She was halfway towards the upper landing when she thought she heard another small noise above her: the scuff of a foot on carpet followed by the swish of a closing door.
She knew that there was no point calling out ‘Who’s there?’ If the person hiding from her had been prepared to show their face, they would hardly have let Kinvara leave the house alone to face whatever had set off the dogs.
Reaching the top of the stairs, Robin saw that a vertical strip of light lay like a spectral finger across the dark floor, emanating from the only lit room. Her neck and scalp prickled as she crept towards it, afraid that the unknown lurker was watching from one of the three dark rooms with open doors she was passing. Constantly checking over her shoulder, she pushed the door of the lit bedroom with the tips of her fingers, raised the bronze frog high and entered.
This was clearly Kinvara’s room: messy, cluttered and deserted. A single lamp burned on the bedside table nearest the door. The bed was unmade, with an air of having been left in a hurry, the cream quilted eiderdown lying crumpled on the floor. The walls were covered with many pictures of horses, all of them of significantly lesser quality, even to Robin’s untutored eye, than the missing picture in the drawing room. The wardrobe doors stood open, but only a Lilliputian could have been hidden among the densely packed clothes within.
Robin returned to the dark landing. Taking a tighter grip on the bronze frog, she orientated herself. The sounds she had heard had come from a room directly overhead, which meant that it was probably the one with the closed door, facing her.
As she reached out her hand towards the doorknob, the terrifying sensation that unseen eyes were watching intensified. Pushing the door open, she felt around on the interior wall without entering, until she found a light switch.
The stark light revealed a cold, bare bedroom with a brass bedstead and a single chest of drawers. The heavy curtains on their old fashioned brass rings had been drawn, hiding the grounds. On the double bed lay the painting, ‘Mare Mourning’, the brown and white mare forever nosing the pure white foal curled up in the straw.
Groping in the pocket of her jacket with the hand not holding the bronze paperweight, Robin found her mobile and took several photographs of the painting lying on the bedspread. It had the appearance of having been hastily placed there.
She had a sudden feeling that something had moved behind her. She whipped around, trying to blink away the shining impression of the gilded frame burned into her retina by the flash on her camera. Then she heard Strike’s and Kinvara’s voices growing louder in the garden and knew that they were returning to the drawing room.
Slapping off the light in the spare room, Robin ran as quietly as possible back across the landing and down the stairs. Fearing that she wouldn’t be able to reach the drawing room in time to greet them, she darted to the downstairs bathroom, flushed the toilet, and then ran back across the hall, reaching the drawing room just as her hostess re-entered it from the garden.
67
. . . I had good reason enough for so jealously drawing a veil of concealment over our compact.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
The Norfolk terrier was struggling in Kinvara’s arms, its paws muddy. At the sight of Robin, Rattenbury set up a volley of barking again and struggled to get free.
‘Sorry, I was dying for the loo,’ panted Robin, the bronze frog hidden behind her back. The old cistern backed up her story, making loud gushing and clanking noises that echoed through the stone-flagged hallway. ‘Any luck?’ Robin called to Strike, who was climbing back into the room behind Kinvara.
‘Nothing,’ said Strike, now haggard with pain. After waiting for the panting Labrador to hop back into the room, he closed the window, the revolver in his other hand. ‘There were definitely people out there, though. The dogs knew it, but I think they’ve taken off. What were the odds of us passing just as they were climbing over the wall?’
‘Oh, do shut up, Rattenbury!’ shouted Kinvara.
She set the terrier down and, when it refused to stop yapping at Robin, she threatened it with a raised hand, at which it whimpered and retreated into a corner to join the Labrador.
‘Horses OK?’ Robin asked, moving to the end table from which she had taken the bronze paperweight.
‘One of the stable doors wasn’t fastened properly,’ said Strike, wincing as he bent to feel his knee. ‘But Mrs Chiswell thinks it might have been left like that. Would you mind if I sat down, Mrs Chiswell?’
‘I – no, I suppose not,’ Kinvara said gracelessly.
She headed to a table of bottles sitting in the corner of the room, uncorked some Famous Grouse and poured herself a stiff measure of whisky. While her back was turned, Robin slid the paperweight back onto the table. She tried to catch Strike’s eyes, but he had sunk down onto the sofa with a faint groan, and now turned to Kinvara.
‘I wouldn’t say no, if you’re offering,’ he said shamelessly, wincing again as he massaged his right knee. ‘Actually, I think this is going to have to come off, do you mind?’
‘Well – no, I suppose not. What do you want?’
‘I’ll have a Scotch as well, please,’ said Strike, setting the revolver down on the table beside the bronze frog, rolling up his trouser leg and signalling with his eyes that Robin, too, should sit down.
While Kinvara sloshed another measure into a glass, Strike started to remove the prosthesis. Turning to give him his drink, Kinvara watched in queasy fascination as Strike worked on the false leg, averting her eyes at the point it left the inflamed stump. Panting as he propped the prosthesis against the ottoman, Strike allowed his trouser leg to fall back over his amputated leg.
‘Thanks very much,’ he said, accepting the whisky from her and taking a swig.
Trapped with a man who couldn’t walk, to whom she ought in theory to be grateful, and to whom she had just given a drink, Kinvara sat down, too, her expression stony.
‘Actually, Mrs Chiswell, I was going to phone you to confirm a couple of things we heard from Tegan earlier,’ said Strike. ‘We could go through them now if you like. Get them out of the way.’
With a slight shiver, Kinvara glanced at the empty fireplace, and Robin said helpfully, ‘Would you like me to—?’
‘No,’ snapped Kinvara. ‘I can do it.’
She went to the deep basket standing beside the fireplace, from which she grabbed an old newspaper. While Kinvara built a structure of small bits of wood over a mound of newspaper and a firelighter, Robin succeeded in catching Strike’s eye.
‘There’s somebody upstairs,’ she mouthed, but she wasn’t sure he had understood. He merely raised his eyebrows quizzically, and turned back to Kinvara.
A match flared. Flames erupted around the little pile of paper and sticks in the fireplace. Kinvara picked up her glass and returned to the drinks table, where she topped it up with more neat Scotch, then, coat wrapped more tightly around herself, she returned to the log basket, selected a large piece of wood, dropped it on top of the burgeoning fire, then fell back onto the sofa.
‘Go on, then,’ she said sullenly to Strike. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘As I say, we spoke to Tegan Butcher today.’
‘And?’
‘And we now know what Jimmy Knight and Geraint Winn were blackmailing your husband about.’
Kinvara evinced no surprise.
‘I told those stupid girls you’d find out,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Izzy and Fizzy. Everyone round here knew what Jack o’Kent was doing in the barn. Of course somebody was going to talk.’
She took a gulp of whisky.
‘I suppose you know all of it, do you? The gallows? The boy in Zimbabwe?’
‘You mean Samuel?’ asked Strike, taking a punt.
‘Exactly, Samuel Mu – Mudrap or something.’
The fire caught suddenly, flames leaping up past the log, which shifted in a shower of sparks.
‘Jasper was worried they were his gallows the moment we heard t
he boy had been hanged. You know all of it, do you? That there were two sets? But only one made it to the government. The other lot went astray, the lorry was hijacked or something. That’s how they ended up in the middle of nowhere.
‘The photographs are pretty grisly, apparently. The Foreign Office thinks it was probably a case of mistaken identity. Jasper didn’t see how they could be traced to him, but Jimmy said he could prove they were.
‘I knew you’d find out,’ said Kinvara, with an air of bitter satisfaction. ‘Tegan’s a horrible gossip.’
‘So, to be clear,’ said Strike, ‘when Jimmy Knight first came here to see you, he was asking for his and Billy’s share for two sets of gallows his father had left completed when he died?’
‘Exactly,’ said Kinvara, sipping her whisky. ‘They were worth eighty thousand for the pair. He wanted forty.’
‘But presumably,’ said Strike, who remembered that Chiswell had talked of Jimmy returning a week after his first attempt to get money, and asking for a reduced amount, ‘your husband told him he’d only ever received payment for one of them, as one set got stolen en route?’
‘Yes,’ said Kinvara, with a shrug. ‘So then Jimmy asked for twenty, but we’d spent it.’
‘How did you feel about Jimmy’s request, when he first came asking for money?’ Strike asked.
Robin wasn’t sure whether Kinvara had turned a little pinker in the face, or whether it was the effects of the whisky.
‘Well, I saw his point, if you want the truth. I could see why he felt he had a claim. Half the proceeds of the gallows belonged to the Knight boys. That had been the arrangement while Jack o’Kent was alive, but Jasper took the view that Jimmy couldn’t expect money for the stolen set, and given that he’d been storing them in his barn, and bearing all the costs of transportation and so on . . . and he said that Jimmy couldn’t sue him even if he wanted to. He didn’t like Jimmy.’
‘No, well, I suppose their politics were very different,’ said Strike.
Kinvara almost smirked.
‘It was a bit more personal than that. Haven’t you heard about Jimmy and Izzy? No . . . I suppose Tegan’s too young to have heard that story. Oh, it was only once,’ she said, apparently under the impression that Strike was shocked, ‘but that was quite enough for Jasper. A man like Jimmy Knight, deflowering his darling daughter, you know . . .
‘But Jasper couldn’t have given Jimmy the money even if he’d wanted to,’ she went on. ‘He’d already spent it. It took care of our overdraft for a while and repaired the stable roof. I never knew,’ she added, as though sensing unspoken criticism, ‘until Jimmy explained it to me that night, what the arrangement between Jasper and Jack o’Kent had been. Jasper had told me the gallows were his to sell and I believed him. Naturally I believed him. He was my husband.’
She got up again and headed back to the drinks table as the fat Labrador, seeking warmth, left its distant corner, waddled around the ottoman and slumped down in front of the now roaring fire. The Norfolk terrier trotted after it, growling at Strike and Robin until Kinvara said angrily:
‘Shut up, Rattenbury.’
‘There’s are a couple more things I wanted to ask you about,’ said Strike. ‘Firstly, did your husband have a passcode on his phone?’
‘Of course he did,’ said Kinvara. ‘He was very security-conscious.’
‘So he didn’t give it out to a lot of people?’
‘He didn’t even tell me what it was,’ said Kinvara. ‘Why are you asking?’
Ignoring the question, Strike said:
‘Your stepson’s now told us a different story to account for his trip down here, on the morning of your husband’s death.’
‘Oh, really? What’s he saying this time?’
‘That he was trying to stop you selling a necklace that’s been in the family for—’
‘Come clean, has he?’ she interrupted, turning back towards them with a fresh whisky in her hands. With her long red hair tangled from the night air, and her flushed cheeks, she had a slight air of abandon now, forgetting to hold her coat closed as she headed back to the sofa, the black nightdress revealing a canyon of cleavage. She flopped back down on the sofa. ‘Yes, he wanted to stop me doing a flit with the necklace, which, by the way, I’m perfectly entitled to do. It’s mine under the terms of the will. Jasper should have been a bit more bloody careful writing it if he didn’t want me to have it, shouldn’t he?’
Robin remembered Kinvara’s tears, the last time they had been in this room, and how she had felt sorry for her, unlikeable though she had shown herself to be in other ways. Her attitude now had little of the grief-stricken widow about it, but perhaps, Robin thought, that was the drink, and the recent shock of their intrusion into her grounds.
‘So you’re backing up Raphael’s story that he drove down here to stop you taking off with the necklace?’
‘Don’t you believe him?’
‘Not really,’ said Strike. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘It rings false,’ said Strike. ‘I’m not convinced your husband was in a fit state that morning to remember what he had and hadn’t put in his will.’
‘He was well enough to call me and demand to know whether I was really walking out on him,’ said Kinvara.
‘Did you tell him you were going to sell the necklace?’
‘Not in so many words, no. I said I was going to leave as soon as I could find somewhere else for me and the horses. I suppose he might have wondered how I’d manage that, with no real money of my own, which made him remember the necklace.’
‘So Raphael came here out of simple loyalty to the father who’d cut him off without a penny?’
Kinvara subjected Strike to a long and penetrating look over her whisky glass, then said to Robin:
‘Would you throw another log on the fire?’
Noting the lack of a ‘please’, Robin nevertheless did as she was asked. The Norfolk terrier, which had now joined the sleeping Labrador on the hearthrug, growled at her until she had sat down again.
‘All right,’ said Kinvara, with an air of coming to a decision. ‘All right, here it is. I don’t suppose it matters any more, anyway. Those bloody girls will find out in the end and serve Raphael right.
‘He did come down to try and stop me taking the necklace, but it wasn’t for Jasper, Fizzy or Flopsy’s sake – I suppose,’ she said aggressively to Robin, ‘you know all the family nicknames, don’t you? You probably had a good giggle at them, while you were working with Izzy?’
‘Erm—’
‘Oh, don’t pretend,’ said Kinvara, rather nastily, ‘I know you’ll have heard them. They call me “Tinky Two” or something, don’t they? And behind his back, Izzy, Fizzy and Torquil call Raphael “Rancid”. Did you know that?’
‘No,’ said Robin, at whom Kinvara was still glaring.
‘Sweet, isn’t it? And Raphael’s mother is known to all of them as the Orca, because she dresses in black and white.
‘Anyway . . . when the Orca realised Jasper wasn’t going to marry her,’ said Kinvara, now very red in the face, ‘d’you know what she did?’
Robin shook her head.
‘She took the famous family necklace to the man who became her next lover, who was a diamond merchant, and she had him prise out the really valuable stones and replace them with cubic zirconias. Man-made diamond substitutes,’ Kinvara elucidated, in case Strike and Robin hadn’t understood. ‘Jasper never realised what she’d done and I certainly didn’t. I expect Ornella’s been having a jolly good laugh every time I’ve been photographed in the necklace, thinking I’m wearing a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of stones.
‘Anyway, when my darling stepson got wind of the fact that I was leaving his father, and heard that I’d talked about having enough money to buy land for the horses, he twigged that I might be about to get the necklace valued. So he came hotfooting it down here, because the last thing he wanted was for the family to find out what his mother had don
e. What would be the odds of him wheedling his way back into his father’s good books after that?’
‘Why haven’t you told anyone this?’ asked Strike.
‘Because Raphael promised me that morning that if I didn’t tell his father what the Orca had done, he’d maybe manage to persuade his mother to give the stones back. Or at least, give me their value.’
Lethal White Page 67