Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘I know one thing,’ said Oliver. ‘He had plenty of reasons to kill himself.’

‘Such as?’ enquired Strike, pen poised over his notebook.

‘His wife was leaving him—’

‘Allegedly,’ said Strike, writing.

‘—they’d lost a baby, his eldest son died in Iraq, the family say he was acting strangely, drinking heavily and so on, and he had serious money problems.’

‘Yeah?’ said Strike. ‘Like what?’

‘He was almost wiped out in the 2008 crash,’ said Oliver. ‘And then there was . . . well, that business you two were investigating.’

‘D’you know where the blackmailers were, at the time of—?’

Oliver made a swift, convulsive movement that nearly knocked over his coffee. Leaning towards Strike he hissed:

‘There’s a super-injunction out, in case you haven’t—’

‘Yeah, we’ve heard,’ said Strike.

‘Well, I happen to like my job.’

‘OK,’ said Strike, unperturbed, but lowering his voice. ‘I’ll rephrase my question. Have they looked into the movements of Geraint Winn and Jimmy—?’

‘Yes,’ said Oliver curtly, ‘and both have alibis.’

‘What are they?’

‘The former was in Bermondsey with—’

‘Not Della?’ blurted Robin, before she could stop herself. The idea of his blind wife being Geraint’s alibi had struck her, somehow, as indecent. She had formed the impression, whether naively or not, that Della stood apart from Geraint’s criminal activity.

‘No,’ said Oliver tersely, ‘and do we have to use names?’

‘Who, then?’ asked Strike.

‘Some employee. He claims he was with the employee and the bloke confirmed it.’

‘Were there other witnesses?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Oliver, with a trace of frustration. ‘I assume so. They’re happy with the alibi.’

‘What about Ji – the other man?’

‘He was in East Ham with his girlfriend.’

‘Was he?’ said Strike, making a note of it. ‘I saw him being marched off to a police van, the night before Chiswell died.’

‘He was let off with a caution. But,’ Oliver said quietly, ‘blackmailers don’t generally kill their victims, do they?’

‘Not if they’re getting money out of them,’ said Strike, still writing. ‘But Knight wasn’t.’

Oliver looked at his watch.

‘Couple more things,’ said Strike equably, his elbow still planted on the envelope containing Ian Nash’s details. ‘Does Vanessa know anything about a phone call to his son that Chiswell made on the morning of his death?’

‘Yeah, she said something about that,’ said Oliver, flicking backwards and forwards through his notebook to find the information. ‘Yeah, he made two calls just after 6 a.m. First to his wife, then to his son.’

Strike and Robin looked at each other again.

‘We knew about the call to Raphael. He called his wife as well?’

‘Yeah, he called her first.’

Oliver seemed to read their reaction correctly, because he said:

‘The wife’s totally in the clear. She was the first person they investigated, once they were satisfied it wasn’t politically motivated, obviously.

‘A neighbour saw her go into the house on Ebury Street the evening before and come out shortly afterwards with a bag, two hours before her husband came back. A taxi driver picked her up halfway down the street and took her to Paddington. She was caught on camera on the train back to wherever she lives – is it Oxfordshire? – and apparently there was someone at the house when she got home, who can vouch for the fact that she arrived there before midnight and never left again until the police came round to tell her Chiswell was dead. Multiple witnesses to her whole journey.’

‘Who was at the house with her?’

‘That, I don’t know.’ Oliver’s eyes moved to the envelope still lying beneath Strike’s elbow. ‘And that really is everything I’ve got.’

Strike had asked everything he had wanted to know, and had gained a couple of bits of information he had not expected, including the abrasions to Chiswell’s face, his poor finances and the phone call to Kinvara in the early morning.

‘You’ve been a big help,’ he told Oliver, sliding the envelope across the table. ‘Much appreciated.’

Oliver appeared relieved that the encounter was over. He stood up and, with one more hasty handshake and a nod to Robin, departed the café. Once Oliver had stridden out of sight, Robin sat back in her chair and sighed.

‘What’s that glum expression for?’ asked Strike, draining his mug of tea.

‘This is going to be the shortest job on record. Izzy wants us to prove it was Kinvara.’

‘She wants the truth about her father’s death,’ said Strike, but he grinned at Robin’s sceptical expression, ‘and, yeah, she’s hoping it was Kinvara. Well, we’ll have to see whether we can break all those alibis, won’t we? I’m going to Woolstone on Saturday. Izzy’s invited me over to Chiswell House, so I can meet her sister. Are you in? I’d rather not drive, the state my leg’s in at the moment.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Robin immediately.

The idea of getting out of London with Strike, even for a day, was so appealing that she did not bother to consider whether she and Matthew had plans, but surely, in the glow of their unexpected rapprochement, he would raise no difficulties. After all, she had not worked for a week and a half. ‘We can take the Land Rover. It’ll be better on country roads than your BMW.’

‘You might need diversionary tactics if that hack’s still watching you,’ said Strike.

‘I think I could probably throw them off more easily in a car than on foot.’

‘Yeah, you probably could,’ said Strike.

Robin was in possession of an advanced driving qualification. Though he had never told her so, Robin was the only person by whom he would willingly be driven.

‘What time are we supposed to be at Chiswell House?’

‘Eleven,’ said Strike, ‘but plan to be away for the whole day. I fancy taking a look at the Knights’ old place while we’re there.’ He hesitated. ‘I can’t remember whether I told you . . . I kept Barclay undercover with Jimmy and Flick.’

He was braced for annoyance that he had not discussed it with her, resentment that Barclay had been working when she wasn’t, or, perhaps most justifiably, a demand to know what he was playing at, given the state of the agency’s finances, but she simply said, with more amusement than rancour:

‘You know you didn’t tell me. Why did you keep him there?’

‘Because I’ve got a gut feeling there’s a lot more to the Knight brothers than meets the eye.’

‘You always tell me to mistrust gut feelings.’

‘Never claimed not to be a hypocrite, though. And brace yourself,’ Strike added, as they got up from the table, ‘Raphael’s not happy with you.’

‘Why not?’

‘Izzy says he fell for you. Quite upset you turned out to be an undercover detective.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin. A faint pink blush spread over her face. ‘Well, I’m sure he’ll bounce back fast enough. He’s that type.’

41

I was thinking of what brought us together from the first, what links us so closely to one another . . .

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Strike had spent many hours of his life trying to guess what he had done to cause the sullen silence of a woman in his vicinity. The best that could be said for the prolonged sulk in which Lorelei spent most of Friday evening was that he knew exactly how he had offended her, and was even prepared to concede that her displeasure was, to some extent, justified.

Within five minutes of his arrival at her flat in Camden, Izzy had called his mobile, partly to tell him about a letter that she had received from Geraint Winn, but mainly, he knew, to talk. She was not the first of his clients to assume that they had purchased, along with detective services, a mixture of father-confessor and therapist. Izzy gave every sign that she was settling in to spend her entire Friday evening talking to Strike, and the flirtatiousness that had been apparent in the knee touching of their last encounter was even more pronounced by phone.