Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  You bailed out on uni. Now you’re bailing out on us. You even bailed on your therapist. You’re a fucking flake.

  The photographs of grim rooms in unknown flats kept dissolving before her eyes as she pictured Matthew and Sarah in the heavy mahogany bed that her father-in-law had bought, and when this happened Robin’s insides seemed to turn to liquid lead and her self-control threatened to melt away and she wanted to phone Matthew back and scream at him, but she didn’t, because she refused to be what he wanted to make her, the irrational, incontinent, uncontrolled woman, the fucking flake.

  And anyway, she had news for Strike, news she was keen to impart once he had finished his interview with Billy. Raphael Chiswell had answered his mobile at eleven o’clock that morning and, after some initial coldness, had agreed to talk to her, but only at a place of his choosing. An hour later, she had received a call from Tegan Butcher, who had not required much persuasion to agree to an interview. Indeed, she seemed disappointed to be talking to the famous Strike’s partner rather than the man himself.

  Robin copied down the details of a room in Putney (live-in landlady, vegetarian household, must like cats), checked the time and decided to change into the only dress she had brought with her from Albury Street, which was hanging, ironed and ready, from the top of Vanessa’s kitchen door. It would take her over an hour to get from Wembley to the restaurant in Old Brompton Road, where she and Raphael had agreed to meet, and she feared that she needed more time than usual to make herself presentable.

  The face staring out of Vanessa’s bathroom mirror was white, with eyes still puffy with lack of sleep. Robin was still trying to paint out the shadows with concealer when her mobile rang.

  ‘Cormoran, hi,’ said Robin, switching to speakerphone. ‘Did you see Billy?’

  His account of the interview with Billy took ten minutes, during which time Robin finished her make-up, brushed her hair and pulled on the dress.

  ‘You know,’ Strike finished, ‘I’m starting to wonder whether we shouldn’t do what Billy wanted us to do in the first place: dig.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Robin, and then, ‘Wait – what? You mean . . . literally?’

  ‘It might come to that,’ said Strike.

  For the first time all day, Robin’s own troubles were entirely eclipsed by something else, something monstrous. Jasper Chiswell’s had been the first body she had seen outside the comforting, sanitised context of the hospital and the funeral parlour. Even the memory of the shrink-wrapped turnip head with its dark, gasping cavity for a mouth paled beside the prospect of earth and worms, a decaying blanket and a child’s rotting bones.

  ‘Cormoran, if you think there’s genuinely a child buried in the dell, we should be telling the police.’

  ‘I might, if I thought Billy’s psychiatrists would vouch for him, but they won’t. I had a long talk with them after the interview. They can’t say one hundred per cent that the child strangling didn’t happen – the old impossible-to-prove-a-negative problem – but they don’t believe it.’

  ‘They think he’s making it up?’

  ‘Not in the normal sense. They think it’s a delusion or, at best, that he misinterpreted something he saw when he was very young. Maybe even something on TV. It would be consistent with his overall symptoms. I think myself there’s unlikely to be anything down there, but it would be good to know for sure.

  ‘Anyway, how’s your day been? Any news?’

  ‘What?’ Robin repeated numbly. ‘Oh – yes. I’m meeting Raphael for a drink at seven o’clock.’

  ‘Excellent work,’ said Strike. ‘Where?’

  ‘Place called Nam something . . . Nam Long Le Shaker?’

  ‘The place in Chelsea?’ said Strike. ‘I was there, a long time ago. Not the best evening I’ve ever had.’

  ‘And Tegan Butcher rang back. She’s a bit of a fan of yours, by the sound of it.’

  ‘Just what this case needs, another mentally disturbed witness.’

  ‘Tasteless,’ said Robin, trying to sound amused. ‘Anyway, she’s living with her mum in Woolstone and working at a bar at Newbury Racecourse. She says she doesn’t want to meet us in the village because her mum won’t like her getting mixed up with us, so she wonders whether we could come and see her at Newbury.’

  ‘How far’s that from Woolstone?’

  ‘Twenty miles or so?’

  ‘All right,’ said Strike, ‘how about we take the Land Rover out to Newbury to interview Tegan and then maybe swing by the dell, just for another look?’

  ‘Um . . . yes, OK,’ said Robin, her mind racing over the logistics of having to return to Albury Street for the Land Rover. She had left it behind because parking places required a permit on Vanessa’s street. ‘When?’

  ‘Whenever Tegan can see us, but ideally this week. Sooner the better.’

  ‘OK,’ said Robin, thinking of the tentative plans she had made to view rooms over the next couple of days.

  ‘Everything all right, Robin?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Ring me when you’ve spoken to Raphael then, OK?’

  ‘Will do,’ said Robin, glad to end the call. ‘Speak later.’

  58

  … I believe two different kinds of will can exist at the same time in one person.

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  Nam Long Le Shaker had the feeling of a decadent, colonial-era bar. Dimly lit, with leafy plants and assorted paintings and prints of beautiful women, the décor mixed Vietnamese and European styles. When Robin entered the restaurant at five past seven, she found Raphael leaning up against the bar, wearing a dark suit and tieless white shirt, already halfway down a drink and talking to the long-haired beauty who stood in front of a glittering wall of bottles.

  ‘Hi,’ said Robin.

  ‘Hello,’ he responded with a trace of coolness, and then, ‘Your eyes are different. Were they that colour at Chiswell House?’

  ‘Blue?’ asked Robin, shrugging off the coat she had worn because she felt shivery, even though the evening was warm. ‘Yes.’

  ‘S’pose I didn’t notice because half the bloody light bulbs are missing. What are you drinking?’

  Robin hesitated. She ought not to drink while conducting an interview, but at the same time, she suddenly craved alcohol. Before she could decide, Raphael said with a slight edge in his voice:

  ‘Been undercover again today, have we?’

  ‘Why d’you ask?’

  ‘Your wedding ring’s gone again.’

  ‘Were your eyes this sharp in the office?’ asked Robin, and he grinned, reminding her why she had liked him, even against her will.

  ‘I noticed your glasses were fake, remember?’ he said. ‘I thought at the time you were trying to be taken seriously, because you were too pretty for politics. So these,’ he indicated his deep brown eyes, ‘may be sharp, but this,’ he tapped his head, ‘not so much.’

  ‘I’ll have a glass of red,’ said Robin, smiling, ‘and I’ll pay, obviously.’

  ‘If this is all on Mr Strike, let’s have dinner,’ said Raphael at once. ‘I’m starving and skint.’

  ‘Really?’

  After a day of trawling through the available rooms for rent on her agency salary, she was not in the mood to hear the Chiswell definition of poverty again.

  ‘Yeah, really, little though you might believe it,’ said Raphael, with a slightly acid smile, and Robin suspected he knew what she had been thinking. ‘Seriously, are we eating, or what?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Robin, who had barely touched food all day, ‘let’s eat.’

  Raphael took his bottle of beer off the bar and led her through to the restaurant where they took a table for two beside the wall. It was so early that they were the only diners.

  ‘My mother used to come here in the eighties,’ said Raphael. ‘It was well known because the owner liked telling the rich and famous to sod off if they weren’t dressed properly to come in, and they all loved it.’

  ‘Rea
lly?’ said Robin, her thoughts miles away. It had just struck her that she would never again have dinner with Matthew like this, just the two of them. She remembered the very last time, at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. What had he been thinking while he ate in silence? Certainly he had been furious at her for continuing to work with Strike, but perhaps he had also been weighing in his mind the competing attractions of Sarah, with her well-paid job at Christie’s, her endless fund of stories about other people’s wealth, and her no doubt self-confident performance in bed, where the diamond earrings her fiancé had bought her snagged on Robin’s pillow.

  ‘Listen, if eating with me’s going to make you look like that, I’m fine with going back to the bar,’ said Raphael.

  ‘What?’ said Robin, surprised out of her thoughts. ‘Oh – no, it isn’t you.’

  A waiter brought over Robin’s wine. She took a large slug.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I was just thinking about my husband. I left him last night.’

  As she watched Raphael freeze in surprise with the bottle at his lips, Robin knew herself to have crossed an invisible boundary. In her whole time at the agency, she had never used truths about her private life to gain another’s confidence, never blended the private and the professional to win another person over. In turning Matthew’s infidelity into a device to manipulate Raphael, she knew that she was doing something that would appal and disgust her husband. Their marriage, he would have thought, ought to be sacrosanct, a world apart from what he saw as her seedy, ramshackle job.

  ‘Seriously?’ said Raphael.

  ‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘but I don’t expect you to believe me, not after all the crap I told you when I was Venetia. Anyway,’ she took her notebook out of her handbag, ‘you said you were OK with me asking some questions?’

  ‘Er – yeah,’ he said, apparently unable to decide whether he was more amused or disconcerted. ‘Is this real? Your marriage broke up last night?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Robin. ‘Why are you looking so shocked?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Raphael. ‘You just seem so . . . Girl Guidey.’ His eyes moved over her face. ‘It’s part of the appeal.’

  ‘Could I just ask my questions?’ said Robin, determinedly unfazed.

  Raphael drank some beer and said:

  ‘Always busy with the job. Turns a man’s thoughts to what it would take to distract you.’

  ‘Seriously—’

  ‘Fine, fine, questions – but let’s order first. Fancy some dim sum?’

  ‘Whatever’s good,’ said Robin, opening her notebook.

  Ordering food seemed to cheer Raphael up.

  ‘Drink up,’ he said.

  ‘I shouldn’t be drinking at all,’ she replied, and indeed, she hadn’t touched the wine since her first gulp. ‘OK, I wanted to talk about Ebury Street.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Raphael.

  ‘You heard what Kinvara said about the keys. I wondered whether—’

  ‘—I ever had one?’ asked Raphael with equanimity. ‘Guess how many times I was ever in that house.’

  Robin waited.

  ‘Once,’ said Raphael. ‘Never went there as a kid. When I got out of – you know – Dad, who hadn’t visited me once while I was inside, invited me down to Chiswell House to see him, so I did. Brushed my hair, put on a suit, got all the way down to that hellhole and he didn’t bother turning up. Detained by a late vote at the House or some crap. Picture how happy Kinvara was to have me on her hands for the night, in that bloody depressing house that I’ve had bad dreams about ever since I was a kid. Welcome home, Raff.

  ‘I took the early train back to London. Following week, no contact from Dad until I get another summons, this time to go to Ebury Street. I considered just not bloody turning up. Why did I go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Robin. ‘Why did you?’

  He looked directly into her eyes.

  ‘You can bloody hate someone and still wish they gave a shit about you and hate yourself for wishing it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Robin quietly, ‘of course you can.’

  ‘So round I trot to Ebury Street, thinking I might get – not a heart to heart, I mean, you met my father – but maybe, you know, some human emotion. He opened the door, said “There you are”, shunted me into the sitting room and there was Henry Drummond and I realised I was there for a job interview. Drummond said he’d take me on, Dad barked at me not to fuck it up and shoved me back out onto the street. First and last time I was ever inside the place,’ said Raphael, ‘so I can’t say I’ve got fond associations with it.’

  He paused to consider what he’d just said, then let out a short laugh.

  ‘And my father killed himself there, of course. I was forgetting that.’

  ‘No key,’ said Robin, making a note.

  ‘No, among the many things I didn’t get that day were a spare key and an invitation to let myself in whenever I fancied it.’

  ‘I need to ask you something that might seem as though it’s slightly out of left field,’ said Robin cautiously.

  ‘This sounds interesting,’ said Raphael, leaning forwards.

  ‘Did you ever suspect that your father was having an affair?’

  ‘What?’ he said, almost comically taken aback. ‘No – but – what?’

  ‘Over the last year or so?’ said Robin. ‘While he was married to Kinvara?’

  He seemed incredulous.

  ‘OK,’ said Robin, ‘if you don’t—’

  ‘What on earth makes you think he was having an affair?’

  ‘Kinvara was always very possessive, very concerned about your father’s whereabouts, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Raphael, now smirking, ‘but you know why that was. That was you.’

  ‘I heard that she broke down months before I went to work in the office. She told somebody that your father had cheated on her. She was distraught, by all accounts. It was around the time her mare was put down and she—’

  ‘—hit Dad with the hammer?’ He frowned. ‘Oh. I thought that was because of her not wanting the horse put down. Well, I suppose Dad was a ladies’ man when he was younger. Hey – maybe that’s what he was up to, the night I went down to Chiswell House and he stayed up in London? Kinvara was definitely expecting him back and she was furious when he cried off at the last minute.’

  ‘Yes, maybe,’ said Robin, making a note. ‘Can you remember what date that was?’

  ‘Er – yeah, as a matter of fact, I can. You don’t tend to forget the day you’re released from jail. I got out on Wednesday the sixteenth of February last year, and Dad asked me to go down to Chiswell House on the following Saturday, so . . . the nineteenth.’

  Robin made a note.

  ‘You never saw or heard signs there was another woman?’

  ‘Come on,’ said Raphael, ‘you were there, at the Commons. You saw how little I had to do with him. Was he going to tell me he was playing around?’

  ‘He told you about seeing the ghost of Jack o’Kent roaming the grounds at night.’

  ‘That was different. He was drunk then, and – morbid. Weird. Banging on about divine retribution . . . I don’t know, I suppose he could’ve been talking about an affair. Maybe he’d grown a conscience at last, three wives down the line.’

  ‘I didn’t think he married your mother?’

  Raphael’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Sorry. Momentarily forgot I’m the bastard.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Robin gently, ‘you know I didn’t mean—’

  ‘All right, sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Being touchy. Being left out of a parent’s will does that to a person.’

  Robin remembered Strike’s dictum about inheritance: It is the money, and it isn’t, and in an uncanny echo of her thoughts, Raphael said:

  ‘It isn’t the money, although God knows I could use the money. I’m jobless, and I don’t think old Henry Drummond’s going to give me a reference, do you? And now my mother looks like she’s going to settle permanently i
n Italy, so she’s talking about selling the London flat, which means I’ll be homeless. It’ll come to this, you know,’ he said bitterly. ‘I’ll end up as Kinvara’s bloody stable boy. No one else will work for her and no one else’ll employ me . . .

  ‘But it’s not just the money. When you’re left out of the will . . . well, left out, that says it all. The last statement of a dead man to his family and I didn’t rate a single mention and now I’ve got fucking Torquil advising me to piss off to Siena with my mother and “start again”. Tosser,’ said Raphael, with a dangerous expression.