Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘Even if I’m dead,’ said Robin, her voice as steady as she could make it, ‘there’ll still be your father’s note and the hotel’s testimony—’

‘OK, so he was worried about what Kinvara was doing at Le Manoir,’ said Raphael roughly. ‘I’ve just told you, nobody saw me on the premises. The stupid cow did ask for two glasses with the champagne, but she could’ve been with someone else.’

‘You aren’t going to have any opportunity to cook up a new story with her,’ said Robin, her mouth drier than ever, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth as she tried to sound calm and confident. ‘She’s in custody now, she isn’t as clever as you – and you made other mistakes,’ Robin rushed on, ‘stupid ones, because you had to enact the plan in a hurry once you realised your father was onto you.’

‘Like?’

‘Like Kinvara taking away the packaging on the amitriptyline, after she’d doctored the orange juice. Kinvara forgetting to tell you the trick to closing the front door properly. And,’ said Robin, aware that she was playing her very last card, ‘her throwing the front door key to you, at Paddington.’

In the wordless space that now stretched between them, Robin thought she heard footsteps close at hand. She didn’t dare look out of the window in case she alerted Raphael, who appeared too appalled by what she had just said to take in anything else.

‘“Throwing the front door key to me?”’ repeated Raphael, with fragile bravado. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘The keys to Ebury Street are restricted, almost impossible to copy. The pair of you only had access to one: hers, because your father was suspicious of you both by the time he died, and he’d made sure the spare was out of your reach.

‘She needed the key to get into the house and doctor the orange juice and you needed it to go in early next morning and suffocate him. So you cobbled together a plan at the last minute: she’d pass you the key at a prearranged spot at Paddington, where you’d be disguised as a homeless person.

‘You were caught on camera. The police have got people enlarging and clarifying the image right now. They think you must have bought things from a charity shop in haste, which might produce another useful witness. The police are now combing CCTV footage for your movements from Paddington onwards.’

Raphael said nothing at all for nearly a minute. His eyes were moving fractionally from left to right, as he tried to find a loophole, an escape.

‘That’s . . . inconvenient,’ he said finally. ‘I didn’t think I was on camera, sitting there.’

Robin thought she could see hope slipping away from him now. Quietly, she continued, ‘As per your plan, Kinvara arrived home in Oxfordshire, called Drummond and left a message that she wanted the necklace valued, to set up that whole back-up story.

‘Early next morning, another burner phone was used to call both Geraint Winn and Jimmy Knight. Both were lured out of their houses, presumably with a promise of information on Chiswell. That was you, making sure they were in the frame if murder was suspected.’

‘No proof,’ muttered Raphael automatically, but still his eyes darted this way and that, searching for invisible lifelines.

‘You let yourself into the house very early in the morning, expecting to find your father almost comatose after his early morning orange juice, but—’

‘He was out of it, at first,’ said Raphael. His eyes had become glazed, and Robin knew that he was remembering what had happened, watching it, inside his head. ‘He was slumped on the sofa, very groggy. I walked straight past him into the kitchen, opened my box of toys—’

For a sliver of a second, Robin saw again the shrink-wrapped head, the grey hair pressed around the face so that only the gaping black hole of the mouth was visible. Raphael had done that; Raphael, who currently had a gun pointing at her face.

‘—but while I’m arranging everything, the old bastard wakes up, sees me fixing the tubing onto the helium canister and comes back to fucking life. He staggers up, grabs Freddie’s sword off the wall and tries to fight, but I got it off him. Bent the blade doing it. Forced him down into the chair – he was still struggling – and—’

Raphael mimed putting the bag over his father’s head.

‘ Caput. ’

‘And then,’ said Robin, her mouth still dry, ‘you made those phone calls from his phone that were supposed to establish your alibi. Kinvara had told you his passcode, of course. And you left, without closing the door properly.’

Robin didn’t know whether she was imagining movement out of the porthole to her left. She kept her eyes fixed on Raphael, and the slightly wavering gun.

‘Loads of this is circumstantial,’ he muttered, eyes still glazed. ‘Flick and Francesca have both got motives for lying about me . . . I didn’t end it well with Francesca . . . I might still have a chance . . . I might . . . ’

‘There’s no chance, Raff,’ said Robin. ‘Kinvara isn’t going to lie for you much longer. When they tell her the truth about “Mare Mourning”, she’s going to put everything together for the first time. I think you insisted she move it into to the drawing room, to protect it from the damp in the spare room. How did you manage that? Did you make up some rubbish about it reminding you of her dead mare? Then she’s going to realise you started up the affair again once you knew its true value, and that all the dreadful things you said to her when you ended it were true. And worst of all,’ said Robin, ‘she’s going to realise that when the two of you heard intruders in the grounds – real ones, this time – you let the woman you were supposedly madly in love with walk out into the grounds in the dark, in her nightdress, while you stayed behind to protect—’

‘ All right! ’ he shouted suddenly and he advanced the gun nozzle until it pressed into her forehead again. ‘Stop fucking talking , will you?’

Robin sat quite still. She imagined how it would feel when he pressed the trigger. He had said he would shoot her through a cushion to muffle the sound, but perhaps he had forgotten, perhaps he was about to lose control.

‘D’you know what it’s like in jail?’ he asked.

She tried to say ‘no’, but the sound wouldn’t come.

‘The noise,’ he whispered. ‘The smell. The ugly, dumb people – like animals, some of them. Worse than animals. I never knew there were people like it. The places they make you eat and shit. Watching your back all the time, waiting for violence. The clanging, the yelling and the fucking squalor. I’d rather be buried alive. I won’t do it again . . .

‘I was going to have a dream life. I was going to be free, totally free. I’d never have to kowtow to the likes of fucking Drummond again. There’s a villa on Capri I’ve had my eye on for a long time. View out over the Gulf of Naples. Then I’d have a nice pad in London . . . new car, once my fucking ban’s lifted . . . imagine walking along and knowing you could buy anything, do anything. A dream life . . .

‘Couple of little problems to get out of the way before I was completely sorted . . . Flick, easy: late night, dark road, knife in the ribs, victim of street crime.

‘And Kinvara . . . once she’d made a will in my favour, after a few years, she’d have broken her neck riding an unsuitable horse or drowned out in Italy . . . she’s a terrible swimmer . . .

‘And then all of them could fuck themselves, couldn’t they? The Chiswells, my whore of a mother. I’d need nothing from anyone. I’d have everything . . .

‘But that’s all gone,’ he said. Dark-skinned though he was, she saw that he had turned ashen, the dark shadows beneath his eyes hollow in the half-light. ‘It’s all gone. You know what, Venetia? I’m going to blow your fucking brains out, because I’ve decided I don’t like you. I think I’d like to see your fucking head explode before mine comes off—’