Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘Do you work for Della Winn?’ asked Robin.

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh, she’s so inspirational,’ gushed Robin. ‘One of my heroines, actually.’

Aamir did not reply, but radiated a desire to be left alone. Robin felt like a terrier trying to harass a racehorse.

‘Have you worked here long?’

‘Six months.’

‘Are you going to the café?’

‘No,’ said Aamir, as though she had propositioned him, and he turned sharply away towards the bathroom.

Robin walked on, holding her box file, wondering whether she had imagined animosity rather than shyness in the young man’s demeanour. It would have been helpful to make a friend in Winn’s office. Having to pretend to be an Izzy-esque goddaughter of Jasper Chiswell was hampering her. She couldn’t help but feel that Robin Ellacott from Yorkshire might have befriended Aamir more easily.

Having set off with fake purpose, she decided to explore for a while before returning to Izzy’s office.

Chiswell’s and Winn’s offices were in the Palace of Westminster itself, which, with its vaulted ceilings, libraries, tearooms and air of comfortable grandeur, might have been an old university college.

A half-covered passageway, watched over by large stone statues of a unicorn and lion, led to an escalator to Portcullis House. This was a modern crystal palace, with a folded glass roof, triangular panes held in place by thick black struts. Beneath was a wide, open-plan area including a café, where MPs and civil servants mingled. Flanked by full-grown trees, large water features consisting of long blocks of covered-in shallow pools became dazzling strips of quicksilver in the June sunshine.

There was a shiver of ambition in the thrumming air, and the sense of being part of a vital world. Beneath the ceiling of artfully fragmented glass, Robin passed political journalists perched on leather benches, all of whom were checking or talking on their mobiles, typing onto laptops or intercepting politicians for comment. Robin wondered whether she might have enjoyed working here if she had never been sent to Strike.

Her explorations ended in the third, dingiest and least interesting of the buildings that housed MPs’ offices, which resembled nothing so much as a three-star hotel, with worn carpets and cream walls and row upon row of identical doors. Robin doubled back, still clutching her file, and passed Winn’s door again fifty minutes after she had last seen it. Quickly checking that the corridor was deserted, she pressed her ear against the thick oak and thought she heard movement within.

‘How’s it going?’ asked Izzy, when Robin re-entered her office a couple of minutes later.

‘I haven’t seen Winn yet.’

‘He might be over at DCMS. He goes to see Della on any excuse,’ said Izzy. ‘Fancy a coffee?’

But before she could leave her desk, her telephone rang.

While Izzy fielded a call from an irate constituent who had been unable to secure tickets for the Olympic diving – ‘yes, I like Tom Daley, too,’ she said, rolling her eyes at Robin, ‘but it’s a lottery , madam’ – Robin spooned out instant coffee and poured UHT milk, wondering how many times she had done this in offices she hated, and feeling suddenly extraordinarily grateful that she had escaped that life for ever.

‘Hung up,’ said Izzy indifferently, setting down the receiver. ‘What were we talking about? Oh, Geraint, yah. He’s furious Della didn’t make him a SPAD.’

‘What’s a SPAD?’ Robin asked, setting Izzy’s coffee down and taking a seat at the other desk.

‘Special Advisor. They’re like temporary civil servants. Lots more prestige, but you don’t hand the posts out to family, it’s not done. Anyway, Geraint’s hopeless, she wouldn’t want him even if it were possible.’

‘I just met the man who works with Winn,’ said Robin. ‘Aamir. He wasn’t too friendly.’

‘Oh, he’s odd,’ said Izzy, dismissively. ‘Barely civil to me. It’s probably because Geraint and Della hate Papa. I’ve never really got to the bottom of why, but they seem to hate all of us – oh, that reminds me: Papa texted a minute ago. My brother Raff’s going to be coming in later this week, to help out in here. Maybe,’ Izzy added, though she did not sound particularly hopeful, ‘if Raff’s any good, he might be able to take over from me. But Raff doesn’t know anything about the blackmail or who you really are, so don’t say anything, will you? Papa’s got about fourteen godchildren. Raff’ll never know the difference.’

Izzy sipped her coffee again, then, suddenly subdued, she said:

‘I suppose you know about Raff. It was all over the papers. That poor woman . . . it was awful. She had a four-year-old daughter . . . ’

‘I did see something,’ said Robin, noncommittally.

‘I was the only one in the family who visited him in jail,’ said Izzy. ‘Everyone was so disgusted by what he’d done. Kinvara – Papa’s wife – said he should have got life, but she’s got no idea,’ she continued, ‘how ghastly it was in there . . . people don’t realise what prison’s like . . . I mean, I know he did a terrible thing, but . . . ’

Her words trailed away. Robin wondered, perhaps ungenerously, whether Izzy was suggesting that jail was no place for a young man as refined as her half-brother. Doubtless it had been a horrible experience, Robin thought, but after all, he had taken drugs, climbed into a car and mown down a young mother.

‘I thought he was working in an art gallery?’ Robin asked.

‘He’s gone and messed up at Drummond’s,’ sighed Izzy. ‘Papa’s really taking him in to keep an eye on him.’

Public money paid for these salaries, Robin thought, remembering again the unusually short prison sentence the son of the minister had served for that drug-induced fatal accident.

‘How did he mess up at the gallery?’

To her great surprise, Izzy’s doleful expression vanished in a sudden spurt of laughter.

‘Oh, God, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. He shagged the other sales assistant in the loo,’ she said, quaking with giggles. ‘I know it isn’t funny really – but he’d just got out of jail, and Raff’s lovely looking and he’s always pulled anyone he wants. They shoved him into a suit and put him in close proximity with some pretty little blonde art graduate, what did they think was going to happen? But as you can imagine, the gallery owner wasn’t too chuffed. He heard them going at it and put Raff on a final warning. Then Raff and the girl went and did it again, so Papa had a total fit and says he’s coming here instead.’

Robin didn’t feel particularly amused, but Izzy appeared not to notice, lost in her own thoughts.

‘You never know, it could be the making of them, Papa and Raff,’ she said hopefully, then checked her watch.

‘Better return some calls,’ she sighed, setting down her coffee mug, but as she reached for her phone she froze, fingers on the receiver as a sing-song male voice rang out in the corridor beyond the closed door.

‘That’s him! Winn!’

‘Well, here I go,’ said Robin, snatching up her box file again.

‘Good luck!’ whispered Izzy.

Emerging into the corridor, Robin saw Winn standing in the doorway of his office, apparently talking to Aamir, who was inside. Winn was holding a folder with orange lettering on it saying ‘The Level Playing Field’. At the sound of Robin’s footsteps, he turned to face her.

‘Well, hello there,’ he said with a Cardiff lilt, stepping back into the corridor.

His gaze dribbled down Robin’s neck, fell onto her breasts, then up again to her mouth and her eyes. Robin knew him from that single look. She had met plenty of them in offices, the type who watched you in a way that made you feel clumsy and self-conscious, who would place a hand in the small of the back as they sidled behind you or ushered you through doors, who peered over your shoulder on the excuse of reading your monitor and made chancy little comments on your clothes that progressed to comments on your figure during after-work drinks. They cried ‘joke!’ if you got angry, and became aggressive in the face of complaints.