“My partner found out.”
“Nobody will believe me,” said Della distractedly, “but I didn’t know, I had no idea. I’ve missed the last four board meetings—preparations for the Paralympics. Geraint only told me the truth after Chiswell threatened him with the press. Even then he claimed it was the accountant’s fault, but he swore to me the other things weren’t true. Swore it, on his mother’s grave.”
She twisted the wedding ring on her finger, apparently distracted.
“I suppose your wretched partner tracked down Elspeth Lacey-Curtis, as well?”
“Afraid so,” lied Strike, judging that a gamble was indicated. “Did Geraint deny that, too?”
“If he’d said anything to make the girls uncomfortable he felt awful, but he swore there was nothing else to it, no touching, just a couple of risqué jokes. But in this climate,” said Della furiously, “a man ought to damned well think about what jokes he makes to a bunch of fifteen-year-old girls!”
Strike leaned forwards and grabbed Della’s wine, which was in danger of being upended again.
“What are you doing?”
“Moving your glass onto the table,” said Strike.
“Oh,” said Della, “thank you.” Making a noticeable effort to control herself, she continued, “Geraint was representing me at that event, and it will go the way it always goes in the press when it all comes out: it will have been my fault, all of it! Because men’s crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren’t they, Mr. Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. Your failings are really our failings, aren’t they? Because the proper role of the woman is carer, and there’s nothing lower in this whole world than a bad mother.”
Breathing hard, she pressed her trembling fingers to her temples. Beyond the net curtains night, deep blue, was inching like a veil over the glaring red of sunset and as the room grew darker, Rhiannon Winn’s features faded gradually into the twilight. Soon all that would be visible was her smile, punctuated by the ugly braces.
“Give me back my wine, please.”
Strike did so. Della drank most of it down at once and continued to clasp the glass as she said bitterly:
“There are plenty of people ready to think all kinds of odd things about a blind woman. Of course, when I was younger, it was worse. There was often a prurient interest in one’s private life. It was the first place some men’s minds went. Perhaps you’ve experienced it, too, have you, with your one leg?”
Strike found that he didn’t resent the blunt mention of his disability from Della.
“Yeah, I’ve had a bit of that,” he admitted. “Bloke I was at school with. Hadn’t seen him in years. It was my first time back in Cornwall since I got blown up. Five pints in, he asked me at what point I warned women my leg was going to come off with my trousers. He thought he was being funny.”
Della smiled thinly.
“Never occurs to some people that it is we who should be making the jokes, does it? But it will be different for you, as a man… most people seem to think it in the natural order of things that the able-bodied woman should look after the disabled man. Geraint had to deal with that for years… people assuming there was something peculiar about him, because he chose a disabled wife. I think I may have tried to compensate for that. I wanted him to have a role… status… but it would have been better for both of us, in retrospect, if he had done something unconnected to me.”
Strike thought she was a little drunk. Perhaps she hadn’t eaten. He felt an inappropriate desire to check her fridge. Sitting here with this impressive and vulnerable woman, it was easy to understand how Aamir had become so entangled with her both professionally and privately, without ever intending to become so.
“People assume I married Geraint because there was nobody else who wanted me, but they’re quite wrong,” said Della, sitting up straighter in her chair. “There was a boy I was at school with who was smitten with me, who proposed when I was nineteen. I had a choice and I chose Geraint. Not as a carer, or because, as journalists have sometimes implied, my limitless ambition made a husband necessary… but because I loved him.”
Strike remembered the day he had followed Della’s husband to the stairwell in King’s Cross, and the tawdry things that Robin had told him about Geraint’s behavior at work, yet nothing that Della had just said struck him as incredible. Life had taught him that a great and powerful love could be felt for the most apparently unworthy people, a circumstance that ought, after all, to give everybody consolation.
“Are you married, Mr. Strike?”
“No,” he said.
“I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it. It took this… all of this mess… to make me realize I can’t go on. I don’t really know when I stopped loving him, but at some point after Rhiannon died, it slipped—”
Her voice broke.
“—slipped away from us.” She swallowed. “Please will you pour me another glass of wine?”
He did so. The room was very dark now. The music had changed again, to a melancholy violin concerto which at last, in Strike’s opinion, was appropriate to the conversation. Della had not wanted to talk to him, but now seemed reluctant to let the conversation end.
“Why did your husband hate Jasper Chiswell so much?” Strike asked quietly. “Because of Chiswell’s political clashes with you, or—?”
“No, no,” said Della Winn wearily. “Because Geraint has to blame somebody other than himself for the misfortunes that befall him.”
Strike waited, but she merely drank more wine, and said nothing.
“What exactly—?”
“Never mind,” she said loudly. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”
But a moment later, after another large gulp of wine, she said:
“Rhiannon didn’t really want to do fencing. Like most little girls, what she wanted was a pony, but we—Geraint and I—we didn’t come from pony-owning backgrounds. We didn’t have the first idea what one does with horses. As I think back, I suppose there were ways around that, but we were both terribly busy and felt it would be impractical, so she took up fencing instead, and very good she was at it, too…
“Have I answered enough of your questions, Mr. Strike?” she asked a little thickly. “Will you find Aamir?”
“I’ll try,” Strike promised her. “Could you give me his number? And yours, so I can keep you updated?”
She had both numbers off by heart, and he copied them down before closing his notebook and getting back to his feet.
“You’ve been very helpful, Mrs. Winn. Thank you.”
“That sounds worrying,” she said, with a faint crease between the eyebrows. “I’m not sure I meant to be.”
“Will you be—?”
“Perfectly,” said Della, enunciating over-clearly. “You’ll call me when you find Aamir, won’t you?”
“If you don’t hear from me before then, I’ll update you in a week’s time,” Strike promised. “Er—is anyone coming in tonight, or—?”
“I see you aren’t quite as hardened as your reputation would suggest,” said Della. “Don’t worry about me. My neighbor will be in to walk Gwynn for me shortly. She checks the gas dials and so forth.”
“In that case, don’t get up. Good night.”
The near-white dog raised her head as he walked towards the door, sniffing the air. He left Della sitting in the darkness, a little drunk, with nothing else for company but the picture of the dead daughter she had never seen.
Closing the front door, Strike couldn’t remember the last time he had felt such a strange mixture of admiration, sympathy and suspicion.
55
… let us at least fight with honorable weapons, since it seems we must fight.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Matthew, who had supposedly been out just for the morning, still hadn’t come home. He had sent two texts since, one at three in the afternoon:
Tom got work troubles, wants to talk. Gone to pub with him (I’m on Cokes.) Back as soon as I can.
And then, at seven o’clock: