Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  ‘Why are you asking me that?’ Della said, in a changed tone.

  ‘Because I’d like to corroborate a story I’ve heard,’ said Strike.

  ‘You mean, that Aamir was here with me, that morning?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well, that’s quite true. I’d slipped downstairs and sprained my wrist. I called Aamir and he came over. He wanted me to go to casualty, but there was no need. I could still move all my fingers. I simply needed some help managing breakfast and so on.’

  ‘You called Mallik?’

  ‘What?’ she said.

  It was the age-old, transparent ‘what?’ of the person who is afraid they’ve made a mistake. Strike guessed that some very rapid thinking was going on behind the dark glasses.

  ‘You called Aamir?’

  ‘Why? What does he say happened?’

  ‘He says your husband went in person to fetch him from his house.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Della and then, ‘of course, yes, I forgot.’

  ‘Did you?’ asked Strike gently. ‘Or are you backing up their story?’

  ‘I forgot,’ Della repeated firmly. ‘When I said I “called” him I wasn’t talking about the telephone. I meant that I called “on” him. Via Geraint.’

  ‘But if Geraint was here when you slipped, couldn’t he have helped you with your breakfast?’

  ‘I think Geraint wanted Aamir to help persuade me to go to casualty.’

  ‘Right. So it was Geraint’s idea to go to Aamir, rather than yours?’

  ‘I can’t remember now,’ she said, but then, contradicting herself, ‘I’d fallen rather heavily. Geraint has a bad back, naturally he wanted help and I thought of Aamir, and then the pair of them nagged me to go to A&E, but there was no need. It was a simple sprain.’

  The light was now fading beyond the net curtains. Della’s black lenses reflected the neon red of the dying sun above the rooftops.

  ‘I’m extremely worried about Aamir,’ she said again, in a strained voice.

  ‘A couple more questions and I’m done,’ Strike replied. ‘Jasper Chiswell hinted in front of a roomful of people that he knew something disreputable about Mallik. Can you tell me anything about that?’

  ‘Yes, well, it was that conversation,’ said Della quietly, ‘that first made Aamir think about resigning. I could feel him pulling away from me after it happened. And then you finished the job, didn’t you? You went to his house, to taunt him further.’

  ‘There was no taunting, Mrs Winn—’

  ‘Liwat, Mr Strike, did you never learn what that meant all the time you were in the Middle East?’

  ‘Yeah, I know what it means,’ said Strike matter-of-factly. ‘Sodomy. Chiswell seemed to be threatening Aamir with exposure—’

  ‘Aamir wouldn’t suffer from exposure of the truth, I assure you!’ said Della fiercely. ‘Not that it matters a jot, but he doesn’t happen to be gay!’

  The Brahms symphony continued on what, to Strike, was its gloomy and intermittently sinister course, horns and violins competing to jar the nerves.

  ‘You want the truth?’ said Della loudly. ‘Aamir objected to being groped and harassed, felt up by a senior civil servant, whose inappropriate touching of young men passing through his office is an open secret, even a joke! And when a comprehensive-educated Muslim boy loses his cool and smacks a senior civil servant, which of the two do you imagine finds themselves smeared and stigmatised? Which of them, do you think, becomes the subject of derogatory rumours, and is forced out of a job?’

  ‘I’m guessing,’ said Strike, ‘not Sir Christopher Barrowclough-Burns.’

  ‘How did you know whom I was talking about?’ said Della sharply.

  ‘Still in the post, is he?’ asked Strike, ignoring the question.

  ‘Of course he is! Everybody knows about his harmless little ways, but nobody wants to go on the record. I’ve been trying to get something done about Barrowclough-Burns for years. When I heard Aamir had left the diversity programme in murky circumstances, I made it my business to find him. He was in a pitiable state when I first made contact with him, absolutely pitiable. Quite apart from the derailing of what should have been a stellar career, there was a malicious cousin who’d heard some gossip and spread the rumour that Aamir had been fired for homosexual activity at work.

  ‘Well, Aamir’s father isn’t the sort of man to look kindly on a gay son. Aamir had been resisting his parents’ pressure to marry a girl they thought suitable. There was a terrible row and a complete breach. This brilliant young man lost everything, family, home and job, in the space of a couple of weeks.’

  ‘So you stepped in?’

  ‘Geraint and I had an empty property around the corner. Both our mothers used to live there. Neither Geraint nor I have siblings. It had become too difficult to manage our mothers’ care from London, so we brought them up from Wales and housed them together, around the corner. Geraint’s mother died two years ago, mine this, so the house was empty. We didn’t need the rent. It seemed only sensible to let Aamir stay there.’

  ‘And this was nothing but disinterested kindness?’ Strike said. ‘You weren’t thinking of how useful he might be to you, when you gave him a job and a house?’

  ‘What d’you mean, “useful”? He’s a very intelligent young man, any office would be—’

  ‘Your husband was pressuring Aamir to get incriminating information on Jasper Chiswell from the Foreign Office, Mrs Winn. Photographs. He was pressuring Aamir to go to Sir Christopher for pictures.’

  Della reached out for her glass of wine, missed the stem by inches and hit the glass with her knuckles. Strike lunged forwards to try and catch it, but too late: a whip-like trail of red wine described a parabola in the air and spattered the beige carpet, the glass falling with a thud beside it. Gwynn got up and approached the spill with mild interest, sniffing the spreading stain.

  ‘How bad is it?’ asked Della urgently, her fingers grasping the arms of her chair, her face inclined to the floor.

  ‘Not good,’ said Strike.

  ‘Salt, please . . . put salt on it. In the cupboard to the right of the cooker!’

  Turning on the light as he entered the kitchen, Strike’s attention was caught for the first time by an odd something he had failed to spot on his previous entry into the room: an envelope stuck high up on a wall-mounted cabinet to the right, too high for Della to reach. Having grabbed the salt out of the cupboard he made a detour to read the single word written on it: Geraint.

  ‘To the right of the cooker!’ Della called a little desperately from the sitting room.

  ‘Ah, the right!’ Strike shouted back, as he tugged down the envelope and slit it open.

  Inside was a receipt from ‘Kennedy Bros. Joiners’, for the replacement of a bathroom door. Strike licked his finger, dampened down the envelope flap, resealed it as best he could and stuck it back where he had found it.

  ‘Sorry,’ he told Della, re-entering the room. ‘It was right in front of me and I didn’t notice.’

  He twisted the top of the cardboard tub and poured salt liberally over the purple stain. The Brahms symphony came to an end as he straightened up, dubious as to the likely success of the home remedy.

  ‘Have you done it?’ Della whispered into the silence.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Strike, watching the wine rising into the white and turning it a dirty grey. ‘I think you’re still going to need a carpet cleaner, though.’

  ‘Oh dear . . . the carpet was new this year.’

  She seemed deeply shaken, though whether this was entirely due to the spilled wine was, Strike thought, debatable. As he returned to the sofa and set down the salt beside the coffee, music started up again, this time a Hungarian air that was no more restful than the symphony, but weirdly manic.

  ‘Would you like more wine?’ he asked her.

  ‘I – yes, I think I would,’ she said.

  He poured her another and passed it directly into her hand. She drank a little, then said sha
kily:

  ‘How could you know what you just told me, Mr Strike?’

  ‘I’d rather not answer that, but I assure you it’s true.’

  Clutching her wine in both hands Della said:

  ‘You have to find Aamir for me. If he thought I sanctioned Geraint telling him to go to Barrowclough-Burns for favours, it’s no wonder he—’

  Her self-control was visibly disintegrating. She tried to set the wine down on the arm of her chair and had to feel for it with the other hand before doing so successfully, all the while shaking her head in little jerks of disbelief.

  ‘No wonder he what?’ asked Strike quietly.

  ‘Accused me of . . . of smothering . . . controlling . . . well, of course, this explains everything . . . we were so close – you wouldn’t understand – it’s hard to explain – but it was remarkable, how soon we became – well, like family. Sometimes, you know, there’s an instant affinity – a connection that years couldn’t forge, with other people—

  ‘But these past few weeks, it all changed – I could feel it – starting when Chiswell made that jibe in front of everyone – Aamir became distant. It was as though he no longer trusted me . . . I should have known . . . oh Lord, I should have known . . . you have to find him, you have to . . . ’

  Perhaps, Strike thought, the depth of her burning sense of need was sexual in origin, and perhaps on some subconscious level it had indeed been tinged with appreciation of Aamir’s youthful masculinity. However, as Rhiannon Winn watched over them from her cheap gilt frame, wearing a smile that didn’t reach her wide, anxious eyes, her teeth glinting with heavy braces, Strike thought it far more likely that Della was a woman possessed of that which Charlotte so conspicuously lacked: a burning, frustrated maternal drive tinged, in Della’s case, with unassuageable regret.

  ‘This as well,’ she whispered. ‘This as well. What hasn’t he ruined?’

  ‘You’re talking about—’

  ‘My husband!’ said Della numbly. ‘Who else? My charity – our charity – but you know that, of course? It was you who told Chiswell about the missing twenty-five thousand, wasn’t it? And the lies, the stupid lies, Geraint’s been telling people? David Beckham, Mo Farah – all those impossible promises?’

  ‘My partner found out.’

  ‘Nobody will believe me,’ said Della distractedly, ‘but I didn’t know, I had no idea. I’ve missed the last four board meetings – preparations for the Paralympics. Geraint only told me the truth after Chiswell threatened him with the press. Even then he claimed it was the accountant’s fault, but he swore to me the other things weren’t true. Swore it, on his mother’s grave.’

  She twisted the wedding ring on her finger, apparently distracted.

  ‘I suppose your wretched partner tracked down Elspeth Lacey-Curtis, as well?’

  ‘Afraid so,’ lied Strike, judging that a gamble was indicated. ‘Did Geraint deny that, too?’

  ‘If he’d said anything to make the girls uncomfortable he felt awful, but he swore there was nothing else to it, no touching, just a couple of risqué jokes. But in this climate,’ said Della furiously, ‘a man ought to damned well think about what jokes he makes to a bunch of fifteen-year-old girls!’

  Strike leaned forwards and grabbed Della’s wine, which was in danger of being upended again.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Moving your glass onto the table,’ said Strike.

  ‘Oh,’ said Della, ‘thank you.’ Making a noticeable effort to control herself, she continued, ‘Geraint was representing me at that event, and it will go the way it always goes in the press when it all comes out: it will have been my fault, all of it! Because men’s crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren’t they, Mr Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. Your failings are really our failings, aren’t they? Because the proper role of the woman is carer, and there’s nothing lower in this whole world than a bad mother.’

  Breathing hard, she pressed her trembling fingers to her temples. Beyond the net curtains night, deep blue, was inching like a veil over the glaring red of sunset and as the room grew darker, Rhiannon Winn’s features faded gradually into the twilight. Soon all that would be visible was her smile, punctuated by the ugly braces.

  ‘Give me back my wine, please.’

  Strike did so. Della drank most of it down at once and continued to clasp the glass as she said bitterly:

  ‘There are plenty of people ready to think all kinds of odd things about a blind woman. Of course, when I was younger, it was worse. There was often a prurient interest in one’s private life. It was the first place some men’s minds went. Perhaps you’ve experienced it, too, have you, with your one leg?’

  Strike found that he didn’t resent the blunt mention of his disability from Della.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve had a bit of that,’ he admitted. ‘Bloke I was at school with. Hadn’t seen him in years. It was my first time back in Cornwall since I got blown up. Five pints in, he asked me at what point I warned women my leg was going to come off with my trousers. He thought he was being funny.’

  Della smiled thinly.

  ‘Never occurs to some people that it is we who should be making the jokes, does it? But it will be different for you, as a man . . . most people seem to think it in the natural order of things that the able-bodied woman should look after the disabled man. Geraint had to deal with that for years . . . people assuming there was something peculiar about him, because he chose a disabled wife. I think I may have tried to compensate for that. I wanted him to have a role . . . status . . . but it would have been better for both of us, in retrospect, if he had done something unconnected to me.’

  Strike thought she was a little drunk. Perhaps she hadn’t eaten. He felt an inappropriate desire to check her fridge. Sitting here with this impressive and vulnerable woman, it was easy to understand how Aamir had become so entangled with her both professionally and privately, without ever intending to become so.

  ‘People assume I married Geraint because there was nobody else who wanted me, but they’re quite wrong,’ said Della, sitting up straighter in her chair. ‘There was a boy I was at school with who was smitten with me, who proposed when I was nineteen. I had a choice and I chose Geraint. Not as a carer, or because, as journalists have sometimes implied, my limitless ambition made a husband necessary . . . but because I loved him.’

  Strike remembered the day he had followed Della’s husband to the stairwell in King’s Cross, and the tawdry things that Robin had told him about Geraint’s behaviour at work, yet nothing that Della had just said struck him as incredible. Life had taught him that a great and powerful love could be felt for the most apparently unworthy people, a circumstance that ought, after all, to give everybody consolation.

  ‘Are you married, Mr Strike?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it. It took this . . . all of this mess . . . to make me realise I can’t go on. I don’t really know when I stopped loving him, but at some point after Rhiannon died, it slipped—’

  Her voice broke.

  ‘—slipped away from us.’ She swallowed. ‘Please will you pour me another glass of wine?’

  He did so. The room was very dark now. The music had changed again, to a melancholy violin concerto which at last, in Strike’s opinion, was appropriate to the conversation. Della had not wanted to talk to him, but now seemed reluctant to let the conversation end.

  ‘Why did your husband hate Jasper Chiswell so much?’ Strike asked quietly. ‘Because of Chiswell’s political clashes with you, or—?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Della Winn wearily. ‘Because Geraint has to blame somebody other than himself for the misfortunes that befall him.’

  Strike waited, but she merely drank more wine, and said nothing.

  ‘What exactly—?’

  ‘Never mind,’
she said loudly. ‘Never mind, it doesn’t matter.’

  But a moment later, after another large gulp of wine, she said:

  ‘Rhiannon didn’t really want to do fencing. Like most little girls, what she wanted was a pony, but we – Geraint and I – we didn’t come from pony-owning backgrounds. We didn’t have the first idea what one does with horses. As I think back, I suppose there were ways around that, but we were both terribly busy and felt it would be impractical, so she took up fencing instead, and very good she was at it, too . . .

  ‘Have I answered enough of your questions, Mr Strike?’ she asked a little thickly. ‘Will you find Aamir?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Strike promised her. ‘Could you give me his number? And yours, so I can keep you updated?’