Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘You’re too nice, girl,’ said Vanessa, steely-eyed over her Pinot Grigio. ‘At a bare minimum I’d have kept her bleeding earring and turned it into a pendant.’

Vanessa was now at work. A spare duvet sat neatly folded at the end of the sofa on which Robin was sitting, with her laptop open in front of her. She had spent the entire afternoon scanning available rooms in shared properties, which were all she could possibly afford on the salary that Strike was paying her. The memory of the bunk bed in Flick’s flat kept recurring as she scanned the adverts in her price range, some of which featured stark, barrack-like rooms with multiple beds inside them, others with photographs that looked as though they ought to feature attached to news stories about reclusive hoarders discovered dead by neighbours. Last night’s laughter seemed remote now. Robin was ignoring the painful, hard lump in her throat that refused to dissolve, no matter how many cups of tea she consumed.

Matthew had tried to contact her twice that day. Neither time had she picked up and he hadn’t left a message. She would need to contact a lawyer about divorce soon, and that would cost money she didn’t have, but her first priority had to be finding herself a place to live and continuing to put in the usual number of hours on the Chiswell case, because if Strike had cause to feel she wasn’t pulling her weight she would be endangering the only part of her life that currently had worth.

You bailed out on uni. Now you’re bailing out on us. You even bailed on your therapist. You’re a fuck ing 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 fuck ing 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?’