Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  ‘Go on,’ said Strike.

  ‘Well, actually,’ said Robin, ‘I was going to say he was quite nice to me, the day I found out all about the Level Playing Field.’

  ‘This was when he offered you a job?’

  ‘Yes, and he said he might have a bit more work for me, once I’d got rid of Winn and Knight.’

  ‘Did he?’ said Strike, curiously. ‘You never told me that.’

  ‘Didn’t I? No, I don’t suppose I did.’

  And like Strike, she remembered the week that he had been laid up at Lorelei’s, followed by the hours at the hospital with Jack.

  ‘I went over to his office, as I told you, and he was on the phone to some hotel about a money clip he’d lost. It was Freddie’s. After Chiswell got off the phone, I told him about the Level Playing Field and he was happier than I ever saw him. “One by one, they trip themselves up”,’ he said.

  ‘Interesting,’ panted Strike, whose leg was now killing him. ‘So you think Raphael’s smarting about the will, do you?’

  Robin, who thought she caught a sardonic note in Strike’s voice, said:

  ‘It isn’t just money—’

  ‘People always say that,’ he grunted. ‘It is the money, and it isn’t. Because what is money? Freedom, security, pleasure, a fresh chance . . . I think there’s more to be got out of Raphael,’ said Strike, ‘and I think you’re going to have to be the one to do it.’

  ‘What else can he tell us?’

  ‘I’d like a bit more clarity on that phone call Chiswell made to him, right before that bag went over his head,’ panted Strike, who was now in considerable pain. ‘It doesn’t make much sense to me, because even if Chiswell knew he was about to kill himself, there were people far better placed to keep Kinvara company than a stepson she didn’t like who was miles away in London.

  ‘Trouble is, the call makes even less sense if it was murder. There’s something,’ said Strike, ‘we aren’t being t – ah. Thank Christ.’

  Steda Cottage had just come into view in a clearing ahead of them. The garden, which was surrounded by a broken-down fence, was now almost as overgrown as its surroundings. The building was squat, made of dark stone and clearly derelict, with a yawning hole in the roof and cracks in most of the windows.

  ‘Sit down,’ Robin advised Strike, pointing him towards a large tree stump just outside the cottage fence. In too much pain to argue, he did as she instructed, while Robin picked her way towards the front door and gave it a little push, but found it locked. Wading through knee-length grass, she peered one by one through the grimy windows. The rooms were thick with dust and empty. The only sign of any previous occupant was in the kitchen, where a filthy mug bearing a picture of Johnny Cash sat alone on a stained surface.

  ‘Doesn’t look as though anyone’s lived here for years, and no sign of anyone sleeping rough,’ she informed Strike, emerging from the other side of the cottage.

  Strike, who had just lit a cigarette, made no answer. He was staring down into a large hollow in the woodland floor, around twenty feet square, bordered with trees and full of nettles, tangled thorn and towering weeds.

  ‘Would you call that a dell?’ he asked her.

  Robin peered down into the basin-like indentation.

  ‘I’d say it’s more like a dell than anything else we’ve passed,’ she said.

  ‘“He strangled the kid and they buried it, down in the dell by our dad’s house”,’ quoted Strike.

  ‘I’ll have a look,’ said Robin. ‘You stay here.’

  ‘No,’ said Strike, raising a hand to stop her, ‘you’re not going to find anything—’

  But Robin was already sliding her way down the steep edges of the ‘dell’, the thorns snagging at her jeans as she descended.

  It was extremely difficult to move around once she reached the bottom. Nettles came up almost to her waist and she held up her hands to avoid scratches and stings. Milk parsley and wood avens speckled the dark green with white and yellow. The long thorny branches of wild roses curled like barbed wire everywhere she trod.

  ‘Watch yourself,’ said Strike, feeling impotent as he watched her struggle along, scratching or stinging herself at every other step.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Robin, peering at the ground beneath the wild vegetation. If anything had been buried here, it had long since been covered by plants, and digging would be a very difficult business. She said as much to Strike, as she bent low to see what lay underneath a dense patch of bramble.

  ‘Doubt Kinvara would be happy with us digging, anyway,’ said Strike, and as he said it, he remembered Billy’s words: She wouldn’t let me dig, but she’d let you.

  ‘Wait,’ said Robin, sounding tense.

  In spite of the fact that he knew perfectly well she could not have found anything, Strike tensed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s something in there,’ said Robin, moving her head from side to side, the better to see into a thick patch of nettles, right in the centre of the dell.

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘What?’ Strike repeated. Although far higher up than her, he could make out nothing whatsoever in the nettle patch. ‘What can you see?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . I might be imagining it.’ She hesitated. ‘You haven’t got gloves, I suppose?’

  ‘No. Robin, don’t—’

  But she had already walked into the patch of nettles, her hands raised, stamping them down at the base wherever she could, flattening them as much as possible. Strike saw her bend over and pull something out of the ground. Straightening up, she stood quite still, her red-gold head bowed over whatever she had found, until Strike said impatiently:

  ‘What is it?’

  Her hair fell away from a face that looked pale against the morass of dark green in which she stood, as she held up a small, wooden cross.

  ‘No, stay there,’ she ordered him, as he moved automatically towards the edge of the dell to help her climb out. ‘I’m fine.’

  She was, in fact, covered in scratches and nettle stings, but deciding that a few more would hardly count, Robin pushed her way more forcefully out of the dell, using her hands to pull herself up the steep sides until she came close enough for Strike to reach out a hand and help her the last few feet.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said breathlessly.

  ‘Looks like it’s been there years,’ she said, rubbing earth from the bottom, which was pointed, the better to stick into the ground. The wood was damp and stained.

  ‘Something was written on it,’ said Strike, taking it from her and squinting at the slimy surface.

  ‘Where?’ said Robin. Her hair grazed his cheek as they stood close beside each other, staring at the very faint residue of what looked like felt tip, long since washed away by rain and dew.

  ‘That looks like a kid’s writing,’ said Robin quietly.

  ‘That’s an “S”,’ said Strike, ‘and at the end . . . is that a “g” or a “y”?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ whispered Robin.

  They stood in silence, contemplating the cross, until the faint, echoing barks of Rattenbury the Norfolk terrier pierced their reverie.

  ‘We’re still on Kinvara’s property,’ said Robin nervously.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Strike, keeping hold of the cross as he began to lumber back the way they had come, teeth gritted against the pain in his leg. ‘Let’s find a pub. I’m starving.’

  44

  But there are so many sorts of white horses in this world, Mrs. Helseth . . .

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  ‘Of course,’ said Robin, as they drove towards the village, ‘a cross sticking out of the ground doesn’t mean there’s anything buried beneath it.’

  ‘True,’ said Strike, who had needed most of his breath on the return walk for the frequent obscenities he uttered as he stumbled and skidded on the forest floor, ‘but it makes you think, doesn’t it?’

  Robin said nothing. Her hands on the steering wheel were covered in nettle
stings that prickled and burned.

  The country inn they reached five minutes later was the very image of picture-postcard England, a white, timbered building with leaded bay windows, moss-covered slates on the roof and climbing red roses around the door. A beer garden with parasols completed the picture. Robin turned the Land Rover into the small car park opposite.

  ‘This is getting stupid,’ muttered Strike, who had left the cross on the dashboard and was now climbing out of the car, staring at the pub.

  ‘What is?’ asked Robin, coming around the back of the car to join him.

  ‘It’s called the White Horse.’

  ‘After the one up the hill,’ said Robin, as they set off across the road together. ‘Look at the sign.’

  Painted on the board atop a wooden pole was the strange chalk figure they had seen earlier.

  ‘The pub where I met Jimmy Knight the first time was called the White Horse, too,’ said Strike.

  ‘The White Horse,’ said Robin, as they walked up the steps into the beer garden, Strike’s limp now more pronounced than ever, ‘is one of the ten most popular pub names in Britain. I read it in some article. Quick, those people are leaving – grab their table, I’ll get the drinks.’

  The low-ceilinged pub was busy inside. Robin headed first for the Ladies where she stripped off her jacket, tied it around her waist and washed her smarting hands. She wished that she had managed to find dock leaves on the journey back from Steda Cottage, but most of her attention on the return walk had been given to Strike who had nearly fallen twice more and hobbled on looking furious with himself, repelling offers of assistance with bad grace and leaning heavily on the walking stick she had fashioned from a branch.

  The mirror showed Robin that she was dishevelled and grubby compared to the prosperous middle-aged people she had just seen in the bar, but being in a hurry to return to Strike and review the morning’s activities, she merely dragged a brush through her hair, wiped a green stain off her neck and returned to queue for drinks.

  ‘Cheers, Robin,’ said Strike gratefully, when she returned to him with a pint of Arkell’s Wiltshire Gold, shoving the menu across the table to her. ‘Ah, that’s good,’ he sighed, taking a swig. ‘So what’s the most popular one?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The most popular pub name. You said the White Horse is in the top ten.’

  ‘Oh, right . . . it’s either the Red Lion or the Crown, I can’t remember which.’

  ‘The Victory’s my real local,’ said Strike reminiscently.

  He had not been back to Cornwall in two years. He saw the pub now in his mind’s eye, a squat building of whitewashed Cornish stone, the steps beside it winding down to the bay. It was the pub in which he had first managed to get served without ID, sixteen years old and dumped back at his uncle and aunt’s for a few weeks, while his mother’s life went through one of its regular bouts of upheaval.

  ‘Ours is the Bay Horse,’ said Robin, and she, too, had a sudden vision of a pub from what she would always think of as home, also white, standing on a street that led off the market square in Masham. It was there that she had celebrated her A-level results with her friends, the same night that Matthew and she had got into a stupid row, and he had left, and she had refused to follow, but remained with her friends.

  ‘Why “bay”?’ asked Strike, now halfway down his pint and luxuriating in the sunshine, his sore leg stretched out in front of him. ‘Why not just “brown”?’

  ‘Well, there are brown horses,’ said Robin, ‘but bay means something different. Black points: legs, mane and tail.’

  ‘What colour was your pony – Angus, wasn’t it?’

  ‘How did you remember that?’ asked Robin, surprised.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Strike. ‘Same as you remembering pub names. Some things stick, don’t they?’

  ‘He was grey.’

  ‘Meaning white. It’s all just jargon to confuse non-riding plebs, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ said Robin, laughing. ‘Grey horses have black skin under the white hair. True whites—’

  ‘—die young,’ said Strike, as a barmaid arrived to take their order. Having ordered a burger, Strike lit another cigarette and as the nicotine hit his brain, felt a wave of something close to euphoria. A pint, a hot day in August, a well-paid job, food on the way and Robin, sitting across from him, their friendship restored, if not entirely to what it had been before her honeymoon, then perhaps as close as was possible, now that she was married. Right now, in this sunny beer garden, and in spite of the pain in his leg, his tiredness and the unresolved mess that was his relationship with Lorelei, life felt simple and hopeful.

  ‘Group interviews are never a good idea,’ he said, exhaling away from Robin’s face, ‘but there were some interesting crosscurrents among the Chiswells, weren’t there? I’m going to keep working on Izzy. I think she might be a bit more forthcoming without the family around.’

  Izzy will like being worked on, Robin thought, as she took out her mobile.

  ‘I’ve got something to show you. Look.’

  She brought up her photograph of Freddie Chiswell’s birthday party.

  ‘That,’ she said, pointing at the girl’s pale, unhappy face, ‘is Rhiannon Winn. She was at Freddie Chiswell’s eighteenth birthday party. Turns out—’ she scrolled back a picture, to show the group in white tunics, ‘they were on the British fencing team together.’

  ‘Christ, of course,’ said Strike, taking the phone from Robin. ‘The sword – the sword in Ebury Street. I bet it was Freddie’s!’

  ‘Of course!’ echoed Robin, wondering why she hadn’t realised that before.

  ‘That can’t be long before she killed herself,’ said Strike, scrutinising more closely the miserable figure of Rhiannon Winn at the birthday party. ‘And – bloody hell, that’s Jimmy Knight behind her. What’s he doing at a public schoolboy’s eighteenth?’

  ‘Free drink?’ suggested Robin.

  Strike gave a small snort of amusement as he handed back Robin’s phone.

  ‘Sometimes the obvious answer is the right one. Was I imagining Izzy looking self-conscious when the story of Jimmy’s teenage sex appeal came up?’

  ‘No,’ said Robin, ‘I noticed that, too.’

  ‘Nobody wants us to talk to Jimmy’s old mates the Butcher brothers, either.’

  ‘Because they know more than where their sister works?’

  Strike sipped his beer, thinking back to what Chiswell had told him the first time they’d met.

  ‘Chiswell said other people were involved in whatever he did to get blackmailed, but they had a lot to lose if it got out.’

  He took out his notebook and contemplated his own spiky, hard-to-read handwriting, while Robin sat peacefully enjoying the quiet chatter of the beer garden. A lazy bee buzzed nearby, reminding her of the lavender walk at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, where she and Matthew had spent their anniversary. It was best not to compare how she felt now to the way she had felt then.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Strike, tapping the open notebook with his pen, ‘the Butcher brothers agreed to take on horse-slashing duties for Jimmy while he was in London? I always thought he might have mates back down here who could’ve taken care of that side of things. But we’ll let Izzy get Tegan’s whereabouts out of them before we approach them. Don’t want to upset the client unless it’s absolutely necessary.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Robin. ‘I wonder . . . d’you think Jimmy met them when he came down here looking for Billy?’

  ‘Could well have done,’ said Strike, nodding over his notes. ‘Very interesting, that. From what they said to each other on that march, Jimmy and Flick knew where Billy was at the time. They were off to see him when my hamstring went. Now they’ve lost him again . . . you know, I’d give a hell of a lot to find Billy. That’s where all of this started and we’re still—’

  He broke off as their food arrived: a burger with blue cheese on it for Strike, and a bowl of chilli for Robin.

  ‘We�
�re still?’ prompted Robin, as the barmaid moved away.

  ‘ . . . none the wiser,’ said Strike, ‘about the kid he claims he saw die. I didn’t want to ask the Chiswells about Suki Lewis, or not yet. Best not to suggest I’m interested in anyone but Chiswell’s death right now.’

  He picked up his burger and took an enormous bite, his eyes unfocused, staring out over the road. After demolishing half of his burger, Strike turned back to his notes.

  ‘Things to be done,’ he announced, picking up his pen again. ‘I want to find this cleaning woman Jasper Chiswell laid off. She had a key for a bit and she might be able to tell us how and when the helium got into the house.