Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  ‘I still fucking love you!’

  The car moved away over the cobbles of Albury Street, past the moulded frontages of the pretty sea merchants’ houses where she had never felt she belonged. At the top of the street she knew that if she looked back, she would see Matthew standing watching the vanishing car. Her eyes met those of the driver in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Robin nonsensically, and then, bewildered by her own apology, she said, ‘I’ve – I’ve just left my husband.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said the driver, switching on her indicator. ‘I’ve left two. It gets easier with practice.’

  Robin tried to laugh, but the noise turned into a loud wet hiccough, and as the car approached the lonely stone swan high on the corner pub, she began to cry in earnest.

  ‘Here,’ said the driver gently, and she passed back a plastic-wrapped pack of tissues.

  ‘Thanks,’ sobbed Robin, extracting one and pressing it to her tired, stinging eyes until the white tissue was sodden and streaked with the last traces of thick black eye make-up that she had worn to impersonate Bobbi Cunliffe. Avoiding the sympathetic gaze of the driver in the rear-view mirror, she looked down into her lap. The wrapper on the tissues was that of an unfamiliar American brand: ‘Dr Blanc’.

  At once, Robin’s elusive memory dropped into view, as though it had been waiting for this tiny prod. Now she remembered exactly where she had seen the phrase ‘Blanc de Blanc’, but it had nothing to do with the case, and everything to do with her imploding marriage, with a lavender walk and a Japanese water garden, and the last time she had ever said ‘I love you’, and the first time she’d known she didn’t mean it.

  56

  I cannot – I will not – go through life with a dead body on my back.

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  As Strike approached Henlys Corner on the North Circular Road the following afternoon, he saw, with a muttered oath, that traffic ahead had come to a halt. The junction, which was a notorious hotspot for congestion, had supposedly been improved earlier that year. As he joined the stationary queue, Strike wound down his window, lit a cigarette and glanced at his dashboard clock, with the familiar sensation of angry impotence that driving in London so often engendered. He had wondered whether it might be wiser to take the Tube north, but the psychiatric hospital lay a good mile from the nearest station, and the BMW was marginally easier on his still sore leg. Now he feared that he was going to be late for an interview that he was determined not to miss, firstly because he had no wish to disoblige the psychiatric team who were letting him see Billy Knight, and secondly because Strike didn’t know when there would next be an opportunity to speak to the younger brother without fear of running into the older. Barclay had assured him that morning that Jimmy’s plans for the day comprised writing a polemic on Rothschild’s global influence for the Real Socialist website and sampling some of Barclay’s new stash.

  Scowling and tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, Strike fell back to ruminating on a question that had been nagging at him since the previous evening: whether or not the cut connection halfway through his call to Robin had really been due to Matthew snatching the phone out of her hand. He had not found Robin’s subsequent assurances that all was well particularly convincing.

  While heating himself baked beans on his one-ringed hob, because he was still attempting to lose weight, Strike had debated calling Robin back. Eating his meatless dinner unenthusiastically in front of the television, supposedly watching highlights of the Olympics closing ceremony, his attention was barely held by the sight of the Spice Girls zooming around on top of London cabs. I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it, Della Winn had said. Perhaps Robin and Matthew were even now in bed together. Was pulling a phone out of her hand any worse than deleting her call history? She had stayed with Matthew after that. Where was her red line?

  And Matthew was surely too careful of his own reputation and prospects to abandon all civilised norms. One of Strike’s last thoughts before falling asleep the night before had been that Robin had successfully fought off the Shacklewell Ripper, a grisly reflection, perhaps, but one that brought a certain reassurance.

  The detective was perfectly aware that the state of his junior partner’s marriage ought to be the least of his worries, given that he so far had no concrete information for the client who was currently paying three full-time investigators to find out the facts about her father’s death. Nevertheless, as the traffic finally moved on, Strike’s thoughts continued to eddy around Robin and Matthew until at last he saw a signpost to the psychiatric clinic and, with an effort, focused his mind on the forthcoming interview.

  Unlike the gigantic rectangular prism of concrete and black glass where Jack had been admitted a few weeks earlier, the hospital outside which Strike parked twenty minutes later boasted crocketed spires and byzantine windows covered with iron bars. In Strike’s opinion it looked like the bastard offspring of a gingerbread palace and a gothic prison. A Victorian stonemason had carved the word ‘Sanatorium’ into the dirty redbrick arch over the double doorway.

  Already five minutes late, Strike flung open the driver’s door and, not bothering to change his trainers for smarter footwear, locked the BMW and hurried, limping, up the grubby front steps.

  Inside he found a chilly hallway with high, off-white ceilings, churchlike windows and a general suspicion of decay barely kept at bay by the fug of disinfectant. Spotting the ward number he had been given by phone, he set off along a corridor to the left.

  Sunlight falling through the barred windows cast striped patches onto the off-white walls, which were hung crookedly with art, some of which had been done by former patients. As Strike passed a series of collages depicting detailed farmyard scenes in felt, tinsel and yarn, a skeletal teenage girl emerged from a bathroom alongside a nurse. Neither of them seemed to notice Strike. Indeed, the girl’s dull eyes were focused, it seemed to him, inward upon a battle she was waging far from the real world.

  Strike was faintly surprised to discover the double doors to the locked ward at the end of the ground floor corridor. Some vague association with belfries and Rochester’s first wife had led him to picture it on an upper floor, hidden perhaps in one of those pointed spires. The reality was entirely prosaic: a large green buzzer on the wall, which Strike pressed, and a male nurse with bright red hair peering through a small glass window, who turned to speak to somebody behind him. The door opened and Strike was admitted.

  The ward had four beds and a seating area, where two patients in day clothes were sitting, playing draughts: an older, apparently toothless man and a pale youth with a thickly bandaged neck. A cluster of people were standing around a workstation just inside the door: an orderly, two more nurses, and what Strike assumed to be two doctors, one male, one female. All turned to stare at him as he entered. One of the nurses nudged the other.

  ‘Mr Strike,’ said the male doctor, who was short, rather foxy in appearance and had a strong Mancunian accent. ‘How do you do? Colin Hepworth, we spoke on the phone. This is my colleague, Kamila Muhammad.’

  Strike shook hands with the woman, whose navy trouser suit reminded him of a policewoman’s.

  ‘We’re both going to be sitting in on your interview with Billy,’ she said. ‘He’s just gone to the bathroom. He’s quite excited about seeing you again. We thought we’d use one of our interview rooms. It’s right here.’

  She led him around the workstation, the nurses still watching avidly, into a small room containing four chairs and a desk that had been bolted to the floor. The walls were pale pink but otherwise bare.

  ‘Ideal,’ said Strike. It was like a hundred interview rooms he had used in the military police. There, too, third parties had often been present, usually lawyers.

  ‘A quick word before we start,’ said Kamila Muhammad, pulling the door to on Strike and her colleague, so that the nurses couldn’t hear their conversation. ‘I don’t know ho
w much you know about Billy’s condition?’

  ‘His brother told me it’s schizoid affective disorder.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘He went off his medication and ended up in a full-blown psychotic episode, which by the sounds of it is when he came to see you.’

  ‘Yeah, he seemed pretty disturbed at the time. He looked as though he’d been sleeping rough, as well.’

  ‘He probably had been. His brother told us he’d been missing around a week at that point. We don’t believe Billy’s psychotic any more,’ she said, ‘but he’s still quite closed down, so it’s hard to gauge to what degree he’s engaged with reality. It can be difficult to get an accurate picture of someone’s mental state where there are paranoid and delusional symptoms.’

  ‘We’re hoping that you can help us disentangle some of the facts from the fiction,’ said the Mancunian. ‘You’ve been a recurring motif in his conversation ever since he was sectioned. He’s been very keen to talk to you, but not so much to any of us. He’s also expressed fear of – of repercussions if he confides in anyone and, again, it’s difficult to know whether that fear is part of his illness or, ah, whether there’s someone who he genuinely has reason to fear. Because, ah—’

  He hesitated, as though trying to choose his words carefully. Strike said:

  ‘I’d imagine his brother could be scary if he chose to be,’ and the psychiatrist seemed relieved to have been understood without breaking confidentiality.

  ‘You know his brother, do you?’

  ‘I’ve met him. Does he visit often?’

  ‘He’s been in a couple of times, but Billy’s often been more distressed and agitated after seeing him. If he seems to be similarly affected during your interview—’ said the Mancunian.

  ‘Understood,’ said Strike.

  ‘Funny, really, seeing you here,’ said Colin, with a faint grin. ‘We assumed that his fixation with you was all part of his psychosis. An obsession with a celebrity is quite common with these kinds of disorders . . . As a matter of fact,’ he said candidly, ‘just a couple of days ago, Kamila and I were agreeing that his fixation with you would preclude an early discharge. Lucky you called, really.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Strike drily, ‘that is lucky.’

  The redheaded male nurse knocked on the door and put his head in.

  ‘That’s Billy ready to talk to Mr Strike.’

  ‘Great,’ said the female psychiatrist. ‘Eddie, could we get some tea in here? Tea?’ she asked Strike over her shoulder. He nodded. She opened the door. ‘Come in, Billy.’

  And there he was: Billy Knight, wearing a grey sweatshirt and jogging pants, his feet in hospital slippers. The sunken eyes were still deeply shadowed, and at some point since he and Strike had last seen each other, he had shaven his head. The finger and thumb of his left hand were bandaged. Even through the tracksuit that somebody, presumably Jimmy, had brought him to wear, Strike could tell that he was underweight, but while his fingernails were bitten to bloody stubs and there was an angry sore at the corner of his mouth, there was no longer an animal stench about him. He shuffled inside the interview room, staring at Strike, then held out a bony hand, which Strike shook. Billy addressed the doctors.

  ‘Are you two going to stay?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Colin, ‘but don’t worry. We’re going to keep quiet. You can say whatever you like to Mr Strike.’

  Kamila positioned two chairs against the wall and Strike and Billy sat down opposite each other, the desk between them. Strike could have wished for a less formal configuration of furniture, but his experience in Special Investigation Branch had taught him that a solid barrier between questioner and interviewee was often useful, and doubtless this was just as true on a locked psychiatric ward.

  ‘I’ve been trying to find you, since you first came to see me,’ Strike said. ‘I’ve been quite worried about you.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Billy. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Can you remember what you said to me at the office?’

  Absently, it seemed, Billy touched his nose and his sternum, but it was a ghost of the tic he had exhibited in Denmark Street, and almost as though he sought to remind himself how he had felt then.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, with a small, humourless smile. ‘I told you about the kid, up by the horse. The one I saw strangled.’

  ‘D’you still think you witnessed a child being strangled?’ asked Strike.

  Billy raised a forefinger to his mouth, gnawed at the nail and nodded.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, removing the finger. ‘I saw it. Jimmy says I imagined it because I’m – you know. Ill. You know Jimmy, don’t you? Went to the White Horse after him, didn’t you?’ Strike nodded. ‘He was fucking livid. White Horse,’ said Billy, with a sudden laugh. ‘That’s funny. Shit, that’s funny. I never even thought of that before.’

  ‘You told me you saw a child killed “up by the horse”. Which horse did you mean?’

  ‘White Horse of Uffington,’ said Billy. ‘Big chalk figure, up on the hill, near where I grew up. Doesn’t look like a horse. More like a dragon and it’s on Dragon Hill, as well. I’ve never understood why they all say it’s a horse.’

  ‘Can you tell me exactly what you saw up there?’

  Like the skeletal girl Strike had just passed, he had the impression that Billy was staring inside himself, and that outer reality had temporarily ceased to exist for him. Finally, he said quietly:

  ‘I was a little kid, proper little. I think they’d given me something. I felt sick and ill, like I was dreaming, slow and groggy, and they kept trying to make me repeat words and stuff and I couldn’t speak properly and they all thought it was funny. I fell over in the grass on the way up. One of them carried me for a bit. I wanted to sleep.’

  ‘You think you’d been given drugs?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Billy dully. ‘Hash, probably, Jimmy usually had some. I think Jimmy took me up the hill with them to keep my father from knowing what they’d done.’

  ‘Who do you mean by “they”?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Billy simply. ‘Grown-ups. Jimmy’s ten years older’n me. Dad used to make him look after me all the time, if he was out with his drinking mates. This lot came to the house in the night and I woke up. One of them gave me a yoghurt to eat. There was another little kid there. A girl. And then we all went out in a car . . . I didn’t want to go. I felt sick. I was crying but Jimmy belted me.

  ‘And we went to the horse in the dark. Me and the little girl were the only kids. She was howling,’ said Billy and the skin of his gaunt face seemed to shrink more tightly to his bones as he said it. ‘Screaming for her mum and he said, “Your mum can’t hear you now, she’s gone.”’

  ‘Who said that?’ asked Strike.

  ‘Him,’ whispered Billy. ‘The one that strangled her.’

  The door opened and a new nurse brought in tea.

  ‘Here we go,’ she said brightly, her eager eyes on Strike. The male psychiatrist frowned at her slightly and she withdrew, closing the door again.

  ‘Nobody’s ever believed me,’ said Billy, and Strike heard the underlying plea. ‘I’ve tried to remember more, I wish I could, if I’ve got to think about it all the time I wish I could remember more of it.

  ‘He strangled her to stop her making a noise. I don’t think he meant it to go that far. They all panicked. I can remember someone shouting “You’ve killed her!” . . . or him,’ Billy said quietly. ‘Jimmy said afterwards it was a boy, but he won’t admit that now. Says I’m making it all up. “Why would I say it was a boy when none of it ever fucking happened, you’re mental.” It was a girl,’ said Billy stubbornly. ‘I don’t know why he tried to say it wasn’t. They called her a girl’s name. I can’t remember what it was, but it was a girl.

  ‘I saw her fall. Dead. Limp on the ground. It was dark. And then they panicked.

  ‘I can’t remember anything about going back down the hill, can’t remember anything after that except the burial, down in the dell by my d
ad’s place.’

  ‘The same night?’ asked Strike.

  ‘I think so, I think it was,’ said Billy nervously. ‘Because I remember looking out of my bedroom window and it was still dark and they were carrying it to the dell, my dad and him.’

  ‘Who’s “him”?’

  ‘The one who killed her. I think it was him. Big guy. White hair. And they put a bundle in the ground, all wrapped up in a pink blanket, and they closed it in.’

  ‘Did you ask your father about what you’d seen?’

  ‘No,’ said Billy. ‘You didn’t ask my dad questions about what he did for the family.’

  ‘For which family?’

  Billy frowned in what seemed to be genuine puzzlement.

  ‘You mean, for your family?’

  ‘No. The family he worked for. The Chiswells.’

  Strike had the impression that this was the first time the dead minister’s family name had been mentioned in front of the two psychiatrists. He saw two pens falter.