flick go to the top of our suspect list.’

  Strike heaved a sigh and closed his eyes.

  ‘Bollocks to it,’ he muttered, as he passed a hand across his face, ‘I keep circling back to motive.’

  Opening his eyes again, he stubbed out his cigarette on his dinner plate and immediately lit another one.

  ‘I’m not surprised MI5 are interested, because there’s no obvious gain here. Oliver was right – blackmailers don’t generally kill their victims, it’s the other way around. Hatred’s a picturesque idea, but a hot-blooded hate killing is a hammer or a lamp to the head, not a meticulously planned fake suicide. If it was murder, it was more like a clinical execution, planned in every detail. Why? What did the killer get out of it? Which also makes me wonder, why then? Why did Chiswell die then?

  ‘It was surely in Jimmy and Flick’s best interests for Chiswell to stay alive until they could produce evidence that forced him to come across with the money they wanted. Same with Raphael: he’d been written out of the will, but his relationship with his father was showing some signs of improvement. It was in his interest for his father to stay alive.

  ‘But Chiswell had covertly threatened Aamir with exposure of something unspecified, but probably sexual, given the Catullus quotation, and he’d recently come into possession of information about the Winns’ dodgy charity. We shouldn’t forget that Geraint Winn wasn’t really a blackmailer: he didn’t want money, he wanted Chiswell’s resignation and disgrace. Is it beyond the realms of possibility that Winn or Mallik took a different kind of revenge when they realised the first plan had failed?’

  Strike dragged heavily on his cigarette and said:

  ‘We’re missing something, Robin. The thing that ties all this together.’

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t tie together,’ said Robin. ‘That’s life, isn’t it? We’ve got a group of people who all had their own personal tribulations and secrets. Some of them had reason not to like Chiswell, to resent him, but that doesn’t mean it all joins up neatly. Some of it must be irrelevant.’

  ‘There’s still something we don’t know.’

  ‘There’s a lot we don’t—’

  ‘No, something big, something . . . fundamental. I can smell it. It keeps almost showing itself. Why did Chiswell say he might have more work for us after he’d scuppered Winn and Knight?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Robin.

  ‘“One by one, they trip themselves up”,’ Strike quoted. ‘Who’d tripped themselves up?’

  ‘Geraint Winn. I’d just told him about the missing money from the charity.’

  ‘Chiswell had been on the phone, trying to find a money clip, you said. A money clip that belonged to Freddie.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Robin.

  ‘Freddie,’ repeated Strike, scratching his chin.

  And for a moment he was back in the communal TV room of a German military hospital, with the television muted in the corner and copies of the Army Times lying on a low table. The young lieutenant who had witnessed Freddie Chiswell’s death had been sitting there alone when Strike found him, wheelchair-bound, a Taliban bullet still lodged in his spine.

  ‘ . . . the convoy stopped, Major Chiswell told me to get out, see what was going on. I told him I could see movement up on the ridge. He told me to fucking well do as I was told.

  ‘I hadn’t gone more than a couple of feet when I got the bullet in the back. The last thing I remember was him yelling out of the lorry at me. Then the sniper took the top of his head off.’

  The lieutenant had asked Strike for a cigarette. He wasn’t supposed to be smoking, but Strike had given him the half pack he had on him.

  ‘Chiswell was a cunt,’ said the young man in the wheelchair.

  In Strike’s imagination he saw tall, blond Freddie swaggering up a country lane, slumming it with Jimmy Knight and his mates. He saw Freddie in fencing garb, out on the piste, watched by the indistinct figure of Rhiannon Winn, who was perhaps already entertaining suicidal thoughts.

  Disliked by his soldiers, revered by his father: could Freddie be the thing that Strike sought, the element that tied everything together, that connected two blackmailers and the story of a strangled child? But the notion seemed to dissolve as he examined it, and the diverse strands of the investigation fell apart once more, stubbornly unconnected.

  ‘I want to know what the photographs from the Foreign Office show,’ said Strike aloud, his eyes on the purpling sky beyond the office window. ‘I want to know who hacked the Uffington white horse onto the back of Aamir Mallik’s bathroom door, and I want to know
why there was a cross in the ground on the exact spot Billy said a kid was buried.’

  ‘Well,’ said Robin, standing up and beginning to clear away the debris of their Chinese takeaway, ‘nobody ever said you weren’t ambitious.’

  ‘Leave that. I’ll do it. You need to get home.’

  I don’t want to go home.

  ‘It won’t take long. What are you up to tomorrow?’

  ‘Got an afternoon appointment with Chiswell’s art dealer friend, Drummond.’

  Having rinsed off the plates and cutlery, Robin took her handbag down from the peg where she’d hung it, then turned back. Strike tended to rebuff expressions of concern, but she had to say it.

  ‘No offence, but you look terrible. Maybe rest your leg before you have to go out again? See you soon.’

  She left before Strike could answer. He sat lost in thought until, finally, he knew he must begin the painful journey back upstairs to his attic flat. Having heaved himself upright again, he closed the windows, turned off the lights and locked up the office.

  As he placed his false foot on the bottom stair to the floor above, his phone rang again. He knew, without checking, that it was Lorelei. She wasn’t about to let him go without at least attempting to hurt him as badly as he had hurt her. Slowly, carefully, keeping his weight off his prosthesis as much as was practical, Strike climbed the stairs to bed.

  49

  Rosmers of Rosmersholm – clergymen, soldiers, men who have filled high places in the state – men of scrupulous honour, every one of them . . .

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  Lorelei didn’t give up. She wanted to see Strike face to face, wanted to know why she had given nearly a year of her life, as she saw it, to an emotional vampire.

  ‘You owe me a meeting,’ she said, when he finally picked up the phone at lunchtime next day. ‘I want to see you. You owe me that.’

  ‘And what will that achieve?’ he asked her. ‘I read your email, you’ve made your feelings clear. I told you from the start what I wanted and what I didn’t want—’

  ‘Don’t give me that “I never pretended I wanted anything serious” line. Who did you call when you couldn’t walk? You were happy enough for me to act like your wife when you were—’

  ‘So let’s both agree I’m a bastard,’ he said, sitting in his combined kitchen-sitting room with his amputated leg stretched out on a chair in front of him. He was wearing only boxer shorts, but would soon need to get his prosthesis on and dress smartly enough to blend in at Henry Drummond’s art gallery. ‘Let’s wish each other well and—’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you don’t get out of it that easily. I was happy, I was doing fine—’

  ‘I never wanted to make you miserable. I like you—’

  ‘You like me,’ she repeated shrilly. ‘A year together and you like me—’

  ‘What do you want?’ he said, losing his temper at last. ‘Me to limp up the fucking aisle, not feeling what I should feel, not wanting it, wishing I was out of it? You’re making me say what I don’t want to say. I didn’t want to hurt anyone—’

  ‘But you did! You did hurt me! And now you want to walk away as though nothing happened!’

  ‘Whereas you want a public scene in a restaurant?’

  ‘I want,’ she said, crying now, ‘not to feel as though I could have been anyone. I want a memory of the end that doesn’t make me feel disposable and cheap—’

  ‘I never saw you that way. I don’t see you like that now,’ he said, eyes closed, wishing he had never crossed the room at Wardle’s party. ‘Truth is, you’re too—’

  ‘Don’t tell me I’m too good for you,’ she said. ‘Leave us both with some dignity.’

  She hung up. Strike’s dominant emotion was relief.

  No investigation had ever brought Strike so reliably back to the same small patch of London. The taxi disgorged him onto the gently sloping pavement of St James’s Street a few hours later, with the red brick St James’s Palace ahead and Pratt’s on Park Place to his right. After paying off the driver, he headed for Drummond’s Gallery, which lay between a wine dealer’s and a hat shop on the left-hand side of the street. Although he had managed to put his prosthesis on, Strike was walking with the aid of a collapsible walking stick that Robin had bought him during another period when his leg had become almost too painful to bear his weight.

  Even if it had marked the end of a relationship he wanted to escape, the call with Lorelei had left its mark. He knew in his heart that he was, in the spirit if not in the letter, guilty of some of the charges she had laid against him. While he had told Lorelei at the outset that he sought neither commitment nor permanence, he had known perfectly well that she had understood him to mean ‘right now’ rather than ‘never’ and he had not corrected that impression, because he wanted a distraction and a defence against the feelings that had dogged him after Robin’s wedding.

  However, the ability to section off his emotions, of which Charlotte had always complained, and to which Lorelei had dedicated a lengthy paragraph of the email dissecting his personality, had never failed him yet. Arriving two minutes early for his appointment with Henry Drummond, he transferred his attention with ease to the questions he intended to put to the late Jasper Chiswell’s old friend.

  Pausing beside the black marble exterior of the gallery, he saw himself reflected in the window and straightened his tie. He was wearing his best Italian suit. Behind his reflection, tastefully illuminated, a single painting in an ornate golden frame stood on an easel behind the spotless glass. It featured a pair of what, to Strike, looked like unrealistic horses with giraffe-like necks and staring eyes, ridden by eighteenth-century jockeys.

  The gallery beyond the heavy door was cool and silent, with a floor of highly polished white marble. Strike walked carefully with his stick among the sporting and wildlife paintings, which were illuminated discreetly around the white walls, all of them in heavy gilded frames, until a well-groomed young blonde in a tight black dress emerged from a side door.

  ‘Oh, good afternoon,’ she said, without asking his name, and walked away towards the back of the gallery, her stilettos making a metallic click on the tiles. ‘Henry! Mr Strike’s here!’

  A concealed door opened, and Drummond emerged: a curious-looking man, whose ascetic features of pinched nose and black brows were enclosed by rolls of fat around chin and neck, as though a puritan had been engulfed by the body of a jolly squire. With his mutton-chop whiskers and dark grey suit and waistcoat he had a timeless, irrefutably upper-class, appearance.

  ‘How do you do?’ he said, offering a warm, dry hand. ‘Come into the office.’

  ‘Henry, Mrs Ross just called,’ said the blonde, as Strike walked into the small room beyond the discreet door, which was book-lined, mahogany-shelved and very tidy. ‘She’d like to see the Munnings before we close. I’ve told her it’s reserved, but she’d still like—’

  ‘Let me know when she arrives,’ said Drummond. ‘And could we have some tea, Lucinda? Or coffee?’ he enquired of Strike.

  ‘Tea would be great, thank you.’

  ‘Do sit down,’ said Drummond, and Strike did so, grateful for a large and sturdy leather chair. The antique desk between them was bare but for a tray of engraved writing paper, a fountain pen and an ivory and silver letter opener. ‘So,’ said Henry Drummond heavily, ‘you’re looking into this appalling business for the family?’

  ‘That’s right. D’you mind if I take notes?’

  ‘Carry on.’

  Strike took out his notebook and pen. Drummond swivelled gently from side to side in his rotating chair.

  ‘Terrible shock,’ he said softly. ‘Of course, one thought immediately of foreign interference. Government minister, eyes of the world on London with the Olympics and so forth . . . ’

  ‘You didn’t think he could have committed suicide?’ asked Strike.

  Drummond sighed heavily.

  ‘I knew him for forty-five years. His life had
not been devoid of vicissitudes. To have come through everything – the divorce from Patricia, Freddie’s death, resignation from the government, Raphael’s ghastly car accident – to end it now, when he was Minister for Culture, when everything seemed back on track . . .

  ‘Because the Conservative Party was his life’s blood, you know,’ said Drummond. ‘Oh, yes. He’d bleed blue. Hated being out, delighted to get back in again, rise to minister . . . we joked of him becoming PM in our younger days, of course, but that dream was gone. Jasper always said, “Tory faithful likes bastards or buffoons”, and that he was neither one nor the other.’

  ‘So you’d say he was in generally good spirits around the time he died?’

  ‘Ah . . . well, no, I couldn’t say that. There were stresses, worries – but suicidal? Definitely not.’