Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘—except that Chiswell’s prints were the only ones on there—’

‘—but would Chiswell not find it odd to come downstairs in the morning to a pre-poured glass of juice? Would you drink a glass of something you hadn’t poured, and which appeared mysteriously in what you thought was an empty house?’

Down in Denmark Street, a group of young women’s voices rose over the constant swish and rumble of traffic, singing Rihanna’s ‘Where Have You Been?’

‘ Where have you been? All my life, all my li fe . . . ’

‘Maybe it was suicide,’ said Robin.

‘That attitude won’t get the bills paid,’ said Strike, tapping his cigarette ash onto his plate. ‘Come on, people who had the means to get into Ebury Street that day: Raphael, Flick—’

‘—and Jimmy,’ said Robin. ‘Everything that applies to Flick applies to him, because she would’ve been able to give him all the information she had about Chiswell’s habits and his house, and given him her copied key.’

‘Correct. So those are three people we know could have got in that morning,’ said Strike, ‘but this took much more than simply being able to get in through the door. The killer also had to know which anti-depressants Kinvara was taking, and arrange for the helium canister and rubber tubing to be there, which suggests close contact with the Chiswells, access to the house to get the stuff inside, or insider knowledge of the fact that the helium and tubing were already in there.’

‘As far as we know, Raphael hadn’t been in Ebury Street lately and wasn’t on terms with Kinvara to know what pills she was taking, though I suppose his father might have mentioned it to him,’ said Robin. ‘Judged on opportunity alone, the Winns and Aamir seem to be ruled out . . . so, assuming she was the cleaner, Jimmy and Flick go to the top of our suspect list.’

Strike heaved a sigh and closed his eyes.

‘Bollocks to it,’ he muttered, as he passed a hand across his face, ‘I keep circling back to motive.’

Opening his eyes again, he stubbed out his cigarette on his dinner plate and immediately lit another one.

‘I’m not surprised MI5 are interested, because there’s no obvious gain here. Oliver was right – blackmailers don’t generally kill their victims, it’s the other way around. Hatred’s a picturesque idea, but a hot-blooded hate killing is a hammer or a lamp to the head, not a meticulously planned fake suicide. If it was murder, it was more like a clinical execution, planned in every detail. Why? What did the killer get out of it? Which also makes me wonder, why then? Why did Chiswell die then ?

‘It was surely in Jimmy and Flick’s best interests for Chiswell to stay alive until they could produce evidence that forced him to come across with the money they wanted. Same with Raphael: he’d been written out of the will, but his relationship with his father was showing some signs of improvement. It was in his interest for his father to stay alive.

‘But Chiswell had covertly threatened Aamir with exposure of something unspecified, but probably sexual, given the Catullus quotation, and he’d recently come into possession of information about the Winns’ dodgy charity. We shouldn’t forget that Geraint Winn wasn’t really a blackmailer: he didn’t want money, he wanted Chiswell’s resignation and disgrace. Is it beyond the realms of possibility that Winn or Mallik took a different kind of revenge when they realised the first plan had failed?’

Strike dragged heavily on his cigarette and said:

‘We’re missing something, Robin. The thing that ties all this together.’

‘Maybe it doesn’t tie together,’ said Robin. ‘That’s life, isn’t it? We’ve got a group of people who all had their own personal tribulations and secrets. Some of them had reason not to like Chiswell, to resent him, but that doesn’t mean it all joins up neatly. Some of it must be irrelevant.’

‘There’s still something we don’t know.’

‘There’s a lot we don’t—’

‘No, something big, something . . . fundamental. I can smell it. It keeps almost showing itself. Why did Chiswell say he might have more work for us after he’d scuppered Winn and Knight?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Robin.

‘“One by one, they trip themselves up”,’ Strike quoted. ‘Who’d tripped themselves up?’

‘Geraint Winn. I’d just told him about the missing money from the charity.’

‘Chiswell had been on the phone, trying to find a money clip, you said. A money clip that belonged to Freddie.’

‘That’s right,’ said Robin.

‘Freddie,’ repeated Strike, scratching his chin.

And for a moment he was back in the communal TV room of a German military hospital, with the television muted in the corner and copies of the Army Times lying on a low table. The young lieutenant who had witnessed Freddie Chiswell’s death had been sitting there alone when Strike found him, wheelchair-bound, a Taliban bullet still lodged in his spine.

‘ . . . the convoy stopped, Major Chiswell told me to get out, see what was going on. I told him I could see movement up on the ridge. He told me to fucking well do as I was told.

‘I hadn’t gone more than a couple of feet when I got the bullet in the back. The last thing I remember was him yelling out of the lorry at me. Then the sniper took the top of his head off.’

The lieutenant had asked Strike for a cigarette. He wasn’t supposed to be smoking, but Strike had given him the half pack he had on him.

‘Chiswell was a cunt,’ said the young man in the wheelchair.

In Strike’s imagination he saw tall, blond Freddie swaggering up a country lane, slumming it with Jimmy Knight and his mates. He saw Freddie in fencing garb, out on the piste, watched by the indistinct figure of Rhiannon Winn, who was perhaps already entertaining suicidal thoughts.

Disliked by his soldiers, revered by his father: could Freddie be the thing that Strike sought, the element that tied everything together, that connected two blackmailers and the story of a strangled child? But the notion seemed to dissolve as he examined it, and the diverse strands of the investigation fell apart once more, stubbornly unconnected.

‘I want to know what the photographs from the Foreign Office show,’ said Strike aloud, his eyes on the purpling sky beyond the office window. ‘I want to know who hacked the Uffington white horse onto the back of Aamir Mallik’s bathroom door, and I want to know why there was a cross in the ground on the exact spot Billy said a kid was buried.’

‘Well,’ said Robin, standing up and beginning to clear away the debris of their Chinese takeaway, ‘nobody ever said you weren’t ambitious.’

‘Leave that. I’ll do it. You need to get home.’

I don’t want t o go home.

‘It won’t take long. What are you up to tomorrow?’

‘Got an afternoon appointment with Chiswell’s art dealer friend, Drummond.’

Having rinsed off the plates and cutlery, Robin took her handbag down from the peg where she’d hung it, then turned back. Strike tended to rebuff expressions of concern, but she had to say it.

‘No offence, but you look terrible. Maybe rest your leg before you have to go out again? See you soon.’

She left before Strike could answer. He sat lost in thought until, finally, he knew he must begin the painful journey back upstairs to his attic flat. Having heaved himself upright again, he closed the windows, turned off the lights and locked up the office.

As he placed his false foot on the bottom stair to the floor above, his phone rang again. He knew, without checking, that it was Lorelei. She wasn’t about to let him go without at least attempting to hurt him as badly as he had hurt her. Slowly, carefully, keeping his weight off his prosthesis as much as was practical, Strike climbed the stairs to bed.