Robin had no idea how to respond to this. Kinvara dropped down into the sagging chair where Raff usually sat, took off the designer sunglasses holding her long red hair off her face and shook it loose. Her bare arms and legs were heavily freckled. The top buttons of her sleeveless green shirt-dress were straining across her heavy bust.
“Whose daughter are you?” asked Kinvara with a trace of petulance. “Jasper didn’t tell me. He doesn’t tell me anything he doesn’t have to tell me, actually. I’m used to it. He just said you’re a goddaughter.”
Nobody had warned Robin that Kinvara did not know who she really was. Perhaps Izzy and Chiswell had not expected them to come face to face.
“I’m Jonathan Hall’s daughter,” said Robin nervously. She had come up with a rudimentary background for Venetia-the-goddaughter, but had never expected to have to elaborate for the benefit of Chiswell’s own wife, who presumably knew all Chiswell’s friends and acquaintances.
“Who’s he?” asked Kinvara. “I should probably know, Jasper’ll be cross I haven’t paid attention—”
“He’s in land management up in—”
“Oh, was it the Northumberland property?” interrupted Kinvara, whose interest had not seemed particularly profound. “That was before my time.”
Thank God, thought Robin.
Kinvara crossed her legs and folded her arms across her large chest. Her foot bounced up and down. She shot Raphael a hard, almost spiteful look.
“Aren’t you going to say hello, Raphael?”
“Hello,” he said.
“Jasper told me to meet him here, but if you’d rather I waited in the corridor I can,” Kinvara said in her high, tight voice.
“Of course not,” muttered Raphael, frowning determinedly at his monitor.
“Well, I wouldn’t want to interrupt anything,” said Kinvara, turning from Raphael to Robin. The story of the blonde in the art gallery bathroom swam back into Robin’s mind. For a second time she pretended to be searching for something in a drawer and it was with relief that she heard the sounds of Chiswell and Izzy coming along the corridor.
“… and by ten o’clock, no later, or I won’t have time to read the whole bloody thing. And tell Haines he’ll have to talk to the BBC, I haven’t got time for a bunch of idiots talking about inclu—Kinvara.”
Chiswell stopped dead in the office door and said, without any trace of affection, “I told you to meet me at DCMS, not here.”
“And it’s lovely to see you, too, Jasper, after three days apart,” said Kinvara, getting to her feet and smoothing her crumpled dress.
“Hi, Kinvara,” said Izzy.
“I forgot you said DCMS,” Kinvara told Chiswell, ignoring her stepdaughter. “I’ve been trying to call you all morning—”
“I told you,” growled Chiswell, “I’d be in meetings till one, and if it’s about those bloody stud fees again—”
“No, it isn’t about the stud fees, Jasper, actually, and I’d have preferred to tell you in private, but if you want me to say it in front of your children, I will!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Chiswell blustered. “Come away, then, come on, we’ll find a private room—”
“There was a man last night,” said Kinvara, “who—don’t look at me like that, Isabella!”
Izzy’s expression was indeed conveying naked skepticism. She raised her eyebrows and walked into the room, acting as though Kinvara had become invisible to her.
“I said you can tell me in a private room!” snarled Chiswell, but Kinvara refused to be deflected.
“I saw a man in the woods by the house last night, Jasper!” she said, in a loud, high-pitched voice that Robin knew would be echoing all the way along the narrow corridor. “I’m not imagining things—there was a man with a spade in the woods, I saw him, and he ran when the dogs chased him! You keep telling me not to make a fuss, but I’m alone in that house at night and if you’re not going to do anything about this, Jasper, I’m going to call the police!”
22
… don’t you feel called upon to undertake it, for the sake of the good cause?
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Strike was in a thoroughly bad temper.
Why the fuck, he asked himself, as he limped towards Mile End Park the following morning, was he, the senior partner and founder of the firm, having to stake out a protest march on a hot Saturday morning, when he had three employees and a knackered leg? Because, he answered himself, he didn’t have a baby who needed watching, or a wife who’d booked plane tickets or broken her wrist, or a fucking anniversary weekend planned. He wasn’t married, so it was his downtime that had to be sacrificed, his weekend that became just two more working days.
Everything that Robin feared Strike to be thinking about her, he was, in fact, thinking: of her house on cobbled Albury Street versus his drafty two rooms in a converted attic, of the rights and status conferred by the little gold ring on her finger, set against Lorelei’s disappointment when he had explained that lunch and possibly dinner would now be impossible, of Robin’s promises of equal responsibility when he had taken her on as a partner, contrasted with the reality of her rushing home to her husband.
Yes, Robin had worked many hours of unpaid overtime in her two years at the agency. Yes, he knew that she had gone way beyond the call of duty for him. Yes, he was, in theory, fucking grateful to her. The fact remained that today, while he was limping along the street towards hours of probably fruitless surveillance, she and her arsehole of a husband were speeding off to a country hotel weekend, a thought that made his sore leg and back no easier to bear.
Unshaven, clad in an old pair of jeans, a frayed, washed-out hoodie and ancient trainers, with a carrier bag swinging from his hand, Strike entered the park. He could see the massing protestors in the distance. The risk of Jimmy recognizing him had almost decided Strike to let the march go unwatched, but the most recent text from Robin (which he had, out of sheer bad temper, left unanswered) had changed his mind.
Kinvara Chiswell came into the office. She claims she saw a man with a spade in the woods near their house last night. From what she said, Chiswell’s been telling her not to call the police about these intruders, but she says she’s going to do it unless he does something about them. Kinvara didn’t know Chiswell’s called us in, btw, she thought I really was Venetia Hall. Also, there’s a chance the charity commission’s investigating the Level Playing Field. I’m trying to get more details.
This communication had served only to aggravate Strike. Nothing short of a concrete piece of evidence against Geraint Winn would have satisfied him right now, with the Sun on Chiswell’s case and their client so tetchy and stressed.
According to Barclay, Jimmy Knight owned a ten-year-old Suzuki Alto, but it had failed its MOT and was currently off the road. Barclay could not absolutely guarantee that Jimmy wasn’t sneaking out under cover of darkness to trespass in Chiswell’s gardens and woods seventy miles away, but Strike thought it unlikely.
On the other hand, he thought it just possible that Jimmy might have sent a proxy to intimidate Chiswell’s wife. He probably still had friends or acquaintances in the area where he grew up. An even more disturbing idea was that Billy had escaped from the prison, real or imaginary, in which he had told Strike he was being held, and decided to dig for proof that the child lay in a pink blanket by his father’s old cottage or, gripped by who knew what paranoid fantasy, to slash one of Kinvara’s horses.
Worried by these inexplicable features of the case, by the interest the Sun was taking in the minister, and aware that the agency was no closer to securing a “bargaining chip” against either of Chiswell’s blackmailers than on the day that Strike had accepted the minister as a client, he felt he had little choice but to leave no stone unturned. In spite of his tiredness, his aching muscles and his strong suspicion that the protest march would yield nothing useful, he had dragged himself out of bed on Saturday morning, strapped his prosthesis back onto a stump that was alr
eady slightly puffy and, unable to think of much he’d like to do less than walk for two hours, set off for Mile End Park.
Once close enough to the crowd of protestors to make out individuals, Strike pulled from the carrier bag swinging from his hand a plastic Guy Fawkes mask, white with curling eyebrows and mustache and now mainly associated with the hacking organization Anonymous, and put it on. Balling up the carrier bag, he shoved it into a handy bin, then hobbled on towards the cluster of placards and banners: “No missiles on homes!” “No snipers on streets!” “Don’t play games with our lives!” and several “He’s got to go!” posters featuring the prime minister’s face. Strike’s fake foot always found grass one of the most difficult surfaces to navigate. He was sweating by the time he finally spotted the orange CORE banners, with their logo of broken Olympic rings.
There were about a dozen of them. Lurking behind a group of chattering youths, Strike readjusted the slipping plastic mask, which had not been constructed for a man whose nose had been broken, and spotted Jimmy Knight, who was talking to two young women, both of whom had just thrown back their heads, laughing delightedly at something Knight had just said. Clamping the mask to his face to make sure the slits aligned with his eyes, Strike scanned the rest of the CORE members and concluded that the absence of tomato-red hair was not because Flick had dyed it another color, but because she wasn’t there.
Stewards now started herding the crowd into something resembling a line. Strike moved into the mass of protestors, a silent, lumbering figure, acting a little obtusely so that the youthful organizers, intimidated by his size, treated him like a rock around which the current must be channeled as he took up a position right behind CORE. A skinny boy who was also wearing an Anonymous mask gave Strike a double thumbs up as he was shunted towards the rear of the line. Strike returned it.
Now smoking a roll-up, Jimmy continued to joke with the two young girls beside him, who were vying for his attention. The darker of the two, who was particularly attractive, was holding a double-sided banner carrying a highly detailed painting of David Cameron as Hitler overlooking the 1936 Olympic Stadium. It was quite an impressive piece of art, and Strike had time to admire it as the procession finally set off at a steady pace, flanked by police and stewards in high visibility jackets, moving gradually out of the park and onto the long, straight Roman Road.
The smooth tarmac was slightly easier on Strike’s prosthesis, but his stump was still throbbing. After a few minutes a chant was got up: “Missiles OUT! Missiles OUT!”
A couple of press photographers were walking backwards in the road ahead, taking pictures of the front of the march.
“Hey, Libby,” said Jimmy, to the girl with the hand-painted Hitler banner. “Wanna get on my shoulders?”
Strike noted her friend’s poorly concealed envy as Jimmy crouched down so that Libby could straddle his neck and be lifted up above the crowd, her banner raised high enough for the photographers in front to see.
“Show ’em your tits, we’ll be front page!” Jimmy called up to her.
“Jimmy!” she squealed, in mock outrage. Her friend’s smile was forced. The cameras clicked, and Strike, grimacing with pain behind the plastic mask, tried not to limp too obviously.
“Guy with the biggest camera was focused on you the whole time,” said Jimmy, when he finally lowered the girl back to the ground.
“Fuck, if I’m in the papers my mum’ll go apeshit,” said the girl excitedly, and she fell into step on Jimmy’s other side, taking any opportunity to nudge or slap him as he teased her about being scared of what her parents would say. She was, Strike judged, at least fifteen years younger than he was.
“Enjoying yourself, Jimmy?”
The mask restricted Strike’s peripheral vision, so that it was only when the uncombed, tomato-red hair appeared immediately in front of him that Strike realized Flick had joined the march. Her sudden appearance had taken Jimmy by surprise, too.
“There you are!” he said, with a feeble show of pleasure.
Flick glared at the girl called Libby, who sped up, intimidated. Jimmy tried to put his arm around Flick, but she shrugged it off.
“Oi,” he said, feigning innocent indignation. “What’s up?”
“Three fucking guesses,” snarled Flick.
Strike could tell that Jimmy was debating which tack to take with her. His thuggishly handsome face showed irritation but also, Strike thought, a certain wariness. For a second time, he tried to put his arm around her. This time, she slapped it away.
“Oi,” he said again, this time aggressively. “The fuck was that for?”
“I’m off doing your dirty work and you’re fucking around with her? What kind of fucking idiot do you think I am, Jimmy?”
“Missiles OUT!” bellowed a steward with a megaphone, and the crowd took up the chant once more. The cries made by the Mohicaned woman beside Strike were as shrill and raucous as a peacock’s. The one bonus of the renewed shouting was that it left Strike at liberty to grunt with pain every time he set his prosthetic foot on the road, which was a kind of release and made the plastic mask reverberate in a ticklish fashion against his sweating face. Squinting through the eyeholes he watched Jimmy and Flick argue, but he couldn’t hear a word over the din of the crowd. Only when the chant subsided at last could he make out a little of what they were saying to each other.
“I’m fucking sick of this,” Jimmy was saying. “I’m not the one who picks up students in bars when—”
“You’d ditched me!” said Flick, in a kind of whispered scream. “You’d fucking ditched me! You told me you didn’t want anything exclusive—”
“Heat of the moment, wasn’t it?” said Jimmy roughly. “I was stressed. Billy was doing my fucking head in. I didn’t expect you to go straight to a bar and pick up some fucking—”
“You told me you were sick of—”
“Fuck’s sake, I lost my temper and said a bunch of shit I didn’t mean. If I went and shagged another woman every time you give me grief—”
“Yeah, well I sometimes think the only reason you even keep me around is Chis—”
“Keep your fucking voice down!”
“—and today, you think it was fun at that creep’s house—”
“I said I was grateful, fuck’s sake, we discussed this, didn’t we? I had to get those leaflets printed or I’d’ve come with you—”
“And I do that cleaning,” she said, with a sudden sob, “and it’s disgusting and then today you send me—it was horrible, Jimmy, he should be in hospital, he’s in a right state—”
Jimmy glanced around. Coming briefly within Jimmy’s eye-line, Strike attempted to walk naturally, though every time he asked his stump to bear his full weight, he felt as though he was pressing it down on a thousand fire ants.
“We’ll get him to hospital after,” said Jimmy. “We will, but he’ll screw it all up if we let him loose now, you know what he’s like… once Winn’s got those photos… hey,” said Jimmy gently, putting his arm around her for a third time. “Listen. I’m so fucking grateful to you.”
“Yeah,” choked Flick, wiping her nose on the back of her hand, “because of the money. Because you wouldn’t even know what Chiswell had done if—”
Jimmy pulled her roughly towards him and kissed her. For a second she resisted, then opened her mouth. The kiss went on and on as they walked. Strike could see their tongues working in each other’s mouths. They staggered slightly as they walked, locked together, while other CORE members grinned, and the girl whom Jimmy had lifted into the air looked crestfallen.
“Jimmy,” murmured Flick at last, when the kiss had ended, but his arm was still around her. She was doe-eyed with lust now, and soft-spoken. “I think you should come and talk to him, seriously. He keeps talking about that bloody detective.”
“What?” said Jimmy, though Strike could tell he’d heard.
“Strike. That bastard soldier with the one leg. Billy’s fixated on him. Thinks he’s going to rescue
him.”
The end point of the march came into sight at last: Bow Quarter in Fairfield Road, where the square brick tower of an old match factory, proposed site of some of the planned missiles, punctured the skyline.
“‘Rescue him’?” repeated Jimmy scornfully. “Fuck’s sake. It’s not like he’s being fucking tortured.”
The marchers were breaking ranks now, dissolving back into a formless crowd that milled around a dark green pond in front of the proposed missile site. Strike would have given much to sit down on a bench or lean up against a tree, as many of the protestors were doing, so as to take the weight off his stump. Both the end, where skin that was never meant to bear his weight was irritated and inflamed, and the tendons in his knee were begging for ice and rest. Instead, he limped on after Jimmy and Flick as they walked around the edge of the crowd, away from their CORE colleagues.
“He wanted to see you and I told him you were busy,” he heard Flick say, “and he cried. It was horrible, Jimmy.”
Pretending to be watching the young black man with a microphone, who was ascending a stage at the front of the crowd, Strike edged closer to Jimmy and Flick.
“I’ll look after Billy when I get the money,” Jimmy was telling Flick. He seemed guilty and conflicted now. “Obviously I’ll look after him… and you. I won’t forget what you’ve done.”
She liked hearing that. Out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw her grubby face flush with excitement. Jimmy took a pack of tobacco and some Rizlas from his jeans pocket and began to roll himself another cigarette.
“Still talking about that fucking detective, is he?”
“Yeah.”
Jimmy lit up and smoked in silence for a while, his eyes roving abstractedly over the crowd.
“Tell you what,” he said suddenly, “I’ll go see him now. Calm him down a bit. We just need him to stay put a bit longer. Coming?”
He held out his hand and Flick took it, smiling. They walked away.
Lethal White Page 21