Brown Panther came in second. They spent Strike’s winnings among the food and coffee tents, killing the hours of daylight until it was time to head for Woolstone and the dell. While panic fluttered in Robin’s chest every time she thought of the tools in the back of the Land Rover and the dark basin full of nettles, Strike distracted her, whether intentionally or not, by a persistent refusal to explain how the testimony of Della Winn and Raphael Chiswell fitted together, or what conclusions he had drawn from it.
“Think,” he kept saying, “just think.”
But Robin was exhausted, and it was easier to simply push him to explain over successive coffees and sandwiches, all the while savoring this unusual interlude in their working lives, for she and Strike had never before spent hours together unless at some time of crisis.
But as the sun sank ever closer to the horizon, Robin’s thoughts darted more insistently towards the dell, and each time they did so her stomach did a small backflip. Noticing her increasingly preoccupied silences, Strike suggested for the second time that she stay in the Land Rover while he and Barclay dug.
“No,” said Robin tersely. “I didn’t come to sit in the car.”
It took them three-quarters of an hour to reach Woolstone. Color was bleeding rapidly out of the sky to the west as they descended for the second time into the Vale of the White Horse, and by the time they had reached their destination a few feeble stars were spotting the dust-colored heavens. Robin turned the Land Rover onto the overgrown track leading to Steda Cottage and the car rocked and pitched its way over the deep furrows and tangled thorns and branches, into the deeper darkness bestowed by the dense canopy above.
“Get as far in as you can,” Strike instructed her, checking the time on his mobile. “Barclay’s got to park behind us. He should’ve been here already, I told him nine o’clock.”
Robin parked and cut the engine, eyeing the thick woodland that lay between the track and Chiswell House. Unseen they might be, but they were still trespassing. Her anxiety about possible detection was as nothing, however, to her very real fear of what lay beneath the tangled nettles at the bottom of that dark basin outside Steda Cottage, and so she returned to the subject she had been using as a distraction all afternoon.
“I’ve told you—think,” said Strike, for the umpteenth time. “Think about the lachesis pills. You’re the one who thought they were significant. Think about all those odd things Chiswell kept doing: taunting Aamir in front of everyone, saying Lachesis ‘knew when everyone’s number would be up,’ telling you ‘one by one, they trip themselves up,’ looking for Freddie’s money clip, which turned up in his pocket.”
“I have thought about those things, but I still don’t see how—”
“The helium and tubing entering the house disguised as a crate of champagne. Somebody knew he wouldn’t want to drink it, because he was allergic. Ask yourself how Flick knew Jimmy had a claim on Chiswell. Think about Flick’s row with her flatmate Laura—”
“How can that have anything to do with this?”
“Think!” said Strike, infuriatingly. “No amitriptyline was found in the empty orange juice carton in Chiswell’s bin. Remember Kinvara, obsessing over Chiswell’s whereabouts. Have a guess what little Francesca at Drummond’s art gallery is going to tell me if I ever get her on the phone. Think about that call to Chiswell’s constituency office about people ‘pissing themselves as they die’—which isn’t conclusive in itself, I grant you, but it’s bloody suggestive when you stop to think about it—”
“You’re winding me up,” said the incredulous Robin. “Your idea connects all of that? And makes sense of it?”
“Yep,” said Strike smugly, “and it also explains how Winn and Aamir knew there were photographs at the Foreign Office, presumably of Jack o’Kent’s gallows in use, when Aamir hadn’t worked there in months and Winn, so far as we know, had never set foot—”
Strike’s mobile rang. He checked the screen.
“Izzy calling back. I’ll take it outside. I want to smoke.”
He got out of the car. Robin heard him say, “Hi,” before he slammed the door. She sat waiting for him, her mind buzzing. Either Strike had genuinely had a brainwave, or he was taking the mickey, and she slightly inclined to the latter, so utterly disconnected did the separate bits of information he had just listed seem.
Five minutes later, Strike returned to the passenger seat.
“Our client’s unhappy,” he reported, slamming the door again. “Tegan was supposed to be telling us that Kinvara crept back out that night to kill Chiswell, not confirming her alibi and blabbing about Chiswell flogging gallows.”
“Izzy admitted it?”
“Didn’t have much choice, did she? But she didn’t like it. Very insistent on telling me that exporting gallows was legal at the time. I put it to her that her father had defrauded Jimmy and Billy out of their money, and you were right. There were two sets of gallows built and ready to sell when Jack o’Kent died and nobody bothered to tell his sons. She liked admitting that even less.”
“D’you think she’s worried they’ll mount a claim on Chiswell’s estate?”
“I can’t see that it’d do Jimmy’s reputation much good in the circles he moves in, accepting money made from hanging people in the Third World,” said Strike, “but you never know.”
A car sped past on the road behind them and Strike craned around hopefully.
“Thought that might be Barclay…” He checked his watch. “Maybe he’s missed the turning.”
“Cormoran,” said Robin, who was far less interested in either Izzy’s mood or Barclay’s whereabouts than in the theory Strike was withholding from her, “have you seriously got an idea that explains everything you just told me?”
“Yeah,” said Strike, scratching his chin, “I have. Trouble is, it brings us closer to who, but I’m still damned if I can see why they did it, unless it was done out of blind hatred—but this doesn’t feel like a red-blooded crime of passion, does it? This wasn’t a hammer round the head. This was a well-planned execution.”
“What happened to ‘means before motive’?”
“I’ve been concentrating on means. That’s how I got here.”
“You won’t even tell me ‘he’ or ‘she’?”
“No good mentor would deprive you of the satisfaction of working it out for yourself. Any biscuits left?”
“No.”
“Lucky I’ve still got this, then,” Strike said, producing a Twix from his pocket, unwrapping it and handing her half, which she took with a bad grace that amused him.
Neither spoke until they had finished eating. Then Strike said, far more soberly than hitherto:
“Tonight’s important. If there’s nothing buried in a pink blanket at the bottom of the dell, the whole Billy business is finished: he imagined the strangling, we’ve set his mind at rest and I get to try and prove my theory about Chiswell’s death, unencumbered by distractions, without worrying where a dead kid fits in and who killed her.”
“Or him,” Robin reminded Strike. “You said Billy wasn’t sure which it was.”
As she said it, her unruly imagination showed her a small skeleton wrapped in the rotten remains of a blanket. Would it be possible to tell whether the body had been male or female from what was left? Would there be a hair grip or a shoelace, buttons, a hank of long hair?
Let there be nothing, she thought. God, let there be nothing there.
But aloud, she asked:
“And if there is—something—someone—buried in the dell?”
“Then my theory’s wrong, because I can’t see how a child strangling in Oxfordshire fits with anything I’ve just mentioned.”