Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  ‘Twenty-two fucking million,’ said Wardle, ‘is a hell of a motive.’

  ‘Cormoran,’ said Robin, picking her jacket off the back of the chair where she’d left it, ‘could I have a quick word outside? I’m going to have to leave, sorry,’ she said to the others.

  ‘Everything OK?’ Strike asked, as they re-entered the corridor together and Robin had closed the door on the group of police.

  ‘Yes,’ said Robin, and then, ‘Well – not really. Maybe,’ she said, handing him her phone, ‘you’d better just read this.’

  Frowning, Strike scrolled slowly through the interchange between Robin and Matthew, including the Evening Standard clip.

  ‘You’re going to meet him?’

  ‘I’ve got to. This must be why Mitch Patterson’s sniffing around. If Matthew fans the flames with the press, which he’s more than capable of doing . . . They’re already excited about you and—’

  ‘Forget me and Charlotte,’ he said roughly, ‘that was twenty minutes that she coerced me into. He’s trying to coerce you—’

  ‘I know he is,’ said Robin, ‘but I have got to talk to him sooner or later. Most of my stuff’s still in Albury Street. We’ve still got a joint bank account.’

  ‘D’you want me to come?’

  Touched, Robin said:

  ‘Thanks, but I don’t think that would help.’

  ‘Then ring me later, will you? Let me know what happened.’

  ‘I will,’ she promised.

  She headed off alone towards the lifts. She didn’t even notice who had just walked past her in the opposite direction until somebody said, ‘Bobbi?’

  Robin turned. There stood Flick Purdue, returning from the bathroom with a policewoman, who seemed to have escorted her there. Like Kinvara, Flick had cried away her make-up. She appeared small and shrunken in a white shirt that Robin suspected her parents had insisted she wear, rather than her Hezbollah T-shirt.

  ‘It’s Robin. How are you, Flick?’

  Flick seemed to be struggling with ideas too monstrous to utter.

  ‘I hope you’re cooperating,’ said Robin. ‘Tell them everything, won’t you?’

  She thought she saw a tiny shake of the head, an instinctive defiance, the last embers of loyalty not yet extinguished, even in the trouble Flick found herself.

  ‘You must,’ said Robin quietly. ‘He’d have killed you next, Flick. You knew too much.’

  69

  I have foreseen all contingencies – long ago.

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  A twenty-minute Tube ride later, Robin emerged at Warwick Avenue underground station in a part of London she barely knew. She had always felt a vague curiosity about Little Venice, as her extravagant middle name, ‘Venetia’, had been given to her because she had been conceived in the real Venice. Doubtless she would henceforth associate this area with Matthew and the bitter, tense meeting she was sure awaited her, down by the canal.

  She walked down a street named Clifton Villas, where plane trees spread leaves of translucent jade against square cream-coloured houses, the walls of which glowed gold in the evening sun. The quiet beauty of this soft summer evening made Robin feel suddenly, overwhelmingly melancholy, because it recalled just such a night in Yorkshire, a decade previously, when she had hurried up the road from her parents’ house, barely seventeen years old and wobbling on her high heels, desperately excited about her first date with Matthew Cunliffe, who had just passed his driving test and would be taking her into Harrogate for the evening.

  And here she was walking towards him again, to arrange the permanent disentanglement of their lives. Robin despised herself for feeling sad, for remembering, when it was preferable to concentrate on his unfaithfulness and unkindness, the joyful shared experiences that had led to love.

  She turned left, crossed the street and walked on, now in the chilly shadow of the brick that bordered the right-hand side of Blomfield Road, parallel to the canal, and saw a police car speeding across the top of the street. The sight of it gave her strength. It felt like a friendly wave from what she knew now was her real life, sent to remind her what she was meant to be, and how incompatible that was with being the wife of Matthew Cunliffe.

  A pair of high black wooden gates was set into the wall, gates that Matthew’s text had told her led to the canal-side bar, but when Robin pushed at them, they were locked. She glanced up and down the road, but there was no sign of Matthew, so she reached into her bag for her mobile, which, though muted was already vibrating with a call. As she took it out, the electric gates opened and she walked through them, raising the mobile to her ear as she did so.

  ‘Hi, I’m just—’

  Strike yelled in her ear.

  ‘Get out of there, it isn’t Matthew—’

  Several things happened at once.

  The phone was torn out of her hand. In one frozen second, Robin registered that there was no bar in sight, only an untidy patch of canal bank beneath a bridge, hemmed by overgrown shrubs, and a dark barge, Odile, sitting squat and shabby in the water below her. Then a fist hit her hard in the solar plexus, and she jack-knifed, winded. Doubled over, she heard a splash as her phone was lobbed into the canal, then somebody grabbed a fistful of her hair and the waistband of her trousers and dragged her, while she still had no air in her lungs to scream, towards the barge. Thrown through the open doorway of the boat, she hit a narrow wooden table and fell to the floor.

  The door slammed shut. She heard the scrape of a lock.

  ‘Sit down,’ said a male voice.

  Still winded, Robin pulled herself up onto a wooden bench at the table, which was covered in a thin cushioned pad, then turned, to find herself looking into the barrel of a revolver.

  Raphael lowered himself into the chair opposite her.

  ‘Who just rang you?’ he demanded and she deduced that in the physical effort to get her on the boat, and his terror that she might make a noise that the caller could hear, he had not had time or opportunity to check the screen on her mobile.

  ‘My husband,’ lied Robin in a whisper.

  Her scalp was burning where he had pulled her hair. The pain in her midriff was such that she wondered whether he had cracked one of her ribs. Still fighting to draw air into her lungs, Robin seemed for a few disorientated seconds to see her predicament in miniature, from far away, encased in a trembling bead of time. She foresaw Raphael tipping her weighted corpse into the dark water by night, and Matthew, who had apparently lured her to the canal, being questioned and maybe accused. She saw the distraught faces of her parents and her brothers at her funeral in Masham, and she saw Strike standing at the back of the church, as he had at her wedding, furious because the thing he had feared had come to pass, and she was dead due to her own failings.

  But as each gasp re-inflated Robin’s lungs, the illusion that she was watching from afar dissolved. She was here, now, on this dingy boat, breathing in its fusty smell, trapped within its wooden walls, with the dilated pupil of the revolver staring at her, and Raphael’s eyes above it.

  Her fear was a real, solid presence in the galley, but it must stand apart from her, because it couldn’t help, and would only hinder. She must stay calm, and concentrate. She chose not to speak. It would give her back some of the power he had just taken from her if she refused to fill the silence. This was the trick of the therapist: let the pause unspool; let the more vulnerable person fill it.

  ‘You’re very cool,’ Raphael said finally. ‘I thought you might get hysterical and scream. That’s why I had to punch you. I wouldn’t have done that otherwise. For what it’s worth, I like you, Venetia.’

  She knew that he was trying to re-impersonate the man who had charmed her against her will at the Commons. Clearly, he thought the old mixture of ruefulness and remorse would make her forgive, and soften, even with her burning scalp, and her bruised ribs, and the gun in her face. She said nothing. His faint, imploring smile disappeared and he said bluntly:

  ‘I n
eed to know how much the police know. If I can still blag my way out of what they’ve got, then I’m afraid you,’ he raised the gun a fraction to point directly at Robin’s forehead (and she thought of vets and the one clean shot that the horse in the dell had been denied) ‘are done for. I’ll muffle the shot in a cushion and put you overboard once it’s dark. But if they already know everything, then I’ll end it, here, tonight, because I’m never going back to prison. So you can see how it’s in your best interests to be honest, can’t you? Only one of us is getting off this boat.’

  And when she didn’t speak, he said fiercely:

  ‘Answer me!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I understand.’

  ‘So,’ he said quietly, ‘were you really just at Scotland Yard?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is Kinvara there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Under arrest?’

  ‘I think so. She’s in an interrogation room with her solicitor.’

  ‘Why have they arrested her?’

  ‘They think the two of you are having an affair. That you were behind everything.’

  ‘What’s “everything”?’

  ‘The blackmail,’ said Robin, ‘and the murder.’

  He advanced the gun so that it was pressing against her forehead. Robin felt the small, cold ring of metal pressing into her skin.

  ‘Sounds like a crock of shit to me. How’re we supposed to have had an affair? She hated me. We were never alone together for two minutes.’

  ‘Yes, you were,’ said Robin. ‘Your father invited you down to Chiswell House, right after you got out of jail. The night he was detained in London. You and she were alone together, then. That’s when we think it started.’

  ‘Proof?’

  ‘None,’ said Robin, ‘but I think you could seduce anyone if you really put your—’

  ‘Don’t try flattery, it won’t work. Seriously, “that’s when we think it started”? Is that all you’ve got?’

  ‘No. There were other signs of something going on.’

  ‘Tell me the signs. All of them.’

  ‘I’d be able to remember better,’ said Robin steadily, ‘without you pressing a gun into my forehead.’

  He withdrew it, but still pointing the revolver at her face, he said:

  ‘Go on. Quickly.’

  Part of Robin wanted to succumb to her body’s desire to dissolve, to carry her off into blissful unconsciousness. Her hands were numb, her muscles felt like soft wax. The place where Raphael had pressed the gun into her skin felt cold, a ring of white fire for a third eye. He hadn’t turned on the lights in the boat. They were facing each other in the deepening darkness and perhaps, by the time he shot her, she would no longer be able to see him clearly . . .

  Focus, said a small, clear voice through the panic. Focus. The longer you keep him talking, the more time they’ll have to find you. Strike knows you were tricked.

  She suddenly remembered the police car speeding across the top of Blomfield Road and wondered whether it had been circling, looking for her, whether the police, knowing that Raphael had lured her to the area, had already dispatched officers to search for them. The fake address had been some distance away along the canal bank, reached, so Raphael’s texts had said, through the black gates. Would Strike guess that Raphael was armed?

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘Kinvara broke down in Della Winn’s office last summer and said that someone had told her she’d never been loved, that she was used as part of a game.’

  She must speak slowly. Don’t rush it. Every second might count, every second that she could keep Raphael hanging on her words, was another second in which somebody might come to her aid.

  ‘Della assumed she was talking about your father, but we checked and Della can’t remember Kinvara actually saying his name. We think you seduced Kinvara as an act of revenge towards your father, kept the affair going for a couple of months, but when she got clingy and possessive, you ditched her.’

  ‘All supposition,’ said Raphael harshly, ‘and therefore bullshit. What else?’

  ‘Why did Kinvara go up to town on the day her beloved mare was likely to be put down?’

  ‘Maybe she couldn’t face seeing the horse shot. Maybe she was in denial about how sick it was.’

  ‘Or,’ said Robin, ‘maybe she was suspicious about what you and Francesca were up to in Drummond’s gallery.’

  ‘No proof. Next.’

  ‘She had a kind of breakdown when she got back to Oxfordshire. She attacked your father and was hospitalised.’

  ‘Still grieving her stillborn, excessively attached to her horses, generally depressed,’ Raphael rattled off. ‘Izzy and Fizzy will fight to take the stand and explain how unstable she is. What else?’

  ‘Tegan told us that one day Kinvara was manically happy again, and she lied when asked why. She said your father had agreed to put her other mare in foal to Totilas. We think the real reason was that you’d resumed the affair with her, and we don’t think the timing was coincidental. You’d just driven the latest batch of paintings up to Drummond’s gallery for valuation.’

  Raphael’s face became suddenly slack, as though his essential self had temporarily vacated it. The gun twitched in his hand and the fine hairs on Robin’s arms lifted gently as though a breeze had rippled over them. She waited for Raphael to speak, but he didn’t. After a minute, she continued:

  ‘We think that when you loaded up the paintings for valuation, you saw “Mare Mourning” close up for the first time and realised that it might be a Stubbs. You decided to substitute a different painting of a mare and foal for valuation.’

  ‘Evidence?’

  ‘Henry Drummond’s now seen the photograph I took of “Mare Mourning” on the spare bed at Chiswell House. He’s ready to testify that it wasn’t among the pictures he valued for your father. The painting he valued at five to eight thousand pounds was by John Frederick Herring, and it showed a black and white mare and foal. Drummond’s also ready to testify that you’re sufficiently knowledgeable about art to have spotted that “Mare Mourning” might be a Stubbs.’

  Raphael’s face had lost its mask-like cast. Now his near-black irises swivelled fractionally from side to side, as though he were reading something only he could see.

  ‘I must’ve accidentally taken the Frederick Herring inste—’

  A police siren sounded a few streets away. Raphael’s head turned: the siren wailed for a few seconds, then, as abruptly as it had started, was shut off.

  He turned back to face Robin. He didn’t seem overly worried by the siren now it had stopped. Of course, he thought that it had been Matthew on the phone when he grabbed her.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, regaining the thread of his thought. ‘That’s what I’ll say. I took the painting of the piebald to be valued by mistake, never saw “Mare Mourning”, had no idea it might be a Stubbs.’

  ‘You can’t have taken the piebald picture by mistake,’ said Robin quietly. ‘It didn’t come from Chiswell House and the family’s prepared to say so.’

  ‘The family,’ said Raphael, ‘don’t notice what’s under their fucking noses. A Stubbs has been hanging in a damp spare bedroom for nigh on twenty years and nobody noticed, and you know why? Because they’re such fucking arrogant snobs . . . “Mare Mourning” was old Tinky’s. She inherited it from the broken-down, alcoholic, gaga old Irish baronet she married before my grandfather. She had no idea what it was worth. She kept it because it was horsey and she loved horses.

  ‘When her first husband died, she hopped over to England and pulled the same trick, became my grandfather’s expensive private nurse and then his even more expensive wife. She died intestate and all her crap – it was mostly crap – got absorbed into the Chiswell estate. The Frederick Herring could easily have been one of hers and nobody noticed it, stuck away in some filthy corner of that bloody house.’

  ‘What if the police trace the piebald picture?’

  ‘They won’
t. It’s my mother’s. I’ll destroy it. When the police ask me, I’ll say my father told me he was going to flog it now he knew it was worth eight grand. “He must’ve sold it privately, officer.”’

  ‘Kinvara doesn’t know the new story. She won’t be able to back you up.’

  ‘This is where her well-known instability and unhappiness with my father works in my favour. Izzy and Fizzy will line up to tell the world that she never paid much attention to what he was up to, because she didn’t love him and was only in it for the money. Reasonable doubt is all I need.’

  ‘What’s going to happen when the police put it to Kinvara that you only restarted the affair because you realised she might be about to become fantastically wealthy?’