“Gets names wrong. Does it all the time. If I didn’t keep an eye on her, we’d have all sorts going on, wrong letters going out to the wrong people… she thought you were someone else. I had her on the phone over lunch, insisting you were somebody our daughter ran across years ago. Verity Pulham. ’Nother of your godfather’s godchildren. Told her straight away it wasn’t you, said I’d pass on her apologies. Silly girl, she is. Very stubborn when she thinks she’s right, but,” he rolled his eyes again and tapped his forehead, the long-suffering husband of an infuriating wife, “I managed to penetrate in the end.”
“Well,” said Robin carefully, “I’m glad she knows she was mistaken, because she didn’t seem to like Verity very much.”
“Truth to tell, Verity was a little bitch,” said Winn, still beaming. Robin could tell he enjoyed using the word. “Nasty to our daughter, you see.”
“Oh dear,” said Robin, with a thud of dread beneath her ribs as she remembered that Rhiannon Winn had killed herself. “I’m sorry. How awful.”
“You know,” said Winn, sitting down and tipping back his chair against the wall, hands behind his head, “you seem far too sweet a girl to be associated with the Chiswell family.” He was definitely a little drunk. Robin could smell faint wine dregs on his breath and Aamir threw him another of those sharp, scathing looks. “What were you doing before this, Venetia?”
“PR,” said Robin, “but I’d like to do something more worthwhile. Politics, or maybe a charity. I was reading about the Level Playing Field,” she said truthfully. “It seems wonderful. You do a lot with veterans, too, don’t you? I saw an interview with Terry Byrne yesterday. The Paralympian cyclist?”
Her attention had been caught by the fact that Byrne had the same below the knee amputation as Strike.
“You’ll have a personal interest in veterans, of course,” said Winn.
Robin’s stomach swooped and fell again.
“Sorry?”
“Freddie Chiswell?” Winn prompted.
“Oh, yes, of course,” said Robin. “Although I didn’t know Freddie very well. He was a bit older than me. Obviously, it was dreadful when he—when he was killed.”
“Oh, yes, awful,” said Winn, though he sounded indifferent. “Della was very much against the Iraq war. Very much against it. Your Uncle Jasper was all for it, mind you.”
For a moment, the air seemed to thrum with Winn’s unexpressed implication that Chiswell had been well served for his enthusiasm.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Robin carefully. “Uncle Jasper thought military action justified on the evidence we had at the time. Anyway,” she said bravely, “nobody can accuse him of acting out of self-interest, can they, when his son had to go and fight?”
“Ah, if you’re going to take that line, who can argue?” said Winn. He raised his hands in mock surrender, his chair slipped a little on the wall and for a few seconds he struggled to maintain balance, seizing the desk and pulling himself and the chair upright again. With a substantial effort, Robin managed not to laugh.
“Geraint,” said Aamir, “we need those letters signed if we’re going to get them off by five.”
“’S’only half four,” said Winn, checking his watch. “Yes, Rhiannon was on the British junior fencing team.”
“How marvelous,” said Robin.
“Sporty, like her mother. Fencing for the Welsh juniors at fourteen. I used to drive her all over the place for tournaments. Hours on the road together! She made the British juniors at sixteen.
“But the English lot were very stand-offish to her,” said Winn, with a glimmer of Celtic resentment. “She wasn’t at one of your big public schools, you see. It was all about connections with them. Verity Pulham, she didn’t have the ability, not really. As a matter of fact, it was only when Verity broke her ankle that Rhiannon, who was a far better fencer, got on the British team at all.”
“I see,” said Robin, trying to balance sympathy with a feigned allegiance to the Chiswells. Surely this could not be the grievance that Winn had against the family? Yet Geraint’s fanatic tone spoke of longstanding resentment. “Well, these things should come down to ability, of course.”
“That’s right,” said Winn. “They should. Look at this, now…”
He fumbled for his wallet and pulled from it an old photograph. Robin held out her hand, but Geraint, keeping a firm hold on the picture, got up clumsily, stumbled over a stack of books lying beside his chair, walked around the desk, came so close that Robin could feel his breath on her neck, and showed her the image of his daughter.
Dressed in fencing garb, Rhiannon Winn stood beaming and holding up the gold medal around her neck. She was pale and small-featured, and Robin could see very little of either parent in her face, although perhaps there was a hint of Della in the broad, intelligent brow. But with Geraint’s loud breathing in her ear, trying to stop herself leaning away from him, Robin had a sudden vision of Geraint Winn striding, with his wide, lipless grin, through a large hall of sweaty teenage girls. Was it shameful to wonder whether it had been parental devotion that had spurred him to chauffeur his daughter all over the country?
“What have you done to yourself, eh?” Geraint asked, his hot breath in her ear. Leaning in, he touched the purple knife scar on her bare forearm.
Unable to prevent herself, Robin snatched her arm away. The nerves around the scar had not yet fully healed: she hated anyone touching it.
“I fell through a glass door when I was nine,” she said, but the confidential, confiding atmosphere had been dispersed like cigarette smoke.
Aamir hovered on the edge of her vision, rigid and silent at his desk. Geraint’s smile had become forced. She had worked too long in offices not to know that a subtle transfer of power had just taken place within the room. Now she stood armed with his little drunken inappropriateness and Geraint was resentful and a little worried. She wished that she had not pulled away from him.
“I wonder, Mr. Winn,” she said breathily, “whether you’d mind giving me some advice about the charitable world? I just can’t make up my mind, politics—charity—and I don’t know anyone else who’s done both.”
“Oh,” said Geraint, blinking behind his thick glasses. “Oh, well… yes, I daresay I could…”
“Geraint,” said Aamir again, “we really do need to get those letters—”
“Yes, all right, all right,” said Geraint loudly. “We’ll talk later,” he said to Robin, with a wink.
“Wonderful,” she said, with a smile.
As Robin walked out she threw Aamir a small smile, which he didn’t return.
18
So matters have got as far as that already, have they!
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
After nearly nine hours at the wheel, Strike’s neck, back and legs were stiff and sore and his bag of provisions long since empty. The first star was glimmering out of the pale, inky wash above when his mobile rang. It was the usual time for his sister, Lucy, to call “for a chat”; he ignored three out of four of her calls, because, much as he loved her, he could muster no interest in her sons’ schooling, the PTA’s squabbles or the intricacies of her husband’s career as a quantity surveyor. Seeing that it was Barclay on the line, however, he turned into a rough and ready lay-by, really the turnoff to a field, cut the engine and answered.
“’M in,” said Barclay laconically. “Wi’ Jimmy.”
“Already?” said Strike, seriously impressed. “How?”
“Pub,” said Barclay. “Interrupted him. He was talkin’ a load o’ pish about Scottish independence. The grea’ thing about English lefties,” he continued, “is they love hearin’ how shit England is. Havenae hadtae buy a pint all afternoon.”
“Bloody hell, Barclay,” said Strike, lighting himself another cigarette on top of the twenty he had already had that day, “that was good work.”
“That was just fer starters,” said Barclay. “You shoulda heard them when I told them how I’ve seen the error of the army’s imperialist ways. Fuck me, they’re gullible. I’m off tae a CORE meetin’ the morrow.”
“How’s Knight supporting himself? Any idea?”
“He told me he’s a journalist on a couple o’ lefty websites and he sells CORE T-shirts and a bit o’ dope. Mind, his shit’s worthless. We went back tae his place, after the pub. Ye’d be better off smokin’ fuckin’ Oxo cubes. I’ve said I’ll get him better. We can run that through office expenses, aye?”