Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

Strike said that it was and, after a curt farewell, Chiswell hung up, leaving Strike to limp towards St James’s Park station.

Settled in a corner seat of the Tube ten minutes later, Strike folded his arms, stretched out his legs and stared unseeingly at the window opposite.

The nature of this investigation was highly unusual. He had never before had a blackmail case where the client was so unforthcoming about his offence – but then, Strike reasoned with himself, he had never had a government minister as a client before. Equally, it was not every day that a possibly psychotic young man burst into Strike’s office and insisted that he had witnessed a child murder, though Strike had certainly received his fair share of unusual and unbalanced communications since hitting the newspapers: what he had once called, over Robin’s occasional protests, ‘the nutter drawer’, now filled half a filing cabinet.

It was the precise relationship between the strangled child and Chiswell’s case of blackmail that was preoccupying Strike, even though, on the face of it, the connection was obvious: it lay in the fact of Jimmy and Billy’s brotherhood. Now somebody (and Strike thought it overwhelmingly likely to be Jimmy, judging from Robin’s account of the call) seemed to have decided to tie Billy’s story to Chiswell, even though the blackmailable offence that had brought Chiswell to Strike could not possibly have been infanticide, or Geraint Winn would have gone to the police. Like a tongue probing a pair of ulcers, Strike’s thoughts kept returning fruitlessly to the Knight brothers: Jimmy, charismatic, articulate, thuggishly good-looking, a chancer and a hothead, and Billy, haunted, filthy, unquestionably ill, bedevilled by a memory no less dreadful for the fact that it might be false.

They piss themselves as they die.

Who did? Again, Strike seemed to hear Billy Knight.

They buried her in a pink blanket, down in the dell by my dad’s house. But afterwards they said it was a boy . . .

He had just been specifically instructed by his client to restrict his investigations to London, not Oxfordshire.

As he checked the name of the station at which they had just arrived, Strike remembered Robin’s self-consciousness when talking about Raphael Chiswell. Yawning, he took out his mobile again and succeeded in Googling the youngest of his client’s offspring, of whom there were many pictures going up the courtroom steps to his trial for manslaughter.

As he scrolled through multiple pictures of Raphael, Strike felt a rising antipathy towards the handsome young man in his dark suit. Setting aside the fact that Chiswell’s son resembled an Italian model more than anything British, the images caused a latent resentment, rooted in class and personal injuries, to glow a little redder inside Strike’s chest. Raphael was of the same type as Jago Ross, the man whom Charlotte had married after splitting with Strike: upper class, expensively clothed and educated, their peccadillos treated more leniently for being able to afford the best lawyers, for resembling the sons of the judges deciding their fates.

The train set off again and Strike, losing his connection, stuffed his phone back into his pocket, folded his arms and resumed his blank stare at the dark window, trying to deny an uncomfortable idea headspace, but it nosed up against him like a dog demanding food, impossible to ignore.

He now realised that he had never imagined Robin being interested in any man other than Matthew, except, of course, for that moment when he himself had held her on the stairs at her wedding, when, briefly . . .

Angry with himself, he kicked the unhelpful thought aside, and forced his wandering mind back onto the curious case of a government minister, slashed horses and a body buried in a pink blanket, down in a dell.

21

… certain games are going on behind your back in this house.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

‘Why are you so busy and I’ve got bugger all to do?’ Raphael asked Robin, late on Friday morning.

She had just returned from tailing Geraint to Portcullis House. Observing him from a distance, she had seen how the polite smiles of the many young women he greeted turned to expressions of dislike as he passed. Geraint had disappeared into a meeting room on the first floor, so Robin had returned to Izzy’s office. Approaching Geraint’s room she had hoped she might be able to slip inside and retrieve the second listening device, but through the open door she saw Aamir working at his computer.

‘Raff, I’ll give you something to do in a moment, babes,’ muttered a fraught Izzy, who was hammering at her keyboard. ‘I’ve got to finish this, it’s for the local party chairwoman. Papa’s coming to sign it in five minutes.’

She threw a harried glance at her brother, who was sprawled in the armchair, his long legs spread out in front of him, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened, playing with the paper visitor’s pass that hung around his neck.

‘Why don’t you go and get yourself a coffee on the terrace?’ Izzy suggested. Robin knew she wanted him out the way when Chiswell turned up.

‘Want to come for a coffee, Venetia?’ asked Raphael.

‘Can’t,’ said Robin. ‘Busy.’

The fan on Izzy’s desk swept Robin’s way and she enjoyed a few seconds of cool breeze. The net-curtained window gave but a misty impression of the glorious June day. Truncated parliamentarians appeared as glowing wraiths on the terrace beyond the glass. It was stuffy inside the cluttered office. Robin was wearing a cotton dress, her hair in a ponytail, but still she occasionally blotted her upper lip with the back of her hand as she pretended to be working.

Having Raphael in the office was, as she had told Strike, a disadvantage. There had been no need to come up with excuses for lurking in the corridor when she had been alone with Izzy. What was more, Raphael watched her a lot, in an entirely different way to Geraint’s lewd up-and-down looks. She didn’t approve of Raphael, but every now and then she found herself coming perilously close to feeling sorry for him. He seemed nervy around his father, and then – well, anybody would think him handsome. That was the main reason she avoided looking at him: it was best not to, if you wanted to preserve any objectivity.

He kept trying to foster a closer relationship with her, which she was attempting to discourage. Only the previous day he had interrupted her as she hovered outside Geraint and Aamir’s door, listening with all her might to a conversation that Aamir was having on the phone about an ‘inquiry’. From the scant details that Robin had so far heard, she was convinced that the Level Playing Field was under discussion.

‘But this isn’t a statutory inquiry?’ Aamir was asking, sounding worried. ‘It isn’t official? I thought this was just a routine . . . but Mr Winn understood that his letter to the fundraising regulator had answered all their concerns.’

Robin could not pass up the opportunity to listen, but knew her situation to be perilous. What she had not expected was to be surprised by Raphael rather than Winn.

‘What are you doing, skulking there?’ he had asked, laughing.

Robin walked hastily away, but she heard Aamir’s door slam behind her and suspected that he, at least, would make sure that it was closed in future.

‘Are you always this jumpy, or is it just me?’ Raphael had asked, hurrying after her. ‘Come for a coffee, come on, I’m so bloody bored.’

Robin had declined brusquely, but even as she pretended to be busy again, she had to admit that part of her – a tiny part – was flattered by his attentions.

There was a knock on the door and, to Robin’s surprise, Aamir Mallik entered the room, holding a list of names. Nervous but determined, he addressed Izzy.