The voice at the end of the phone seemed to become more strident.
“Back at DCMS, he’s got a meeting at ten,” said Izzy. “I can’t—well, because he’s very busy, you know, the Olymp—yes… goodbye.”
Izzy slammed the receiver down and struggled out of her jacket.
“She should take another rest cure. The last one doesn’t seem to have done her much good.”
“Izzy doesn’t believe in mental illness,” Raphael told Robin.
He was contemplating her, still slightly curious and, she guessed, trying to draw her out.
“Of course I believe in mental illness, Raff!” said Izzy, apparently stung. “Of course I do! I was sorry for her when it happened—I was, Raff—Kinvara had a stillbirth two years ago,” Izzy explained, “and of course that’s sad, of course it is, and it was quite understandable that she was a bit, you know, afterwards, but—no, I’m sorry,” she said crossly, addressing Raphael, “but she uses it. She does, Raff. She thinks it entitles her to everything she wants and—well, she’d have been a dreadful mother, anyway,” said Izzy defiantly. “She can’t stand not being the center of attention. When she’s not getting enough she starts her little girl act—don’t leave me alone, Jasper, I get scared when you’re not here at night. Telling stupid lies… funny phone calls to the house, men hiding in the flowerbeds, fiddling with the horses.”
“What?” said Raphael, half-laughing, but Izzy cut him short.
“Oh, Christ, look, Papa’s left his briefing papers.”
She hurried out from behind her desk, snatched a leather folder off the top of the radiator and called over her shoulder, “Raff, you can listen to the phone messages and transcribe them for me while I’m gone, OK?”
The heavy wooden door thudded shut behind her, leaving Robin and Raphael alone. If she had been hyperaware of Raphael before Izzy had gone, now he seemed to Robin to fill the entire room, his olive dark eyes on her.
He took Ecstasy and ran his car into a mother of a four-year-old. He barely served a third of his sentence and now his father’s put him on the taxpayer’s payroll.
“How do I do this, then?” asked Raphael, moving behind Izzy’s desk.
“Just press play, I expect,” Robin muttered, sipping her coffee and pretending to make notes on a pad.
Canned messages began to issue from the answering machine, drowning out the faint hum of conversation from the terrace beyond the net-curtained window.
A man named Rupert asked Izzy to call him back about “the AGM.”
A constituent called Mrs. Ricketts spoke for two solid minutes about traffic along the Banbury road.
An irate woman said crossly that she ought to have expected an answering machine and that MPs ought to be answering to the public personally, then spoke until cut off by the machine about her neighbors’ failure to lop overhanging branches from a tree, in spite of repeated requests from the council.
Then a man’s growl, almost theatrically menacing, filled the quiet office:
“They say they piss themselves as they die, Chiswell, is that true? Forty grand, or I’ll find out how much the papers will pay.”
20
We two have worked our way forward in complete companionship.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Strike had selected the Two Chairmen for his Wednesday evening catch-up with Robin because of its proximity to the Palace of Westminster. The pub was tucked away on a junction of centuries-old back streets—Old Queen Street, Cockpit Steps—amid a motley collection of quaint, sedate buildings that stood at oblique angles to each other. Only as he limped across the road and saw the hanging metal sign over the front door did Strike realize that the “two chairmen” for whom the pub was named were not, as he had assumed, joint managers of a board, but lowly servants carrying the heavy load of a sedan chair. Tired and sore as Strike was, the image seemed appropriate, although the occupant of the sedan chair in the pub sign was a refined lady in white, not a large, curmudgeonly minister with wiry hair and a short temper.
The bar was crowded with after-work drinkers and Strike had a sudden apprehension that he might not get a seat inside, an unwelcome prospect, because leg, back and neck were tight and sore after yesterday’s long drive and the hours he had spent in Harley Street today, watching Dodgy Doc.
Strike had just bought a pint of London Pride when the table by the window became free. With a turn of speed born of necessity, he nabbed the high bench with its back to the street before the nearest group of suited men and women could annex it. There was no question of anybody challenging his right to sole occupancy of a table made for four. Strike was large enough, and surly enough in appearance to make even this group of civil servants doubt their ability to negotiate a compromise.
The wooden-floored bar was what Strike mentally categorized as “upmarket utilitarian.” A faded mural on the back wall depicted bewigged eighteenth-century men gossiping together, but otherwise all was pared-back wood and monochrome prints. He peered out of the window to see whether Robin was within sight, but as there was no sign of her he drank his beer, read the day’s news on his phone and tried to ignore the menu lying on the table in front of him, which was taunting him with a picture of battered fish.
Robin, who had been due to arrive at six, was still absent at half past. Unable to resist the picture on the menu any longer, Strike ordered himself cod and chips and a second pint, and read a long article in The Times about the upcoming Olympics opening ceremony, which was really a long list of the ways in which the journalist feared it might misrepresent and humiliate the nation.
By a quarter to seven, Strike was starting to worry about Robin. He had just decided to call her when she came hurrying in through the door, flushed, wearing glasses that Strike knew she did not need and with an expression that he recognized as the barely contained excitement of one who has something worthwhile to impart.
“Hazel eyes,” he noted, as she sat down opposite him. “Good one. Changes your whole look. What’ve you got?”
“How do you know I’ve—? Well, loads, actually,” she said, deciding it was not worthwhile toying with him. “I nearly called you earlier but there have been people around all day, and I had a close shave this morning placing the listening device.”
“You did it? Bloody well done!”
“Thanks. I really want a drink, hang on.”
She came back with a glass of red wine and launched immediately into an account of the message that Raphael had found on the answering machine that morning.
“I had no chance of getting the caller’s number, because there were four messages after it. The phone system’s antiquated.”
Frowning, Strike asked: “How did the caller pronounce ‘Chiswell,’ can you remember?”
“They said it right. Chizzle.”
“Fits with Jimmy,” said Strike. “What happened after the call?”
“Raff told Izzy about it when she got back to the office,” said Robin, and Strike thought he detected a touch of self-consciousness as she said the name “Raff.” “He didn’t understand what he was passing on, obviously. Izzy called her dad straight away and he went berserk. We could hear him shouting on the end of the line, though not much of what he was actually saying.”
Strike stroked his chin, thinking.
“What did the anonymous caller sound like?”
“London accent,” Robin said. “Threatening.”
“‘They piss themselves as they die,’” repeated Strike in an undertone.
There was something that Robin wanted to say, but a brutal personal memory made it hard for her to articulate.
“Strangling victims—”
“Yeah,” said Strike, cutting her off. “I know.”
Both of them drank.
“Well, assuming the call was Jimmy,” Robin went on, “he’s phoned the department twice today.”
She opened her handbag and showed Strike the listening device hidden inside it.