“My mother used to come here in the eighties,” said Raphael. “It was well known because the owner liked telling the rich and famous to sod off if they weren’t dressed properly to come in, and they all loved it.”
“Really?” said Robin, her thoughts miles away. It had just struck her that she would never again have dinner with Matthew like this, just the two of them. She remembered the very last time, at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. What had he been thinking while he ate in silence? Certainly he had been furious at her for continuing to work with Strike, but perhaps he had also been weighing in his mind the competing attractions of Sarah, with her well-paid job at Christie’s, her endless fund of stories about other people’s wealth, and her no doubt self-confident performance in bed, where the diamond earrings her fiancé had bought her snagged on Robin’s pillow.
“Listen, if eating with me’s going to make you look like that, I’m fine with going back to the bar,” said Raphael.
“What?” said Robin, surprised out of her thoughts. “Oh—no, it isn’t you.”
A waiter brought over Robin’s wine. She took a large slug.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was just thinking about my husband. I left him last night.”
As she watched Raphael freeze in surprise with the bottle at his lips, Robin knew herself to have crossed an invisible boundary. In her whole time at the agency, she had never used truths about her private life to gain another’s confidence, never blended the private and the professional to win another person over. In turning Matthew’s infidelity into a device to manipulate Raphael, she knew that she was doing something that would appall and disgust her husband. Their marriage, he would have thought, ought to be sacrosanct, a world apart from what he saw as her seedy, ramshackle job.
“Seriously?” said Raphael.
“Yes,” said Robin, “but I don’t expect you to believe me, not after all the crap I told you when I was Venetia. Anyway,” she took her notebook out of her handbag, “you said you were OK with me asking some questions?”
“Er—yeah,” he said, apparently unable to decide whether he was more amused or disconcerted. “Is this real? Your marriage broke up last night?”
“Yes,” said Robin. “Why are you looking so shocked?”
“I don’t know,” said Raphael. “You just seem so… Girl Guidey.” His eyes moved over her face. “It’s part of the appeal.”
“Could I just ask my questions?” said Robin, determinedly unfazed.
Raphael drank some beer and said:
“Always busy with the job. Turns a man’s thoughts to what it would take to distract you.”
“Seriously—”
“Fine, fine, questions—but let’s order first. Fancy some dim sum?”
“Whatever’s good,” said Robin, opening her notebook.
Ordering food seemed to cheer Raphael up.
“Drink up,” he said.
“I shouldn’t be drinking at all,” she replied, and indeed, she hadn’t touched the wine since her first gulp. “OK, I wanted to talk about Ebury Street.”
“Go on,” said Raphael.
“You heard what Kinvara said about the keys. I wondered whether—”
“—I ever had one?” asked Raphael with equanimity. “Guess how many times I was ever in that house.”
Robin waited.
“Once,” said Raphael. “Never went there as a kid. When I got out of—you know—Dad, who hadn’t visited me once while I was inside, invited me down to Chiswell House to see him, so I did. Brushed my hair, put on a suit, got all the way down to that hellhole and he didn’t bother turning up. Detained by a late vote at the House or some crap. Picture how happy Kinvara was to have me on her hands for the night, in that bloody depressing house that I’ve had bad dreams about ever since I was a kid. Welcome home, Raff.
“I took the early train back to London. Following week, no contact from Dad until I get another summons, this time to go to Ebury Street. I considered just not bloody turning up. Why did I go?”
“I don’t know,” said Robin. “Why did you?”
He looked directly into her eyes.
“You can bloody hate someone and still wish they gave a shit about you and hate yourself for wishing it.”
“Yes,” said Robin quietly, “of course you can.”
“So round I trot to Ebury Street, thinking I might get—not a heart to heart, I mean, you met my father—but maybe, you know, some human emotion. He opened the door, said ‘There you are,’ shunted me into the sitting room and there was Henry Drummond and I realized I was there for a job interview. Drummond said he’d take me on, Dad barked at me not to fuck it up and shoved me back out onto the street. First and last time I was ever inside the place,” said Raphael, “so I can’t say I’ve got fond associations with it.”
He paused to consider what he’d just said, then let out a short laugh.
“And my father killed himself there, of course. I was forgetting that.”
“No key,” said Robin, making a note.
“No, among the many things I didn’t get that day were a spare key and an invitation to let myself in whenever I fancied it.”
“I need to ask you something that might seem as though it’s slightly out of left field,” said Robin cautiously.
“This sounds interesting,” said Raphael, leaning forwards.
“Did you ever suspect that your father was having an affair?”
“What?” he said, almost comically taken aback. “No—but—what?”
“Over the last year or so?” said Robin. “While he was married to Kinvara?”
He seemed incredulous.
“OK,” said Robin, “if you don’t—”
“What on earth makes you think he was having an affair?”
“Kinvara was always very possessive, very concerned about your father’s whereabouts, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah,” said Raphael, now smirking, “but you know why that was. That was you.”
“I heard that she broke down months before I went to work in the office. She told somebody that your father had cheated on her. She was distraught, by all accounts. It was around the time her mare was put down and she—”
“—hit Dad with the hammer?” He frowned. “Oh. I thought that was because of her not wanting the horse put down. Well, I suppose Dad was a ladies’ man when he was younger. Hey—maybe that’s what he was up to, the night I went down to Chiswell House and he stayed up in London? Kinvara was definitely expecting him back and she was furious when he cried off at the last minute.”
“Yes, maybe,” said Robin, making a note. “Can you remember what date that was?”
“Er—yeah, as a matter of fact, I can. You don’t tend to forget the day you’re released from jail. I got out on Wednesday the sixteenth of February last year, and Dad asked me to go down to Chiswell House on the following Saturday, so… the nineteenth.”
Robin made a note.
“You never saw or heard signs there was another woman?”
“Come on,” said Raphael, “you were there, at the Commons. You saw how little I had to do with him. Was he going to tell me he was playing around?”
“He told you about seeing the ghost of Jack o’Kent roaming the grounds at night.”
“That was different. He was drunk then, and—morbid. Weird. Banging on about divine retribution… I don’t know, I suppose he could’ve been talking about an affair. Maybe he’d grown a conscience at last, three wives down the line.”
“I didn’t think he married your mother?”
Raphael’s eyes narrowed.
“Sorry. Momentarily forgot I’m the bastard.”
“Oh, come on,” said Robin gently, “you know I didn’t mean—”
“All right, sorry,” he muttered. “Being touchy. Being left out of a parent’s will does that to a person.”