Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘You’re going to meet him?’

‘I’ve got to. This must be why Mitch Patterson’s sniffing around. If Matthew fans the flames with the press, which he’s more than capable of doing . . . They’re already excited about you and—’

‘Forget me and Charlotte,’ he said roughly, ‘that was twenty minutes that she coerced me into. He’s trying to coerce you— ’

‘I know he is,’ said Robin, ‘but I have got to talk to him sooner or later. Most of my stuff’s still in Albury Street. We’ve still got a joint bank account.’

‘D’you want me to come?’

Touched, Robin said:

‘Thanks, but I don’t think that would help.’

‘Then ring me later, will you? Let me know what happened.’

‘I will,’ she promised.

She headed off alone towards the lifts. She didn’t even notice who had just walked past her in the opposite direction until somebody said, ‘Bobbi?’

Robin turned. There stood Flick Purdue, returning from the bathroom with a policewoman, who seemed to have escorted her there. Like Kinvara, Flick had cried away her make-up. She appeared small and shrunken in a white shirt that Robin suspected her parents had insisted she wear, rather than her Hezbollah T-shirt.

‘It’s Robin. How are you, Flick?’

Flick seemed to be struggling with ideas too monstrous to utter.

‘I hope you’re cooperating,’ said Robin. ‘Tell them everything, won’t you?’

She thought she saw a tiny shake of the head, an instinctive defiance, the last embers of loyalty not yet extinguished, even in the trouble Flick found herself.

‘You must,’ said Robin quietly. ‘He’d have killed you next, Flick. You knew too much.’

69

I have foreseen all contingencies – long ago.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

A twenty-minute Tube ride later, Robin emerged at Warwick Avenue underground station in a part of London she barely knew. She had always felt a vague curiosity about Little Venice, as her extravagant middle name, ‘Venetia’, had been given to her because she had been conceived in the real Venice. Doubtless she would henceforth associate this area with Matthew and the bitter, tense meeting she was sure awaited her, down by the canal.

She walked down a street named Clifton Villas, where plane trees spread leaves of translucent jade against square cream-coloured houses, the walls of which glowed gold in the evening sun. The quiet beauty of this soft summer evening made Robin feel suddenly, overwhelmingly melancholy, because it recalled just such a night in Yorkshire, a decade previously, when she had hurried up the road from her parents’ house, barely seventeen years old and wobbling on her high heels, desperately excited about her first date with Matthew Cunliffe, who had just passed his driving test and would be taking her into Harrogate for the evening.

And here she was walking towards him again, to arrange the permanent disentanglement of their lives. Robin despised herself for feeling sad, for remembering, when it was preferable to concentrate on his unfaithfulness and unkindness, the joyful shared experiences that had led to love.

She turned left, crossed the street and walked on, now in the chilly shadow of the brick that bordered the right-hand side of Blomfield Road, parallel to the canal, and saw a police car speeding across the top of the street. The sight of it gave her strength. It felt like a friendly wave from what she knew now was her real life, sent to remind her what she was meant to be, and how incompatible that was with being the wife of Matthew Cunliffe.

A pair of high black wooden gates was set into the wall, gates that Matthew’s text had told her led to the canal-side bar, but when Robin pushed at them, they were locked. She glanced up and down the road, but there was no sign of Matthew, so she reached into her bag for her mobile, which, though muted was already vibrating with a call. As she took it out, the electric gates opened and she walked through them, raising the mobile to her ear as she did so.

‘Hi, I’m just—’

Strike yelled in her ear.

‘ Get out of there, it isn’t Matthew— ’

Several things happened at once.

The phone was torn out of her hand. In one frozen second, Robin registered that there was no bar in sight, only an untidy patch of canal bank beneath a bridge, hemmed by overgrown shrubs, and a dark barge, Odile , sitting squat and shabby in the water below her. Then a fist hit her hard in the solar plexus, and she jack-knifed, winded. Doubled over, she heard a splash as her phone was lobbed into the canal, then somebody grabbed a fistful of her hair and the waistband of her trousers and dragged her, while she still had no air in her lungs to scream, towards the barge. Thrown through the open doorway of the boat, she hit a narrow wooden table and fell to the floor.

The door slammed shut. She heard the scrape of a lock.

‘Sit down,’ said a male voice.

Still winded, Robin pulled herself up onto a wooden bench at the table, which was covered in a thin cushioned pad, then turned, to find herself looking into the barrel of a revolver.

Raphael lowered himself into the chair opposite her.

‘Who just rang you?’ he demanded and she deduced that in the physical effort to get her on the boat, and his terror that she might make a noise that the caller could hear, he had not had time or opportunity to check the screen on her mobile.

‘My husband,’ lied Robin in a whisper.

Her scalp was burning where he had pulled her hair. The pain in her midriff was such that she wondered whether he had cracked one of her ribs. Still fighting to draw air into her lungs, Robin seemed for a few disorientated seconds to see her predicament in miniature, from far away, encased in a trembling bead of time. She foresaw Raphael tipping her weighted corpse into the dark water by night, and Matthew, who had apparently lured her to the canal, being questioned and maybe accused. She saw the distraught faces of her parents and her brothers at her funeral in Masham, and she saw Strike standing at the back of the church, as he had at her wedding, furious because the thing he had feared had come to pass, and she was dead due to her own failings.

But as each gasp re-inflated Robin’s lungs, the illusion that she was watching from afar dissolved. She was here, now, on this dingy boat, breathing in its fusty smell, trapped within its wooden walls, with the dilated pupil of the revolver staring at her, and Raphael’s eyes above it.

Her fear was a real, solid presence in the galley, but it must stand apart from her, because it couldn’t help, and would only hinder. She must stay calm, and concentrate. She chose not to speak. It would give her back some of the power he had just taken from her if she refused to fill the silence. This was the trick of the therapist: let the pause unspool; let the more vulnerable person fill it.

‘You’re very cool,’ Raphael said finally. ‘I thought you might get hysterical and scream. That’s why I had to punch you. I wouldn’t have done that otherwise. For what it’s worth, I like you, Venetia.’

She knew that he was trying to re-impersonate the man who had charmed her against her will at the Commons. Clearly, he thought the old mixture of ruefulness and remorse would make her forgive, and soften, even with her burning scalp, and her bruised ribs, and the gun in her face. She said nothing. His faint, imploring smile disappeared and he said bluntly:

‘I need to know how much the police know. If I can still blag my way out of what they’ve got, then I’m afraid you,’ he raised the gun a fraction to point directly at Robin’s forehead (and she thought of vets and the one clean shot that the horse in the dell had been denied) ‘are done for. I’ll muffle the shot in a cushion and put you overboard once it’s dark. But if they already know everything, then I’ll end it, here, tonight, because I’m never going back to prison. So you can see how it’s in your best interests to be honest, can’t you? Only one of us is getting off this boat.’