Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  ‘I thought you liked punctuality, Dad,’ he said, raising his arms and letting them fall in a slightly hopeless gesture.

  His father turned to Izzy. ‘Give him something to do.’

  Chiswell marched out. Mortified, Robin headed for her desk. Nobody spoke until Chiswell’s footsteps had died away, then Izzy spoke.

  ‘He’s under all kinds of stress just now, Raff, babes. It isn’t you. He’s honestly going berserk about the smallest things.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Robin forced herself to say to Raphael. ‘I completely overreacted.’

  ‘No problem,’ he replied, in the kind of accent that is routinely described as ‘public school’. ‘For the record, I’m not, in fact, a sex offender.’

  Robin laughed nervously.

  ‘You’re the goddaughter I didn’t know about? Nobody tells me anything. Venetia, yeah? I’m Raff.’

  ‘Um – yes – hi.’

  They shook hands and Robin retook her seat, busying herself with some pointless paper shuffling. She could feel her colour fluctuating.

  ‘It’s just crazy at the moment,’ Izzy said, and Robin knew that she was trying, for not entirely unselfish reasons, to persuade Raphael that their father wasn’t as bad to work with as he might appear. ‘We’re understaffed, we’ve got the Olympics coming up, TTS is constantly going off on Papa—’

  ‘What’s going off on him?’ asked Raphael, dropping down into the sagging armchair, loosening his tie and crossing his long legs.

  ‘TTS,’ Izzy repeated. ‘Lean over and put on the kettle while you’re there, Raff, I’m dying for a coffee. TTS. It stands for Tinky the Second. It’s what Fizz and I call Kinvara.’

  The many nicknames of the Chiswell family had been explained to Robin during her office interludes with Izzy. Izzy’s older sister Sophia was ‘Fizzy’, while Sophia’s three children rejoiced in the pet names of ‘Pringle’, ‘Flopsy’ and ‘Pong’.

  ‘Why “Tinky the Second”?’ asked Raff, unscrewing a jar of instant coffee with long fingers. Robin was still very aware of all his movements, though keeping her eyes on her supposed work. ‘What was Tinky the First?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Raff, you must have heard about Tinky,’ said Izzy. ‘That ghastly Australian nurse Grampy married last time round, when he was getting senile. He blew most of the money on her. He was the second silly old codger she’d married. Grampy bought her a dud racehorse and loads of horrible jewellery. Papa nearly had to go to court to get her out of the house when Grampy died. She dropped dead of breast cancer before it got really expensive, thank God.’

  Startled by this sudden callousness, Robin looked up.

  ‘How d’you take it, Venetia?’ Raphael asked as he spooned coffee into mugs.

  ‘White, no sugar, please,’ said Robin. She thought it best if she maintained a low profile for a while, after her recent incursion into Winn’s office.

  ‘TTS married Papa for his dosh,’ Izzy ploughed on, ‘and she’s horse-mad like Tinky. You know she’s got nine now? Nine!’

  ‘Nine what?’ said Raphael.

  ‘Horses, Raff!’ said Izzy impatiently. ‘Bloody uncontrollable, bad-mannered, hot-blooded horses that she mollycoddles and keeps as child substitutes and spends all the money on! God, I wish Papa would leave her,’ said Izzy. ‘Pass the biscuit tin, babes.’

  He did so. Robin, who could feel him looking at her, maintained the pretence of absorption in her work.

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Jasper Chiswell’s office,’ said Izzy, trying to prise off the lid of the biscuit tin one-handed, the receiver under her chin. ‘Oh,’ she said, suddenly cool. ‘Hello, Kinvara. You’ve just missed Papa . . . ’

  Grinning at his half-sister’s expression, Raphael took the biscuits from her, opened them and offered the tin to Robin, who shook her head. A torrent of indistinguishable words was pouring from Izzy’s earpiece.

  ‘No . . . no, he’s gone . . . he only came over to say hello to Raff . . . ’

  The voice at the end of the phone seemed to become more strident.

  ‘Back at DCMS, he’s got a meeting at ten,’ said Izzy. ‘I can’t – well, because he’s very busy, you know, the Olymp – yes . . . goodbye.’

  Izzy slammed the receiver down and struggled out of her jacket.

  ‘She should take another rest cure. The last one doesn’t seem to have done her much good.’

  ‘Izzy doesn’t believe in mental illness,’ Raphael told Robin.

  He was contemplating her, still slightly curious and, she guessed, trying to draw her out.

  ‘Of course I believe in mental illness, Raff!’ said Izzy, apparently stung. ‘Of course I do! I was sorry for her when it happened – I was, Raff – Kinvara had a stillbirth two years ago,’ Izzy explained, ‘and of course that’s sad, of course it is, and it was quite understandable that she was a bit, you know, afterwards, but – no, I’m sorry,’ she said crossly, addressing Raphael, ‘but she uses it. She does, Raff. She thinks it entitles her to everything she wants and – well, she’d have been a dreadful mother, anyway,’ said Izzy defiantly. ‘She can’t stand not being the centre of attention. When she’s not getting enough she starts her little girl act – don’t leave me alone, Jasper, I get scared when you’re not here at night. Telling stupid lies . . . funny phone calls to the house, men hiding in the flowerbeds, fiddling with the horses.’

  ‘What?’ said Raphael, half-laughing, but Izzy cut him short.

  ‘Oh, Christ, look, Papa’s left his briefing papers.’

  She hurried out from behind her desk, snatched a leather folder off the top of the radiator and called over her shoulder, ‘Raff, you can listen to the phone messages and transcribe them for me while I’m gone, OK?’

  The heavy wooden door thudded shut behind her, leaving Robin and Raphael alone. If she had been hyperaware of Raphael before Izzy had gone, now he seemed to Robin to fill the entire room, his olive dark eyes on her.

  He took Ecstasy and ran his car into a mother of a four-year-old. He barely served a third of his sentence and now his father’s put him on the taxpayer’s payroll.

  ‘How do I do this, then?’ asked Raphael, moving behind Izzy’s desk.

  ‘Just press play, I expect,’ Robin muttered, sipping her coffee and pretending to make notes on a pad.

  Canned messages began to issue from the answering machine, drowning out the faint hum of conversation from the terrace beyond the net-curtained window.

  A man named Rupert asked Izzy to call him back about ‘the AGM’.

  A constituent called Mrs Ricketts spoke for two solid minutes about traffic along the Banbury road.

  An irate woman said crossly that she ought to have expected an answering machine and that MPs ought to be answering to the public personally, then spoke until cut off by the machine about her neighbours’ failure to lop overhanging branches from a tree, in spite of repeated requests from the council.

  Then a man’s growl, almost theatrically menacing, filled the quiet office:

  ‘They say they piss themselves as they die, Chiswell, is that true? Forty grand, or I’ll find out how much the papers will pay.’

  20

  We two have worked our way forward in complete companionship.

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  Strike had selected the Two Chairmen for his Wednesday evening catch-up with Robin because of its proximity to the Palace of Westminster. The pub was tucked away on a junction of centuries-old back streets – Old Queen Street, Cockpit Steps – amid a motley collection of quaint, sedate buildings that stood at oblique angles to each other. Only as he limped across the road and saw the hanging metal sign over the front door did Strike realise that the ‘two chairmen’ for whom the pub was named were not, as he had assumed, joint managers of a board, but lowly servants carrying the heavy load of a sedan chair. Tired and sore as Strike was, the image seemed appropriate, although the occupant of the sedan chair in the pub sign was a refined lady in white, not a large, curmudgeo
nly minister with wiry hair and a short temper.

  The bar was crowded with after-work drinkers and Strike had a sudden apprehension that he might not get a seat inside, an unwelcome prospect, because leg, back and neck were tight and sore after yesterday’s long drive and the hours he had spent in Harley Street today, watching Dodgy Doc.

  Strike had just bought a pint of London Pride when the table by the window became free. With a turn of speed born of necessity, he nabbed the high bench with its back to the street before the nearest group of suited men and women could annexe it. There was no question of anybody challenging his right to sole occupancy of a table made for four. Strike was large enough, and surly enough in appearance to make even this group of civil servants doubt their ability to negotiate a compromise.

  The wooden-floored bar was what Strike mentally categorised as ‘upmarket utilitarian’. A faded mural on the back wall depicted bewigged eighteenth-century men gossiping together, but otherwise all was pared-back wood and monochrome prints. He peered out of the window to see whether Robin was within sight, but as there was no sign of her he drank his beer, read the day’s news on his phone and tried to ignore the menu lying on the table in front of him, which was taunting him with a picture of battered fish.

  Robin, who had been due to arrive at six, was still absent at half past. Unable to resist the picture on the menu any longer, Strike ordered himself cod and chips and a second pint, and read a long article in The Times about the upcoming Olympics opening ceremony, which was really a long list of the ways in which the journalist feared it might misrepresent and humiliate the nation.

  By a quarter to seven, Strike was starting to worry about Robin. He had just decided to call her when she came hurrying in through the door, flushed, wearing glasses that Strike knew she did not need and with an expression that he recognised as the barely contained excitement of one who has something worthwhile to impart.

  ‘Hazel eyes,’ he noted, as she sat down opposite him. ‘Good one. Changes your whole look. What’ve you got?’

  ‘How do you know I’ve—? Well, loads, actually,’ she said, deciding it was not worthwhile toying with him. ‘I nearly called you earlier but there have been people around all day, and I had a close shave this morning placing the listening device.’

  ‘You did it? Bloody well done!’

  ‘Thanks. I really want a drink, hang on.’

  She came back with a glass of red wine and launched immediately into an account of the message that Raphael had found on the answering machine that morning.

  ‘I had no chance of getting the caller’s number, because there were four messages after it. The phone system’s antiquated.’

  Frowning, Strike asked: ‘How did the caller pronounce “Chiswell”, can you remember?’

  ‘They said it right. Chizzle.’

  ‘Fits with Jimmy,’ said Strike. ‘What happened after the call?’

  ‘Raff told Izzy about it when she got back to the office,’ said Robin, and Strike thought he detected a touch of self-consciousness as she said the name ‘Raff’. ‘He didn’t understand what he was passing on, obviously. Izzy called her dad straight away and he went berserk. We could hear him shouting on the end of the line, though not much of what he was actually saying.’

  Strike stroked his chin, thinking.

  ‘What did the anonymous caller sound like?’

  ‘London accent,’ Robin said. ‘Threatening.’

  ‘“They piss themselves as they die”,’ repeated Strike in an undertone.

  There was something that Robin wanted to say, but a brutal personal memory made it hard for her to articulate.

  ‘Strangling victims—’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Strike, cutting her off. ‘I know.’

  Both of them drank.

  ‘Well, assuming the call was Jimmy,’ Robin went on, ‘he’s phoned the department twice today.’

  She opened her handbag and showed Strike the listening device hidden inside it.

  ‘You retrieved it?’ he asked, staggered.

  ‘And replaced it with another one,’ said Robin, unable to suppress a triumphant smile. ‘That’s why I’m late. I took a chance. Aamir, who works with Winn, left and Geraint came into our office while I was packing up, to chat me up.’

  ‘He did, did he?’ asked Strike, amused.

  ‘I’m glad you find it funny,’ said Robin coolly. ‘He isn’t a nice man.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Strike. ‘In what way is he not a nice man?’

  ‘Just take it from me,’ said Robin. ‘I’ve met plenty of them in offices. He’s a pervert, but with creepy add-ons. He was just telling me,’ she said, and her indignation showed in the rising tide of pink in her face, ‘that I remind him of his dead daughter. Then he touched my hair.’

  ‘Touched your hair?’ repeated Strike, unamused.

  ‘Picked a bit of it off my shoulder and ran it through his fingers,’ said Robin. ‘Then I think he saw what I thought of him and tried to pass it off as fatherly. Anyway, I said I needed the loo but asked him to stay put so we could keep chatting about charities. I nipped down the corridor and swapped the devices.’

  ‘That was bloody good going, Robin.’

  ‘I listened to it on the way here,’ said Robin, pulling headphones out of her pocket, ‘and—’

  Robin handed Strike the headphones.

  ‘—I’ve cued up the interesting bit.’

  Strike obediently inserted the earbuds and Robin switched on the tape in her handbag.

  ‘ . . . at three thirty, Aamir.’

  The Welsh male voice was interrupted by the sound of a mobile phone ringing. Feet scuffled near the power point, the ring ceased and Geraint said:

  ‘Oh, hello Jimmy . . . half a mo’ – Aamir, close that door.’

  More scuffling, footsteps.

  ‘Jimmy, yes . . . ?’

  There followed a long stretch in which Geraint seemed to be attempting to stem the flow of a mounting tirade.

  ‘Whoa – now, wai . . . Jimmy, lis . . . Jimmy, listen – listen! I know you’ve lost out, Jimmy, I understand how bitter you – Jimmy, please! We understand your feelings – that’s unfair, Jimmy, neither Della nor I grew up wealth – my father was a coalminer, Jimmy! Now listen, please! We’re close to getting the pictures!’

  There followed a spell in which Strike thought he heard, very faintly, the rise and fall of Jimmy Knight’s fluent speech at the end of the telephone.

  ‘I take your point,’ said Geraint finally, ‘but I urge you to do nothing rash, Jimmy. He isn’t going to give you – Jimmy, listen! He isn’t going to give you your money, he’s made that perfectly clear. It’s the newspapers now or nothing, so . . . proof, Jimmy! Proof!’

  Another, shorter period of unintelligible gabbling followed.

  ‘I’ve just told you, haven’t I? Yes . . . no, but the Foreign Office . . . well, hardly . . . no, Aamir has a contact . . . yes . . . yes . . . all right then . . . I will, Jimmy. Good – yes, all right. Yes. Goodbye.’

  The clunk of a mobile being set down was followed by Geraint’s voice.

  ‘Stupid prick,’ he said.

  There were more footsteps. Strike glanced at Robin, who by a rolling gesture of the hand indicated that he should keep listening. After perhaps thirty seconds, Aamir spoke, diffident and strained.

  ‘Geraint, Christopher didn’t promise anything about the pictures.’

  Even on the tinny little tape, with the nearby shufflings of paper at Geraint’s desk, the silence sounded charged.

  ‘Geraint, did you h—?’

  ‘Yes, I heard!’ snapped Winn. ‘Good God, boy, a first from the LSE and you can’t think of a way to persuade that bastard to give you pictures? I’m not asking you to take them out of the department, just to get copies. That shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man.’

  ‘I don’t want more trouble,’ muttered Aamir.

  ‘Well, I should have thought,’ said Geraint, ‘after everything Della in particular has done fo
r you . . . ’

  ‘And I’m grateful,’ said Aamir swiftly. ‘You know I am . . . all right, I’ll – I’ll try.’

  For the next minute there were no sounds but scuffing footsteps and papers, followed by a mechanical click. The device automatically switched off after a minute of no talking, activated again when somebody spoke. The next voice was that of a different man asking whether Della would be attending ‘the sub-committee’ this afternoon.