He wore a frock coat, white tie and tails and an ornate badge of office. In his unexpected grandeur, Robin thought wildly of the white rabbit, popping up in the middle of madness.
‘I left it in my office. I’ll be fine. Just need a second . . . ’
She had blundered into a blaze of gold and colour that was increasing her feeling of oppression. The Members’ Lobby, that familiar, ornate, Victorian-gothic chamber she had seen on television, stood right outside the Commons, and on the periphery of her vision loomed four gigantic bronze statues of previous prime ministers – Thatcher, Atlee, Lloyd George and Churchill – while busts of all the others lined the walls. They appeared to Robin like severed heads and the gilding, with its intricate tracery and richly coloured embellishments, danced around her, jeering at her inability to cope with its ornate beauty.
She heard the scraping of a chair’s legs. The steward had brought her a seat and was asking a colleague to fetch a glass of water.
‘Thank you . . . thank you . . . ’ said Robin numbly, feeling inadequate, ashamed and embarrassed. Strike must never know about this. He would send her home, tell her she wasn’t fit to do the job. Nor must she tell Matthew, who treated these episodes as shameful, inevitable consequences of her stupidity in continuing surveillance work.
The steward talked to her kindly while she recovered and within a few minutes she was able to respond appropriately to his well-intentioned patter. While her breathing returned to normal, he told her the tale of how Edward Heath’s bust had begun to turn green on the arrival of the full-sized Thatcher statue beside him, and how it had had to be treated to turn it back to its dark brown bronze.
Robin laughed politely, got to her feet and handed him the empty glass with renewed thanks.
What treatment would it take, she wondered as she set off again, to return her to what she had once been?
14
… how happy I should feel if I could succeed in bringing a little light into all this murky ugliness.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Strike rose early on Tuesday morning. After showering, putting on his prosthesis and dressing, he filled a thermos with dark brown tea, took the sandwiches he had made the previous evening out of the fridge, stowed them in a carrier bag along with two packets of Club biscuits, chewing gum and a few bags of salt and vinegar crisps, then headed out into the sunrise and off to the garage where he kept his BMW. He had an appointment for a haircut at half past twelve, with Jimmy Knight’s ex-wife, in Manchester.
Once settled in the car, his bag of provisions within easy reach, Strike pulled on the trainers he kept in the car, which gave his fake foot better purchase on the brake. He then took out his mobile and began to compose a text to Robin.
Starting with the names that Wardle had given him, Strike had spent much of Monday researching, as best as he could, the two children the policemen had told him had vanished from the Oxfordshire area twenty years previously. Wardle had misspelled the boy’s first name, which had cost Strike time, but Strike had finally dug out archived press reports about Imamu Ibrahim, in which Imamu’s mother had asserted that her estranged husband had kidnapped the boy and taken him to Algeria. Strike had finally dredged up two lines about Imamu and his mother on the website of an organisation that worked to resolve international custody issues. From this, Strike had to conclude that Imamu had been found alive and well with his father.
The fate of Suki Lewis, the twelve-year-old runaway from a care home, was more mysterious. Strike had finally discovered an image of her, buried in an old news story. Suki had vanished from her residential care home in Swindon in 1992 and Strike could find no other mention of her since. Her blurry picture showed a rather toothy, undersized child, fine-featured, with short dark hair.
Little girl it was, but after they said it was a little boy.
So a vulnerable, androgynous child might have disappeared off the face of the earth around the same time, and in the approximate area, that Billy Knight claimed to have witnessed the strangling of a boy-girl.
In the car, he composed a text to Robin.
If you can make it sound natural, ask Izzy if she remembers anything about a 12-year-old called Suki Lewis. She ran away 20 years ago from a care home near their family house.
The dirt on his windscreen shimmered and blurred in the rising sun as he left London. Driving was no longer the pleasure it had once been. Strike could not afford a specially adapted vehicle, and even though it was an automatic, the operation of the BMW’s pedals remained challenging with his prosthesis. In challenging conditions, he sometimes reverted to operating brake and accelerator with his left foot.
When he finally joined the M6, Strike hoped to settle in at sixty miles an hour, but some arsehole in a Vauxhall Corsa decided to tailgate him.
‘Fucking overtake,’ growled Strike. He was not minded to alter his own speed, having settled in comfortably without needing to use his false foot more than was necessary, and for a while he glowered into his rear view mirror until the Vauxhall driver got the hint and took himself off.
Relaxing to the degree that was ever possible behind the wheel these days, Strike wound down the window to admit the fine, fresh summer’s day and allowed his thoughts to return to Billy and the missing Suki Lewis.
She wouldn’t let me dig, he had said in the office, compulsively tapping his nose and his chest, but she’d let you.
Who, Strike wondered, was ‘she’? Perhaps the new owner of Steda Cottage? They might well object to Billy asking to dig up flowerbeds in search of bodies.
After feeling around with his left hand inside his provisions bag, extracting and ripping open a bag of crisps with his teeth, Strike reminded himself for the umpteenth time that Billy’s whole story might be a chimera. Suki Lewis could be anywhere. Not every lost child was dead. Perhaps Suki, too, had been stolen away by an errant parent. Twenty years previously, in the infancy of the internet, imperfect communication between regional police forces could be exploited by those wishing to reinvent themselves or others. And even if Suki was no longer alive, there was nothing to suggest that she had been strangled, let alone that Billy Knight had witnessed it. Most people would surely conclude that this was a case of much smoke, but no fire.
Chewing crisps by the handful, Strike reflected that whenever it came to a question of what ‘most people’ would think, he usually envisaged his half-sister Lucy, the only one of his seven half-siblings with whom he had shared his chaotic and peripatetic childhood. To him, Lucy represented the acme of all that was conventional and unimaginative, even though they had both grown up on intimate terms with the macabre, the dangerous and the frightening.
Before Lucy had gone to live permanently with their aunt and uncle in Cornwall, at the age of fourteen, their mother had hauled her and Strike from squat to commune to rented flat to friend’s floor, rarely remaining in the same place more than six months, exposing her children to a parade of eccentric, damaged and addicted human beings along the way. Right hand on the wheel, left hand now groping around for biscuits, Strike recalled some of the nightmarish spectacles that he and Lucy had witnessed as children: the psychotic youth fighting an invisible devil in a basement flat in Shoreditch, the teenager literally being whipped at a quasi-mystical commune in Norfolk (still, for Strike’s money, the worst place that Leda had ever taken them) and Shayla, one of the most fragile of Leda’s friends and a part-time prostitute, sobbing about the brain damage inflicted on her toddler son by a violent boyfriend.
That unpredictable and sometimes terrifying childhood had left Lucy with a craving for stability and conformity. Married to a quantity surveyor whom Strike disliked, with three sons he barely knew, she would probably dismiss Billy’s story of the strangled boy-girl as the product of a broken mind, sweeping it swiftly away into the corner with all the other things she could not bear to think about. Lucy needed to pretend that violence and strangeness had vanished into a past as dead as their mother; that with Leda gone, lif
e was unshakeably secure.
Strike understood. Profoundly different though they were, often though she exasperated him, he loved Lucy. Nevertheless, he could not help comparing her with Robin as he bowled towards Manchester. Robin had grown up in what seemed to Strike the very epitome of middle-class stability, but she was courageous in a way that Lucy was not. Both women had been touched by violence and sadism. Lucy had reacted by burying herself where she hoped it would never reach her again; Robin, by facing it almost daily, investigating and resolving other crimes and traumas, driven to do so by the same impulse to actively disentangle complications and disinter truths that Strike recognised in himself.
As the sun climbed higher, still dappling the grubby windscreen, he experienced a powerful regret that she wasn’t here with him now. She was the best person he had ever met to run a theory past. She’d unscrew the thermos for him and pour him tea. We’d have a laugh.
They had slipped back into their old bantering ways a couple of times lately, since Billy had entered the office with a story troubling enough to break down the reserve that had, over a year, hardened into a permanent impediment to their friendship . . . or whatever it was, thought Strike, and for a moment or two he felt her again in his arms on the stairs, breathed in the scent of white roses and of the perfume that hung around the office when Robin was at her desk . . .
With a kind of mental grimace, he reached for another cigarette, lit up and forced his mind towards Manchester, and the line of questioning he intended to take with Dawn Clancy, who, for five years, had been Mrs Jimmy Knight.
15
Yes, she is a queer one, she is. She has always been very much on the high horse . . .
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
While Strike was speeding northwards, Robin was summoned without explanation to a personal meeting with the Minister for Culture himself.
Walking in the sunshine towards the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which stood in a large white Edwardian building a few minutes away from the Palace of Westminster, Robin found herself almost wishing that she were one of the tourists cluttering the pavement, because Chiswell had sounded bad tempered on the phone.
Robin would have given a great deal to have something useful to tell the minister about his blackmailer, but as she had only been on the job a day and a half, all she could say with any certainty was that her first impressions of Geraint Winn had now been confirmed: he was lazy, lecherous, self-important and indiscreet. The door of his office stood open more often than not, and his sing-song voice rang down the corridor as he talked with injudicious levity about his constituents’ petty concerns, name-dropped celebrities and senior politicians and generally sought to give the impression of a man for whom running a mere constituency office was an unimportant sideshow.
He hailed Robin jovially from his desk whenever she passed his open door, showing a pronounced eagerness for further contact. However, whether by chance or design, Aamir Mallik kept thwarting Robin’s attempts to turn these greetings into conversations, either interrupting with questions for Winn or, as he had done just an hour previously, simply closing the door in Robin’s face.
The exterior of the great block that housed the DCMS, with its stone swags, its columns and its neoclassical façade, was not reassuring. The interior had been modernised and hung with contemporary art, including an abstract glass sculpture that hung from the cupola over the central staircase, up which Robin was led by an efficient-seeming young woman. Believing her to be the minister’s goddaughter, her companion was at pains to show her points of interest.
‘The Churchill Room,’ she said, pointing left as they turned right. ‘That’s the balcony he gave his speech from, on VE Day. The minister’s just along here . . . ’
She led Robin down a wide, curving corridor that doubled as an open-plan workspace. Smart young people sat at an array of desks in front of lengthy windows to the right, which looked out onto a quadrangle, which, in size and scale, bore the appearance of a colosseum, with its high white windowed walls. It was all very different from the cramped office where Izzy made their instant coffee from a kettle. Indeed, a large, expensive machine complete with pods sat on one desk for that purpose.
The offices to the left were separated from this curving space by glass walls and doors. Robin spotted the Minister for Culture from a distance, sitting at his desk beneath a contemporary painting of the Queen, talking on the telephone. He indicated by a brusque gesture that her escort should show Robin inside the office and continued talking on the telephone as Robin waited, somewhat awkwardly, for him to finish his call. A woman’s voice was issuing from the earpiece, high-pitched and to Robin, even eight feet away, hysterical.
‘I’ve got to go, Kinvara!’ barked Chiswell into the mouthpiece. ‘Yes . . . we’ll talk about this later. I’ve got to go.’
Setting down the receiver harder than was necessary, he pointed Robin to a chair opposite him. His coarse, straight grey hair stood out around his head in a wiry halo, his fat lower lip giving him an air of angry petulance.
‘The newspapers are sniffing around,’ he growled. ‘That was m’wife. The Sun rang her this morning, asking whether the rumours are true. She said “what rumours?” but the fella didn’t specify. Fishing, obviously. Trying to surprise something out of her.’
He frowned at Robin, whose appearance he seemed to find wanting.
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-seven,’ she said.
‘You look younger.’
It didn’t sound like a compliment.
‘Managed to plant the surveillance device yet?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Robin.
‘Where’s Strike?’
‘In Manchester, interviewing Jimmy Knight’s ex-wife,’ said Robin.
Chiswell made the angry, subterranean noise usually rendered as ‘harrumph’, then got to his feet. Robin jumped up, too.
‘Well, you’d better get back and get on with it,’ said Chiswell. ‘The National Health Service,’ he added, with no change of tone, as he headed towards the door. ‘People are going to think we’re bloody mad.’
‘Sorry?’ said Robin, entirely thrown.
Chiswell pulled open the glass door and indicated that Robin should pass through it ahead of him, out into the open-plan area where all the smart young people sat working beside their sleek coffee machine.
‘Olympics opening ceremony,’ he explained, following her. ‘Lefty bloody crap. We won two bloody world wars, but we’re not supposed to celebrate that.’
‘Nonsense, Jasper,’ said a deep, melodious Welsh voice close at hand. ‘We celebrate military victories all the time. This is a different kind of celebration.’
Della Winn, the Minister for Sport, was standing just outside Chiswell’s door, holding the leash of her near-white Labrador. A woman of stately appearance, with grey hair swept back off a broad forehead, she wore sunglasses so dark that Robin could make out nothing behind them. Her blindness, Robin knew from her research, had been due to a rare condition in which neither eyeball had grown in utero. She sometimes wore prosthetic eyes, especially when she was to be photographed. Della was sporting a quantity of heavy, tactile jewellery in gold, with a large necklace of intaglios, and dressed from head to foot in sky blue. Robin had read in one of Strike’s printed profiles of the politician that Geraint laid out Della’s clothes for her every morning and that it was simplest for him, not having a great feel for fashion, to select things in the same colour. Robin had found this rather touching when she read it.
Chiswell did not appear to relish the sudden appearance of his colleague and indeed, given that her husband was blackmailing him, Robin supposed that this was hardly surprising. Della, on the other hand, gave no sign of embarrassment.
‘I thought we might share the car over to Greenwich,’ she said to Chiswell, while the pale Labrador snuffled gently at the hem of Robin’s skirt. ‘Give us a chance to go over the plans for the twelfth. What are you doing,
Gwynn?’ she added, feeling the Labrador’s head tugging.
‘She’s sniffing me,’ said Robin nervously, patting the Labrador.
‘This is my goddaughter, ah . . . ’
‘Venetia,’ said Robin, as Chiswell was evidently struggling to remember her name.
‘How do you do?’ said Della, holding out her hand. ‘Visiting Jasper?’
‘No, I’m interning in the constituency office,’ said Robin, shaking the warm, be-ringed hand, as Chiswell walked away to examine the document held by a hovering young man in a suit.
‘Venetia,’ repeated Della, her face still turned towards Robin. A faint frown appeared on the handsome face, half-masked behind the impenetrable black glasses. ‘What’s your surname?’
‘Hall,’ said Robin.
She felt a ridiculous flutter of panic, as though Della were about to unmask her. Still poring over the document he had been shown, Chiswell moved away, leaving Robin, or so it felt, entirely at Della’s mercy.
Lethal White Page 17