The small space was divided by an archway into sitting and dining areas. Two places had been set at the long table in the other half of the room, beneath small, shuttered windows. The only other person in the basement apart from himself and Georgina was a white-coated chef working in a minuscule kitchen a mere yard from where Strike sat. The chef bade Strike welcome in a French accent, then continued carving cold roast beef.
Here was the very antithesis of the smart restaurants where Strike tailed errant husbands and wives, where the lighting was chosen to complement glass and granite, and sharp-tongued restaurant critics sat like stylish vultures on uncomfortable modern chairs. Pratt’s was dimly lit. Brass picture lights dotted walls papered in dark red, which was largely obscured by stuffed fish in glass cases, hunting prints and political cartoons. In a blue and white tiled niche along one side of the room sat an ancient iron stove. The china plates, the threadbare carpet, the table bearing its homely load of ketchup and mustard all contributed to an ambience of cozy informality, as though a bunch of aristocratic boys had dragged all the things they liked about the grown-up world—its games, its drink and its trophies—down into the basement where Nanny would dole out smiles, comfort and praise.
Twelve o’clock arrived, but Chiswell did not. “Georgina,” however, was friendly and informative about the club. She and her husband, the chef, lived on the premises. Strike could not help but reflect that this must be some of the most expensive real estate in London. To maintain the little club, which, Georgina told him, had been established in 1857, was costing somebody a lot of money.
“The Duke of Devonshire owns it, yes,” said Georgina brightly. “Have you seen our betting book?”
Strike turned the pages of the heavy, leather-bound tome, where long ago wagers had been recorded. In a gigantic scrawl dating back to the seventies, he read: “Mrs. Thatcher to form the next government. Bet: one lobster dinner, the lobster to be larger than a man’s erect cock.”
He was grinning over this when a bell rang overhead.
“That’ll be the minister,” said Georgina, bustling away upstairs.
Strike replaced the betting book on its shelf and returned to his seat. From overhead came heavy footsteps and then, descending the stairs, the same irascible, impatient voice he had heard on Monday.
“—no, Kinvara, I can’t. I’ve just told you why, I’ve got a lunch meeting… no, you can’t… Five o’clock, then, yes… yes… yes!… Goodbye!”
A pair of large, black-shod feet descended the stairs until Jasper Chiswell emerged into the basement, peering around with a truculent air. Strike rose from his armchair.
“Ah,” said Chiswell, scrutinizing Strike from beneath his heavy eyebrows. “You’re here.”
Jasper Chiswell wore his sixty-eight years reasonably well. A big, broad man, though round-shouldered, he still had a full head of gray hair which, implausible though it seemed, was his own. This hair made Chiswell an easy target for cartoonists, because it was coarse, straight and rather long, standing out from his head in a manner that suggested a wig or, so the unkind suggested, a chimney brush. To the hair was added a large red face, small eyes and a protuberant lower lip, which gave him the air of an overgrown baby perpetually on the verge of a tantrum.
“M’wife,” he told Strike, brandishing the mobile still in his hand. “Come up to town without warning. Sulking. Thinks I can drop everything.”
Chiswell stretched out a large, sweaty hand, which Strike shook, then eased off the heavy overcoat he was wearing despite the heat of the day. As he did so, Strike noticed the pin on his frayed regimental tie. The uninitiated might think it a rocking horse, but Strike recognized it at once as the White Horse of Hanover.
“Queen’s Own Hussars,” said Strike, nodding at it as both men sat down.
“Yerse,” said Chiswell. “Georgina, I’ll have some of that sherry you gave me when I was in with Alastair. You?” he barked at Strike.
“No thanks.”
Though nowhere near as dirty as Billy Knight, Chiswell did not smell very fresh.
“Yerse, Queen’s Own Hussars. Aden and Singapore. Happy days.”
He didn’t seem happy at the moment. His ruddy skin had an odd, plaque-like appearance close up. Dandruff lay thick in the roots of his coarse hair and large patches of sweat spread around the underarms of his blue shirt. The minister bore the unmistakable appearance, not unusual in Strike’s clients, of a man under intense strain, and when his sherry arrived, he swallowed most of it in a single gulp.
“Shall we move through?” he suggested, and without waiting for an answer he barked, “We’ll eat straight away, Georgina.”
Once they were seated at the table, which had a stiff, snowy-white tablecloth like those at Robin’s wedding, Georgina brought them thick slices of cold roast beef and boiled potatoes. It was English nursery food, plain and unfussy, and none the worse for it. Only when the stewardess had left them in peace, in the dim dining room full of oil paintings and more dead fish, did Chiswell speak again.
“You were at Jimmy Knight’s meeting,” he said, without preamble. “A plainclothes officer there recognized you.”
Strike nodded. Chiswell shoved a boiled potato in his mouth, masticated angrily, and swallowed before saying:
“I don’t know who’s paying you to get dirt on Jimmy Knight, or what you may already have on him, but whoever it is and whatever you’ve got, I’m prepared to pay double for the information.”
“I haven’t got anything on Jimmy Knight, I’m afraid,” said Strike. “Nobody was paying me to be at the meeting.”
Chiswell looked stunned.
“But then, why were you there?” he demanded. “You’re not telling me you intend to protest against the Olympics?”
So plosive was the “p” of “protest” that a small piece of potato flew out of his mouth across the table.
“No,” said Strike. “I was trying to find somebody I thought might be at the meeting. They weren’t.”
Chiswell attacked his beef again as though it had personally wronged him. For a while, the only sounds were those of their knives and forks scraping the china. Chiswell speared the last of his boiled potatoes, put it whole into his mouth, let his knife and fork fall with a clatter onto his plate and said:
“I’d been thinking of hiring a detective before I heard you were watching Knight.”
Strike said nothing. Chiswell eyed him suspiciously.
“You have the reputation of being very good.”
“Kind of you to say so,” said Strike.
Chiswell continued to glare at Strike with a kind of furious desperation, as though wondering whether he dared hope that the detective would not prove yet another disappointment in a life beset with them.
“I’m being blackmailed, Mr. Strike,” he said abruptly. “Blackmailed by a pair of men who have come together in a temporary, though probably unstable, alliance. One of them is Jimmy Knight.”
“I see,” said Strike.
He, too, put his knife and fork together. Georgina appeared to know by some psychic process that Strike and Chiswell had eaten their fill of the main course. She arrived to clear away, reappearing with a treacle tart. Only once she had retired to the kitchen, and both men had helped themselves to large slices of pudding, did Chiswell resume his story.
“There’s no need for sordid details,” he said, with an air of finality. “All you need to know is that Jimmy Knight is aware that I did something that I would not wish to see shared with the gentlemen of the fourth estate.”
Strike said nothing, but Chiswell seemed to think his silence had an accusatory flavor, because he added sharply:
“No crime was committed. Some might not like it, but it wasn’t illegal at the—but that’s by the by,” said Chiswell, and took a large gulp of water. “Knight came to me a couple of months ago and asked for forty thousand pounds in hush money. I refused to pay. He threatened me with exposure, but as he didn’t appear to have any proof of his claim, I dared hope he would be unable to follow through on the threat.
“No press story resulted, so I concluded that I was right in thinking he had no proof. He returned a few weeks later and asked for half the former sum. Again, I refused.
“It was then, thinking to increase the pressure on me, I assume, that he approached Geraint Winn.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know who—?”