Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘He’s under all kinds of stress just now, Raff, babes. It isn’t you. He’s honestly going berserk about the smallest things.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Robin forced herself to say to Raphael. ‘I completely overreacted.’

‘No problem,’ he replied, in the kind of accent that is routinely described as ‘public school’. ‘For the record, I’m not, in fact, a sex offender.’

Robin laughed nervously.

‘You’re the goddaughter I didn’t know about? Nobody tells me anything. Venetia, yeah? I’m Raff.’

‘Um – yes – hi.’

They shook hands and Robin retook her seat, busying herself with some pointless paper shuffling. She could feel her colour fluctuating.

‘It’s just crazy at the moment,’ Izzy said, and Robin knew that she was trying, for not entirely unselfish reasons, to persuade Raphael that their father wasn’t as bad to work with as he might appear. ‘We’re understaffed, we’ve got the Olympics coming up, TTS is constantly going off on Papa—’

‘ What’s going off on him?’ asked Raphael, dropping down into the sagging armchair, loosening his tie and crossing his long legs.

‘TTS,’ Izzy repeated. ‘Lean over and put on the kettle while you’re there, Raff, I’m dying for a coffee. TTS. It stands for Tinky the Second. It’s what Fizz and I call Kinvara.’

The many nicknames of the Chiswell family had been explained to Robin during her office interludes with Izzy. Izzy’s older sister Sophia was ‘Fizzy’, while Sophia’s three children rejoiced in the pet names of ‘Pringle’, ‘Flopsy’ and ‘Pong’.

‘Why “Tinky the Second”?’ asked Raff, unscrewing a jar of instant coffee with long fingers. Robin was still very aware of all his movements, though keeping her eyes on her supposed work. ‘What was Tinky the First?’

‘Oh, come on, Raff, you must have heard about Tinky,’ said Izzy. ‘That ghastly Australian nurse Grampy married last time round, when he was getting senile. He blew most of the money on her. He was the second silly old codger she’d married. Grampy bought her a dud racehorse and loads of horrible jewellery. Papa nearly had to go to court to get her out of the house when Grampy died. She dropped dead of breast cancer before it got really expensive, thank God.’

Startled by this sudden callousness, Robin looked up.

‘How d’you take it, Venetia?’ Raphael asked as he spooned coffee into mugs.

‘White, no sugar, please,’ said Robin. She thought it best if she maintained a low profile for a while, after her recent incursion into Winn’s office.

‘TTS married Papa for his dosh,’ Izzy ploughed on, ‘ and she’s horse-mad like Tinky. You know she’s got nine now? Nine!’

‘Nine what?’ said Raphael.

‘Horses, Raff!’ said Izzy impatiently. ‘Bloody uncontrollable, bad-mannered, hot-blooded horses that she mollycoddles and keeps as child substitutes and spends all the money on! God , I wish Papa would leave her,’ said Izzy. ‘Pass the biscuit tin, babes.’

He did so. Robin, who could feel him looking at her, maintained the pretence of absorption in her work.

The telephone rang.

‘Jasper Chiswell’s office,’ said Izzy, trying to prise off the lid of the biscuit tin one-handed, the receiver under her chin. ‘Oh,’ she said, suddenly cool. ‘Hello, Kinvara. You’ve just missed Papa . . . ’

Grinning at his half-sister’s expression, Raphael took the biscuits from her, opened them and offered the tin to Robin, who shook her head. A torrent of indistinguishable words was pouring from Izzy’s earpiece.

‘No . . . no, he’s gone . . . he only came over to say hello to Raff . . . ’

The voice at the end of the phone seemed to become more strident.

‘Back at DCMS, he’s got a meeting at ten,’ said Izzy. ‘I can’t – well, because he’s very busy, you know, the Olymp – yes . . . goodbye.’

Izzy slammed the receiver down and struggled out of her jacket.

‘She should take another rest cure. The last one doesn’t seem to have done her much good . ’

‘Izzy doesn’t believe in mental illness,’ Raphael told Robin.

He was contemplating her, still slightly curious and, she guessed, trying to draw her out.

‘Of course I believe in mental illness, Raff!’ said Izzy, apparently stung. ‘Of course I do! I was sorry for her when it happened – I was , Raff – Kinvara had a stillbirth two years ago,’ Izzy explained, ‘and of course that’s sad, of course it is, and it was quite understandable that she was a bit, you know, afterwards, but – no, I’m sorry,’ she said crossly, addressing Raphael, ‘but she uses it. She does , Raff. She thinks it entitles her to everything she wants and – well, she’d have been a dreadful mother, anyway,’ said Izzy defiantly. ‘She can’t stand not being the centre of attention. When she’s not getting enough she starts her little girl act – don’t leave me alone, Jasper, I get scared when you’re not here at night. Telling stupid lies . . . funny phone calls to the house, men hiding in the flowerbeds, fiddling with the horses.’

‘ What? ’ said Raphael, half-laughing, but Izzy cut him short.

‘Oh, Christ, look, Papa’s left his briefing papers.’

She hurried out from behind her desk, snatched a leather folder off the top of the radiator and called over her shoulder, ‘Raff, you can listen to the phone messages and transcribe them for me while I’m gone, OK?’

The heavy wooden door thudded shut behind her, leaving Robin and Raphael alone. If she had been hyperaware of Raphael before Izzy had gone, now he seemed to Robin to fill the entire room, his olive dark eyes on her.

He took Ecstasy and ran his car into a mother of a four - year - old . He barely served a third of his sentence and now his father’s put him on the taxpayer’ s payroll.

‘How do I do this, then?’ asked Raphael, moving behind Izzy’s desk.

‘Just press play, I expect,’ Robin muttered, sipping her coffee and pretending to make notes on a pad.

Canned messages began to issue from the answering machine, drowning out the faint hum of conversation from the terrace beyond the net-curtained window.

A man named Rupert asked Izzy to call him back about ‘the AGM’.

A constituent called Mrs Ricketts spoke for two solid minutes about traffic along the Banbury road.

An irate woman said crossly that she ought to have expected an answering machine and that MPs ought to be answering to the public personally, then spoke until cut off by the machine about her neighbours’ failure to lop overhanging branches from a tree, in spite of repeated requests from the council.

Then a man’s growl, almost theatrically menacing, filled the quiet office:

‘ They say they piss themselves as they die, Chiswell, is that true? Forty grand, or I’ll find out how much the papers will pay. ’

20

We two have worked our way forward in complete companionship.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Strike had selected the Two Chairmen for his Wednesday evening catch-up with Robin because of its proximity to the Palace of Westminster. The pub was tucked away on a junction of centuries-old back streets – Old Queen Street, Cockpit Steps – amid a motley collection of quaint, sedate buildings that stood at oblique angles to each other. Only as he limped across the road and saw the hanging metal sign over the front door did Strike realise that the ‘two chairmen’ for whom the pub was named were not, as he had assumed, joint managers of a board, but lowly servants carrying the heavy load of a sedan chair. Tired and sore as Strike was, the image seemed appropriate, although the occupant of the sedan chair in the pub sign was a refined lady in white, not a large, curmudgeonly minister with wiry hair and a short temper.