“Della Winn’s husband.”
“Della Winn, the Minister for Sport?” said Strike, startled.
“Yes, of course Della-Winn-the-Minister-for-Sport,” snapped Chiswell.
The Right Honorable Della Winn, as Strike knew well, was a Welshwoman in her early sixties who had been blind since birth. No matter their party affiliation, people tended to admire the Liberal Democrat, who had been a human rights lawyer before standing for Parliament. Usually photographed with her guide dog, a pale yellow Labrador, she had been much in evidence in the press of late, her current bailiwick being the Paralympics. She had visited Selly Oak while Strike had been in the hospital, readjusting to the loss of his leg in Afghanistan. He had been left with a favorable impression of her intelligence and her empathy. Of her husband, Strike knew nothing.
“I don’t know whether Della knows what Geraint’s up to,” said Chiswell, spearing a piece of treacle tart and continuing to speak while he chewed it. “Probably, but keeping her nose clean. Plausible deniability. Can’t have the sainted Della involved in blackmail, can we?”
“Her husband’s asked you for money?” asked Strike, incredulous.
“Oh no, no. Geraint wants to force me from office.”
“Any particular reason why?” said Strike.
“There’s an enmity between us dating back many years, rooted in a wholly baseless—but that’s irrelevant,” said Chiswell, with an angry shake of the head. “Geraint approached me, ‘hoping it isn’t true,’ and ‘offering me a chance to explain.’ He’s a nasty, twisted little man who’s spent his life holding his wife’s handbag and answering her telephone calls. Naturally he’s relishing the idea of wielding some actual power.”
Chiswell took a swig of sherry.
“So, as you can see, I’m in something of a cleft stick, Mr. Strike. Even if I were minded to pay off Jimmy Knight, I still have to contend with a man who wants my disgrace, and who may well be able to lay hands on proof.”
“How could Winn get proof?”
Chiswell took another large mouthful of treacle tart and glanced over his shoulder to check that Georgina remained safely in the kitchen.
“I’ve heard,” he muttered, and a fine mist of pastry flew from the slack lips, “that there may be photographs.”
“Photographs?” repeated Strike.
“Winn can’t have them, of course. If he had, it would all be over. But he might be able to find a way of getting hold of them. Yerse.”
He shoved the last piece of tart into his mouth, then said:
“Of course, there’s a chance the photographs don’t incriminate me. There are no distinguishing marks, so far as I’m aware.”
Strike’s imagination frankly boggled. He yearned to ask, “Distinguishing marks on what, Minister?” but refrained.
“It all happened six years ago,” continued Chiswell. “I’ve been over and over the damn thing in my head. There were others involved who might have talked, but I doubt it, I doubt it very much. Too much to lose. No, it’s all going to come down to what Knight and Winn can dig up. I strongly suspect that if he gets hold of the photographs, Winn will go straight to the press. I don’t think that would be Knight’s first choice. He simply wants money.
“So here I am, Mr. Strike, a fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi. I’ve lived with this hanging over me for weeks now. It hasn’t been enjoyable.”
He peered at Strike through his tiny eyes, and the detective was irresistibly put in mind of a mole, blinking up at a hovering spade that waited to crush it.
“When I heard you were at that meeting I assumed you were investigating Knight and had some dirt on him. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way out of this diabolical situation is to find something that I can use against each of them, before they get their hands on those photographs. Fight fire with fire.”
“Blackmail with blackmail?” said Strike.
“I don’t want anything from them except to leave me the hell alone,” snapped Chiswell. “Bargaining chips, that’s all I want. I acted within the law,” he said firmly, “and in accordance with my conscience.”
Chiswell was not a particularly likable man, but Strike could well imagine that the ongoing suspense of waiting for public exposure would be torture, especially to a man who had already endured his fair share of scandals. Strike’s scant research on his prospective client the previous evening had unearthed gleeful accounts of the affair that had ended his first marriage, of the fact that his second wife had spent a week in a clinic for “nervous exhaustion” and of the grisly drug-induced car crash in which his younger son had killed a young mother.
“This is a very big job, Mr. Chiswell,” said Strike. “It’ll take two or three people to thoroughly investigate Knight and Winn, especially if there’s time pressure.”
“I don’t care what it costs,” said Chiswell. “I don’t care if you have to put your whole agency on it.
“I refuse to believe there isn’t anything dodgy about Winn, sneaking little toad that he is. There’s something funny about them as a couple. She, the blind angel of light,” Chiswell’s lip curled, “and he, her potbellied henchman, always scheming and backstabbing and grubbing up every freebie he can get. There must be something there. Must be.
“As for Knight, Commie rabble rouser, there’s bound to be something the police haven’t yet caught up with. He was always a tearaway, a thoroughly nasty piece of work.”
“You knew Jimmy Knight before he started trying to blackmail you?” asked Strike.
“Oh, yes,” said Chiswell. “The Knights are from my constituency. The father was an odd-job man who did a certain amount of work for our family. I never knew the mother. I believe she died before the three of them moved into Steda Cottage.”
“I see,” said Strike.
He was recalling Billy’s anguished words, “I seen a child strangled and nobody believes me,” the nervous movement from nose to chest as he made his slipshod half-cross, and the prosaic, precise detail of the pink blanket in which the dead child had been buried.
“There’s something I think I should tell you before we discuss terms, Mr. Chiswell,” said Strike. “I was at the CORE meeting because I was trying to find Knight’s younger brother. His name’s Billy.”
The crease between Chiswell’s myopic eyes deepened a fraction.
“Yerse, I remember that there were two of them, but Jimmy was the elder by a considerable amount—a decade or more, I would guess. I haven’t seen—Billy, is it?—in many years.”
“Well, he’s seriously mentally ill,” said Strike. “He came to me last Monday with a peculiar story, then bolted.”
Chiswell waited, and Strike was sure he detected tension.
“Billy claims,” said Strike, “that he witnessed the strangling of a small child when he was very young.”
Chiswell did not recoil, horrified; he did not bluster or storm. He did not demand whether he was being accused, or ask what on earth that had to do with him. He responded with none of the flamboyant defenses of the guilty man, and yet Strike could have sworn that to Chiswell, this was not a new story.
“And who does he claim strangled the child?” he asked, fingering the stem of his wine glass.
“He didn’t tell me—or wouldn’t.”
“You think this is what Knight is blackmailing me over? Infanticide?” asked Chiswell roughly.
“I thought you ought to know why I went looking for Jimmy,” said Strike.
“I have no deaths on my conscience,” said Jasper Chiswell forcefully. He swallowed the last of his water. “One cannot,” he added, replacing the empty glass on the table, “be held accountable for unintended consequences.”
10
I have believed that we two together would be equal to it.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm