Read backwards, it seemed to Strike that each suspect’s relation to the dead man became cruder, more transactional, until the list terminated with Jimmy Knight and his angry demand for forty thousand pounds.
Strike continued to pore over the list of names as though he might suddenly see something emerging out of his dense, spiky handwriting, the way unfocused eyes may spot the 3D image hidden in a series of brightly coloured dots. All that occurred to him, however, was the fact that there was an unusual number of pairs connected to Chiswell’s death: couples – Geraint and Della, Jimmy and Flick; pairs of full siblings – Izzy and Fizzy, Jimmy and Billy; the duo of blackmailing collaborators – Jimmy and Geraint; and the subsets of each blackmailer and his deputy – Flick and Aamir. There was even the quasi-parental pairing of Della and Aamir. This left two people who formed a pair in being isolated within the otherwise close-knit family: the widowed Kinvara and Raphael, the unsatisfactory, outsider son.
Strike tapped his pen unconsciously against the notebook, thinking. Pairs. The whole business had begun with a pair of crimes: Chiswell’s blackmail and Billy’s allegation of infanticide. He had been trying to find the connection between them from the start, unable to believe that they could be entirely separate cases, even if on the face of it their only link was in the blood tie between the Knight brothers.
Turning the page, he examined the notes he had headed ‘Places’. After a few minutes spent examining his own jottings concerning access to the house in Ebury Street, and the locations, in several cases unknown, of the suspects at the time of Chiswell’s death, he made a note to remind himself that he still hadn’t received from Izzy contact details for Tegan Butcher, the stable girl who could confirm that Kinvara had been at home in Woolstone while Chiswell was suffocating in a plastic bag in London.
He turned to the next page, headed ‘Things’, and now he set down his pen and spread Robin’s photographs out so that they formed a collage of the death scene. He scrutinised the flash of gold in the pocket of the dead man, and then the bent sword, half hidden in shadow in the corner of the room.
It seemed to Strike that the case he was investigating was littered with objects that had been found in surprising places: the sword in the corner, the lachesis pills on the floor, the wooden cross found in a tangle of nettles at the bottom of the dell, the canister of helium and the rubber tubing in a house where no child’s party had ever been held, but his tired mind could find neither answers nor patterns here.
Finally, Strike downed the rest of his beer, lobbed the empty can across the room into the kitchen bin, turned to a blank page in his notebook and began to write a to-do list for the Sunday of which two hours had already elapsed.
1. Call Wardle
Text note found in Flick’s flat,
Update on police case if possible.
2. Call Izzy
Show her stolen note.
Ask: was Freddie’s money clip ever found?
Tegan’s details?
Need phone number for Raphael.
Also phone number, if poss, for Della Winn
3. Call Barclay
Give update.
Cover Jimmy & Flick again
When does Jimmy visit Billy?
4. Call hospital
Try and arrange interview with Billy when Jimmy not there.
5. Call Robin
Arrange interview with Raphael
6. Call Della
Try and arrange interview
After a little further thought, he finished the list with
7. Buy teabags/beer/bread
After tidying up the Chiswell file, tipping the overflowing ashtray into the bin, opening the window wider to admit more cold, fresh air, Strike went for a last pee, cleaned his teeth, switched off the lights and returned to his bedroom, where a single reading lamp still burned.
Now, with his defences weakened by beer and tiredness, the memories he had sought to bury in work forced their way to the forefront of his mind. As he undressed and removed his prosthetic leg, he found himself going back over every word Charlotte had said to him across the table for two in Franco’s, remembering the expression of her green eyes, the scent of Shalimar reaching him through the garlic fumes of the restaurant, her thin white fingers playing with the bread.
He got into bed between the chilly sheets and lay, hands behind his head, staring up into the darkness. He wished he could feel indifferent, but in fact his ego had stretched luxuriously at the idea that she had read all about the cases that had made his name and that she thought about him while in bed with her husband. Now, though, reason and experience rolled up their sleeves, ready to conduct a professional post-mortem on the remembered conversation, methodically disinterring the unmistakable signs of Charlotte’s perennial will to shock and her apparently insatiable need for conflict.
The abandonment of her titled husband and newborn children for a famous, one-legged detective would certainly constitute the crowning achievement of a career of disruption. Having an almost pathological hatred of routine, responsibility or obligation, she had sabotaged every possibility of permanence before she had to deal with the threats of boredom or compromise. Strike knew all this, because he knew her better than any other human being, and he knew that their final parting had happened at the exact moment where real sacrifice and hard choices had to be made.
But he also knew – and the knowledge was like ineradicable bacteria in a wound that stopped it ever healing – that she loved him as she had never loved anyone else. Of course, the sceptical girlfriends and wives of his friends, none of whom had liked Charlotte, had told him over and over again, ‘That’s not love, what she does to you’, or, ‘Not being funny, Corm, but how do you know she hasn’t said exactly the same to all the others she’s had?’ Such women saw his confidence that Charlotte loved him as delusion or egotism. They had not been present for those times of total bliss and mutual understanding that remained some of the best of Strike’s life. They had not shared jokes inexplicable to any other human being but himself and Charlotte, or felt the mutual need that had drawn them back together for sixteen years.
She had walked from him straight into the arms of the man she thought would hurt Strike worst, and indeed, it had hurt, because Ross was the absolute antithesis of him and had dated Charlotte before Strike had even met him. Yet Strike remained certain her flight to Ross had been self-immolation, done purely for spectacular effect, a Charlottian form of sati.
Difficile est longum subito deponere amorem,
Difficile est, verum hoc qua lubet efficias.
It is hard to abruptly shrug off a long-established love
Hard, but this, somehow, you must do.
Strike turned off the light, closed his eyes and sank, once more, into uneasy dreams of the empty house where squares of unfaded wallpaper bore witness to the removal of everything of value, but this time he walked alone, with the strange sensation that hidden eyes were watching.
53
And then, in the end, the poignant misery of her victory . . .
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Robin arrived home just before 2 a.m. As she crept around the kitchen, making herself a sandwich, she noticed on the kitchen calendar that Matthew was planning to play five-a-side football later that morning. Accordingly, when she slipped into bed with him twenty minutes later, she set the alarm on her phone for eight o’clock before plugging it in to charge. As part of her effort to try and keep the atmosphere amicable, she wanted to get up to see him before he left.
He seemed happy that she’d made the effort to join him for breakfast, but when she asked whether he wanted her to come and cheer from the sidelines, or meet him for lunch afterwards, he declined both offers.
‘I’ve got paperwork to do this afternoon. I don’t want to drink at lunchtime. I’ll come straight back,’ he said, so Robin, secretly delighted, because she was so tired, told him to have a goo
d time and kissed him goodbye.
Trying not to focus on how much lighter of heart she felt once Matthew had left the house, Robin occupied herself with laundry and other essentials until, shortly after midday, while she was changing the sheets on their bed, Strike called.
‘Hi,’ said Robin, gladly abandoning her task, ‘any news?’
‘Plenty. Ready to write some stuff down?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, hurriedly grabbing notebook and pen off the top of her dressing table and sitting down on the stripped mattress.
‘I’ve been making some calls. First off, Wardle. Very impressed with your work in getting hold of that note—’
Robin smiled at her reflection in the mirror.
‘—though he’s warned me the police won’t take kindly to us, as he put it, “clodhopping all over an open case”. I’ve asked him not to say where he got the tip-off about the note, but I expect they’ll put two and two together, given that Wardle and I are mates. Still, that’s unavoidable. The interesting bit is that the police are still worried about the same features of the death scene as we are and they’ve been going deeper into Chiswell’s finances.’
‘Looking for evidence of blackmail?’
‘Yeah, but they haven’t got anything, because Chiswell never paid out. Here’s the interesting bit. Chiswell got an unexplained payment in cash of forty thousand pounds last year. He opened a separate bank account for it, then seems to have spent it all on house repairs and other sundries.’
‘He received forty thousand pounds?’
‘Yep. And Kinvara and the rest of the family are claiming total ignorance. They say they don’t know where the money came from or why Chiswell would’ve opened a separate account to take receipt of it.’
‘The same amount Jimmy asked for before he scaled down his request,’ said Robin. ‘That’s odd.’
‘Certainly is. So then I called Izzy.’
‘You’ve been busy,’ said Robin.
‘You haven’t heard the half of it. Izzy denies knowledge of where the forty grand came from, but I’m not sure I believe her. Then I asked her about the note Flick stole. She’s appalled that Flick might’ve been posing as her father’s cleaner. Very shaken up. I think for the first time she’s considering the possibility that Kinvara isn’t guilty.’
‘I take it she never met this so-called Polish woman?’
‘Correct.’
‘What did she make of the note?’
‘She thinks it looks like a to-do list, as well. She assumes “Suzuki” meant the Grand Vitara, which was Chiswell’s. No thoughts on “mother”. The one thing of interest I got from her was in relation to “blanc de blanc”. Chiswell was allergic to champagne. Apparently it made him go bright red and hyperventilate. What’s odd about that is, there was a big empty box labelled Moët & Chandon in the kitchen when I checked it, the morning Chiswell died.’
‘You never told me that.’
‘We’d just found the body of a government minister. An empty box seemed relatively uninteresting at the time, and it never occurred to me it might be relevant to anything until I spoke to Izzy today.’
‘Were there bottles inside?’
‘Nothing, so far as I could see, and according to the family, Chiswell never entertained there. If he wasn’t drinking champagne himself, why was the box there?’
‘You don’t think—’
‘That’s exactly what I think,’ said Strike. ‘I reckon that box was how the helium and the rubber tubing got into the house, disguised.’
‘Wow,’ said Robin, lying back on the unmade bed and looking up at the ceiling.
‘Quite clever. The killer could’ve sent it to him as a gift, couldn’t they, knowing he was highly unlikely to open and drink it?’
‘Bit slapdash,’ said Robin. ‘What was to stop him opening it up anyway? Or re-gifting it?’
‘We need to find out when it was sent,’ Strike was saying. ‘Meanwhile, one minor mystery’s been cleared up. Freddie’s money clip was found.’
‘Where?’
‘Chiswell’s pocket. That was the flash of gold in the photograph you took.’
‘Oh,’ said Robin, blankly. ‘So he must have found it, before he died?’
‘Well, it’d be hard for him to find it after he died.’
‘Ha ha,’ said Robin sarcastically. ‘There is another possibility.’
‘That the killer planted it on the corpse? Funny you should say that. Izzy says she was very surprised when it turned up on the body, because if he’d found it, she would have assumed he’d have told her. He made a massive fuss about losing it, apparently.’
‘He did,’ Robin agreed. ‘I heard him on the phone, ranting on about it. They fingerprinted it, presumably?’
‘Yeah. Nothing suspicious. Only his – but at this point, that means nothing. If there was a killer, it’s clear they wore gloves. I also asked Izzy about the bent sword, and we were right. It was Freddie’s old sabre. Nobody knows how it got bent, but Chiswell’s fingerprints were the only ones on there. I suppose it’s possible Chiswell got it off the wall while drunk and sentimental and accidentally trod on it, but again, there’s nothing to say a gloved killer couldn’t have handled it as well.’
Robin sighed. Her elation at finding the note appeared to have been premature.
‘So, still no real leads?’
‘Hold your horses,’ said Strike bracingly, ‘I’m leading up to the good stuff.
‘Izzy managed to get a new phone number for that stable girl who can confirm Kinvara’s alibi, Tegan Butcher. I want you to give her a ring. I think you’ll seem less intimidating to her than I will.’
Robin jotted down the digits Strike read out.
‘And after you’ve called Tegan, I want you to phone Raphael,’ said Strike, giving her the second number he had got from Izzy. ‘I’d like to clear up once and for all what he was really up to, the morning his father died.’
‘Will do,’ said Robin, glad of something concrete to do.
‘Barclay’s going to go back onto Jimmy and Flick,’ said Strike, ‘and I . . . ’
He left a small pause, deliberately dramatic, and Robin laughed.
‘And you’re . . . ’
‘ . . . am going to interview Billy Knight and Della Winn.’
‘What?’ said Robin, amazed. ‘How’re you going to get into the hosp – and she’ll never agree—’
‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong,’ said Strike. ‘Izzy dug Della’s number out of Chiswell’s records for me. I just rang her. I admit, I was expecting her to tell me to piss off—’
‘—in slightly more elevated language, if I know Della,’ Robin suggested.
‘—and she sounded initially as though she wanted to,’ admitted Strike, ‘but Aamir’s disappeared.’
‘What?’ said Robin, sharply.
‘Calm down. “Disappeared” is Della’s word. In reality, he resigned the day before yesterday and vacated his house, which hardly makes him a missing person. He’s not picking up the phone to her. She’s blaming me, because – her words again – I did “a fine job” on him when I went round to question him. She says he’s very fragile and it’ll be my fault if he ends up doing himself a mischief. So—’
‘You’ve offered to find him in exchange for her answering questions?’
‘Right in one,’ said Strike. ‘She jumped at the offer. Says I’ll be able to reassure him that he’s not in trouble and that nothing unsavoury I might have heard about him will go any further.’
‘I hope he’s all right,’ said Robin, concerned. ‘He really didn’t like me, but that just proves he’s smarter than any of the rest of them. When are you meeting Della?’
‘Seven o’clock this evening, at her house in Bermondsey. And tomorrow afternoon, if all goes to plan, I’m going to be talking to Billy. I checked with Barclay, and Jimmy’s got no plans to visit then, so I called the hospital. I’m waiting for Billy’s psychiatrist to call me back now and confirm.’
&n
bsp; ‘You think they’ll let you question him?’
‘Supervised, yeah, I think they will. They’re interested in seeing how lucid he is if he gets to talk to me. He’s back on his meds and greatly improved, but he’s still telling the story of the strangled kid. If the psychiatric team’s in agreement, I’m going to be visiting the locked ward tomorrow.’
‘Well, great. It’s good to have things to be getting on with. God knows, we could use a breakthrough – even if it is about the death we’re not being paid to investigate,’ she sighed.
‘There might not be a death at the bottom of Billy’s story at all,’ said Strike, ‘but it’s going to bug me for ever unless we find out. I’ll let you know how I get on with Della.’
Robin wished him luck, bade him goodbye and ended the call, though she remained lying on her half-made bed. After a few seconds, she said aloud:
‘Blanc de blancs.’
Once again, she had the sense of a buried memory shifting, issuing a gust of low mood. Where on earth had she seen that phrase, while feeling miserable?
Lethal White Page 52
