Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘Pointlessly spiteful?’ asked Raphael, arms folded beneath the picture of the dead foal. ‘Because you’re so convinced you’re right, and the other person’s wrong, that it’s OK to stop them doing something harmless?’

‘Raff,’ said Izzy at once, ‘I know you’re upset—’

‘I’m not upset, Izz,’ said Raphael. ‘Very liberating, really, going back through all the shitty things Dad did while he was alive—’

‘That’s enough, boy!’ said Torquil.

‘Don’t call me “boy”,’ said Raphael, shaking another cigarette out of his packet. ‘All right? Don’t fucking call me “boy”.’

‘You’ll have to excuse Raff,’ Torquil told Strike loudly, ‘he’s upset with m’late father-in-law because of the will.’

‘I already knew I’d been written out of the will!’ snapped Raphael, pointing at Kinvara. ‘ She saw to that!’

‘Your father didn’t need any persuasion from me, I promise you!’ said Kinvara, scarlet in the face now. ‘Anyway, you’ve got plenty of money, your mother spoils you rotten.’ She turned to Robin. ‘His mother left Jasper for a diamond merchant, after taking Jasper for everything she could lay her hands on—’

‘Could I ask another couple of questions?’ said Strike loudly, before a plainly fuming Raphael could speak.

‘The vet will be here for Romano in a minute,’ said Kinvara. ‘I need to get back to the stable.’

‘Just a couple, and I’m done,’ Strike assured her. ‘Did you ever miss any amitriptyline pills? I think you were prescribed them, weren’t you?’

‘The police asked me this. I might have lost some,’ said Kinvara, with irritating vagueness, ‘but I can’t be sure. There was a box I thought I’d lost and then I found it again and it didn’t have as many pills in as I remembered, and I know I meant to leave a pack at Ebury Street in case I ever forgot when I was coming up from London, but when the police asked me I couldn’t remember whether I’d actually done it or not.’

‘So you couldn’t swear to it that you had pills missing?’

‘No,’ said Kinvara. ‘Jasper might have stolen some, but I can’t swear to it.’

‘Have you had any more intruders in your garden since your husband died?’ asked Strike.

‘No,’ said Kinvara. ‘Nothing.’

‘I heard that a friend of your husband’s tried to call him early the morning that he died, but couldn’t get through. D’you happen to know who the friend was?’

‘Oh . . . yes. It was Henry Drummond,’ said Kinvara.

‘And who’s—?’

‘He’s an art dealer, very old friend of Papa’s,’ interrupted Izzy. ‘Raphael worked for him for a little while – didn’t you, Raff? – until he came to help Papa at the House of Commons.’

‘I can’t see what Henry’s got to do with anything,’ said Torquil, with an angry little laugh.

‘Well, I think that’s everything,’ said Strike, ignoring this comment as he closed his notebook, ‘except that I’d be glad to know whether you think your husband’s death was suicide, Mrs Chiswell.’

The hand grasping the tissue contracted tightly.

‘Nobody’s interested in what I think,’ she said.

‘I assure you, I am,’ said Strike.

Kinvara’s eyes flickered from Raphael, who was scowling at the lawn outside, to Torquil.

‘Well, if you want my opinion, Jasper did a very stupid thing, right before he—’

‘Kinvara,’ said Torquil sharply, ‘you’d be best advised—’

‘I’m not interested in your advice!’ said Kinvara, turning on him suddenly, eyes narrowed. ‘After all, it’s your advice that brought this family to financial ruin!’

Fizzy shot her husband a look across Izzy, warning him against retorting. Kinvara turned back to Strike.

‘My husband provoked somebody, somebody I warned him he shouldn’t upset, shortly before he died—’

‘You mean Geraint Winn?’ asked Strike.

‘No,’ said Kinvara, ‘but you’re close. Torquil doesn’t want me to say anything about it, because it involves his good friend Christopher—’

‘Bloody hell!’ exploded Torquil. He got to his feet, again hitching up his mustard corduroys, and looking incensed. ‘My God, are we dragging total outsiders into this fantasy, now? What the bloody hell has Christopher got to do with anything? M’father-in-law killed himself!’ he told Strike loudly, before rounding on his wife and sister-in-law. ‘I’ve tolerated this nonsense because you gels want peace of mind, but frankly, if this is where it’s going to lead—’

Izzy and Fizzy set up an outcry, both trying to placate him and justify themselves, and in the midst of this mêlée, Kinvara got to her feet, tossed back her long red hair and walked towards the door, leaving Robin with the strong impression that she had lobbed this grenade into the conversation deliberately. At the door she paused, and the others’ heads turned, as though she had called to them. In her high, clear, childish voice, Kinvara said:

‘You all come back here and treat this house as though you’re the real owners and I’m a guest, but Jasper said I could live here as long as I’m alive. Now I need to see the vet and when I get back, I’d like you all to have gone home. You aren’t welcome here any more.’

43

… I am afraid it will not be long before we hear something of the family ghost.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Robin asked whether she might use the bathroom before they departed from Chiswell House and was shown across the hall by Fizzy, who was still fuming at Kinvara.

‘How dare she,’ said Fizzy, as they crossed the hall. ‘ How dare she? This is Pringle’s house, not hers.’ And, in the next breath, ‘ Please don’t pay any attention to what she said about Christopher, she’s simply trying to get a rise out of Torks, it was a disgusting thing to do, he’s simply livid .’

‘Who is Christopher?’ Robin asked.

‘Well – I don’t know whether I should say,’ replied Fizzy. ‘But I suppose, if you – of course, he can’t have anything to do with it. It’s just Kinvara’s spite. She’s talking about Sir Christopher Barrowclough-Burns. Old friend of Torks’ family. Christopher’s a senior civil servant and he was that boy Mallik’s mentor at the Foreign Office.’

The lavatory was chilly and antiquated. As she bolted the door, Robin heard Fizzy striding back to the drawing room, doubtless to placate the angry Torquil. She looked around: the chipped, painted stone walls were bare except for many small dark holes in which the occasional nail still stuck out. Robin presumed Kinvara was responsible for the removal of a large number of Perspex frames from the wall, which now stood stacked on the floor facing the toilet. They contained a jumble of family photographs in messy collages.

After drying her hands on a damp towel that smelled of dog, Robin crouched down to flick through these frames. Izzy and Fizzy had been almost indistinguishable as children, making it impossible to tell which of them was cartwheeling on the croquet lawn, or jumping a pony at a local gymkhana, dancing in front of a Christmas tree in the hall or embracing the young Jasper Chiswell at a shooting picnic, the men all in tweeds and Barbours.

Freddie, however, was immediately recognisable, because unlike his sisters he had inherited his father’s protuberant lower lip. As white-blond in youth as his niece and nephews, he featured frequently, beaming for the camera as a toddler, stony-faced as a child in a new prep school uniform, muddy and triumphant in rugby kit.

Robin paused to examine a group shot of teenagers, all dressed head to toe in white fencing jackets, Union Jacks ran down the sides of everyone’s breeches. She recognised Freddie, who was standing in the middle of the group, holding a large silver cup. At the far end of the group was a miserable-looking girl whom Robin recognised immediately as Rhiannon Winn, older and thinner than she had been in the photograph her father had shown Robin, her slightly cringing air at odds with the proud smiles on every other face.