Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘Oh, really? What’s he saying this time?’

‘That he was trying to stop you selling a necklace that’s been in the family for—’

‘Come clean, has he?’ she interrupted, turning back towards them with a fresh whisky in her hands. With her long red hair tangled from the night air, and her flushed cheeks, she had a slight air of abandon now, forgetting to hold her coat closed as she headed back to the sofa, the black nightdress revealing a canyon of cleavage. She flopped back down on the sofa. ‘Yes, he wanted to stop me doing a flit with the necklace, which, by the way, I’m perfectly entitled to do. It’s mine under the terms of the will. Jasper should have been a bit more bloody careful writing it if he didn’t want me to have it, shouldn’t he?’

Robin remembered Kinvara’s tears, the last time they had been in this room, and how she had felt sorry for her, unlikeable though she had shown herself to be in other ways. Her attitude now had little of the grief-stricken widow about it, but perhaps, Robin thought, that was the drink, and the recent shock of their intrusion into her grounds.

‘So you’re backing up Raphael’s story that he drove down here to stop you taking off with the necklace?’

‘Don’t you believe him?’

‘Not really,’ said Strike. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘It rings false,’ said Strike. ‘I’m not convinced your husband was in a fit state that morning to remember what he had and hadn’t put in his will.’

‘He was well enough to call me and demand to know whether I was really walking out on him,’ said Kinvara.

‘Did you tell him you were going to sell the necklace?’

‘Not in so many words, no. I said I was going to leave as soon as I could find somewhere else for me and the horses. I suppose he might have wondered how I’d manage that, with no real money of my own, which made him remember the necklace.’

‘So Raphael came here out of simple loyalty to the father who’d cut him off without a penny?’

Kinvara subjected Strike to a long and penetrating look over her whisky glass, then said to Robin:

‘Would you throw another log on the fire?’

Noting the lack of a ‘please’, Robin nevertheless did as she was asked. The Norfolk terrier, which had now joined the sleeping Labrador on the hearthrug, growled at her until she had sat down again.

‘All right,’ said Kinvara, with an air of coming to a decision. ‘All right, here it is. I don’t suppose it matters any more, anyway. Those bloody girls will find out in the end and serve Raphael right.

‘He did come down to try and stop me taking the necklace, but it wasn’t for Jasper, Fizzy or Flopsy’s sake – I suppose,’ she said aggressively to Robin, ‘you know all the family nicknames, don’t you? You probably had a good giggle at them, while you were working with Izzy?’

‘Erm—’

‘Oh, don’t pretend,’ said Kinvara, rather nastily, ‘I know you’ll have heard them. They call me “Tinky Two” or something, don’t they? And behind his back, Izzy, Fizzy and Torquil call Raphael “Rancid”. Did you know that?’

‘No,’ said Robin, at whom Kinvara was still glaring.

‘Sweet, isn’t it? And Raphael’s mother is known to all of them as the Orca, because she dresses in black and white.

‘Anyway . . . when the Orca realised Jasper wasn’t going to marry her,’ said Kinvara, now very red in the face, ‘d’you know what she did?’

Robin shook her head.

‘She took the famous family necklace to the man who became her next lover, who was a diamond merchant, and she had him prise out the really valuable stones and replace them with cubic zirconias. Man-made diamond substitutes,’ Kinvara elucidated, in case Strike and Robin hadn’t understood. ‘Jasper never realised what she’d done and I certainly didn’t. I expect Ornella’s been having a jolly good laugh every time I’ve been photographed in the necklace, thinking I’m wearing a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of stones.

‘Anyway, when my darling stepson got wind of the fact that I was leaving his father, and heard that I’d talked about having enough money to buy land for the horses, he twigged that I might be about to get the necklace valued. So he came hotfooting it down here, because the last thing he wanted was for the family to find out what his mother had done. What would be the odds of him wheedling his way back into his father’s good books after that?’

‘Why haven’t you told anyone this?’ asked Strike.

‘Because Raphael promised me that morning that if I didn’t tell his father what the Orca had done, he’d maybe manage to persuade his mother to give the stones back. Or at least, give me their value.’

‘And are you still trying to recover the missing stones?’

Kinvara squinted malevolently at Strike over the rim of her glass.

‘I haven’t done anything about it since Jasper died, but that doesn’t mean I won’t. Why should I let the bloody Orca waltz off with what’s rightfully mine? It’s down in Jasper’s will, the contents of the house that haven’t been spefi – specif – spe-cif-ically excluded,’ she enunciated carefully, thick-tongued now, ‘belong to me. So,’ she said, fixing Strike with a gimlet stare, ‘does that sound more like Raphael to you? Coming down here to try and cover up for his darling mama?’

‘Yes,’ said Strike, ‘I’d have to say it does. Thank you for your honesty.’

Kinvara looked pointedly at the grandfather clock, which was now showing three in the morning, but Strike refused to take the hint.

‘Mrs Chiswell, there’s one last thing I want to ask and I’m afraid it’s quite personal.’

‘What?’ she said crossly.

‘I spoke to Mrs Winn recently. Della Winn, you know, the—’

‘Della-Winn-the-Minister-for-Sport,’ said Kinvara, just as her husband had done, the first time Strike met him. ‘Yes, I know who she is. Very odd woman.’

‘In what way?’

Kinvara wriggled her shoulders impatiently, as though it should be obvious.

‘Never mind. What did she say?’

‘That she met you in a state of considerable distress a year ago and that from what she could gather, you were upset because your husband had admitted to an affair.’

Kinvara opened her mouth then closed it again. She sat thus for a few seconds, then shook her head as though to clear it and said:

‘I . . . thought he was being unfaithful, but I was wrong. I got it all wrong.’

‘According to Mrs Winn, he’d said some fairly cruel things to you.’

‘I don’t remember what I said to her. I wasn’t very well at the time. I was overemotional and I got everything wrong.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Strike, ‘but, as an outsider, your marriage seemed—’

‘What a dreadful job you’ve got,’ said Kinvara shrilly. ‘What a really nasty, seedy job you do. Yes, our marriage was going wrong, what of it? Do you think, now he’s dead, now he’s killed himself , I want to relive it all with the pair of you , perfect strangers whom my stupid stepdaughters have dragged in, to stir everything up and make it ten times worse?’

‘So you’ve changed your mind, have you? You think your husband committed suicide? Because when we were last here, you suggested Aamir Mallik—’

‘I don’t know what I said then!’ she said hysterically. ‘Can you not understand what it’s been like since Jasper killed himself, with the police and the family and you ? I didn’t think this would happen, I had no idea, it didn’t seem real – Jasper was under enormous pressure those last few months, drinking too much, in an awful temper – the blackmail, the fear of it all coming out – yes, I think he killed himself and I’ve got to live with the fact that I walked out on him that morning, which was probably the final straw!’