Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  Yet the press didn’t come for her, even though the newspapers were hardly holding back on the subject of Chiswell. The Mail had already run a double-page spread on the various tribulations and scandals that had plagued Jasper Chiswell’s life. ‘Once mentioned as a possible prime minister’, ‘sexy Italian Ornella Serafin, with whom he had the affair that broke up his first marriage’, ‘voluptuous Kinvara Hanratty, who was thirty years his junior’, ‘Lieutenant Freddie Chiswell, eldest son, died in the Iraq war his father had staunchly supported’, ‘youngest child Raphael, whose drug-filled joy ride ended in the death of a young mother’.

  Broadsheets contained tributes from friends and colleagues: ‘a fine mind, a supremely able minister, one of Thatcher’s bright young men’, ‘but for a somewhat tumultuous private life, there were no heights he might not have reached’, ‘the public persona was irascible, even abrasive, but the Jasper Chiswell I knew at Harrow was a witty and intelligent boy’.

  Five days of lurid press coverage passed, yet still, the press’s mysterious restraint on the subject of Strike and Robin’s involvement held, and still, nobody had printed a word about blackmail.

  On the Friday morning following the discovery of Chiswell’s body, Strike was sitting quietly at Nick and Ilsa’s kitchen table, sunlight pouring through the window behind him.

  His host and hostess were at work. Nick and Ilsa, who had been trying for some years to have a baby, had recently adopted a pair of kittens whom Nick had insisted on calling Ossie and Ricky, after the two Spurs players he had revered in his teens. The cats, who had only recently consented to sit on the knees of their adoptive parents, had not appreciated the arrival of the large and unfamiliar Strike. Finding themselves alone with him, they had sought refuge on top of a kitchen wall cabinet. He was currently conscious of the scrutiny of four pale green eyes, which followed his every movement from on high.

  Not that he was currently moving a great deal. Indeed, for much of the past half an hour he had been almost motionless, as he pored over the photographs that Robin had taken in Ebury Street, which he had printed out in Nick’s study for convenience. Finally, causing Ricky to jump up in a flurry of upended fur, Strike isolated nine of the photographs and put the rest in a pile. While Strike scrutinised his selected images, Ricky settled back down, the tip of a black tail swaying as he awaited the detective’s next move.

  The first photograph that Strike had selected showed a close-up of the small, semi-circular puncture mark on Chiswell’s left hand.

  The second and third pictures showed different angles of the glass that had sat on the coffee table in front of Chiswell. A powdery residue was visible on the sides, above an inch of orange juice.

  The fourth, fifth and sixth photographs Strike laid together side by side. Each showed a slightly different angle of the body, with slices of the surrounding room caught within its frame. Once again, Strike studied the ghostly outline of the buckled sword in the corner, the dark patch over the mantelpiece where a picture had previously hung and, beneath this, barely noticeable against the dark wallpaper, a pair of brass hooks spaced nearly a yard apart.

  The seventh and eighth photographs, when placed side by side, showed the entirety of the coffee table. Kinvara’s farewell letter sat on top of a number of papers and books, of which only a sliver of one letter was visible, signed by ‘Brenda Bailey’. Of the books, Strike could see nothing but a partial title on an old cloth edition – ‘CATUL’ – and the lower part of a Penguin paperback. Also in shot was the upturned corner of the threadbare rug beneath the table.

  The ninth and final picture, which Strike had enlarged from yet another shot of the body, showed Chiswell’s gaping trouser pocket, in which something shiny and golden had been caught in the flash of Robin’s camera. While he was still contemplating this gleaming object, Strike’s mobile rang. It was his hostess, Ilsa.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, standing up and grabbing the packet of Benson & Hedges and lighter that lay on the side behind him. With an eruption of claws on wood, Ossie and Ricky streaked along the top of the kitchen cabinets, in case Strike was about to start throwing things at them. Checking to see that they were too far away to make a break for the garden, Strike let himself outside and swiftly closed the back door. ‘Any news?’

  ‘Yes. Looks like you were right.’

  Strike sat down on a wrought iron garden chair and lit up.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’ve just had coffee with my contact. He can’t speak freely, given the nature of what we’re talking about, but I put your theory to him and he said “That sounds very plausible.” Then I said, “Fellow politician?” and he said that sounded very likely, too, and I said I supposed that in that situation, the press would appeal, and he said, yes, he thought so, too.’

  Strike exhaled.

  ‘I owe you, Ilsa, thanks. The good news is, I’ll be able to get out of your hair.’

  ‘Corm, we don’t mind you staying, you know that.’

  ‘The cats don’t like me.’

  ‘Nick says they can tell you’re a Gooner.’

  ‘The comedy circuit lost a shining light when your husband decided on Medicine. Dinner’s on me tonight and I’ll clear out afterwards.’

  Strike then rang Robin. She picked up on the second ring.

  ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘I’ve found out why the press aren’t all over us. Della’s taken out a super-injunction. The papers aren’t allowed to report that Chiswell hired us, in case it breaks the blackmail story. Ilsa’s just met her High Court contact and he confirmed it.’

  There was a pause, while Robin digested this information.

  ‘So Della convinced a judge that Chiswell made up the blackmail?’

  ‘Exactly, that he was using us to dig dirt on enemies. I’m not surprised the judge swallowed it. The whole world thinks Della’s whiter than white.’

  ‘But Izzy knew why I was there,’ protested Robin. ‘The family will have confirmed that he was being blackmailed.’

  Strike tapped ash absent-mindedly into Ilsa’s pot of rosemary.

  ‘Will they? Or will they want it all hushed up, now he’s dead?’

  He took her silence as reluctant agreement.

  ‘The press will appeal the injunction, won’t they?’

  ‘They’re already trying, according to Ilsa. If I were a tabloid editor, I’d be having us watched, so I think we’d better be careful. I’m going back to the office tonight, but I think you should stay home.’

  ‘For how long?’ said Robin.

  He heard the strain in her voice and wondered whether it was entirely due to the stress of the case.

  ‘We’ll play it by ear. Robin, they know you were the one inside the Houses of Parliament. You became the story while he was alive and you’re sure as hell the story now they know who you really are, and he’s dead.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘How’re you getting on with the accounts?’ he asked.

  She had insisted on being given this job, little though either of them enjoyed it.

  ‘They’d look a lot healthier if Chiswell had paid his bill.’

  ‘I’ll try and tap the family,’ said Strike, rubbing his eyes, ‘but it feels tasteless asking for money before the funeral.’

  ‘I’ve been looking through the photos again,’ said Robin. In daily contact since finding the body, every one of their conversations wound its way back to the pictures of Chiswell’s corpse and the room in which they had found him.

  ‘Me too. Notice anything new?’

  ‘Yes, two little brass hooks on the wall. I think the sword was usually—’

  ‘—displayed beneath the missing painting?’

  ‘Exactly. D’you think it was Chiswell’s, from the army?’

  ‘Very possibly. Or some ancestor’s.’

  ‘I wonder why it was taken down? And how it got bent?’

  ‘You think Chiswell grabbed it off the wall to try and defend himself against his murderer?’
r />   ‘That’s the first time,’ said Robin quietly, ‘you’ve said it. “Murderer”.’

  A wasp swooped low over Strike but, repelled by his cigarette smoke, buzzed away again.

  ‘I was joking.’

  ‘Were you?’

  Strike stretched out his legs in front of him, contemplating his feet. Stuck in the house, which was warm, he had not bothered with shoes and socks. His bare foot, which rarely saw sunlight, was pale and hairy. The prosthetic foot, a single piece of carbon fibre with no individual toes, had a dull gleam in the sunshine.

  ‘There are odd features,’ Strike said, as he waggled his remaining toes, ‘but it’s been a week and no arrest. The police will have noticed everything we did.’

  ‘Hasn’t Wardle heard anything? Vanessa’s dad’s ill. She’s on compassionate leave, or I’d’ve asked her.’

  ‘Wardle’s deep in anti-terrorist stuff for the Olympics. Considerately spared the time to call my voicemail and piss himself laughing at my client dying on me, though.’

  ‘Cormoran, did you notice the name on those homeopathic pills I trod on?’

  ‘No,’ said Strike. This wasn’t one of the photographs he had isolated. ‘What was it?’

  ‘Lachesis. I saw it when I enlarged the picture.’

  ‘Why’s that significant?’

  ‘When Chiswell came into our office and quoted that Latin poem at Aamir, and said something about a man of your habits, he mentioned Lachesis. He said she was—’

  ‘One of the Fates.’

  ‘—exactly. The one who “knew when everyone’s number was up”.’

  Strike smoked in silence for a few seconds.

  ‘Sounds like a threat.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You definitely can’t remember which poem it was? Author, perhaps?’

  ‘I’ve been trying, but no – wait—’ said Robin suddenly. ‘He gave it a number.’

  ‘Catullus,’ said Strike, sitting up straighter on the iron garden chair.

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘Because Catullus’s poems are numbered, not titled, there was an old copy on Chiswell’s coffee table. Catullus described plenty of interesting habits: incest, sodomy, child rape . . . he might’ve missed out bestiality. There’s a famous one about a sparrow, but nobody buggers it.’

  ‘Funny coincidence, isn’t it?’ said Robin, ignoring the witticism.

  ‘Maybe Chiswell was prescribed the pills and that put him in mind of the Fate?’

  ‘Did he seem to you like the kind of man who’d trust homeopathy?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Strike, ‘but if you’re suggesting the killer dropped a tube of lachesis as an artistic flourish—’

  He heard a distant trill of bells.

  ‘There’s someone at the door,’ said Robin, ‘I’d better—’

  ‘Check who it is, before you answer,’ said Strike. He had had a sudden presentiment.

  Her footsteps were muffled by what he knew was carpet.

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Mitch Patterson.’

  ‘Has he seen you?’

  ‘No, I’m upstairs.’

  ‘Then don’t answer.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  But her breathing had become noisy and ragged.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said, her voice constricted.

  ‘What’s he—?’

  ‘I’m going to go. I’ll call you later.’

  The line went dead.

  Strike lowered the mobile. Feeling a sudden heat in the fingers of the hand not holding his phone, he realised his cigarette had burned to the filter. Stubbing it out on the hot paving stone, he flicked it over the wall into the garden of a neighbour whom Nick and Ilsa disliked, and immediately lit another, thinking about Robin.

  He was concerned about her. It was to be expected, of course, that she was experiencing anxiety and stress after finding a body and being interviewed by the security services, but he had noticed lapses in concentration over the phone, where she asked him the same thing two or three times. There was also what he considered her unhealthy eagerness to get back to the office, or out on the street.

  Convinced that she ought to be taking some time out, Strike hadn’t told Robin about a line of investigation he was currently pursuing, because he was sure she would insist on being allowed to help.

  The fact was that, for Strike, the Chiswell case had begun, not with the dead man’s story of blackmail, but with Billy Knight’s tale of a strangled child wrapped in a pink blanket in the ground. Ever since Billy’s last plea for help, Strike had been phoning the telephone number from which it had been made. Finally, on the previous morning, he had got an answer from a curious passer-by, who had confirmed the phone box’s position on the edge of Trafalgar Square.

  Strike. That bastard soldier with the one leg. Billy’s fixated on him. Thinks he’s going to rescue him.

  Surely there was a chance, however tiny, that Billy might gravitate back to the place where he had last sought help? Strike had spent a few hours wandering Trafalgar Square on the previous afternoon, knowing how remote was the possibility that Billy would show up, yet feeling compelled to do something, however pointless.

  Strike’s other decision, which was even harder to justify, because it cost money the agency could currently ill afford, was to keep Barclay embedded with Jimmy and Flick.

  ‘It’s your money,’ the Glaswegian said, when the detective gave him this instruction, ‘but what’m I looking for?’

  ‘Billy,’ said Strike, ‘and in the absence of Billy, anything strange.’

  Of course, the next lot of accounts would show Robin exactly what Barclay was up to.

  Strike had a sudden feeling that he was being watched. Ossie, the bolder of Nick and Ilsa’s kittens, was sitting at the kitchen window, beside the kitchen taps, staring through the window with eyes of pale jade. His gaze felt judgmental.

  37

  I shall never conquer this completely. There will always be a doubt confronting me – a question.

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  Wary of breaching the conditions of the super-injunction, photographers stayed away from Chiswell’s funeral in Woolstone. News organisations restricted themselves to brief, factual announcements that the service had taken place. Strike, who had considered sending flowers, had decided against it on the basis that the gesture might be taken as a tasteless reminder that his bill remained unpaid. Meanwhile the inquest into Chiswell’s death was opened and adjourned, pending further investigations.

  And then, quite suddenly, nobody was very interested in Jasper Chiswell. It was as though the corpse that had been borne aloft for a week upon a swell of newsprint, gossip and rumour, now sank beneath stories of sportsmen and women, of Olympic preparations and predictions, the country in the grip of an almost universal preoccupation, for whether they approved or disapproved of the event, it was impossible to ignore or avoid.

  Robin was still phoning Strike daily, pressuring him to let her come back to work, but Strike continued to refuse. Not only had Mitch Patterson twice more appeared in her street, but an unfamiliar young busker had spent the whole week playing on the pavement opposite Strike’s office, missing chord changes every time he saw the detective and regularly breaking off halfway through songs to answer his mobile. The press, it seemed, had not forgotten that the Olympics would eventually end, and that there was still a juicy story to be run on the reason Jasper Chiswell had hired private detectives.

  None of Strike’s police contacts knew anything about the progress of their colleagues’ investigation into the case. Usually able to fall asleep under even the most unpropitious conditions, Strike found himself unusually restless and wakeful by night, listening to the increased noise from the London now heaving with Olympics visitors. The last time he had endured such a long stretch of sleeplessness had been his first week of consciousness after his leg had been borne off by the IED in Afg
hanistan. Then he had been kept awake by a tormenting itch impossible to scratch, because he felt it on his missing foot.

  Strike hadn’t seen Lorelei since the night of the Paralympic reception. After leaving Charlotte in the street, he had set off for Trafalgar Square to try and locate Billy, with the result that he had been even later to dinner with Lorelei than he had expected. Tired, sore, frustrated at his failure to find Billy and jarred by the unexpected meeting with his ex, he had arrived at the curry house in the expectation, and perhaps the hope, that Lorelei would have already left.