Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  Shortly after half past ten, they turned off the motorway onto a country road that wound down into the valley where the tiny village of Woolstone lay nestled. Robin parked beside a hedgerow full of Traveller’s Joy, so that Strike could reattach his prosthesis. Replacing her sunglasses in her handbag, Robin noticed two texts from Matthew. They had arrived two hours earlier, but the alert of her mobile must have been drowned out by the racket of the Land Rover.

  The first read:

  All day. What about Tom?

  The second, which had been sent ten minutes later, said:

  Ignore last, was meant for work.

  Robin was rereading these when Strike said:

  ‘Shit.’

  He had already reattached his prosthesis, and was staring through his window at something she could not see.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look at that.’

  Strike pointed back up the hill down which they had just driven. Robin ducked her head so that she could see what had caught his attention.

  A gigantic prehistoric white chalk figure had been cut into the hillside. To Robin, it resembled a stylised leopard, but the realisation of what it was supposed to be had already hit her when Strike said:

  ‘“Up by the horse. He strangled the kid, up by the horse.”’

  42

  In a family there is always something or other going awry . . .

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  A flaking wooden sign marked the turning to Chiswell House. The drive, which was overgrown and full of potholes, was bordered on the left by a dense patch of woodland and on the right, by a long field that had been separated into paddocks by electric fences, and contained a number of horses. As the Land Rover lurched and rumbled towards the out-of-sight house, two of the largest horses, spooked by the noisy and unfamiliar car, took off. A chain reaction then occurred, as most of their companions began to canter around, too, the original pair kicking out at each other as they went.

  ‘Wow,’ said Robin, watching the horses as the Land Rover swayed over the uneven ground. ‘She’s got stallions in together.’

  ‘That’s bad, is it?’ asked Strike, as a hairy creature the colour of jet lashed out with teeth and back legs at an equally large animal he would have categorised as brown, though doubtless the coat colour had some rarefied equine name.

  ‘It’s not usually done,’ said Robin, wincing as the black stallion’s rear legs made contact with its companion’s flank.

  They turned a corner and saw a plain-faced neo-classical house of dirty yellow stone. The gravelled forecourt, like the drive, had several potholes and was strewn with weeds, the windows were grubby and a large tub of horse feed sat incongruously beside the front door. Three cars were already sitting there: a red Audi Q3, a racing green Range Rover and an old and muddy Grand Vitara. To the right of the house lay a stable block and to the left, a wide croquet lawn that had long since been given over to the daisies. More dense woodland lay beyond.

  As Robin braked, an overweight black Labrador and a rough-coated terrier came shooting out of the front door, both barking. The Labrador seemed keen to make friends but the Norfolk terrier, which had a face like a malevolent monkey, barked and growled until a fair-haired man, dressed in stripy shirt and mustard-coloured corduroy trousers, appeared at the doorway and bellowed:

  ‘SHUT UP, RATTENBURY!’

  Cowed, the dog subsided into low growls, all directed at Strike.

  ‘Torquil D’Amery,’ drawled the fair-haired man, approaching Strike with his hand outstretched. There were deep pockets beneath his pale blue eyes and his shiny pink face looked as though it never needed a razor. ‘Ignore the dog, he’s a bloody menace.’

  ‘Cormoran Strike. This is—’

  Robin had just held out her hand when Kinvara erupted out of the house, wearing old jodhpurs and a washed-out T-shirt, her loose red hair falling everywhere.

  ‘For God’s sake . . . don’t you know anything about horses?’ she shrieked at Strike and Robin. ‘Why did you come up the drive so fast?’

  ‘You should wear a hard hat if you’re going in there, Kinvara!’ Torquil called at her retreating figure, but she stormed away giving no sign that she had heard him. ‘Not your fault,’ he assured Strike and Robin, rolling his eyes. ‘Got to take the drive at speed or you’ll get stuck in one of the bloody holes, ha ha. Come on in – ah, here’s Izzy.’

  Izzy emerged from the house, wearing a navy shirtdress, the sapphire cross still around her neck. To Robin’s slight surprise, she embraced Strike as though he was an old friend come to offer condolences.

  ‘Hi, Izzy,’ he said, taking half a step backwards to extricate himself from the embrace. ‘You know Robin, obviously.’

  ‘Oh, yah, got to get used to calling you “Robin” now,’ said Izzy, smiling and kissing Robin on both cheeks. ‘Sorry if I slip up and call you Venetia – I’m bound to, that’s how I still think of you.

  ‘Did you hear about the Winns?’ she asked, in almost the same breath.

  They nodded.

  ‘Horrible, horrible little man,’ said Izzy. ‘I’m delighted Della’s given him the push.

  ‘Anyway, come along in . . . where’s Kinvara?’ she asked her brother-in-law as she led them into the house, which seemed gloomy after the brightness outside.

  ‘Bloody horses are upset again,’ said Torquil, over the renewed barking of the Norfolk terrier. ‘No, fuck off, Rattenbury, you’re staying outside.’

  He banged the front door closed on the terrier, which began to whine and scratch at it instead. The Labrador padded quietly in Izzy’s wake as she led them through a dingy hallway with wide stone stairs, into a drawing room on the right.

  Long windows faced out over the croquet lawn and the woods. As they entered, three white-blond children raced through the overgrown grass outside with raucous cries, then passed out of sight. There was nothing of modernity about them. In their dress and their hairstyles they might have walked straight out of the 1940s.

  ‘They’re Torquil and Fizzy’s,’ said Izzy fondly.

  ‘Guilty as charged,’ said Torquil, proudly. ‘M’wife’s upstairs, I’ll go and get her.’

  As Robin turned away from the window she caught a whiff of a strong, heady scent that gave her an unaccountable feeling of tension until she spotted the vase of stargazer lilies standing on a table behind a sofa. They matched the faded curtains, once scarlet and now a washed-out pale rose, and the frayed fabric on the walls, where two patches of darker crimson showed that pictures had been removed. Everything was threadbare and worn. Over the mantelpiece hung one of the few remaining paintings, which showed a stabled horse with a splashy brown and white coat, its nose touching a starkly white foal curled in the straw.

  Beneath this painting, and standing so quietly that they had not immediately noticed him, was Raphael. With his back to the empty grate, hands in the pockets of his jeans, he appeared more Italian than ever in this very English room, with its faded tapestry cushions, its gardening books piled in a heap on a small table and its chipped Chinoiserie lamps.

  ‘Hi, Raff,’ said Robin.

  ‘Hello, Robin,’ he said, unsmiling.

  ‘This is Cormoran Strike, Raff,’ said Izzy. Raphael didn’t move, so Strike walked over to him to shake hands, which Raphael did reluctantly, returning his hand to his jeans immediately afterwards.

  ‘Yah, so, Fizz and I were just talking about Winn,’ said Izzy, who seemed greatly preoccupied with the news of the Winns’ split. ‘We just hope to God he’s going to keep his mouth shut, because now Papa’s gorn, he can say whatever he likes about him and get away with it, can’t he?’

  ‘You’ve got the goods on Winn, if he tries,’ Strike reminded her.

  She cast him a look of glowing gratitude.

  ‘You’re right, of course, and we wouldn’t have that if it weren’t for you . . . and Venetia – Robin, I mean,’ she added, as an afterthought.

  ‘Torks, I’m downstairs!’ bellowed
a woman from just outside the room, and a woman who was unmistakably Izzy’s sister backed into the room carrying a laden tray. She was older, heavily freckled and weather-beaten, her blonde hair streaked with silver, and she wore a striped shirt very like her husband’s, though she had twinned hers with pearls. ‘TORKS!’ she bellowed at the ceiling, making Robin jump. ‘I’M DOWN HERE!’

  She set the tray with a clatter on the needlepoint ottoman that stood in front of Raff and the fireplace.

  ‘Hi, I’m Fizzy. Where’s Kinvara gorn?’

  ‘Faffing around with the horses,’ said Izzy, edging around the sofa and sitting down. ‘Excuse not to be here, I expect. Grab a pew, you two.’

  Strike and Robin took two sagging armchairs that stood side by side, at right angles to the sofa. The springs beneath them seemed to have worn out decades ago. Robin felt Raphael’s eyes on her.

  ‘Izz tells me you know Charlie Campbell,’ Fizzy said to Strike, pouring everybody tea.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Strike.

  ‘Lucky man,’ said Torquil, who had just re-entered the room.

  Strike gave no sign he had heard this.

  ‘Did you ever meet Jonty Peters?’ Fizzy continued. ‘Friend of the Campbells? He had something to do with the police . . . no, Badger, these aren’t for you . . . Torks, what did Jonty Peters do?’

  ‘Magistrate,’ said Torquil promptly.

  ‘Yah, of course,’ said Fizzy, ‘magistrate. Did you ever meet Jonty, Cormoran?’

  ‘No,’ said Strike, ‘afraid not.’

  ‘He was married to what’s-her-name, lovely gel, Annabel. Did masses for Save the Children, got her CBE last year, so well-deserved. Oh, but if you knew the Campbells, you must have met Rory Moncrieff?’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ said Strike patiently, wondering what Fizzy would have said if he’d told her that the Campbells had kept him as far from their friends and family as was possible. Perhaps she was equal even to that: oh, but then, you must have run across Basil Plumley? They loathed him, yah, violent alcoholic, but his wife did climb Kilimanjaro for Dogs Trust . . .

  Torquil pushed the fat Labrador away from the biscuits and it ambled away into a corner, where it flopped down for a doze. Fizzy sat down between her husband and Izzy on the sofa.

  ‘I don’t know whether Kinvara’s intending to come back,’ said Izzy. ‘We might as well get started.’

  Strike asked whether the family had heard any more about the progress of the police investigation. There was a tiny pause, during which the distant shrieks of children echoed across the overgrown lawn.

  ‘We don’t know much more than I’ve already told you,’ said Izzy, ‘though I think we all get the sense – don’t we?’ she appealed to the other family members, ‘that the police think it’s suicide. On the other hand, they clearly feel they have to investigate thoroughly—’

  ‘That’s because of who he was, Izz,’ Torquil interrupted. ‘Minister of the Crown, obviously they’re going to look into it more deeply than they would for the bloke in the street. You should know, Cormoran,’ he said portentously, adjusting his substantial weight on the sofa, ‘sorry, gels, but I’m going to say it – personally, I think it was suicide.

  ‘I understand, of course I do, that that’s a hard thought to bear, and don’t think I’m not happy you’ve been brought in!’ he assured Strike. ‘If it puts the gels’ minds at rest, that’s all to the good. But the, ah, male contingent of the family – eh, Raff? – think there’s nothing more to it than, well, m’father-in-law felt he couldn’t go on. Happens. Not in his right mind, clearly. Eh, Raff?’ repeated Torquil.

  Raphael did not seem to relish the implicit order. Ignoring his brother-in-law, he addressed Strike directly.

  ‘My father was acting strangely in the last couple of weeks. I didn’t understand why, at the time. Nobody had told me he was being blackm—’

  ‘We’re not going into that,’ said Torquil quickly. ‘We agreed. Family decision.’

  Izzy said anxiously:

  ‘Cormoran, I know you wanted to know what Papa was being blackmailed about—’

  ‘Jasper broke no law,’ said Torquil firmly, ‘and that’s the end of it. I’m sure you’re discreet,’ he said to Strike, ‘but these things get out, they always do. We don’t want the papers crawling all over us again. We’re agreed, aren’t we?’ he demanded of his wife.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Fizzy, who seemed conflicted. ‘No, of course we don’t want it all over the papers, but Jimmy Knight had good reason to wish Papa harm, Torks, and I think it’s important Cormoran knows that, at least. You know he was here, in Woolstone, this week?’

  ‘No,’ said Torquil, ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Yah, Mrs Ankill saw him,’ said Fizzy. ‘He asked her whether she’d seen his brother.’

  ‘Poor little Billy,’ said Izzy vaguely. ‘He wasn’t right. Well, you wouldn’t be, would you, if you were brought up by Jack o’Kent? Papa was out with the dogs one night years ago,’ she told Strike and Robin, ‘and he saw Jack kicking Billy, literally kicking him, all around their garden. The boy was naked. When he saw Papa, Jack o’Kent stopped, of course.’

  The idea that this incident should have been reported to either police or social work seemed not to have occurred to Izzy, or indeed her father. It was as though Jack o’Kent and his son were wild creatures in the wood, behaving, regrettably, as such animals naturally behaved.

  ‘I think the less said about Jack o’Kent,’ said Torquil, ‘the better. And you say Jimmy had reason to wish your father harm, Fizz, but what he really wanted was money, and killing your father certainly wasn’t going—’

  ‘He was angry with Papa, though,’ said Fizzy determinedly. ‘Maybe, when he realised Papa wasn’t going to pay up, he saw red. He was a holy terror when he was a teenager,’ she told Strike. ‘Got into far-left politics early. He used to be down in the local pub with the Butcher brothers, telling everybody that Tories should be hung, drawn and quartered, trying to sell people the Socialist Worker . . . ’

  Fizzy glanced sideways at her younger sister, who rather determinedly, Strike thought, ignored her.

  ‘He was trouble, always trouble,’ Fizzy said. ‘The girls liked him, but—’

  The drawing room door opened and, to the rest of the family’s evident surprise, Kinvara strode in, flushed and agitated. After a little difficulty extricating himself from his sagging armchair, Strike succeeded in standing up and held out a hand.

  ‘Cormoran Strike. How do you do?’

  Kinvara looked as though she would have liked to ignore his friendly overture, but shook the offered hand with bad grace. Torquil pulled up another chair beside the ottoman, and Fizzy poured an extra cup of tea.

  ‘Horses all right, Kinvara?’ Torquil asked heartily.

  ‘Well, Mystic’s taken another chunk out of Romano,’ she said with a nasty glance at Robin, ‘so I’ve had to call the vet again. He gets upset every time somebody comes up the drive too fast, otherwise he’s absolutely fine.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’ve put the stallions in together, Kinvara,’ said Fizzy.

  ‘It’s a myth that they don’t get along,’ Kinvara snapped back. ‘Bachelor herds are perfectly common in the wild. There was a study in Switzerland that proved they can coexist peacefully once they’ve established the hierarchy among themselves.’

  She spoke in dogmatic, almost fanatic, tones.

  ‘We were just telling Cormoran about Jimmy Knight,’ Fizzy told Kinvara.

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to go into—?’

  ‘Not the blackmail,’ said Torquil hastily, ‘but what a horror he was when he was younger.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Kinvara, ‘I see.’

  ‘Your stepdaughter’s worried that he may have had something to do with your husband’s death,’ said Strike, watching her for a reaction.

  ‘I know,’ said Kinvara, with apparent indifference, her eyes following Raphael, who had just walked away from the grate to fetch a pack of M
arlboro Lights that lay beside a table lamp. ‘I never knew Jimmy Knight. The first time I ever laid eyes on him was when he turned up at the house a year ago to speak to Jasper. There’s an ashtray beneath that magazine, Raphael.’

  Her stepson lit his cigarette and returned, carrying the ashtray, which he placed on a table beside Robin, before resuming his position in front of the empty fireplace.

  ‘That was the start of it,’ Kinvara continued. ‘The blackmail. Jasper wasn’t actually there that night, so Jimmy talked to me. Jasper was furious when he came home and I told him.’

  Strike waited. He suspected that he wasn’t the only one in the room who thought Kinvara might break the family vow of omerta and blurt out what Jimmy had come to say. She refrained, however, so Strike drew out his notebook.