Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  Strike and Robin nodded.

  ‘Mum felt sorry for her, she thought the thing about getting a foal was, you know, a sort of substitute. Mum thinks it was all to do with the baby, how Mrs Chiswell’s mood went up and down all the time.

  ‘Like, one day, a few weeks after she came out of hospital, I remember, she was manic. I think it was the drugs they had her on. High as a kite. Singing in the yard. And I said to her, “You’re cheerful, Mrs C”, and she laughed and said, “Oh, I’ve been working on Jasper and I think I’m nearly there, I think he’s going to let me use Totilas after all.” It was all rubbish. I asked him and he was really grumpy about it, said it was wishful thinking and he could hardly afford as many horses as she’d already got.’

  ‘You don’t think he might’ve surprised her,’ said Strike, ‘by offering her a different stallion to breed from? A cheaper one?’

  ‘That would just’ve annoyed her,’ said Tegan. ‘It was Totilas or nothing.’ She stubbed out the cigarette Strike had given her, checked her watch and said regretfully, ‘I’ve only got a couple more minutes.’

  ‘Two more things, and we’re done,’ said Strike. ‘I’ve heard that your family knew a girl called Suki Lewis, years ago? She was a runaway from care—’

  ‘You know everything!’ said Tegan again, delightedly. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Billy Knight told me. D’you happen to know what happened to Suki?’

  ‘Yeah, she went to Aberdeen. She was in our Dan’s class at school. Her mum was a nightmare: drink and drugs and all sorts. Then the mum goes on a real bender and that’s how Suki got put into care. She ran away to find her dad. He worked on the North Sea rigs.’

  ‘And you think she found her father, do you?’ asked Strike.

  With a triumphant air, Tegan reached into her back pocket for her mobile. After a few clicks, she presented Strike with the Facebook page she had brought up for a beaming brunette, who stood posing with a posse of girlfriends in front of a swimming pool in Ibiza. Through the tan, the bleached smile and the false eyelashes, Strike discerned the palimpsest of the thin, buck-toothed girl from the old photograph. The page was captioned ‘Susanna McNeil’.

  ‘See?’ said Tegan happily. ‘Her dad took her in with his new family. “Susanna” was her proper name but her mum called her “Suki”. My mum’s friends with Susanna’s auntie. Says she’s doing great.’

  ‘You’re quite sure this is her?’ asked Strike.

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ said Tegan. ‘We were all pleased for her. She was a nice girl.’

  She checked her watch again.

  ‘’M’sorry, but that’s my break over, I’ve got to go.’

  ‘One more question,’ said Strike. ‘How well did your brothers know the Knight family?’

  ‘Quite well,’ said Tegan. ‘The boys were in different years at school but yeah, they knew them through working at Chiswell House.’

  ‘What do your brothers do now, Tegan?’

  ‘Paul’s managing a farm over near Aylesbury now and Dan’s up in London doing landscape – why are you writing this down?’ she said, alarmed for the first time at the sight of Strike’s pen moving across his notebook. ‘You mustn’t tell my brothers I’ve spoken to you! They’ll go mad if they think I’ve talked about what went on up at the house!’

  ‘Really? What did go on up there?’ Strike asked.

  Tegan looked uncertainly from him to Robin and back again.

  ‘You already know, don’t you?’

  And when neither Strike nor Robin responded she said:

  ‘Listen, Dan and Paul just helped out with transporting them. Loading them up and that. And it was legal back then!’

  ‘What was legal?’ asked Strike.

  ‘I know you know,’ said Tegan, half-worried, half-amused. ‘Someone’s been talking, haven’t they? Is it Jimmy Knight? He was back not long ago, sniffing around, wanting to talk to Dan. Anyway, everyone knew, locally. It was supposed to be hush-hush, but we all knew about Jack.’

  ‘Knew what about him?’ asked Strike.

  ‘Well . . . that he was the gallows maker.’

  Strike absorbed the information without so much as a quiver of the eyelid. Robin wasn’t sure her own expression had remained as impassive.

  ‘But you already knew,’ said Tegan. ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Strike, to reassure her. ‘We knew.’

  ‘Thought so,’ said Tegan, relieved and sliding down, inelegantly, from her chair. ‘But if you see Dan, don’t tell him I said. He’s like Mum. “Least said, soonest mended.” Mind, none of us think there was anything wrong with it. This country’d be better with the death penalty, if you ask me.’

  ‘Thanks for meeting us, Tegan,’ said Strike. She blushed slightly as she shook first his hand, then Robin’s.

  ‘No problem,’ she said, now seeming reluctant to leave them. ‘Are you going to stay for the races? Brown Panther’s running in the two-thirty.’

  ‘We might,’ said Strike, ‘we’ve got a bit of time to kill before our next appointment.’

  ‘I’ve got a tenner on Brown Panther,’ Tegan confided. ‘Well . . . bye, then.’

  She had gone a few steps when she wheeled around and returned to Strike, now even pinker in the face.

  ‘Can I have a selfie with you?’

  ‘Er,’ said Strike, carefully not catching Robin’s eye, ‘I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘Can I have your autograph, then?’

  Deciding that this was the lesser of two evils, Strike wrote his signature on a napkin.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Clutching her napkin, Tegan departed at last. Strike waited until she had disappeared into the bar before turning to Robin, who was already busy on her phone.

  ‘Six years ago,’ she said, reading from the mobile screen, ‘an EU directive came in banning member states from exporting torture equipment. Until then, it was perfectly legal to export British-made gallows abroad.’

  64

  Speak so that I can understand you.

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  ‘“I acted within the law and in accordance with my conscience”,’ Strike quoted Chiswell’s gnomic pronouncement back in Pratt’s. ‘So he did. Never hid the fact that he was pro-hanging, did he? I suppose he provided the wood from his grounds.’

  ‘And the space for Jack o’Kent to build them – which is why Jack o’Kent warned Raff not to go into the barn, when he was a child.’

  ‘And they probably split the profits.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Robin, remembering what Flick had shrieked after the minister’s car, the night of the Paralympic reception. ‘“He put the horse on them” . . . Cormoran, d’you think—?’

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ said Strike, his thoughts keeping pace with hers. ‘The last thing Billy said to me at the hospital was “I hated putting the horse on them”. Even in the middle of a psychotic episode, Billy could carve a perfect White Horse of Uffington into wood . . . Jack o’Kent had his boys carving it onto trinkets for tourists and onto gallows for export . . . nice little father-son business he had going, eh?’

  Strike clinked his beer glass against her little champagne bottle and downed the last dregs of his Doom Bar.

  ‘To our first proper breakthrough. If Jack o’Kent was putting a little bit of local branding on the gallows, they were traceable back to him, weren’t they? And not only to him: to the Vale of the White Horse, and to Chiswell. It all fits, Robin. Remember Jimmy’s placard, with the pile of dead black children on it? Chiswell and Jack o’Kent were flogging them abroad – Middle East or Africa, probably. But Chiswell can’t have known they had the horse carved into them – Christ, no, he definitely didn’t,’ said Strike, remembering Chiswell’s words in Pratt’s, ‘because when he told me there were photographs, he said “there are no distinguishing marks, so far as I’m aware”.’

  ‘You know how Jimmy said he was owed?’ said Robin, following her own train of thought. �
��And how Raff said Kinvara thought he had a legitimate claim for money, at first? What d’you think are the chances that Jack o’Kent left some gallows ready for sale when he died—’

  ‘—and Chiswell sold them without bothering to track down and pay off Jack’s sons? Very smart,’ said Strike, nodding. ‘So for Jimmy, this all started as a demand for his rightful share of his father’s estate. Then, when Chiswell denied he owed them anything, it turned into blackmail.’

  ‘Not a very strong case for blackmail, though, when you think about it, is it?’ said Robin. ‘D’you really think Chiswell would have lost a lot of voters over this? It was legal at the time he sold them, and he was publicly pro-death penalty, so nobody could say he was a hypocrite. Half the country thinks we should bring back hanging. I’m not sure the kind of people who vote for Chiswell would have thought he did much wrong.’

  ‘Another good point,’ conceded Strike, ‘and Chiswell could probably have brazened it out. He’d survived worse: impregnating his mistress, divorce, an illegitimate kid, Raphael’s drugged-up car crash and imprisonment . . .

  ‘But there were “unintended consequences”, remember?’ Strike asked thoughtfully. ‘What did those pictures at the Foreign Office show, that Winn was so keen to get hold of? And who’s that “Samuel” Winn just mentioned on the phone?’

  Strike pulled out his notebook and jotted down a few sentences in his dense, hard-to-read handwriting.

  ‘At least,’ said Robin, ‘we’ve got confirmation of Raff’s story. The necklace.’

  Strike grunted, still writing. When he’d finished, he said, ‘Yeah, that was useful, as far as it went.’

  ‘What d’you mean, “as far as it went”?’

  ‘Him heading down to Oxfordshire to stop Kinvara running off with a valuable necklace is a better story than the trying-to-stop-her-topping-herself one,’ said Strike, ‘but I still don’t think we’re being told everything.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Same objection as before. Why would Chiswell send Raphael down there as his emissary, when his wife hated him? Can’t see why Raphael would be any more persuasive than Izzy.’

  ‘Have you taken against Raphael, or something?’

  Strike raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I haven’t got personal feelings for him one way or the other. You?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Robin, a little too quickly. ‘So, what was that theory you mentioned, before Tegan arrived?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Strike. ‘Well, it might be nothing, but a couple of things Raphael said to you jumped out at me. Got me thinking.’

  ‘What things?’

  Strike told her.

  ‘I can’t see what’s significant about any of that.’

  ‘Maybe not in isolation, but try putting it together with what Della told me.’

  ‘Which bit?’

  But even when Strike reminded her what Della had said, Robin remained confused.

  ‘I don’t see the connection.’

  Strike got up, grinning.

  ‘Mull it over for a while. I’m going to ring Izzy and tell her Tegan’s let the cat out of the bag about the gallows.’

  He walked away and disappeared into the crowds in search of a quiet spot from which to make his call, leaving Robin to swill the now-tepid champagne around in the miniature bottle and ponder what Strike had just said. Nothing coherent emerged from her exhausted attempts to connect the disparate pieces of information, and after a few minutes she gave up and simply sat there, enjoying the warm breeze that lifted the hair from her shoulders.

  In spite of her tiredness, the shattered state of her marriage and her very real apprehension about going digging in the dell later that night, it was pleasant to sit here, breathing in the smells of the racecourse, of soft air redolent of turf, leather and horse, catching trails of perfume from the women now moving away from the bar towards the stands, and the smoky whiff of venison burgers cooking in a van nearby. For the first time in a week, Robin realised that she was actually hungry.

  She picked up the cork of the champagne bottle and turned it over in her fingers, remembering another cork, the one she had saved from her twenty-first birthday party, for which Matthew had come home from university with a bunch of new friends, Sarah among them. Looking back, she knew that her parents had wanted to throw a big party for her twenty-first in compensation for her not having the graduation party they had all been expecting.

  Strike was taking a long time. Perhaps Izzy was spilling all the details, now that they knew what the substance of the blackmail had been about, or perhaps, Robin thought, she simply wanted to keep him on the phone.

  Izzy isn’t his type, though.

  The thought startled her a little. She felt slightly guilty for giving it headspace and even more uncomfortable when it was jostled out of the way by another.

  All his girlfriends have been beautiful. Izzy isn’t.

  Strike attracted remarkably good-looking women, when you considered his generally bearlike appearance and what he himself had referred to in her hearing as ‘pube-like’ hair.

  I bet I look gross, was Robin’s next, inconsequential thought. Puffy-faced and pale when she had got in the Land Rover that morning, she had cried a lot since. She was half-deliberating whether she had time to find a bathroom and at least brush her hair, when she spotted Strike walking back towards her holding a venison burger in each hand and a betting slip in his mouth.

  ‘Izzy isn’t picking up,’ he informed her through clenched teeth. ‘Left a message. Grab one of these and come on. I’ve just put a tenner each way on Brown Panther.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you’re a betting man,’ said Robin.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Strike, removing the betting slip from his teeth and pocketing it, ‘but I’m feeling lucky today. Come on, we’ll watch the race.’

  As Strike turned away, Robin slid the champagne cork discreetly into her pocket.

  ‘Brown Panther,’ Strike said through a mouthful of burger, as they approached the track. ‘Except he isn’t, is he? Black mane, so he’s—’

  ‘—a bay, yes,’ said Robin. ‘Are you upset he isn’t a panther, either?’

  ‘Just trying to follow the logic. That stallion I found online – Blanc de Blancs – was chestnut, not white.’

  ‘Not grey, you mean.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ muttered Strike, half-amused, half-exasperated.

  65

  I wonder how many there are who would do as much – who dare do it?

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  Brown Panther came in second. They spent Strike’s winnings among the food and coffee tents, killing the hours of daylight until it was time to head for Woolstone and the dell. While panic fluttered in Robin’s chest every time she thought of the tools in the back of the Land Rover and the dark basin full of nettles, Strike distracted her, whether intentionally or not, by a persistent refusal to explain how the testimony of Della Winn and Raphael Chiswell fitted together, or what conclusions he had drawn from it.

  ‘Think,’ he kept saying, ‘just think.’

  But Robin was exhausted, and it was easier to simply push him to explain over successive coffees and sandwiches, all the while savouring this unusual interlude in their working lives, for she and Strike had never before spent hours together unless at some time of crisis.

  But as the sun sank ever closer to the horizon, Robin’s thoughts darted more insistently towards the dell, and each time they did so her stomach did a small backflip. Noticing her increasingly preoccupied silences, Strike suggested for the second time that she stay in the Land Rover while he and Barclay dug.

  ‘No,’ said Robin tersely. ‘I didn’t come to sit in the car.’

  It took them three-quarters of an hour to reach Woolstone. Colour was bleeding rapidly out of the sky to the west as they descended for the second time into the Vale of the White Horse, and by the time they had reached their destination a few feeble stars were spotting the dust-coloured h
eavens. Robin turned the Land Rover onto the overgrown track leading to Steda Cottage and the car rocked and pitched its way over the deep furrows and tangled thorns and branches, into the deeper darkness bestowed by the dense canopy above.

  ‘Get as far in as you can,’ Strike instructed her, checking the time on his mobile. ‘Barclay’s got to park behind us. He should’ve been here already, I told him nine o’clock.’

  Robin parked and cut the engine, eyeing the thick woodland that lay between the track and Chiswell House. Unseen they might be, but they were still trespassing. Her anxiety about possible detection was as nothing, however, to her very real fear of what lay beneath the tangled nettles at the bottom of that dark basin outside Steda Cottage, and so she returned to the subject she had been using as a distraction all afternoon.