Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘Then there’s old Dodgy Doc. He still hasn’t done anything newsworthy.’

‘Shame,’ said Robin, then she caught herself. ‘No, I don’t mean that, I mean good.’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘This job,’ she sighed. ‘It messes with your ethics. Who’s watching Dodgy today?’

‘I was going to ask you to do it,’ said Strike, ‘but the client called yesterday afternoon. He’d forgotten to tell me Dodgy’s at a symposium in Paris.’

Eyes still on the ceiling, brow furrowed in thought, Strike said:

‘We’ve got two days at that tech conference starting tomorrow. Which do you want to do, Harley Street or a conference centre out in Epping Forest? We can swap over if you want. D’you want to spend tomorrow watching Dodgy, or with hundreds of stinking geeks in superhero T-shirts?’

‘Not all tech people smell,’ Robin reprimanded him. ‘Your mate Spanner doesn’t.’

‘You don’t want to judge Spanner by the amount of deodorant he puts on to come here,’ said Strike.

Spanner, who had overhauled their computer and telephone system when the business had received its dramatic boost in business, was the younger brother of Strike’s old friend Nick. He fancied Robin, as she and Strike were equally aware.

Strike mulled over options, rubbing his chin again.

‘I’ll call Chiswell back and find out what he’s after,’ he said at last. ‘You never know, it might be a bigger job than that lawyer whose wife’s sleeping around. He’s next on the waiting list, right?’

‘Him, or that American woman who’s married to the Ferrari dealer. They’re both waiting.’

Strike sighed. Infidelity formed the bulk of their workload.

‘I hope Chiswell’s wife isn’t cheating. I fancy a change.’

The sofa made its usual flatulent noises as Strike quit it. As he strode back to the inner office, Robin called after him:

‘Are you happy for me to finish up this paperwork, then?’

‘If you don’t mind,’ said Strike, closing the door behind him.

Robin turned back to her computer feeling quite cheerful. A busker had just started singing ‘No Woman, No Cry’ in Denmark Street and for a while there, while they talked about Billy Knight and the Chiswells, she had felt as though they were the Strike and Robin of a year ago, before he had sacked her, before she had married Matthew.

Meanwhile, in the inner office, Strike’s call to Jasper Chiswell had been answered almost instantly.

‘Chiswell,’ he barked.

‘Cormoran Strike here,’ said the detective. ‘You spoke to my partner a short while ago.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said the Minister for Culture, who sounded as though he were in the back of a car. ‘I’ve got a job for you. Nothing I want to discuss over the phone. I’m busy today and this evening, unfortunately, but tomorrow would suit.’

‘ Ob - observing the hypocrites . . . ’ sang the busker down in the street.

‘Sorry, no chance tomorrow,’ said Strike, watching motes of dust fall through the bright sunlight. ‘No chance until Friday, actually. Can you give me an idea what kind of job we’re talking about, Minister?’

Chiswell’s response was both tense and angry.

‘I can’t discuss it over the phone. I’ll make it worth your while to meet me, if that’s what you want.’

‘It isn’t a question of money, it’s time. I’m solidly booked until Friday.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake—’

Chiswell suddenly removed his phone from his mouth and Strike heard him talking furiously to somebody else.

‘— left here, you moron! Lef – for fuck’s sake! No, I’ll walk. I’ll bloody walk, open the door!’

In the background, Strike heard a nervous man say:

‘I’m sorry, Minister, it was No Entry—’

‘Never mind that! Open this – open this blo ody door !’

Strike waited, eyebrows raised. He heard a car door slam, rapid footsteps and then Jasper Chiswell spoke again, his mouth close to the receiver.

‘The job’s urgent!’ he hissed.

‘If it can’t wait until Friday, you’ll have to find someone else, I’m afraid.’

‘ My feet is my only carriage ,’ sang the busker.

Chiswell said nothing for a few seconds; then, finally:

‘It’s got to be you. I’ll explain when we meet, but – all right, if it has to be Friday, meet me at Pratt’s Club. Park Place. Come at twelve, I’ll give you lunch.’

‘All right,’ Strike agreed, now thoroughly intrigued. ‘See you at Pratt’s.’

He hung up and returned to the office where Robin was opening and sorting mail. When he told her the upshot of the conversation, she Googled Pratt’s for him.

‘I didn’t think places like this still existed,’ she said in disbelief, after a minute’s reading off the monitor.

‘Places like what?’

‘It’s a gentleman’s club . . . very Tory . . . no women allowed, except as guests of club members at lunchtime . . . and “to avoid confusion”,’ Robin read from the Wikipedia page, ‘“all male staff members are called George”.’

‘What if they hire a woman?’

‘Apparently they did in the eighties,’ said Robin, her expression midway between amusement and disapproval. ‘They called her Georgina.’

9

It is best for you not to know. Best for us both.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

At half past eleven the following Friday, a suited and freshly shaven Strike emerged from Green Park Tube station and proceeded along Piccadilly. Double-deckers rolled past the windows of luxury shops, which were capitalising on Olympics fever to push an eclectic mix of goods: gold-wrapped chocolate medals, Union Jack brogues, antique sporting posters and, over and again, the jagged logo that Jimmy Knight had compared to a broken swastika.

Strike had allowed a generous margin of time to reach Pratt’s, because his leg was again aching after two days in which he had rarely been able to take the weight off his prosthesis. He had hoped that the tech conference in Epping Forest, where he had spent the previous day, might have offered intervals of rest, but he had been disappointed. His target, the recently fired partner of a start-up, was suspected of trying to sell key features of their new app to competitors. For hours, Strike had tailed the young man from booth to booth, documenting all his movements and his interactions, hoping at some point that he would tire and sit. However, between the coffee bar where customers stood at high tables, to the sandwich bar where everyone stood and ate sushi with their fingers out of plastic boxes, the target had spent eight hours walking or standing. Coming after long hours of lurking in Harley Street the day before, it was hardly surprising that the removal of his prosthesis the previous evening had been an uncomfortable affair, the gel pad that separated stump from artificial shin difficult to prise off. As Strike passed the cool off-white arches of the Ritz, he hoped Pratt’s contained at least one comfortable chair of generous proportions.

He turned right into St James’s Street, which led him in a gentle slope straight down to the sixteenth-century St James’s Palace. This was not an area of London that Strike usually visited on his own account, given that he had neither the means nor the inclination to buy from gentlemen’s outfitters, long-established gun shops or centuries’ old wine dealers. As he drew nearer to Park Place, though, he was visited by a personal memory. He had walked this street more than ten years previously, with Charlotte.

They had walked up the slope, not down it, heading for a lunch date with her father, who was now dead. Strike had been on leave from the army and they had recently resumed what was, to everyone who knew them, an incomprehensible and obviously doomed affair. On neither side of their relationship had there ever been a single supporter. His friends and family had viewed Charlotte with everything from mistrust to loathing, while hers had always considered Strike, the illegitimate son of an infamous rockstar, as one more manifestation of Charlotte’s need to shock and rebel. Strike’s military career had been nothing to her family, or rather, it had been just another sign of his plebeian unfitness to aspire to the well-bred beauty’s hand, because gentlemen of Charlotte’s class did not enter the Military Police, but Cavalry or Guards regiments.