‘None of them have got the guts to say that they all felt like killing Dad at times, not now he’s dead, so they project it all onto someone else. And that,’ said Raphael, ‘is why none of them are talking about Geraint Winn. He gets double protection, because Saint Freddie was involved in Winn’s big grudge. It’s staring them in the face that he had a real motive, but we’re not supposed to mention that.’
‘Go on,’ said Robin, her pen at the ready. ‘Mention.’
‘No, forget it,’ said Raphael, ‘I shouldn’t have—’
‘I don’t think you say much accidentally, Raff. Out with it.’
He laughed.
‘I’m trying to stop fucking over people who don’t deserve it. It’s all part of the great redemption project.’
‘Who doesn’t deserve it?’
‘Francesca, the little girl I – you know – at the gallery. She’s the one who told me. She got it from her older sister, Verity.’
‘Verity,’ repeated Robin.
Sleep-deprived, she struggled to remember where she had heard that name. It was very like ‘Venetia’, of course . . . and then she remembered.
‘Wait,’ she said, frowning in her effort to concentrate. ‘There was a Verity on the fencing team with Freddie and Rhiannon Winn.’
‘Right in one,’ said Raphael.
‘You all know each other,’ said Robin wearily, unknowingly echoing Strike’s thought as she started writing again.
‘Well, that’s the joy of the public school system,’ said Raphael. ‘In London, if you’ve got the money, you meet the same three hundred people everywhere you go . . . Yeah, when I first arrived at Drummond’s gallery, Francesca couldn’t wait to tell me that her big sister had once dated Freddie. I think she thought that made the pair of us predestined, or something.
‘When she realised I thought Freddie was a bit of a shit,’ said Raphael, ‘she changed tack and told me a nasty story.
‘Apparently, at his eighteenth, Freddie, Verity and a couple of others decided to mete out some punishment to Rhiannon for having dared to replace Verity on the fencing team. In their view she was – I don’t know – a bit common, a bit Welsh? – so they spiked her drink. All good fun. Sort of stuff that goes on the dorm, you know.
‘But she didn’t react too well to neat vodka – or maybe, from their point of view, she reacted really well. Anyway, they managed to take some nice pictures of her, to pass around among themselves . . . this was in the early days of the internet. These days I suppose half a million people would have viewed them in the first twenty-four hours, but Rhiannon only had to endure the whole fencing team and most of Freddie’s mates having a good gloat.
‘Anyway,’ said Raphael, ‘about a month later, Rhiannon killed herself.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Robin quietly.
‘Yeah,’ said Raphael. ‘After little Franny told me the story, I asked Izzy about it. She got very upset, told me not to repeat it, ever – but she didn’t deny it. I got lots of “nobody kills themselves because of a silly joke at a party” bluster and she told me I mustn’t talk about Freddie like that, it would break Dad’s heart . . .
‘Well, the dead don’t have hearts to break, do they? And personally, I think it’s about time somebody pissed on Freddie’s eternal flame. If he hadn’t been born a Chiswell, the bastard would’ve been in borstal. But I suppose you’ll say I can talk, after what I did.’
‘No,’ said Robin gently. ‘That isn’t what I was going to say.’
The pugnacious expression faded from his face. He checked his watch.
‘I’m going to have to go. I’ve got to be somewhere at nine.’
Robin raised her hand to signal for the bill. When she turned back to Raphael, she saw his eyes moving in routine fashion over both the other women in the restaurant, and in the mirror she saw how the blonde tried to hold his gaze.
‘You can go,’ she said, handing over her credit card to the waitress. ‘I don’t want to make you late.’
‘No, I’ll walk you out.’
While she was still putting her credit card back into her handbag, he picked up her coat and held it up for her.
‘Thank you.’
‘No problem.’
Out on the pavement, he hailed a taxi.
‘You take this one,’ he said. ‘I fancy a walk. Clear my head. I feel as though I’ve had a bad therapy session.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ said Robin. She didn’t want to charge a taxi all the way back to Wembley to Strike. ‘I’m going to get the Tube. Goodnight.’
‘’Night, Venetia,’ he said.
Raphael got into the taxi, which glided away, and Robin pulled her coat more tightly around herself as she walked off in the opposite direction. It had been a chaotic interview, but she had managed to get much more than she had expected out of Raphael. Taking out her mobile again, she phoned Strike.
59
We two go with each other . . .
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
When he saw Robin was calling him, Strike, who had taken his notebook out to the Tottenham for a drink, pocketed the former, downed the remainder of his pint in one and took the call out onto the street.
The mess that building works had made of the top of Tottenham Court Road – the rubble-strewn channel where a street had been, the portable railings and the plastic barricades, the walkways and planks that enabled tens of thousands of people to continue to pass through the busy junction – were so familiar to him now that he barely noticed them. He had not come outside for the view, but for a cigarette, and he smoked two while Robin relayed everything that Raphael had told her.
Once the call was over, Strike returned his mobile to his pocket and absent-mindedly lit himself a third cigarette from the tip of the second and continued to stand there, thinking deeply about everything she had said and forcing passers-by to navigate around him.
A couple of things that Robin had told him struck the detective as interesting. Having finished his third cigarette and flicked it into the open abyss in the road, Strike retreated inside the pub and ordered himself a second pint. A group of students had now taken his table, so he headed into the back, where high bar stools sat beneath a stained-glass cupola whose colours were dimmed by night. Here, Strike took out his notebook again and re-examined the list of names over which he had pored in the early hours of Sunday, while he sought distraction from thoughts of Charlotte. After gazing at it again in the manner of a man who knows something is concealed there, he turned a few pages to reread the notes he had made of his interview with Della.
Large, hunch-backed and motionless but for the eyes flicking along the lines he had scribbled in the blind woman’s house, Strike unknowingly repelled a couple of timid backpackers who had considered asking whether they might share his table and take the weight off their blistered feet. Fearing the consequences of breaking his almost tangible concentration, they retreated before he noticed them.
Strike turned back to the list of names. Married couples, lovers, business partners, siblings.
Pairs.
He flicked further backwards to the pages to find the notes he had made during the interview with Oliver, who had taken them through the forensic findings. A two-part killing, this: amitriptyline and helium, each potentially fatal on its own, yet used together.
Pairs.
Two victims, killed twenty years apart, a strangled child and a suffocated government minister, the former buried on the latter’s land.
Pairs.
Strike turned thoughtfully to a blank page and made a new note for himself.
Francesca – confirm story
60
. . . you really must give me some explanation of your taking this matter – this possibility – so much to heart.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
The following morning, a carefully worded official statement about Jasper Chiswell appeared in all the papers. Along with the rest of the British public, Strike learned o
ver his breakfast that the authorities had concluded that no foreign power or terrorist organisation had been involved in the untimely death of the Minister for Culture, but that no other conclusion had yet been reached.
The news that there was no news had been greeted online with barely a ripple of interest. The local postboxes of Olympic winners were still being painted gold, and the public was basking in the satisfied afterglow arising from a triumphant games, its unspent enthusiasm for all things athletic now concentrated on the imminent prospect of the Paralympics. Chiswell’s death had been filed away in the popular mind as the vaguely inexplicable suicide of a wealthy Tory.
Keen to know whether this official statement indicated that the Met investigation was close to concluding, Strike called Wardle to find out what he knew.
Unfortunately, the policeman was no wiser than Strike himself. Wardle added, not without a certain irritability, that he had not had a single day off in three weeks, that the policing of the capital while the city heaved under the weight of millions of extra visitors was complex and onerous past Strike’s probable understanding, and that he didn’t have time to go ferreting for information on unrelated matters on Strike’s behalf.
‘Fair enough,’ said Strike, unfazed. ‘Only asking. Say hello to April for me.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Wardle, before Strike could hang up. ‘She wanted me to ask you what you’re playing at with Lorelei.’
‘Better let you go, Wardle, the country needs you,’ said Strike, and he hung up on the policeman’s grudging laugh.
In the absence of information from his police contacts, and with no official standing to secure him the interviews he desired, Strike was temporarily stymied at a crucial point in the case, a frustration no more pleasant for being familiar.
A few phone calls after breakfast informed him that Francesca Pulham, Raphael’s sometime colleague and lover from Drummond’s gallery, was still studying in Florence, where she had been sent to remove her from his pernicious influence. Francesca’s parents were currently on holiday in Sri Lanka. The Pulhams’ housekeeper, who was the only person connected with the family that Strike was able to reach, refused point blank to give him telephone numbers for any of them. From her reaction, he guessed the Pulhams might be the kind of people who’d run for lawyers at the very idea of a private detective calling their house.
Having exhausted all possible avenues to the holidaying Pulhams, Strike left a polite request for an interview on Geraint Winn’s voicemail, the fourth he had made that week, but the day wore on and Winn didn’t call back. Strike couldn’t blame him. He doubted that he would have chosen to be helpful, had he been in Winn’s shoes.
Strike had not yet told Robin that he had a new theory about the case. She was busy in Harley Street, watching Dodgy Doc, but on Wednesday she called the office with the welcome news that she had arranged an interview with Tegan Butcher on Saturday at Newbury Racecourse.
‘Excellent!’ said Strike, cheered by the prospect of action, and striding through to the outer office to bring up Google Maps on Robin’s computer. ‘OK, I think we’re going to be looking at an overnighter. Interview Tegan, then head over to Steda Cottage once it gets dark.’
‘Cormoran, are you serious about this?’ said Robin. ‘You genuinely want to go digging in the dell?’
‘That sounds like a nursery rhyme,’ said Strike vaguely, examining B roads on the monitor. ‘Look, I don’t think there’s anything there. In fact, as of yesterday, I’m sure of it.’
‘What happened yesterday?’
‘I had an idea. I’ll tell you when I see you. Look, I promised Billy I’d find out the truth about his strangled child. There’s no other way to be totally sure, is there, other than digging? But if you’re feeling squeamish, you can stay in the car.’
‘And what about Kinvara? We’ll be on her property.’
‘We’ll hardly be digging up anything important. That whole area’s waste ground. I’m going to get Barclay to meet us there, after dark. I’m not much good for digging. Will Matthew be OK if you’re away overnight Saturday?’
‘Fine,’ said Robin, with an odd inflection that made Strike suspect that he wouldn’t be fine about it at all.
‘And you’re OK to drive the Land Rover?’
‘Er – is there any chance we could take your BMW instead?’
‘I’d rather not take the BMW up that overgrown track. Is there something wrong with the—?’
‘No,’ said Robin, cutting across him. ‘That’s fine, OK, we’ll take the Land Rover.’
‘Great. How’s Dodgy?’
‘In his consulting rooms. Any news on Aamir?’
‘I’ve got Andy trying to find the sister he’s still on good terms with.’
‘And what are you up to?’
‘I’ve just been reading the Real Socialist Party website.’
‘Why?’
‘Jimmy gives quite a lot away in his blog posts. Places he’s been and things he’s seen. You OK to stay on Dodgy until Friday?’
‘Actually,’ said Robin, ‘I was going to ask whether I could take a couple of days off to deal with some personal business.’
‘Oh,’ said Strike, brought up short.
‘I’ve got a couple of appointments I need – I’d rather not miss,’ said Robin.
It wasn’t convenient to Strike to have to cover Dodgy Doc himself, partly because of the continuing pain in his leg, but mainly because he was eager to continue chasing down confirmation of his theory on the Chiswell case. This was also very short notice to ask for two days’ leave. On the other hand, Robin had just indicated a willingness to sacrifice her weekend to a probable wildgoose chase into the dell.
‘Yeah, OK. Everything all right?’
‘Fine, thanks. I’ll let you know if anything interesting happens with Dodgy. Otherwise, we should probably leave London at elevenish on Saturday.’
‘Barons Court again?’
‘Would it be all right if you meet me at Wembley Stadium station? It would just be easier, because of where I’m going to be on Friday night.’
This, too, was inconvenient: a journey for Strike of twice the length and involving a change of Tube.
‘Yeah, OK,’ he said again.
After Robin had hung up, he remained in her chair for a while, pondering their conversation.
She had been noticeably tight-lipped about the nature of the appointments that were so important that she didn’t want to miss them. He remembered how particularly angry Matthew had sounded in the background of his calls to Robin, to discuss their pressured, unstable and occasionally dangerous job. She had twice sounded distinctly underwhelmed about the prospect of digging in the hard ground at the bottom of the dell, and now asked to drive the BMW rather than the tank-like Land Rover.
He had almost forgotten his suspicion of a couple of months ago, that Robin might be trying to get pregnant. Into his mind swam the vision of Charlotte’s swollen belly at the dinner table. Robin wasn’t the kind of woman who’d be able to walk away from her child as soon as it left the womb. If Robin was pregnant . . .
Logical and methodical as he usually was, and aware in one part of himself that he was theorising on scant data, Strike’s imagination nevertheless showed him Matthew, the father-to-be, listening in on Robin’s tense request for time off for scans and medical checks, gesticulating angrily at her that the time had come to stop, to go easy on herself, to take better care.
Strike turned back to Jimmy Knight’s blog, but it took him a little longer than usual to discipline his troubled mind back into obedience.
61
Oh, you can tell me. You and I are such friends, you know.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Fellow Tube travellers gave Strike a slightly wider berth than was necessary on Saturday morning, even allowing for his kit bag. He generally managed to cut a path easily through crowds, given his bulk and his boxer’s profile, but the way he was muttering and cursing as he struggled up the sta
irs at Wembley Stadium station – the lifts weren’t working – made passers-by extra careful to neither jostle nor impede him.
The primary reason for Strike’s bad mood was Mitch Patterson, whom he had spotted that morning from the office window, skulking in a doorway, dressed in jeans and a hoodie entirely unsuited to his age and bearing. Puzzled and angered by the private detective’s reappearance, but having no route out of the building except by the front door, Strike had called a cab to wait for him at the end of the street, and left the building only once it was in position. Patterson’s expression when Strike had said ‘Morning, Mitch’ might have amused Strike, if he hadn’t been so insulted that Patterson had thought he could get away with watching the agency in person.
Lethal White Page 60
