Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  ‘When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘The last time we met face to face was here, at the gallery,’ said Drummond. ‘I can tell you exactly what date it was: Friday the twenty-second of June.’

  This, Strike knew, was the day that he had met Chiswell for the first time. He remembered the minister walking away towards Drummond’s gallery after their lunch at Pratt’s.

  ‘And how did he seem to you that day?’

  ‘Extremely angry,’ said Drummond, ‘but that was inevitable, given what he walked in on, here.’

  Drummond picked up the letter opener and turned it delicately in his thick fingers.

  ‘His son – Raphael – had just been caught, for the second time – ah—’

  Drummond balked for a second.

  ‘—in flagrante,’ he said, ‘with the other young person I employed at that time, in the bathroom behind me.’

  He indicated a discreet black door.

  ‘I had already caught them in there, a month prior to that. I hadn’t told Jasper the first time, because I felt he had quite enough on his plate.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Drummond fingered the ornate ivory, cleared his throat and said:

  ‘Jasper’s marriage isn’t – wasn’t . . . I mean to say, Kinvara is a handful. Difficult woman. She was badgering Jasper to put one of her mares in foal to Totilas at the time.’

  When Strike looked blank, Drummond elucidated:

  ‘Top dressage stallion. Nigh on ten thousand for semen.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Strike.

  ‘Well, quite,’ said Drummond. ‘And when Kinvara doesn’t get what she wants . . . one doesn’t know whether it’s temperament or something deeper – actual mental instability – anyway, Jasper had a very difficult time with her.

  ‘Then he’d been through the ghastly business of Raphael’s, ah, accident – that poor young mother killed – the press, and so on and so forth, his son in jail . . . as a friend, I didn’t want to add to his troubles.

  ‘I’d told Raphael the first time it happened that I wouldn’t inform Jasper, but I also said he was on a final warning and if he stepped out of line again, he would be out on his ear, old friend of his father’s or not. I had Francesca to consider, too. She’s my goddaughter, eighteen years old and completely smitten with him. I didn’t want to have to tell her parents.

  ‘So when I walked in and heard them, I really had no choice. I’d thought I was safe to leave Raphael in charge for an hour because Francesca wasn’t at work that day, but of course, she’d sneaked in specially to see him, on her day off.

  ‘Jasper arrived to find me pounding on the door. There was no way to hide what was going on. Raphael was trying to block my entrance to the bathroom here while Francesca climbed out of the window. She couldn’t face me. I rang her parents, told them everything. She never came back.

  ‘Raphael Chiswell,’ said Drummond heavily, ‘is a Bad Lot. Freddie, the son who died – my godchild too, incidentally – was worth a million of . . . well, well,’ he said, turning the penknife over and over in his fingers, ‘one shouldn’t say it, I know.’

  The office door opened and the young blonde in the black dress entered with a tea tray. Strike compared it mentally to the tea he had in the office as she set down two silver pots, one containing hot water, bone china cups and saucers and a sugar bowl complete with tongs.

  ‘Mrs Ross has just arrived, Henry.’

  ‘Tell her I’m tied up for the next twenty minutes or so. Ask her to wait, if she’s got time.’

  ‘So I take it,’ said Strike, when Lucinda had left, ‘that there wasn’t much time for conversation that day?’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Drummond, unhappily. ‘Jasper had come to see Raphael at work, believing that all was going splendidly, and to arrive in the middle of that scene . . . Totally on my side, obviously, once he grasped what was going on. He was the one who actually shoved the boy out of the way to get the bathroom door open. Then he turned a nasty colour. He had a heart problem, you know, it had been grumbling on for years. Sat down on the toilet rather suddenly. I was very worried, but he wouldn’t let me call Kinvara . . .

  ‘Raphael had the decency to be ashamed of himself, then. Tried to help his father. Jasper told him to get out of it, made me close the door, leave him in there . . . ’

  Now sounding gruff, Drummond broke off and poured himself and Strike tea. He was evidently in some distress. As he added three lumps to his own cup, the teaspoon rattled against the cup.

  ‘’Pologise. Last time I ever saw Jasper, you see. He came out of the bathroom, ghastly colour, still, shook my hand, apologised, said he’d let his oldest friend . . . let me down.’

  Drummond coughed again, swallowed and continued with what seemed an effort:

  ‘None of it was Jasper’s fault. Raphael learned such morals as he’s got from the mother, and she’s best described as a high-class . . . well, well. Meeting Ornella was really the start of all Jasper’s problems. If he’d only stayed with Patricia . . .

  ‘Anyway, I never saw Jasper again. I had some difficulty bringing myself to shake Raphael’s hand at the funeral, if you want the truth.’

  Drummond took a sip of tea and Strike tried his own. It was far too weak.

  ‘All sounds very unpleasant,’ the detective said.

  ‘You may well say so,’ sighed Drummond.

  ‘You’ll appreciate that I have to ask about some sensitive matters.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Drummond.

  ‘You’ve spoken to Izzy. Did she tell you that Jasper Chiswell was being blackmailed?’

  ‘She mentioned it,’ said Drummond, with a glance to check that the door was shut. ‘He hadn’t breathed a word to me. Izzy said it was one of the Knights . . . one remembers a family in the grounds. The father was an odd-job man, yes? As for the Winns, well, no, I don’t think there was much liking between them and Jasper. Strange couple.’

  ‘The Winns’ daughter Rhiannon was a fencer,’ said Strike. ‘She was on the junior British fencing team with Freddie Chiswell—’

  ‘Oh yes, Freddie was awfully good,’ said Drummond.

  ‘Rhiannon was a guest at Freddie’s eighteenth birthday party, but she was a couple of years younger. She was only sixteen when she killed herself.’

  ‘How ghastly,’ said Drummond.

  ‘You don’t know anything about that?’

  ‘How should I?’ said Drummond, a fine crease between his dark eyes.

  ‘You weren’t at the eighteenth?’

  ‘I was, as a matter of fact. Godfather, you know.’

  ‘You can’t remember Rhiannon?’

  ‘Goodness, you can’t expect me to remember all the names! There were upwards of a hundred young people there. Jasper had a marquee in the garden and Patricia ran a treasure hunt.’

  ‘Really?’ said Strike.

  His own eighteenth birthday party, in a rundown pub in Shoreditch, had not included a treasure hunt.

  ‘Just in the grounds, you know. Freddie always liked a competition. A glass of champagne at every clue, it was rather jolly, got things off with a swing. I was manning clue three, down by what the children always used to call the dell.’

  ‘The hollow in the ground by the Knights’ cottage?’ asked Strike casually. ‘It was full of nettles when I saw it.’

  ‘We didn’t put the clue in the dell, we put it under Jack o’Kent’s doormat. He couldn’t be trusted to take care of the champagne, because he had a drink problem. I sat on the edge of the dell in a deck chair and watched them hunt and everyone who found the clue got a glass of champagne and off they went.’

  ‘Soft drinks for the under-eighteens?’ asked Strike.

  Faintly exasperated by this killjoy attitude, Drummond said:

  ‘Nobody had to drink champagne. It was an eighteenth, a celebration.’

  ‘So Jasper Chiswell never mentioned anything to you that he wouldn’t want to get into the press?’ asked Strike, returning to the m
ain point.

  ‘Nothing whatsoever.’

  ‘When he asked me to find a way of countering his blackmailers, he told me that whatever he’d done happened six years ago. He implied to me that it wasn’t illegal when he did it, but is now.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what that could have been. Jasper was a very law-abiding type, you know. Whole family, pillars of the community, churchgoers, they’ve done masses for the local area . . . ’

  A litany of Chiswellian beneficence followed, which rolled on for a couple of minutes and did not fool Strike in the slightest. Drummond was obfuscating, he was sure, because Drummond knew exactly what Chiswell had done. He became almost lyrical as he extolled the innate goodness of Jasper, and of the entire family, excepting, always, the scapegrace Raphael.

  ‘ . . . and hand always in his pocket,’ Drummond concluded, ‘mini­bus for the local Brownies, repairs to the church roof, even after the family finances . . . well, well,’ he said again, in a little embarrassment.

  ‘The blackmailable offence,’ Strike began again, but Drummond interrupted.

  ‘There was no offence.’ He caught himself. ‘You just said it yourself. Jasper told you he had done nothing illegal. No law was broken.’

  Deciding that it would do no good to push Drummond harder about the blackmail, Strike turned a page in his notebook, and thought he saw the other relax.

  ‘You called Chiswell on the morning he died,’ said Strike.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Would that have been the first time you’d spoken since sacking Raphael?’

  ‘Actually, no. There had been a conversation a couple of weeks prior to that. M’wife wanted to invite Jasper and Kinvara over for dinner. I called him at DCMS, breaking the ice, you know, after the Raphael business. It wasn’t a long conversation, but amicable enough. He said they couldn’t make the night suggested. He also told me . . . well, to be frank, he told me he wasn’t sure how much longer he and Kinvara would be together, that the marriage was in trouble. He sounded tired, exhausted . . . unhappy.’

  ‘You had no more contact until the thirteenth?’

  ‘We had no contact even then,’ Drummond reminded him. ‘I phoned Jasper, yes, but there was no answer. Izzy tells me—’ He faltered. ‘She tells me that he was probably already dead.’

  ‘It was early for a call,’ said Strike.

  ‘I . . . had information I thought he should have.’

  ‘Of what kind?’

  ‘It was personal.’

  Strike waited. Drummond sipped his tea.

  ‘It related to the family finances, which as I imagine you know, were very poor at the time Jasper died.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’d sold off land and remortgaged the London property, offloaded all the good paintings through me. He was right down to the dregs, at the end, trying to sell me some of old Tinky’s leavings. It was . . . a little embarrassing, actually.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I deal in Old Masters,’ said Drummond. ‘I do not buy paintings of spotted horses by unknown Australian folk artists. As a courtesy to Jasper, being an old friend, I had some of it valued with my usual man at Christie’s. The only thing that had any monetary worth at all was a painting of a piebald mare and foal—’

  ‘I think I’ve seen that,’ said Strike.

  ‘—but it was worth peanuts,’ said Drummond. ‘Peanuts.’

  ‘How much, at a guess?’

  ‘Five to eight thousand at a push,’ said Drummond dismissively.

  ‘Quite a lot of peanuts to some people,’ said Strike.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ said Henry Drummond, ‘that wouldn’t have repaired a tenth of the roof at Chiswell House.’

  ‘But he was considering selling it?’ asked Strike.

  ‘Along with half a dozen others,’ said Drummond.

  ‘I had the impression that Mrs Chiswell was particularly attached to that painting.’

  ‘I don’t think his wife’s wishes were of much importance to him by the end . . . Oh dear,’ sighed Drummond, ‘this is all very difficult. I really don’t wish to be responsible for telling the family something that I know will only cause hurt and anger. They’re already suffering.’

  He tapped his teeth with a nail.

  ‘I assure you,’ he said, ‘that the reason for my call cannot have any bearing on Jasper’s death.’

  Yet he seemed in two minds.

  ‘You must speak to Raphael,’ he said, clearly choosing his words with care, ‘because I think . . . possibly . . . I don’t like Raphael,’ he said, as though he had not already made that perfectly clear, ‘but I think, actually, he did an honourable thing on the morning his father died. At least, I can’t see what he personally had to gain by it, and I think he’s keeping silent about it for the same reason as myself. Being in the family, he is better placed to decide what to do than I can be. Speak to Raphael.’

  Strike had the impression that Henry Drummond would rather Raphael made himself unpopular with the family.

  There was a knock on the office door. Blonde Lucinda put her head inside.

  ‘Mrs Ross isn’t feeling terribly well, Henry; she’s going to go, but she’d like to say goodbye.’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ said Drummond, getting to his feet. ‘I don’t think I can be of more use, I’m afraid, Mr Strike.’

  ‘I’m very grateful for you seeing me,’ said Strike, also rising, though with difficulty, and picking up his walking stick again. ‘Could I ask one last thing?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Drummond, pausing.

  ‘Do you understand anything by the phrase “he put the horse on them”?’

  Drummond appeared genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Who put what horse . . . where?’

  ‘You don’t know what that might mean?’

  ‘I’ve really no idea. Terribly sorry, but as you’ve heard, I’ve got a client waiting.’

  Strike had no alternative but to follow Drummond back into the gallery.

  In the middle of the otherwise deserted gallery stood Lucinda, who was fussing over a dark, heavily pregnant woman sitting on a high chair, sipping water.

  As he recognised Charlotte, Strike knew that this second encounter could not be a coincidence.

  50

  … you have branded me, once for all – branded me for life.

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  ‘Corm,’ she said weakly, gaping at him over the rim of her glass. She was pale, but Strike, who would have put nothing past her to stage a situation that she could use to her advantage, including skipping food or applying white foundation, merely nodded.

  ‘Oh, you know each other?’ said Drummond, surprised.

  ‘I must go,’ mumbled Charlotte, getting to her feet while the concerned Lucinda hovered. ‘I’m late, I’m meeting my sister.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re well enough?’ said Lucinda.

  Charlotte gave Strike a tremulous smile.

  ‘Would you mind walking me up the road? It’s only a block.’

  Drummond and Lucinda turned to Strike, clearly delighted to offload responsibility for this wealthy, well-connected woman onto his shoulders.

  ‘Not sure I’m the best person for the job,’ said Strike, indicating his stick.

  He felt Drummond and Lucinda’s surprise.

  ‘I’ll give you plenty of warning if I think I’m actually going into labour,’ said Charlotte. ‘Please?’

  He could have said ‘No’. He might have said, ‘Why don’t you get your sister to meet you here?’ A refusal, as she knew well, would make him appear churlish in front of people he might need to talk to again.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, keeping his voice just the right side of brusque.

  ‘Thanks so much, Lucinda,’ said Charlotte, sliding down from the chair.

  She was wearing a beige silk trench coat over a black T-shirt, maternity jeans and sneakers. Everything she wore, even these casual things, was of fine quality. She had always favoured monochrome
colours, stark or classic designs, against which her remarkable beauty was thrown into relief.

  Strike held open the door for her, reminded by her pallor of the occasion when Robin had turned white and clammy at journey’s end, after deftly steering a hire car out of what could have been a disastrous crash on black ice.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said to Henry Drummond.

  ‘My pleasure,’ said the art dealer formally.