Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  ‘Robin, come on. Please. Let’s talk.’

  So they had gone into the sitting room and talked. Tired of conflict, she had apologised for hurting Matthew’s feelings by missing the cricket match, and for forgetting her wedding ring on their anniversary weekend. Matthew in turn had expressed regret for the things he had said during Sunday’s row, and especially for the remark about her lack of achievements.

  Robin felt as though they were moving chess pieces on a board that was vibrating in the preliminary tremors of an earthquake. It’s too late. You know, surely, that none of this matters any more?

  But when the talk was finished, Matthew said, ‘So we’re OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘We’re fine.’

  He had stood up, held out a hand and helped her up from her chair. She had forced a smile and then he had kissed her, hard, on the mouth, and begun to tug at the green dress. She heard the fabric around the zip tear and when she began to protest, he clamped his mouth on hers again.

  She knew that she could stop him, she knew that he was waiting for her to stop him, that she was being tested in an ugly, underhand way, that he would deny what he was really doing, that he would claim to be the victim. She hated him for doing it this way, and part of her wanted to be the kind of woman who could have disengaged from her own revulsion and from her own reluctant flesh, but she had fought too long and too hard to regain possession of her own body to barter it in this way.

  ‘No,’ she said, pushing him away. ‘I don’t want to.’

  He released her at once, as she had known he would, with an expression compounded of anger and triumph. Suddenly, she knew that she had not fooled him when they had had sex on their anniversary weekend, and paradoxically that made her feel tender towards him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Matthew. ‘So am I.’

  And he had walked out of the room, leaving Robin with a chill down her back where the green dress had torn.

  Where the hell was Strike? It was five past nine and she wanted company. She also wanted to know what had happened after he left the reception with Charlotte. Anything would be preferable to sitting here, thinking about Matthew.

  As though the thought had summoned him, her phone rang.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, before she could speak. ‘Suspicious package at bloody Green Park. I’ve been stuck on the Tube for twenty minutes and I’ve only just got reception. I’ll be there as quick as I can, but you might have to start without me.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Robin, closing her tired eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ Strike repeated, ‘I’m on my way. Got something to tell you, actually. Funny thing happened last night – oh, hang on, we’re moving. See you shortly.’

  He hung up, leaving Robin with the prospect of having to deal alone with the first effusions of Jasper Chiswell’s anger, and still grappling formless feelings of dread and misery that swirled around a dark, graceful woman who was sixteen years’ worth of knowledge and memories ahead of her when it came to Cormoran Strike, which, Robin told herself, shouldn’t matter, for God’s sake, haven’t you got enough problems without worrying about Strike’s love life, it’s nothing whatsoever to do with you . . .

  She felt a sudden guilty prickle around her lips, where Strike’s missed kiss had landed outside the hospital. As though she could wash it away, she downed the dregs of her coffee, got up and left the café for the broad, straight street, which comprised two symmetrical lines of identical nineteenth-century houses.

  She walked briskly, not because she was in any hurry to bear the brunt of Chiswell’s anger and disappointment, but because activity helped dispel her uncomfortable thoughts.

  Arriving outside Chiswell’s house precisely on time, she lingered for a few hopeful seconds beside the glossy black front door, just in case Strike were to appear at the last moment. He didn’t. Robin therefore steadied herself, walked up the three clean white steps from the pavement and knocked on the front door, which was on the latch and opened a few inches. A man’s muffled voice shouted something that might have been ‘come in’.

  Robin passed into a small, dingy hall dominated by vertiginous stairs. The olive-green wallpaper was drab and peeling in places. Leaving the front door as she had found it, she called out:

  ‘Minister?’

  He didn’t answer. Robin knocked gently on the door to the right, and opened it.

  Time froze. The scene seemed to fold in upon her, crashing through her retinas into a mind unprepared for it, and shock kept her standing in the doorway, her hand still on the handle and her mouth slightly open, trying to comprehend what she was seeing.

  A man was sitting in a Queen Anne chair, his legs splayed, his arms dangling, and he seemed to have a shiny grey turnip for a head, in which a carved mouth gaped, but no eyes.

  Then Robin’s struggling comprehension grasped the fact that it was not a turnip, but a human head shrink-wrapped in a clear plastic bag, into which a tube ran from a large canister. The man looked as though he had suffocated. His left foot lay sideways on the rug, revealing a small hole in the sole, his thick fingers dangled, almost touching the carpet, and there was a stain at his groin where his bladder had emptied.

  And next she understood that it was Chiswell himself who sat in the chair, and that his thick mass of grey hair was pressed flat against his face in the vacuum created by the bag, and that the gaping mouth had sucked the plastic into itself, which was why it gaped so darkly.

  35

  … the White Horse! In broad daylight!

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  Somewhere in the distance, outside the house, a man shouted. He sounded like a workman, and in some part of her brain Robin knew that that was who she had heard when she was expecting to hear ‘come in’. Nobody had invited her into the house. The door had simply been left ajar.

  Now, when it might have been expected, she didn’t panic. There was no threat here, however horrifying the sight of that awful dummy, with the turnip head and the tube, this poor lifeless figure could not hurt her. Knowing that she must check that life was extinct, Robin approached Chiswell and gently touched his shoulder. It was easier, not being able to see his eyes, because of the coarse hair that obscured them like a horse’s forelock. The flesh felt hard beneath his striped shirt and cooler than she had expected.

  But then she imagined the gaping mouth speaking, and took several quick steps backwards, until her foot landed with a crunch on something hard on the carpet and she slipped. She had cracked a pale blue plastic tube of pills lying on the carpet. She recognised them as the sort of homeopathic tablets sold in her local chemist.

  Taking out her mobile, she called 999 and asked for the police. After explaining that she had found a body and giving the address, she was told that someone would be with her shortly.

  Trying not to focus on Chiswell, she took in the frayed curtains, which were of an indeterminate dun colour, trimmed with sad little bobbles, the antiquated TV in its faux wood cladding, the patch of darker wallpaper over the mantelpiece where a painting had once hung, and the silver-framed photographs. But the shrink-wrapped head, the rubber piping and the cold glint of the canister seemed to turn all of this everyday normality into pasteboard. The nightmare alone was real.

  So Robin turned her mobile onto its camera function and began to take photographs. Putting a lens between herself and the scene mitigated the horror. Slowly and methodically, she documented the scene.

  A glass sat on the coffee table in front of the body, with a few millimetres of what looked like orange juice in it. Scattered books and papers lay beside it. There was a piece of thick cream writing paper headed with a red Tudor rose, like a drop of blood, and the printed address of the house in which Robin stood. Somebody had written in a rounded, girlish hand.

  Tonight was the final straw. How stupid do you think

  I am, putting that girl in your office right under

  my nose? I hope yo
u realise how ridiculous you look,

  how much people are laughing at you, chasing a

  girl who’s younger than your daughters.

  I’ve had enough. Make a fool of yourself, I don’t

  care any more, it’s over.

  I’ve gone back to Woolstone. Once I’ve made

  arrangements for the horses, I’ll clear out for good.

  Your bloody horrible children will be happy, but will

  you, Jasper? I doubt it, but it’s too late.

  K

  As Robin bent to take a picture of the note, she heard the front door snap shut, and with a gasp, she spun around. Strike was standing on the threshold, large, unshaven, still in the suit he had worn to the reception. He was staring at the figure in the chair.

  ‘The police are on their way,’ said Robin. ‘I just called them.’

  Strike moved carefully into the room.

  ‘Holy shit.’

  He spotted the cracked tube of pills on the floor, stepped over them, and scrutinised the tubing and the plastic-covered face.

  ‘Raff said he was behaving strangely,’ said Robin, ‘but I don’t think he ever dreamed . . . ’

  Strike said nothing. He was still examining the body.

  ‘Was that there yesterday evening?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That,’ said Strike, pointing.

  There was a semi-circular mark on the back of Chiswell’s hand, dark red against the coarse, pallid skin.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ said Robin.

  The full shock of what had happened was starting to hit her and she was finding it hard to arrange her thoughts, which floated, unmoored and disconnected, through her head: Chiswell barking through the car window to persuade the police to let Strike into last night’s reception, Chiswell calling Kinvara a stupid bitch, Chiswell demanding that they meet him here this morning. It was unreasonable to expect her to remember the backs of his hands.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Strike. He noticed at the mobile in Robin’s hand. ‘Have you taken pictures of everything?’

  She nodded.

  ‘All of this?’ he asked, waving a hand over the table. ‘That?’ he added, pointing at the cracked pills on the carpet.

  ‘Yes. That was my fault. I trod on them.’

  ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘The door was open. I thought he’d left it on the latch for us,’ said Robin. ‘A workman shouted in the street and I thought it was Chiswell saying “come in”. I was expecting—’

  ‘Stay here,’ said Strike.

  He left the room. She heard him climbing the stairs and then his heavy footsteps on the ceiling above, but she knew that there was nobody there. She could feel the house’s essential lifelessness, its flimsy cardboard unreality, and, sure enough, Strike returned less than five minutes later, shaking his head.

  ‘Nobody.’

  He walked past her through a door that led off the sitting room and, hearing his footsteps hit tile, Robin knew that it was the kitchen.

  ‘Completely empty,’ Strike said, re-emerging.

  ‘What happened last night?’ Robin asked. ‘You said something funny happened.’

  She wanted to discuss a subject other than the awful form that dominated the room in its grotesque lifelessness.

  ‘Billy called me. He said people were trying to kill him – chasing him. He claimed to be in a phone box in Trafalgar Square. I went to try and find him, but he wasn’t there.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Robin.

  So he hadn’t been with Charlotte. Even in this extremity, Robin registered the fact, and was glad.

  ‘The hell?’ said Strike quietly, looking past her into a corner of the room.

  A buckled sword was leaning against the wall in a dark corner. It looked as though it had been forced or stood on and deliberately bent. Strike walked carefully around the body to examine it, but then they heard the police car pulling up outside the house and he straightened up.

  ‘We’ll tell them everything, obviously,’ said Strike.

  ‘Yes,’ said Robin.

  ‘Except the surveillance devices. Shit – they’ll find them in your office—’

  ‘They won’t,’ said Robin. ‘I took them home yesterday, in case we decided I needed to clear out because of the Sun.’

  Before Strike could express admiration for this clear-eyed foresight, somebody rapped hard on the front door.

  ‘Well, it’s been nice while it’s lasted, hasn’t it?’ Strike said, with a grim smile, as he moved towards the hall. ‘Being out of the papers?’

  PART TWO

  36

  What has happened can be hushed up – or at any rate can be explained away . . .

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  The Chiswell case maintained its singular character even when their client was no more.

  As the usual cumbersome procedures and formalities enveloped the corpse, Strike and Robin were escorted from Ebury Street to Scotland Yard, where they were separately interviewed. Strike knew that a tornado of speculation must be whirling through the newsrooms of London at the death of a government minister, and sure enough, by the time they emerged from Scotland Yard six hours later, the colourful details of Chiswell’s private life were being broadcast across TV and radio, while opening the internet browsers on their phones revealed brief news items from news sites, as a tangle of baroque theories spread across blogs and social media, in which a multitude of cartoonish Chiswells died at the hand of myriad nebulous foes. As he rode in a taxi back to Denmark Street, Strike read how Chiswell the corrupt capitalist had been murdered by the Russian mafia after failing to pay back interest on some seedy, illegal transaction, while Chiswell the defender of solid English values had surely been dispatched by vengeful Islamists after his attempts to resist the rise of sharia law.

  Strike returned to his attic flat only to collect his belongings, and decamped to the house of his old friends Nick and Ilsa, respectively a gastroenterologist and a lawyer. Robin, who at Strike’s insistence had taken a taxi directly home to Albury Street, was given a peremptory hug by Matthew, whose tissue-thin pretence of sympathy was worse, Robin felt, than outright fury.

  When he heard that Robin had been summoned back to Scotland Yard for further interrogation the next day, Matthew’s self-control crumbled.

  ‘Anyone could have seen this coming!’

  ‘Funny, it seemed to take most people by surprise,’ Robin said. She had just ignored her mother’s fourth call of the morning.

  ‘I don’t mean Chiswell killing himself—’

  ‘—it’s pronounced “Chizzle”—’

  ‘—I mean you getting yourself into trouble for sneaking around the Houses of Parliament!’

  ‘Don’t worry, Matt. I’ll make sure the police know you were against it. Wouldn’t want your promotion prospects compromised.’

  But she wasn’t sure that her second interviewer was a policeman. The softly spoken man in a dark grey suit didn’t reveal whom he worked for. Robin found this gentleman far more intimidating than yesterday’s police, even though they had, at times, been forceful to the point of aggression. Robin told her new interviewer everything she had seen and heard in the Commons, omitting only the strange conversation between Della Winn and Aamir Mallik, which had been captured on the second listening device. As the interaction had taken place behind a closed door after normal working hours, she could only have heard it by using surveillance equipment. Robin assuaged her conscience by telling herself that this conversation could not possibly have anything to do with Chiswell’s death, but squirming feelings of guilt and terror pursued her as she left the building for the second time. So consumed was she by what she hoped was paranoia by this brush with the security services, that she called Strike from a payphone near the Tube, instead of using her mobile.

  ‘I’ve just had another interview. I’m pretty sure it was MI5.’

  ‘Bound to happen,’ said Strike, and she took solace from his matter-of-fac
t tone. ‘They’ve got to check you out, make sure you are who you claim to be. Isn’t there anywhere you can go, other than home? I can’t believe the press aren’t onto us yet, but it must be imminent.’

  ‘I could go back to Masham, I suppose,’ Robin said, ‘but they’re bound to try there if they want to find me. That’s where they came after the Ripper stuff.’

  Unlike Strike, she had no friends of her own into whose anonymous homes she felt she could vanish. All her friends were Matthew’s, too, and she had no doubt that, like her husband, they would be scared of harbouring anybody who was of interest to the security services. At a loss as to what to do, she went back to Albury Street.