Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘Holy shit.’

He spotted the cracked tube of pills on the floor, stepped over them, and scrutinised the tubing and the plastic-covered face.

‘Raff said he was behaving strangely,’ said Robin, ‘but I don’t think he ever dreamed . . . ’

Strike said nothing. He was still examining the body.

‘Was that there yesterday evening?’

‘What?’

‘That,’ said Strike, pointing.

There was a semi-circular mark on the back of Chiswell’s hand, dark red against the coarse, pallid skin.

‘I can’t remember,’ said Robin.

The full shock of what had happened was starting to hit her and she was finding it hard to arrange her thoughts, which floated, unmoored and disconnected, through her head: Chiswell barking through the car window to persuade the police to let Strike into last night’s reception, Chiswell calling Kinvara a stupid bitch, Chiswell demanding that they meet him here this morning. It was unreasonable to expect her to remember the backs of his hands.

‘Hmm,’ said Strike. He noticed at the mobile in Robin’s hand. ‘Have you taken pictures of everything?’

She nodded.

‘All of this?’ he asked, waving a hand over the table. ‘That?’ he added, pointing at the cracked pills on the carpet.

‘Yes. That was my fault. I trod on them.’

‘How did you get in?’

‘The door was open. I thought he’d left it on the latch for us,’ said Robin. ‘A workman shouted in the street and I thought it was Chiswell saying “come in”. I was expecting—’

‘Stay here,’ said Strike.

He left the room. She heard him climbing the stairs and then his heavy footsteps on the ceiling above, but she knew that there was nobody there. She could feel the house’s essential lifelessness, its flimsy cardboard unreality, and, sure enough, Strike returned less than five minutes later, shaking his head.

‘Nobody.’

He walked past her through a door that led off the sitting room and, hearing his footsteps hit tile, Robin knew that it was the kitchen.

‘Completely empty,’ Strike said, re-emerging.

‘What happened last night?’ Robin asked. ‘You said something funny happened.’

She wanted to discuss a subject other than the awful form that dominated the room in its grotesque lifelessness.

‘Billy called me. He said people were trying to kill him – chasing him. He claimed to be in a phone box in Trafalgar Square. I went to try and find him, but he wasn’t there.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin.

So he hadn’t been with Charlotte. Even in this extremity, Robin registered the fact, and was glad.

‘The hell?’ said Strike quietly, looking past her into a corner of the room.

A buckled sword was leaning against the wall in a dark corner. It looked as though it had been forced or stood on and deliberately bent. Strike walked carefully around the body to examine it, but then they heard the police car pulling up outside the house and he straightened up.

‘We’ll tell them everything, obviously,’ said Strike.

‘Yes,’ said Robin.

‘Except the surveillance devices. Shit – they’ll find them in your office—’

‘They won’t,’ said Robin. ‘I took them home yesterday, in case we decided I needed to clear out because of the Sun .’

Before Strike could express admiration for this clear-eyed foresight, somebody rapped hard on the front door.

‘Well, it’s been nice while it’s lasted, hasn’t it?’ Strike said, with a grim smile, as he moved towards the hall. ‘Being out of the papers?’

PART TWO

36

What has happened can be hushed up – or at any rate can be explained away . . .

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

The Chiswell case maintained its singular character even when their client was no more.

As the usual cumbersome procedures and formalities enveloped the corpse, Strike and Robin were escorted from Ebury Street to Scotland Yard, where they were separately interviewed. Strike knew that a tornado of speculation must be whirling through the newsrooms of London at the death of a government minister, and sure enough, by the time they emerged from Scotland Yard six hours later, the colourful details of Chiswell’s private life were being broadcast across TV and radio, while opening the internet browsers on their phones revealed brief news items from news sites, as a tangle of baroque theories spread across blogs and social media, in which a multitude of cartoonish Chiswells died at the hand of myriad nebulous foes. As he rode in a taxi back to Denmark Street, Strike read how Chiswell the corrupt capitalist had been murdered by the Russian mafia after failing to pay back interest on some seedy, illegal transaction, while Chiswell the defender of solid English values had surely been dispatched by vengeful Islamists after his attempts to resist the rise of sharia law.

Strike returned to his attic flat only to collect his belongings, and decamped to the house of his old friends Nick and Ilsa, respectively a gastroenterologist and a lawyer. Robin, who at Strike’s insistence had taken a taxi directly home to Albury Street, was given a peremptory hug by Matthew, whose tissue-thin pretence of sympathy was worse, Robin felt, than outright fury.

When he heard that Robin had been summoned back to Scotland Yard for further interrogation the next day, Matthew’s self-control crumbled.

‘Anyone could have seen this coming!’

‘Funny, it seemed to take most people by surprise,’ Robin said. She had just ignored her mother’s fourth call of the morning.

‘I don’t mean Chiswell killing himself—’

‘—it’s pronounced “Chizzle”—’

‘—I mean you getting yourself into trouble for sneaking around the Houses of Parliament!’

‘Don’t worry, Matt. I’ll make sure the police know you were against it. Wouldn’t want your promotion prospects compromised.’

But she wasn’t sure that her second interviewer was a policeman. The softly spoken man in a dark grey suit didn’t reveal whom he worked for. Robin found this gentleman far more intimidating than yesterday’s police, even though they had, at times, been forceful to the point of aggression. Robin told her new interviewer everything she had seen and heard in the Commons, omitting only the strange conversation between Della Winn and Aamir Mallik, which had been captured on the second listening device. As the interaction had taken place behind a closed door after normal working hours, she could only have heard it by using surveillance equipment. Robin assuaged her conscience by telling herself that this conversation could not possibly have anything to do with Chiswell’s death, but squirming feelings of guilt and terror pursued her as she left the building for the second time. So consumed was she by what she hoped was paranoia by this brush with the security services, that she called Strike from a payphone near the Tube, instead of using her mobile.

‘I’ve just had another interview. I’m pretty sure it was MI5.’

‘Bound to happen,’ said Strike, and she took solace from his matter-of-fact tone. ‘They’ve got to check you out, make sure you are who you claim to be. Isn’t there anywhere you can go, other than home? I can’t believe the press aren’t onto us yet, but it must be imminent.’

‘I could go back to Masham, I suppose,’ Robin said, ‘but they’re bound to try there if they want to find me. That’s where they came after the Ripper stuff.’

Unlike Strike, she had no friends of her own into whose anonymous homes she felt she could vanish. All her friends were Matthew’s, too, and she had no doubt that, like her husband, they would be scared of harbouring anybody who was of interest to the security services. At a loss as to what to do, she went back to Albury Street.