Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  Strike removed the earbuds.

  ‘Did you catch it all?’ Robin asked.

  ‘I think so,’ said Strike.

  She leaned back, watching Strike expectantly.

  ‘The Foreign Office?’ he repeated quietly. ‘What the hell can he have done that means the Foreign Office has got pictures?’

  ‘I thought we weren’t supposed to be interested in what he did?’ said Robin, eyebrows raised.

  ‘I never said I wasn’t interested. Just that I’m not being paid to find out.’

  Strike’s fish and chips arrived. He thanked the barmaid and proceeded to add a generous amount of ketchup to his plate.

  ‘Izzy was completely matter of fact about whatever it is,’ said Robin, thinking back. ‘She couldn’t possibly have spoken about it the way she did if he’d – you know – murdered anybody.’

  She deliberately avoided the word ‘strangled’. Three panic attacks in three days were quite sufficient.

  ‘Got to say,’ said Strike, now chewing chips, ‘that anonymous call makes you – unless,’ he said, struck by a thought, ‘Jimmy’s had the bright idea of trying to drag Chiswell into the Billy business on top of whatever else he’s genuinely done. A child-killing doesn’t have to be true to make trouble for a government minister who’s already got the press on his tail. You know the internet. Plenty of people out there think being a Tory as tantamount to being a child killer. This might be Jimmy’s idea of adding pressure.’

  Strike stabbed a few chips moodily with his fork.

  ‘I’d be glad to know where Billy is, if we had somebody free to look for him. Barclay hasn’t seen any sign of him and says Jimmy hasn’t mentioned having a brother.’

  ‘Billy said he was being held captive,’ Robin said tentatively.

  ‘Don’t think we can set much store on anything Billy’s saying right now, to be honest. I knew a guy in the Shiners who had a psychotic episode on exercises. Thought he had cockroaches living under his skin.’

  ‘In the—?’

  ‘Shiners. Fusiliers. Want a chip?’

  ‘I’d better not,’ sighed Robin, though she was hungry. Matthew, whom she had warned by text that she would be late, had told her he would wait for her to get home, so they could eat dinner together. ‘Listen, I haven’t told you everything.’

  ‘Suki Lewis?’ asked Strike, hopefully.

  ‘I haven’t been able to work her into the conversation yet. No, it’s that Chiswell’s wife claims men have been lurking in the flowerbeds and fiddling with her horses.’

  ‘Men?’ Strike repeated. ‘In the plural?’

  ‘That’s what Izzy said – but she also says Kinvara’s hysterical and attention-seeking.’

  ‘Getting to be a bit of a theme, that, isn’t it? People who’re supposed to be too crazy to know what they’ve seen.’

  ‘D’you think that could have been Jimmy, as well? In the garden?’

  Strike thought it over as he chewed.

  ‘I can’t see what he’s got to gain from lurking in the garden or fiddling with horses, unless he’s at the point where he just wants to frighten Chiswell. I’ll check with Barclay and see whether Jimmy’s got a car or mentioned going to Oxfordshire. Did Kinvara call the police?’

  ‘Raff asked that, when Izzy got back,’ said Robin, and once again, Strike thought he detected a trace of self-consciousness as she spoke the man’s name. ‘Kinvara claims the dogs barked, she saw the shadow of a man in the garden, but he ran away. She says there were footprints in the horses’ field next morning and that one of them had been cut with a knife.’

  ‘Did she call a vet?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s harder to ask questions with Raff in the office. I don’t want to look too nosy, because he doesn’t know who I am.’

  Strike pushed his plate away from him and felt for his cigarettes.

  ‘Photos,’ he mused, returning to the central point. ‘Photos at the Foreign Office. What the hell can they show that would incriminate Chiswell? He’s never worked at the Foreign Office, has he?’

  ‘No,’ said Robin. ‘The highest post he’s ever held is Minister for Trade. He had to resign from there because of the affair with Raff’s mother.’

  The wooden clock over the fireplace was telling her it was time to leave. She didn’t move.

  ‘You’re liking Raff, then?’ Strike said suddenly, catching her off guard.

  ‘What?’

  Robin was scared that she had blushed.

  ‘What do you mean, I’m “liking” him?’

  ‘Just an impression I got,’ said Strike. ‘You disapproved of him before you met him.’

  ‘D’you want me to be antagonistic towards him, when I’m supposed to be his father’s goddaughter?’ demanded Robin.

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Strike, though Robin had the sense that he was laughing at her, and resented it.

  ‘I’d better get going,’ she said, sweeping the headphones off the table and back into her bag. ‘I told Matt I’d be home for dinner.’

  She got up, bade Strike goodbye and left the pub.

  Strike watched her go, dimly sorry that he had commented on her manner when mentioning Raphael Chiswell. After a few minutes’ solitary beer consumption, he paid for his food and ambled out onto the pavement, where he lit a cigarette and called the Minister for Culture, who answered on the second ring.

  ‘Wait there,’ said Chiswell. Strike could hear a murmuring crowd behind him. ‘Crowded room.’

  The clunk of a door closing and the noise of the crowd was muted.

  ‘’M at a dinner,’ said Chiswell. ‘Anything for me?’

  ‘It isn’t good news, I’m afraid,’ said Strike, walking away from the pub, up Queen Anne Street, between white painted buildings that gleamed in the dusk. ‘My partner succeeded in planting the listening device in Mr Winn’s office this morning. We’ve got a recording of him talking to Jimmy Knight. Winn’s assistant – Aamir, is it? – is trying to get copies of those photographs you told me about. At the Foreign Office.’

  The ensuing silence lasted so long that Strike wondered whether they had been cut off.

  ‘Minist—?’

  ‘I’m here!’ snarled Chiswell. ‘That boy Mallik, is it? Dirty little bastard. Dirty little bastard. He’s already lost one job – let him try, that’s all. Let him try! Does he think I won’t – I know things about Aamir Mallik,’ he said. ‘Oh yes.’

  Strike waited, in some surprise, for elucidation of these remarks, but none were forthcoming. Chiswell merely breathed heavily into the telephone. Soft, muffled thuds told Strike that Chiswell was pacing up and down on carpet.

  ‘Is that all you had to say to me?’ demanded the MP at last.

  ‘There was one other thing,’ said Strike. ‘My partner says your wife’s seen a man or men trespassing on your property at night.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Chiswell, ‘yerse.’ He did not sound particularly concerned. ‘My wife keeps horses and she takes their security very seriously.’

  ‘You don’t think this has any connection with—?’

  ‘Not in the slightest, not in the slightest. Kinvara’s sometimes – well, to be candid,’ said Chiswell, ‘she can be bloody hysterical. Keeps a bunch of horses, always fretting they’re going to be stolen. I don’t want you wasting time chasing shadows through the undergrowth in Oxfordshire. My problems are in London. Is that everything?’

  Strike said that it was and, after a curt farewell, Chiswell hung up, leaving Strike to limp towards St James’s Park station.

  Settled in a corner seat of the Tube ten minutes later, Strike folded his arms, stretched out his legs and stared unseeingly at the window opposite.

  The nature of this investigation was highly unusual. He had never before had a blackmail case where the client was so unforthcoming about his offence – but then, Strike reasoned with himself, he had never had a government minister as a client before. Equally, it was not every day that a possibly psychotic young man burst into Strike’s
office and insisted that he had witnessed a child murder, though Strike had certainly received his fair share of unusual and unbalanced communications since hitting the newspapers: what he had once called, over Robin’s occasional protests, ‘the nutter drawer’, now filled half a filing cabinet.

  It was the precise relationship between the strangled child and Chiswell’s case of blackmail that was preoccupying Strike, even though, on the face of it, the connection was obvious: it lay in the fact of Jimmy and Billy’s brotherhood. Now somebody (and Strike thought it overwhelmingly likely to be Jimmy, judging from Robin’s account of the call) seemed to have decided to tie Billy’s story to Chiswell, even though the blackmailable offence that had brought Chiswell to Strike could not possibly have been infanticide, or Geraint Winn would have gone to the police. Like a tongue probing a pair of ulcers, Strike’s thoughts kept returning fruitlessly to the Knight brothers: Jimmy, charismatic, articulate, thuggishly good-looking, a chancer and a hothead, and Billy, haunted, filthy, unquestionably ill, bedevilled by a memory no less dreadful for the fact that it might be false.

  They piss themselves as they die.

  Who did? Again, Strike seemed to hear Billy Knight.

  They buried her in a pink blanket, down in the dell by my dad’s house. But afterwards they said it was a boy . . .

  He had just been specifically instructed by his client to restrict his investigations to London, not Oxfordshire.

  As he checked the name of the station at which they had just arrived, Strike remembered Robin’s self-consciousness when talking about Raphael Chiswell. Yawning, he took out his mobile again and succeeded in Googling the youngest of his client’s offspring, of whom there were many pictures going up the courtroom steps to his trial for manslaughter.

  As he scrolled through multiple pictures of Raphael, Strike felt a rising antipathy towards the handsome young man in his dark suit. Setting aside the fact that Chiswell’s son resembled an Italian model more than anything British, the images caused a latent resentment, rooted in class and personal injuries, to glow a little redder inside Strike’s chest. Raphael was of the same type as Jago Ross, the man whom Charlotte had married after splitting with Strike: upper class, expensively clothed and educated, their peccadillos treated more leniently for being able to afford the best lawyers, for resembling the sons of the judges deciding their fates.

  The train set off again and Strike, losing his connection, stuffed his phone back into his pocket, folded his arms and resumed his blank stare at the dark window, trying to deny an uncomfortable idea headspace, but it nosed up against him like a dog demanding food, impossible to ignore.

  He now realised that he had never imagined Robin being interested in any man other than Matthew, except, of course, for that moment when he himself had held her on the stairs at her wedding, when, briefly . . .

  Angry with himself, he kicked the unhelpful thought aside, and forced his wandering mind back onto the curious case of a government minister, slashed horses and a body buried in a pink blanket, down in a dell.

  21

  … certain games are going on behind your back in this house.

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  ‘Why are you so busy and I’ve got bugger all to do?’ Raphael asked Robin, late on Friday morning.

  She had just returned from tailing Geraint to Portcullis House. Observing him from a distance, she had seen how the polite smiles of the many young women he greeted turned to expressions of dislike as he passed. Geraint had disappeared into a meeting room on the first floor, so Robin had returned to Izzy’s office. Approaching Geraint’s room she had hoped she might be able to slip inside and retrieve the second listening device, but through the open door she saw Aamir working at his computer.

  ‘Raff, I’ll give you something to do in a moment, babes,’ muttered a fraught Izzy, who was hammering at her keyboard. ‘I’ve got to finish this, it’s for the local party chairwoman. Papa’s coming to sign it in five minutes.’

  She threw a harried glance at her brother, who was sprawled in the armchair, his long legs spread out in front of him, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened, playing with the paper visitor’s pass that hung around his neck.

  ‘Why don’t you go and get yourself a coffee on the terrace?’ Izzy suggested. Robin knew she wanted him out the way when Chiswell turned up.

  ‘Want to come for a coffee, Venetia?’ asked Raphael.

  ‘Can’t,’ said Robin. ‘Busy.’

  The fan on Izzy’s desk swept Robin’s way and she enjoyed a few seconds of cool breeze. The net-curtained window gave but a misty impression of the glorious June day. Truncated parliamentarians appeared as glowing wraiths on the terrace beyond the glass. It was stuffy inside the cluttered office. Robin was wearing a cotton dress, her hair in a ponytail, but still she occasionally blotted her upper lip with the back of her hand as she pretended to be working.

  Having Raphael in the office was, as she had told Strike, a disadvantage. There had been no need to come up with excuses for lurking in the corridor when she had been alone with Izzy. What was more, Raphael watched her a lot, in an entirely different way to Geraint’s lewd up-and-down looks. She didn’t approve of Raphael, but every now and then she found herself coming perilously close to feeling sorry for him. He seemed nervy around his father, and then – well, anybody would think him handsome. That was the main reason she avoided looking at him: it was best not to, if you wanted to preserve any objectivity.

  He kept trying to foster a closer relationship with her, which she was attempting to discourage. Only the previous day he had interrupted her as she hovered outside Geraint and Aamir’s door, listening with all her might to a conversation that Aamir was having on the phone about an ‘inquiry’. From the scant details that Robin had so far heard, she was convinced that the Level Playing Field was under discussion.

  ‘But this isn’t a statutory inquiry?’ Aamir was asking, sounding worried. ‘It isn’t official? I thought this was just a routine . . . but Mr Winn understood that his letter to the fundraising regulator had answered all their concerns.’

  Robin could not pass up the opportunity to listen, but knew her situation to be perilous. What she had not expected was to be surprised by Raphael rather than Winn.

  ‘What are you doing, skulking there?’ he had asked, laughing.

  Robin walked hastily away, but she heard Aamir’s door slam behind her and suspected that he, at least, would make sure that it was closed in future.

  ‘Are you always this jumpy, or is it just me?’ Raphael had asked, hurrying after her. ‘Come for a coffee, come on, I’m so bloody bored.’

  Robin had declined brusquely, but even as she pretended to be busy again, she had to admit that part of her – a tiny part – was flattered by his attentions.

  There was a knock on the door and, to Robin’s surprise, Aamir Mallik entered the room, holding a list of names. Nervous but determined, he addressed Izzy.

  ‘Yeah, uh, hi. Geraint would like to add the Level Playing Field trustees to the Paralympian reception on the twelfth of July,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to do with that reception,’ snapped Izzy. ‘DCMS are organising it, not me. Why,’ she erupted, wiping her sweaty fringe off her forehead, ‘does everyone come to me?’

  ‘Geraint needs them to come,’ said Aamir. The list of names quivered in his hand.

  Robin wondered whether she dared creep into Aamir’s empty office right now and swap the listening devices. She got to her feet quietly, trying not to draw attention to herself.

  ‘Why doesn’t he ask Della?’ asked Izzy.

  ‘Della’s busy. It’s only eight people,’ said Aamir. ‘He really needs—’

  ‘“Hear the word of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity!”’

  The Minister for Culture’s booming tones preceded him into the room. Chiswell stood in the doorway, wearing a crumpled suit and blocking Robin’s exit. She sat down quietly again. Aamir, or so it seemed to Robin, braced himsel
f.

  ‘Know who Lachesis was, Mr Mallik?’ asked Chiswell.

  ‘Can’t say I do,’ said Aamir.

  ‘No? Didn’t study the Greeks in your Harringay Comprehensive? You seem to have time on your hands, Raff. Teach Mr Mallik about Lachesis.’

  ‘I don’t know, either,’ said Raphael, peering up at his father through his thick, dark lashes.

  ‘Playing stupid, eh? Lachesis,’ said Chiswell, ‘was one of the Fates. She measured out each man’s allotted lifespan. Knew when everyone’s number would be up. Not a fan of Plato, Mr Mallik? Catullus more up your street, I expect. He produced some fine poetry about men of your habits. Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi, eh? Poem 16, look it up, you’ll enjoy it.’