Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

The door to Strike’s inner office was standing open when she arrived. He was sitting behind his desk, listening to someone on his mobile. Sunlight fell in treacle-gold pools across the worn carpet. The soft mumble of traffic was soon obliterated by the rattle of the old kettle and, five minutes after her arrival, Robin set a mug of steaming dark brown Typhoo in front of Strike, who gave her a thumbs up and a silent ‘thanks’. She returned to her desk, where a light was flashing on the phone to indicate a recorded message. She dialled their answering service and listened while a cool female voice informed her that the call had been made ten minutes before Robin had arrived and, presumably, while Strike was either upstairs, or busy with the other call.

A cracked whisper hissed in Robin’s ear.

‘I’m sorry I ran out on you, Mr Strike, I’m sorry. I can’t come back, though. He’s keeping me here, I can’t get out, he’s wired the doors . . . ’

The end of the sentence was lost in sobs. Worried, Robin tried to attract Strike’s attention, but he had turned in his swivel chair to look out of the window, still listening to his mobile. Random words reached Robin through the pitiable sounds of distress on the phone.

‘ . . . can’t get out . . . I’m all alone . . . ’

‘Yeah, OK,’ Strike was saying in his office. ‘Wednesday, then, OK? Great. Have a good one.’

‘ . . . please help me, Mr Strike! ’ wailed the voice in Robin’s ear.

She smacked the button to switch to speakerphone and at once the tortured voice filled the office.

‘The doors will explode if I try and escape Mr Strike, please help me, please come and get me, I shouldn’t have come, I told him I know about the little kid and it’s bigger, much bigger, I thought I could trust him—’

Strike spun in his desk chair, got up and came striding through to the outer office. There was a clunk as though the receiver had been dropped. The sobbing continued at a distance, as though the distraught speaker was stumbling away from the phone.

‘That’s him again,’ said Strike. ‘Billy, Billy Knight.’

The sobbing and gasping grew louder again and Billy said in a frantic whisper, his lips evidently pressed against the mouthpiece.

‘There’s someone at the door. Help me. Help me, Mr Strike.’

The call was cut.

‘Get the number,’ said Strike. Robin reached for the receiver to dial 1471, but before she could do so, the phone rang again. She snatched it up, her eyes on Strike’s.

‘Cormoran Strike’s office.’

‘Ah . . . yes, good morning,’ said a deep, patrician voice.

Robin grimaced at Strike and shook her head.

‘Shit,’ he muttered, and moved back into his office to get his tea.

‘I’d like to speak to Mr Strike, please.’

‘I’m afraid he’s on another call right now,’ lied Robin.

Their standard practice for a year had been to phone the client back. It weeded out journalists and cranks.

‘I’ll hold,’ said the caller, who sounded captious, unused to not getting his way.

‘He’ll be a while, I’m afraid. Could I take a number and get him to call you back?’

‘Well, it needs to be within the next ten minutes, because I’m about to go into a meeting. Tell him I want to discuss a job I’d like him to do for me.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t guarantee that Mr Strike will be able to undertake the job in person,’ said Robin, which was also the standard response to deflect press. ‘Our agency’s quite booked up at the moment.’

She pulled pen and paper towards her.

‘What kind of job are you—?’

‘It has to be Mr Strike,’ said the voice firmly. ‘Make that clear to him. It has to be Mr Strike himself. My name’s Chizzle.’

‘How are you spelling that?’ asked Robin, wondering whether she had heard correctly.

‘C – H – I – S – W – E – L – L. Jasper Chiswell. Ask him to call me on the following number.’

Robin copied down the digits Chiswell gave her and bade him good morning. As she set down the receiver, Strike sat down on the fake leather sofa they kept in the outer room for clients. It had a disobliging habit of making unexpected farting noises when you shifted position.

‘A man called Jasper Chizzle, spelled “Chiswell” wants you to take on a job for him. He says it’s got to be you, nobody else.’ Robin screwed up her forehead in perplexity. ‘I know the name, don’t I?’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘He’s Minister for Culture.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Robin, realisation dawning. ‘ Of course! The big man with the weird hair!’

‘That’s him.’

A clutch of vague memories and associations assailed Robin. She seemed to remember an old affair, resignation in disgrace, rehabilitation and, somewhat more recently, a fresh scandal, another nasty news story . . .

‘Didn’t his son get sent to jail for manslaughter not that long ago?’ she said. ‘That was Chiswell, wasn’t it? His son was stoned and driving and he killed a young mother?’

Strike recalled his attention, it seemed, from a distance. He was wearing a peculiar expression.

‘Yeah, that rings a bell,’ said Strike.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘A few things, actually,’ said Strike, running a hand over his stubbly chin. ‘For starters: I tracked down Billy’s brother on Friday.’

‘How?’

‘Long story,’ said Strike, ‘but turns out Jimmy’s part of a group that’s protesting against the Olympics. “CORE”, they call themselves. Anyway, he was with a girl, and the first thing she said when I told them I was a private detective was: “Chiswell’s sent him.”’

Strike pondered this point while drinking his perfectly brewed tea.

‘But Chiswell wouldn’t need me to keep an eye on CORE,’ he went on, thinking aloud. ‘There was already a plainclothes guy there.’

Though keen to hear what other things troubled Strike about Chiswell’s call, Robin did not prompt him, but sat in silence, allowing him to mull the new development. It was precisely this kind of tact that Strike had missed when she was out of the office.

‘And get this,’ he went on at last, as though there had been no interruption. ‘The son who went to jail for manslaughter isn’t – or wasn’t – Chiswell’s only boy. His eldest was called Freddie and he died in Iraq. Yeah. Major Freddie Chiswell, Queen’s Royal Hussars. Killed in an attack on a convoy in Basra. I investigated his death in action while I was still SIB.’

‘So you know Chiswell?’

‘No, never met him. You don’t meet families, usually . . . I knew Chiswell’s daughter years ago, as well. Only slightly, but I met her a few times. She was an old school friend of Charlotte’s.’

Robin experienced a tiny frisson at the mention of Charlotte. She had a great curiosity, which she successfully concealed, about Charlotte, the woman Strike had been involved with on and off for sixteen years, whom he had been supposed to marry before the relationship ended messily and, apparently, permanently.

‘Pity we couldn’t get Billy’s number,’ said Strike, running a large, hairy-backed hand over his jaw again.

‘I’ll make sure I get it if he calls again,’ Robin assured him. ‘Are you going to ring Chiswell back? He said he was about to go into a meeting.’

‘I’m keen to find out what he wants, but the question is whether we’ve got room for another client,’ said Strike. ‘Let’s think . . . ’

He put his hands behind his head, frowning up at the ceiling, on which many fine cracks were exposed by the sunlight. Screw that now . . . the office would soon be a developer’s problem, after all . . .

‘I’ve got Andy and Barclay watching the Webster kid. Barclay’s doing well, by the way. I’ve had three solid days’ surveillance out of him, pictures, the lot.