Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

Finally, at ten past four, her luck changed. Geraint Winn swaggered around the corner, rather tipsy after what seemed to have been a prolonged lunch, and in sharp contrast to his wife, he seemed delighted to meet her as she set off towards him.

‘There she is!’ he said, over-loudly. ‘I wanted a word with you! Come in here, come in!’

He pushed open the door of his office. Puzzled, but only too eager to see the interior of the room she was hoping to bug, Robin followed him.

Aamir was working in shirtsleeves at his desk, which formed a tiny oasis of order in the general clutter. Stacks of folders lay around Winn’s desk. Robin noticed the orange logo of the Level Playing Field on a pile of letters in front of him. There was a power point directly under Geraint’s desk that would be an ideal position for the listening device.

‘Have you two met?’ Geraint asked jovially. ‘Venetia, Aamir.’

He sat down and invited Robin to take the armchair on which a sliding pile of card folders lay.

‘Did Redgrave call back?’ Winn asked Aamir, struggling out of his suit jacket.

‘Who?’ said the latter.

‘Sir Steve Redgrave!’ said Winn, with the suspicion of an eye roll in Robin’s direction. She felt embarrassed for him, especially as Aamir’s muttered ‘no’ was cold.

‘Level Playing Field,’ Winn told Robin.

He had managed to get his jacket off. With an attempted flourish, he threw it onto the back of his chair. It slid limply onto the floor, but Geraint appeared not to notice, and instead tapped the orange logo on the topmost letter in front of him. ‘Our cha—’ he belched. ‘Pardon me – our charity. Disadvantaged and disabled athletes, you know. Lots of high profile supporters. Sir Steve keen to—’ he belched again, ‘—pardon – help. Well, now. I wanted to apologise. For my poor wife.’

He seemed to be enjoying himself hugely. Out of the corner of her eye, Robin saw Aamir fling Geraint a sharp look, like the flash of a claw, swiftly retracted.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Robin.

‘Gets names wrong. Does it all the time. If I didn’t keep an eye on her, we’d have all sorts going on, wrong letters going out to the wrong people . . . she thought you were someone else. I had her on the phone over lunch, insisting you were somebody our daughter ran across years ago. Verity Pulham. ’Nother of your godfather’s godchildren. Told her straight away it wasn’t you, said I’d pass on her apologies. Silly girl, she is. Very stubborn when she thinks she’s right, but,’ he rolled his eyes again and tapped his forehead, the long-suffering husband of an infuriating wife, ‘I managed to penetrate in the end.’

‘Well,’ said Robin carefully, ‘I’m glad she knows she was mistaken, because she didn’t seem to like Verity very much.’

‘Truth to tell, Verity was a little bitch,’ said Winn, still beaming. Robin could tell he enjoyed using the word. ‘Nasty to our daughter, you see.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Robin, with a thud of dread beneath her ribs as she remembered that Rhiannon Winn had killed herself. ‘I’m sorry. How awful.’

‘You know,’ said Winn, sitting down and tipping back his chair against the wall, hands behind his head, ‘you seem far too sweet a girl to be associated with the Chiswell family.’ He was definitely a little drunk. Robin could smell faint wine dregs on his breath and Aamir threw him another of those sharp, scathing looks. ‘What were you doing before this, Venetia?’

‘PR,’ said Robin, ‘but I’d like to do something more worthwhile. Politics, or maybe a charity. I was reading about the Level Playing Field,’ she said truthfully. ‘It seems wonderful. You do a lot with veterans, too, don’t you? I saw an interview with Terry Byrne yesterday. The Paralympian cyclist?’

Her attention had been caught by the fact that Byrne had the same below the knee amputation as Strike.

‘You’ll have a personal interest in veterans, of course,’ said Winn.

Robin’s stomach swooped and fell again.

‘Sorry?’

‘Freddie Chiswell?’ Winn prompted.

‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said Robin. ‘Although I didn’t know Freddie very well. He was a bit older than me. Obviously, it was dreadful when he – when he was killed.’

‘Oh, yes, awful,’ said Winn, though he sounded indifferent. ‘Della was very much against the Iraq war. Very much against it. Your Uncle Jasper was all for it, mind you.’

For a moment, the air seemed to thrum with Winn’s unexpressed implication that Chiswell had been well served for his enthusiasm.

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said Robin carefully. ‘Uncle Jasper thought military action justified on the evidence we had at the time. Anyway,’ she said bravely, ‘nobody can accuse him of acting out of self-interest, can they, when his son had to go and fight?’

‘Ah, if you’re going to take that line, who can argue?’ said Winn. He raised his hands in mock surrender, his chair slipped a little on the wall and for a few seconds he struggled to maintain balance, seizing the desk and pulling himself and the chair upright again. With a substantial effort, Robin managed not to laugh.

‘Geraint,’ said Aamir, ‘we need those letters signed if we’re going to get them off by five.’

‘’S’only half four,’ said Winn, checking his watch. ‘Yes, Rhiannon was on the British junior fencing team.’

‘How marvellous,’ said Robin.

‘Sporty, like her mother. Fencing for the Welsh juniors at fourteen. I used to drive her all over the place for tournaments. Hours on the road together! She made the British juniors at sixteen.

‘But the English lot were very stand-offish to her,’ said Winn, with a glimmer of Celtic resentment. ‘She wasn’t at one of your big public schools, you see. It was all about connections with them. Verity Pulham, she didn’t have the ability, not really. As a matter of fact, it was only when Verity broke her ankle that Rhiannon, who was a far better fencer, got on the British team at all.’

‘I see,’ said Robin, trying to balance sympathy with a feigned allegiance to the Chiswells. Surely this could not be the grievance that Winn had against the family? Yet Geraint’s fanatic tone spoke of longstanding resentment. ‘Well, these things should come down to ability, of course.’

‘That’s right,’ said Winn. ‘They should. Look at this, now . . . ’

He fumbled for his wallet and pulled from it an old photograph. Robin held out her hand, but Geraint, keeping a firm hold on the picture, got up clumsily, stumbled over a stack of books lying beside his chair, walked around the desk, came so close that Robin could feel his breath on her neck, and showed her the image of his daughter.

Dressed in fencing garb, Rhiannon Winn stood beaming and holding up the gold medal around her neck. She was pale and small-featured, and Robin could see very little of either parent in her face, although perhaps there was a hint of Della in the broad, intelligent brow. But with Geraint’s loud breathing in her ear, trying to stop herself leaning away from him, Robin had a sudden vision of Geraint Winn striding, with his wide, lipless grin, through a large hall of sweaty teenage girls. Was it shameful to wonder whether it had been parental devotion that had spurred him to chauffeur his daughter all over the country?

‘What have you done to yourself, eh?’ Geraint asked, his hot breath in her ear. Leaning in, he touched the purple knife scar on her bare forearm.

Unable to prevent herself, Robin snatched her arm away. The nerves around the scar had not yet fully healed: she hated anyone touching it.

‘I fell through a glass door when I was nine,’ she said, but the confidential, confiding atmosphere had been dispersed like cigarette smoke.