‘And are you still trying to recover the missing stones?’
Kinvara squinted malevolently at Strike over the rim of her glass.
‘I haven’t done anything about it since Jasper died, but that doesn’t mean I won’t. Why should I let the bloody Orca waltz off with what’s rightfully mine? It’s down in Jasper’s will, the contents of the house that haven’t been spefi – specif – spe-cif-ically excluded,’ she enunciated carefully, thick-tongued now, ‘belong to me. So,’ she said, fixing Strike with a gimlet stare, ‘does that sound more like Raphael to you? Coming down here to try and cover up for his darling mama?’
‘Yes,’ said Strike, ‘I’d have to say it does. Thank you for your honesty.’
Kinvara looked pointedly at the grandfather clock, which was now showing three in the morning, but Strike refused to take the hint.
‘Mrs Chiswell, there’s one last thing I want to ask and I’m afraid it’s quite personal.’
‘What?’ she said crossly.
‘I spoke to Mrs Winn recently. Della Winn, you know, the—’
‘Della-Winn-the-Minister-for-Sport,’ said Kinvara, just as her husband had done, the first time Strike met him. ‘Yes, I know who she is. Very odd woman.’
‘In what way?’
Kinvara wriggled her shoulders impatiently, as though it should be obvious.
‘Never mind. What did she say?’
‘That she met you in a state of considerable distress a year ago and that from what she could gather, you were upset because your husband had admitted to an affair.’
Kinvara opened her mouth then closed it again. She sat thus for a few seconds, then shook her head as though to clear it and said:
‘I . . . thought he was being unfaithful, but I was wrong. I got it all wrong.’
‘According to Mrs Winn, he’d said some fairly cruel things to you.’
‘I don’t remember what I said to her. I wasn’t very well at the time. I was overemotional and I got everything wrong.’
‘Forgive me,’ said Strike, ‘but, as an outsider, your marriage seemed—’
‘What a dreadful job you’ve got,’ said Kinvara shrilly. ‘What a really nasty, seedy job you do. Yes, our marriage was going wrong, what of it? Do you think, now he’s dead, now he’s killed himself, I want to relive it all with the pair of you, perfect strangers whom my stupid stepdaughters have dragged in, to stir everything up and make it ten times worse?’
‘So you’ve changed your mind, have you? You think your husband committed suicide? Because when we were last here, you suggested Aamir Mallik—’
‘I don’t know what I said then!’ she said hysterically. ‘Can you not understand what it’s been like since Jasper killed himself, with the police and the family and you? I didn’t think this would happen, I had no idea, it didn’t seem real – Jasper was under enormous pressure those last few months, drinking too much, in an awful temper – the blackmail, the fear of it all coming out – yes, I think he killed himself and I’ve got to live with the fact that I walked out on him that morning, which was probably the final straw!’
The Norfolk terrier began to yap furiously again. The Labrador woke with a start and started barking, too.
‘Please leave!’ shouted Kinvara, getting to her feet. ‘Get out! I never wanted you mixed up in this in the first place! Just go, will you?’
‘Certainly,’ said Strike politely, setting down his empty glass. ‘Would you mind waiting while I get my leg back on?’
Robin had already stood up. Strike strapped the false leg back on while Kinvara watched, chest heaving, glass in hand. At last, Strike was ready to stand, but his first attempt had him falling back onto the sofa. With Robin’s assistance, he finally achieved a standing position.
‘Well, goodbye, Mrs Chiswell.’
Kinvara’s only answer was to stalk to the window and fling it open again, shouting at the dogs, which had got up excitedly, to stay put.
No sooner had her unwelcome guests stepped out onto the gravel path than Kinvara slammed the window behind them. While Robin put her Wellington boots back on, they heard the shriek of the brass curtain rings as Kinvara dragged the drapes shut, then called the dogs out of the room.
‘Not sure I’m going to be able to make it back to the car, Robin,’ said Strike, who wasn’t putting weight on his prosthesis. ‘In retrospect, the digging might’ve . . . might’ve been a mistake.’
Wordlessly, Robin took his arm and placed it over her shoulders. He didn’t resist. Together they moved slowly off across the grass.
‘Did you understand what I mouthed at you back there?’ asked Robin.
‘That there was someone upstairs? Yeah,’ he said, wincing horribly every time he put down his false foot. ‘I did.’
‘You don’t seem—’
‘I’m not surpr – wait,’ he said abruptly, still leaning on her as he came to a halt. ‘You didn’t go up there?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin.
‘For fuck’s sake—’
‘I heard footsteps.’
‘And what would’ve happened if you’d been jumped?’
‘I took a weapon and I wasn’t – and if I hadn’t gone up there, I wouldn’t have seen this.’
Taking out her mobile, Robin brought up the photo of the painting on the bed, and handed it to him.
‘You didn’t see Kinvara’s expression, when she saw the blank wall. Cormoran, she didn’t realise that painting had been moved until you asked about it. Whoever was upstairs tried to hide it while she was outside.’
Strike stared at the phone screen for what felt like a long time, his arm heavy on Robin’s shoulders. Finally, he said:
‘Is that a piebald?’
‘Seriously?’ said Robin, in total disbelief. ‘Horse colours? Now?’
‘Answer me.’
‘No, piebalds are black and white, not brown and—’
‘We need to go to the police,’ said Strike. ‘The odds on another murder just went up exponentially.’
‘You aren’t serious?’
‘I’m completely serious. Get me back to the car and I’ll tell you everything . . . but don’t ask me to talk till then, because my leg’s fucking killing me.’
68
I have tasted blood now . . .
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Three days later, Strike and Robin received an unprecedented invitation. As a courtesy for having chosen to aid rather than upstage the police in passing on information about Flick’s stolen note and ‘Mare Mourning’, the Met welcomed the detective partners into the heart of the investigation at New Scotland Yard. Used to being treated by the police as either inconveniences or showboaters, Strike and Robin were surprised but grateful for this unforeseen thawing of relations.
On arrival, the tall blonde Scot who was heading the team ducked out of an interrogation room for a minute to shake hands. Strike and Robin knew that the police had brought two suspects in for questioning, although nobody had yet been charged.
‘We spent the morning on hysterics and flat denial,’ DCI Judy McMurran told them, ‘but I think we’ll have cracked her by the end of the day.’
‘Any chance we could give them a little look, Judy?’ asked her subordinate, DI George Layborn, who had met Strike and Robin at the door and brought them upstairs. He was a pudgy man who reminded Robin of the traffic policeman who had thought he was such a card, back on the hard shoulder where she’d had her panic attack.
‘Go on, then,’ said DCI McMurran, with a smile.
Layborn led Strike and Robin around a corner and through the first door on their right into a dark and cramped area, of which half one wall was a two-way mirror into an interrogation room.
Robin, who had only ever seen such spaces in films and on TV, was mesmerised. Kinvara Chiswell was sitting on one side of a desk, beside a thin-lipped solicitor in a pinstriped suit. White-faced, devoid of make-up, wearing a pale grey silk blouse so creased she might have slept in it, Kinvara was wee
ping into a tissue. Opposite her sat another detective inspector in a far cheaper suit than the solicitor’s. His expression was impassive.
As they watched, DCI McMurran re-entered the room and took the vacant chair beside her colleague. After what felt like a very long time, but was probably only a minute, DCI McMurran spoke.
‘Still nothing to say about your night at the hotel, Mrs Chiswell?’
‘This is like a nightmare,’ whispered Kinvara. ‘I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe I’m here.’
Her eyes were pink, swollen and apparently lashless now that she had wept her mascara away.
‘Jasper killed himself,’ she said tremulously. ‘He was depressed! Everyone will tell you so! The blackmail was eating away at him . . . have you talked to the Foreign Office yet? Even the idea that there might be photographs of that boy who was hanged – can’t you see how scared Jasper was? If that had come out—’
Her voice cracked.
‘Where’s your evidence against me?’ she demanded. ‘Where is it? Where?’
Her solicitor gave a dry little cough.
‘To return,’ said DCI McMurran, ‘to the subject of the hotel. Why do you think your husband called them, trying to ascertain—’
‘It isn’t a crime to go to a hotel!’ said Kinvara hysterically, and she turned to her solicitor, ‘This is ridiculous, Charles, how can they make a case against me because I went to a—’
‘Mrs Chiswell will answer any questions you’ve got about her birthday,’ the solicitor told DCI McMurran, with what Robin thought was remarkable optimism, ‘but equally—’
The door of the observation room opened and hit Strike.
‘No problem, we’ll shift,’ Layborn told his colleague. ‘Come on, gang, we’ll go to the incident room. Got plenty more to show you.’
As they turned a second corner, they saw Eric Wardle walking towards them.
‘Never thought I’d see the day,’ he said, grinning as he shook Strike’s hand. ‘Actually invited in by the Met.’
‘You staying, Wardle?’ asked Layborn, who seemed faintly resentful at the prospect of another policeman sharing the guests he was keen to impress.
‘Might as well,’ said Wardle. ‘Find out what I’ve been assisting in, all these weeks.’
‘Must’ve taken its toll,’ said Strike, as they followed Layborn into the incident room, ‘passing on all that evidence we found.’
Wardle sniggered.
Used as she was to the cramped and slightly dilapidated offices in Denmark Street, Robin was fascinated to see the space that Scotland Yard devoted to the investigation into a high profile and suspicious death. A whiteboard on the wall carried a timeline for the killing. The adjacent wall bore a collage of photographs of the death scene and the corpse, the latter showing Chiswell freed from his plastic wrapping, so that his congested face appeared in awful close-up, with a livid scratch down one cheek, the cloudy eyes half open, the skin a dark, mottled purple.
Spotting her interest, Layborn showed her the toxicology reports and phone records that the police had used to build their case, then unlocked the large cupboard where physical evidence was bagged and tagged, including the cracked tube of lachesis pills, a grubby orange juice carton and Kinvara’s farewell letter to her husband. Seeing the note that Flick had stolen, and a printout of the photograph of ‘Mare Mourning’ lying on a spare bed, both of which Robin knew had now become central to the police case, she experienced a rush of pride.
‘Right then,’ said DI Layborn, closing the cupboard and walking over to a computer monitor. ‘Time to see the little lady in action.’
He inserted a video disc in the nearest machine, beckoning Strike, Robin and Wardle closer.
The crowded forecourt of Paddington station was revealed, jerky black and white figures moving everywhere. The time and date showed in the upper left corner.
‘There she is,’ said Layborn, hitting ‘pause’ and pointing a stubby figure at a woman. ‘See her?’
Even though blurred, the figure was recognisable as Kinvara. A bearded man had been caught in the frame, staring, probably because her coat hung open, revealing the clinging black dress she had worn to the Paralympian reception. Layborn pressed ‘play’ again.
‘Watch her, watch her – gives to the homeless—’
Kinvara had donated to a swaddled man holding a cup in a doorway.
‘—watch her,’ Layborn said unnecessarily, ‘straight up to the railway worker – pointless question – shows him her ticket . . . watch her, now . . . off to the platform, stops and asks another bloke a question, making sure she’s remembered every bloody step of the way, even if she’s not caught on camera . . . aaaand . . . onto the train.’
The picture twitched and changed. A train was pulling into the station at Swindon. Kinvara got off, talking to another woman.
‘See?’ said Layborn. ‘Still making damn sure people remember her, just in case. And—’
The picture changed again, to that of the car park at Swindon station.
‘—there she is,’ said Layborn, ‘car’s parked right near the camera, conveniently. In she gets and off she goes. Gets home, insists the stable girl stays overnight, sleeps in the next room, goes outside next morning to ride within sight of the girl . . . cast-iron alibi.
‘Course, like you, we’d already come to the conclusion that if it was murder, it must have been a two-person job.’
‘Because of the orange juice?’ asked Robin.
‘Mostly,’ said Layborn. ‘If Chiswell’ (he said the name as it was spelled) ‘had taken amitriptyline unknowingly, the most likely explanation was that he’d poured himself doctored juice out of a carton in the fridge, but the carton in the bin was undoctored and only had his prints on.’
‘Easy to get his prints on small objects once he was dead, though,’ said Strike. ‘Just press his hand onto them.’
‘Exactly,’ said Layborn, striding over to the wall of photographs and pointing at a close-up of the pestle and mortar. ‘So we went back to this. The way Chiswell’s prints are positioned and the way the powdered residue was sitting there pointed to it being faked, which meant the doctored juice could have been fixed up hours in advance, by somebody who had a key, who knew which anti-depressants the wife was on, that Chiswell’s sense of taste and smell were impaired and that he always drank juice in the mornings. Then all they’d need to do is have the accomplice plant an undoctored juice carton in the bin with his dead handprint on, and take away the one with the amitriptyline residue in it.
‘Well, who’s better positioned to know and do all of that, than the missus?’ asked Layborn rhetorically. ‘But here she was, with her cast-iron alibi for time of death, seventy-odd miles away when he was gulping down anti-depressants. Not to mention she’s left that letter, trying to give us a nice clean story: husband already facing bankruptcy and blackmail realises his wife’s leaving him, which tips him over the edge, so he tops himself.
‘But,’ said Layborn, pointing at the enlarged picture of the dead Chiswell’s face, stripped of its plastic bag, revealing a deep red scrape on the cheek, ‘we didn’t like the look of that. We thought from the first that was suspicious. Amitriptyline in overdose can cause agitation as well as sleepiness. That mark looked as though somebody else forced the bag over his head.
‘Then there was the open door. The last person in or out didn’t know there was a trick to closing it properly, so it didn’t look like Chiswell was the last person to touch it. Plus, the packaging on the pills being absent – that smelled wrong from the start. Why would Jasper Chiswell get rid of it?’ asked Layborn. ‘Just a few little careless mistakes.’
‘It nearly came off,’ said Strike. ‘If only Chiswell had been put to sleep by the amitriptyline as intended, and if they’d thought the thing through right to the finest details – close the door properly, leave the pill packaging in situ—’
‘But they didn’t,’ said Layborn, ‘and she’s not smart enough on her o
wn to talk herself out of this.’
‘“I can’t believe this is happening”,’ Strike quoted. ‘She’s consistent. On Saturday night she told us “I didn’t think this would happen”, “it didn’t seem real—”’
‘Try that in court,’ said Wardle quietly.
‘Yeah, what were you expecting, love, when you crushed up a load of pills and put them in his orange juice?’ said Layborn. ‘Guilty is as guilty does.’
‘Amazing, the lies people can tell themselves when they’re drifting along in the wake of a stronger personality,’ said Strike. ‘I’ll bet you a tenner that when McMurran finally breaks her, Kinvara’ll say they started off hoping Chiswell would kill himself, then trying to pressure him into doing it, and finally reached a point when there didn’t seem much difference between trying to push him into suicide, and putting the pills in his orange juice herself. I notice she’s still trying to push the gallows business as the reason he’d top himself.’
Lethal White Page 68
