Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘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 the 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.’