“So let’s both agree I’m a bastard,” he said, sitting in his combined kitchen-sitting room with his amputated leg stretched out on a chair in front of him. He was wearing only boxer shorts, but would soon need to get his prosthesis on and dress smartly enough to blend in at Henry Drummond’s art gallery. “Let’s wish each other well and—”
“No,” she said, “you don’t get out of it that easily. I was happy, I was doing fine—”
“I never wanted to make you miserable. I like you—”
“You like me,” she repeated shrilly. “A year together and you like me—”
“What do you want?” he said, losing his temper at last. “Me to limp up the fucking aisle, not feeling what I should feel, not wanting it, wishing I was out of it? You’re making me say what I don’t want to say. I didn’t want to hurt anyone—”
“But you did! You did hurt me! And now you want to walk away as though nothing happened!”
“Whereas you want a public scene in a restaurant?”
“I want,” she said, crying now, “not to feel as though I could have been anyone. I want a memory of the end that doesn’t make me feel disposable and cheap—”
“I never saw you that way. I don’t see you like that now,” he said, eyes closed, wishing he had never crossed the room at Wardle’s party. “Truth is, you’re too—”
“Don’t tell me I’m too good for you,” she said. “Leave us both with some dignity.”
She hung up. Strike’s dominant emotion was relief.
No investigation had ever brought Strike so reliably back to the same small patch of London. The taxi disgorged him onto the gently sloping pavement of St. James’s Street a few hours later, with the red brick St. James’s Palace ahead and Pratt’s on Park Place to his right. After paying off the driver, he headed for Drummond’s Gallery, which lay between a wine dealer’s and a hat shop on the left-hand side of the street. Although he had managed to put his prosthesis on, Strike was walking with the aid of a collapsible walking stick that Robin had bought him during another period when his leg had become almost too painful to bear his weight.
Even if it had marked the end of a relationship he wanted to escape, the call with Lorelei had left its mark. He knew in his heart that he was, in the spirit if not in the letter, guilty of some of the charges she had laid against him. While he had told Lorelei at the outset that he sought neither commitment nor permanence, he had known perfectly well that she had understood him to mean “right now” rather than “never” and he had not corrected that impression, because he wanted a distraction and a defense against the feelings that had dogged him after Robin’s wedding.
However, the ability to section off his emotions, of which Charlotte had always complained, and to which Lorelei had dedicated a lengthy paragraph of the email dissecting his personality, had never failed him yet. Arriving two minutes early for his appointment with Henry Drummond, he transferred his attention with ease to the questions he intended to put to the late Jasper Chiswell’s old friend.
Pausing beside the black marble exterior of the gallery, he saw himself reflected in the window and straightened his tie. He was wearing his best Italian suit. Behind his reflection, tastefully illuminated, a single painting in an ornate golden frame stood on an easel behind the spotless glass. It featured a pair of what, to Strike, looked like unrealistic horses with giraffe-like necks and staring eyes, ridden by eighteenth-century jockeys.
The gallery beyond the heavy door was cool and silent, with a floor of highly polished white marble. Strike walked carefully with his stick among the sporting and wildlife paintings, which were illuminated discreetly around the white walls, all of them in heavy gilded frames, until a well-groomed young blonde in a tight black dress emerged from a side door.
“Oh, good afternoon,” she said, without asking his name, and walked away towards the back of the gallery, her stilettos making a metallic click on the tiles. “Henry! Mr. Strike’s here!”
A concealed door opened, and Drummond emerged: a curious-looking man, whose ascetic features of pinched nose and black brows were enclosed by rolls of fat around chin and neck, as though a puritan had been engulfed by the body of a jolly squire. With his mutton-chop whiskers and dark gray suit and waistcoat he had a timeless, irrefutably upper-class, appearance.
“How do you do?” he said, offering a warm, dry hand. “Come into the office.”
“Henry, Mrs. Ross just called,” said the blonde, as Strike walked into the small room beyond the discreet door, which was book-lined, mahogany-shelved and very tidy. “She’d like to see the Munnings before we close. I’ve told her it’s reserved, but she’d still like—”
“Let me know when she arrives,” said Drummond. “And could we have some tea, Lucinda? Or coffee?” he inquired of Strike.
“Tea would be great, thank you.”
“Do sit down,” said Drummond, and Strike did so, grateful for a large and sturdy leather chair. The antique desk between them was bare but for a tray of engraved writing paper, a fountain pen and an ivory and silver letter opener. “So,” said Henry Drummond heavily, “you’re looking into this appalling business for the family?”
“That’s right. D’you mind if I take notes?”
“Carry on.”
Strike took out his notebook and pen. Drummond swiveled gently from side to side in his rotating chair.
“Terrible shock,” he said softly. “Of course, one thought immediately of foreign interference. Government minister, eyes of the world on London with the Olympics and so forth…”
“You didn’t think he could have committed suicide?” asked Strike.
Drummond sighed heavily.
“I knew him for forty-five years. His life had not been devoid of vicissitudes. To have come through everything—the divorce from Patricia, Freddie’s death, resignation from the government, Raphael’s ghastly car accident—to end it now, when he was Minister for Culture, when everything seemed back on track…
“Because the Conservative Party was his life’s blood, you know,” said Drummond. “Oh, yes. He’d bleed blue. Hated being out, delighted to get back in again, rise to minister… we joked of him becoming PM in our younger days, of course, but that dream was gone. Jasper always said, ‘Tory faithful likes bastards or buffoons,’ and that he was neither one nor the other.”
“So you’d say he was in generally good spirits around the time he died?”
“Ah… well, no, I couldn’t say that. There were stresses, worries—but suicidal? Definitely not.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“The last time we met face to face was here, at the gallery,” said Drummond. “I can tell you exactly what date it was: Friday the twenty-second of June.”
This, Strike knew, was the day that he had met Chiswell for the first time. He remembered the minister walking away towards Drummond’s gallery after their lunch at Pratt’s.
“And how did he seem to you that day?”
“Extremely angry,” said Drummond, “but that was inevitable, given what he walked in on, here.”
Drummond picked up the letter opener and turned it delicately in his thick fingers.
“His son—Raphael—had just been caught, for the second time—ah—”
Drummond balked for a second.
“—in flagrante,” he said, “with the other young person I employed at that time, in the bathroom behind me.”
He indicated a discreet black door.
“I had already caught them in there, a month prior to that. I hadn’t told Jasper the first time, because I felt he had quite enough on his plate.”
“In what way?”
Drummond fingered the ornate ivory, cleared his throat and said:
“Jasper’s marriage isn’t—wasn’t… I mean to say, Kinvara is a handful. Difficult woman. She was badgering Jasper to put one of her mares in foal to Totilas at the time.”
When Strike looked blank, Drummond elucidated:
“
Top dressage stallion. Nigh on ten thousand for semen.”
“Christ,” said Strike.
“Well, quite,” said Drummond. “And when Kinvara doesn’t get what she wants… one doesn’t know whether it’s temperament or something deeper—actual mental instability—anyway, Jasper had a very difficult time with her.
“Then he’d been through the ghastly business of Raphael’s, ah, accident—that poor young mother killed—the press, and so on and so forth, his son in jail… as a friend, I didn’t want to add to his troubles.
“I’d told Raphael the first time it happened that I wouldn’t inform Jasper, but I also said he was on a final warning and if he stepped out of line again, he would be out on his ear, old friend of his father’s or not. I had Francesca to consider, too. She’s my goddaughter, eighteen years old and completely smitten with him. I didn’t want to have to tell her parents.
“So when I walked in and heard them, I really had no choice. I’d thought I was safe to leave Raphael in charge for an hour because Francesca wasn’t at work that day, but of course, she’d sneaked in specially to see him, on her day off.
“Jasper arrived to find me pounding on the door. There was no way to hide what was going on. Raphael was trying to block my entrance to the bathroom here while Francesca climbed out of the window. She couldn’t face me. I rang her parents, told them everything. She never came back.
“Raphael Chiswell,” said Drummond heavily, “is a Bad Lot. Freddie, the son who died—my godchild too, incidentally—was worth a million of… well, well,” he said, turning the penknife over and over in his fingers, “one shouldn’t say it, I know.”
The office door opened and the young blonde in the black dress entered with a tea tray. Strike compared it mentally to the tea he had in the office as she set down two silver pots, one containing hot water, bone china cups and saucers and a sugar bowl complete with tongs.
“Mrs. Ross has just arrived, Henry.”
“Tell her I’m tied up for the next twenty minutes or so. Ask her to wait, if she’s got time.”
“So I take it,” said Strike, when Lucinda had left, “that there wasn’t much time for conversation that day?”
“Well, no,” said Drummond, unhappily. “Jasper had come to see Raphael at work, believing that all was going splendidly, and to arrive in the middle of that scene… Totally on my side, obviously, once he grasped what was going on. He was the one who actually shoved the boy out of the way to get the bathroom door open. Then he turned a nasty color. He had a heart problem, you know, it had been grumbling on for years. Sat down on the toilet rather suddenly. I was very worried, but he wouldn’t let me call Kinvara…
“Raphael had the decency to be ashamed of himself, then. Tried to help his father. Jasper told him to get out of it, made me close the door, leave him in there…”
Now sounding gruff, Drummond broke off and poured himself and Strike tea. He was evidently in some distress. As he added three lumps to his own cup, the teaspoon rattled against the cup.
“’Pologise. Last time I ever saw Jasper, you see. He came out of the bathroom, ghastly color, still, shook my hand, apologized, said he’d let his oldest friend… let me down.”
Drummond coughed again, swallowed and continued with what seemed an effort:
“None of it was Jasper’s fault. Raphael learned such morals as he’s got from the mother, and she’s best described as a high-class… well, well. Meeting Ornella was really the start of all Jasper’s problems. If he’d only stayed with Patricia…
“Anyway, I never saw Jasper again. I had some difficulty bringing myself to shake Raphael’s hand at the funeral, if you want the truth.”
Drummond took a sip of tea and Strike tried his own. It was far too weak.
“All sounds very unpleasant,” the detective said.
“You may well say so,” sighed Drummond.
“You’ll appreciate that I have to ask about some sensitive matters.”
“Of course,” said Drummond.
“You’ve spoken to Izzy. Did she tell you that Jasper Chiswell was being blackmailed?”
“She mentioned it,” said Drummond, with a glance to check that the door was shut. “He hadn’t breathed a word to me. Izzy said it was one of the Knights… one remembers a family in the grounds. The father was an odd-job man, yes? As for the Winns, well, no, I don’t think there was much liking between them and Jasper. Strange couple.”
“The Winns’ daughter Rhiannon was a fencer,” said Strike. “She was on the junior British fencing team with Freddie Chiswell—”
“Oh yes, Freddie was awfully good,” said Drummond.
“Rhiannon was a guest at Freddie’s eighteenth birthday party, but she was a couple of years younger. She was only sixteen when she killed herself.”
“How ghastly,” said Drummond.
“You don’t know anything about that?”
“How should I?” said Drummond, a fine crease between his dark eyes.
“You weren’t at the eighteenth?”
“I was, as a matter of fact. Godfather, you know.”
“You can’t remember Rhiannon?”
“Goodness, you can’t expect me to remember all the names! There were upwards of a hundred young people there. Jasper had a marquee in the garden and Patricia ran a treasure hunt.”
“Really?” said Strike.
His own eighteenth birthday party, in a rundown pub in Shoreditch, had not included a treasure hunt.
“Just in the grounds, you know. Freddie always liked a competition. A glass of champagne at every clue, it was rather jolly, got things off with a swing. I was manning clue three, down by what the children always used to call the dell.”
“The hollow in the ground by the Knights’ cottage?” asked Strike casually. “It was full of nettles when I saw it.”
“We didn’t put the clue in the dell, we put it under Jack o’Kent’s doormat. He couldn’t be trusted to take care of the champagne, because he had a drink problem. I sat on the edge of the dell in a deck chair and watched them hunt and everyone who found the clue got a glass of champagne and off they went.”
“Soft drinks for the under-eighteens?” asked Strike.
Faintly exasperated by this killjoy attitude, Drummond said:
“Nobody had to drink champagne. It was an eighteenth, a celebration.”
“So Jasper Chiswell never mentioned anything to you that he wouldn’t want to get into the press?” asked Strike, returning to the main point.
“Nothing whatsoever.”
“When he asked me to find a way of countering his blackmailers, he told me that whatever he’d done happened six years ago. He implied to me that it wasn’t illegal when he did it, but is now.”
“I’ve no idea what that could have been. Jasper was a very law-abiding type, you know. Whole family, pillars of the community, churchgoers, they’ve done masses for the local area…”
A litany of Chiswellian beneficence followed, which rolled on for a couple of minutes and did not fool Strike in the slightest. Drummond was obfuscating, he was sure, because Drummond knew exactly what Chiswell had done. He became almost lyrical as he extolled the innate goodness of Jasper, and of the entire family, excepting, always, the scapegrace Raphael.
“… and hand always in his pocket,” Drummond concluded, “minibus for the local Brownies, repairs to the church roof, even after the family finances… well, well,” he said again, in a little embarrassment.
“The blackmailable offense,” Strike began again, but Drummond interrupted.
“There was no offense.” He caught himself. “You just said it yourself. Jasper told you he had done nothing illegal. No law was broken.”
Deciding that it would do no good to push Drummond harder about the blackmail, Strike turned a page in his notebook, and thought he saw the other relax.
“You called Chiswell on the morning he died,” said Strike.
“I did.”
“Would that have been the first ti
me you’d spoken since sacking Raphael?”
“Actually, no. There had been a conversation a couple of weeks prior to that. M’wife wanted to invite Jasper and Kinvara over for dinner. I called him at DCMS, breaking the ice, you know, after the Raphael business. It wasn’t a long conversation, but amicable enough. He said they couldn’t make the night suggested. He also told me… well, to be frank, he told me he wasn’t sure how much longer he and Kinvara would be together, that the marriage was in trouble. He sounded tired, exhausted… unhappy.”
“You had no more contact until the thirteenth?”
“We had no contact even then,” Drummond reminded him. “I phoned Jasper, yes, but there was no answer. Izzy tells me—” He faltered. “She tells me that he was probably already dead.”
“It was early for a call,” said Strike.
“I… had information I thought he should have.”
“Of what kind?”
“It was personal.”
Strike waited. Drummond sipped his tea.
“It related to the family finances, which as I imagine you know, were very poor at the time Jasper died.”
“Yes.”
“He’d sold off land and remortgaged the London property, offloaded all the good paintings through me. He was right down to the dregs, at the end, trying to sell me some of old Tinky’s leavings. It was… a little embarrassing, actually.”
“How so?”
“I deal in Old Masters,” said Drummond. “I do not buy paintings of spotted horses by unknown Australian folk artists. As a courtesy to Jasper, being an old friend, I had some of it valued with my usual man at Christie’s. The only thing that had any monetary worth at all was a painting of a piebald mare and foal—”
“I think I’ve seen that,” said Strike.
“—but it was worth peanuts,” said Drummond. “Peanuts.”
“How much, at a guess?”
“Five to eight thousand at a push,” said Drummond dismissively.
“Quite a lot of peanuts to some people,” said Strike.
“My dear fellow,” said Henry Drummond, “that wouldn’t have repaired a tenth of the roof at Chiswell House.”
“But he was considering selling it?” asked Strike.
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