Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

The offices to the left were separated from this curving space by glass walls and doors. Robin spotted the Minister for Culture from a distance, sitting at his desk beneath a contemporary painting of the Queen, talking on the telephone. He indicated by a brusque gesture that her escort should show Robin inside the office and continued talking on the telephone as Robin waited, somewhat awkwardly, for him to finish his call. A woman’s voice was issuing from the earpiece, high-pitched and to Robin, even eight feet away, hysterical.

‘I’ve got to go, Kinvara!’ barked Chiswell into the mouthpiece. ‘Yes . . . we’ll talk about this later. I’ve g ot to go. ’

Setting down the receiver harder than was necessary, he pointed Robin to a chair opposite him. His coarse, straight grey hair stood out around his head in a wiry halo, his fat lower lip giving him an air of angry petulance.

‘The newspapers are sniffing around,’ he growled. ‘That was m’wife. The Sun rang her this morning, asking whether the rumours are true. She said “what rumours?” but the fella didn’t specify. Fishing, obviously. Trying to surprise something out of her.’

He frowned at Robin, whose appearance he seemed to find wanting.

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-seven,’ she said.

‘You look younger.’

It didn’t sound like a compliment.

‘Managed to plant the surveillance device yet?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Robin.

‘Where’s Strike?’

‘In Manchester, interviewing Jimmy Knight’s ex-wife,’ said Robin.

Chiswell made the angry, subterranean noise usually rendered as ‘harrumph’, then got to his feet. Robin jumped up, too.

‘Well, you’d better get back and get on with it,’ said Chiswell. ‘The National Health Service,’ he added, with no change of tone, as he headed towards the door. ‘People are going to think we’re bloody mad.’

‘Sorry?’ said Robin, entirely thrown.

Chiswell pulled open the glass door and indicated that Robin should pass through it ahead of him, out into the open-plan area where all the smart young people sat working beside their sleek coffee machine.

‘Olympics opening ceremony,’ he explained, following her. ‘Lefty bloody crap. We won two bloody world wars, but we’re not supposed to celebrate that.’

‘Nonsense, Jasper,’ said a deep, melodious Welsh voice close at hand. ‘We celebrate military victories all the time. This is a different kind of celebration.’

Della Winn, the Minister for Sport, was standing just outside Chiswell’s door, holding the leash of her near-white Labrador. A woman of stately appearance, with grey hair swept back off a broad forehead, she wore sunglasses so dark that Robin could make out nothing behind them. Her blindness, Robin knew from her research, had been due to a rare condition in which neither eyeball had grown in utero . She sometimes wore prosthetic eyes, especially when she was to be photographed. Della was sporting a quantity of heavy, tactile jewellery in gold, with a large necklace of intaglios, and dressed from head to foot in sky blue. Robin had read in one of Strike’s printed profiles of the politician that Geraint laid out Della’s clothes for her every morning and that it was simplest for him, not having a great feel for fashion, to select things in the same colour. Robin had found this rather touching when she read it.

Chiswell did not appear to relish the sudden appearance of his colleague and indeed, given that her husband was blackmailing him, Robin supposed that this was hardly surprising. Della, on the other hand, gave no sign of embarrassment.

‘I thought we might share the car over to Greenwich,’ she said to Chiswell, while the pale Labrador snuffled gently at the hem of Robin’s skirt. ‘Give us a chance to go over the plans for the twelfth. What are you doing, Gwynn?’ she added, feeling the Labrador’s head tugging.

‘She’s sniffing me,’ said Robin nervously, patting the Labrador.

‘This is my goddaughter, ah . . . ’

‘Venetia,’ said Robin, as Chiswell was evidently struggling to remember her name.

‘How do you do?’ said Della, holding out her hand. ‘Visiting Jasper?’

‘No, I’m interning in the constituency office,’ said Robin, shaking the warm, be-ringed hand, as Chiswell walked away to examine the document held by a hovering young man in a suit.

‘Venetia,’ repeated Della, her face still turned towards Robin. A faint frown appeared on the handsome face, half-masked behind the impenetrable black glasses. ‘What’s your surname?’

‘Hall,’ said Robin.

She felt a ridiculous flutter of panic, as though Della were about to unmask her. Still poring over the document he had been shown, Chiswell moved away, leaving Robin, or so it felt, entirely at Della’s mercy.

‘You’re the fencer,’ said Della.

‘Sorry?’ said Robin, totally confused again, her mind on posts and rails. Some of the young people around the space-age coffee machine had turned around to listen, expressions of polite interest on their faces.

‘Yes,’ said Della. ‘Yes, I remember you. You were on the English team with Freddie.’

Her friendly expression had hardened. Chiswell was now leaning over a desk while he struck through phrases on the document.

‘No, I never fenced,’ said Robin, thoroughly out of her depth. She had realised at the mention of the word ‘team’ that swords were under discussion, rather than fields and livestock.

‘You certainly did,’ said Della flatly. ‘I remember you. Jasper’s goddaughter, on the team with Freddie.’

It was a slightly unnerving display of arrogance, of complete self-belief. Robin felt inadequate to the job of continuing to protest, because there were now several listeners. Instead, she merely said, ‘Well, nice to have met you,’ and walked away.

‘ Again , you mean,’ said Della sharply, but Robin made no reply.

16

… a man with as dirty a record as his! . . . This is the sort of man that poses as a leader of the people! And successfully, too!

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

After four and a half hours in the driving seat, Strike’s exit from the BMW in Manchester was far from graceful. He stood for a while in Burton Road, a broad, pleasant street with its mixture of shops and houses, leaning on the car, stretching his back and leg, grateful that he had managed to find a parking space only a short way from ‘Stylz’. The bright pink shopfront stood out between a café and a Tesco Express, pictures of moody models with unnaturally tinted hair in the window.

With its black and white tiled floor and pink walls that reminded Strike of Lorelei’s bedroom, the interior of the small shop was determinedly trendy, but it did not appear to cater to a particularly youthful or adventurous clientele. There were currently only two clients, one of whom was a large woman of at least sixty, who was reading Good Housekeeping in front of a mirror, her hair a mass of foil. Strike made a bet with himself as he entered that Dawn would prove to be the slim peroxide blonde with her back to him, chatting animatedly to an elderly lady whose blue hair she was perming.

‘I’ve got an appointment with Dawn,’ Strike told the young receptionist, who looked slightly startled to see anything so large and male in this fug of perfumed ammonia. The peroxided blonde turned at the sound of her name. She had the leathery, age-spotted skin of a committed sunbed user.

‘With you in a moment, cock,’ she said, smiling. He settled to wait on a bench in the window.

Five minutes later, she was leading him to an upholstered pink chair at the back of the shop.

‘What are you after, then?’ she asked him, inviting him with a gesture to sit down.