“You retrieved it?” he asked, staggered.
“And replaced it with another one,” said Robin, unable to suppress a triumphant smile. “That’s why I’m late. I took a chance. Aamir, who works with Winn, left and Geraint came into our office while I was packing up, to chat me up.”
“He did, did he?” asked Strike, amused.
“I’m glad you find it funny,” said Robin coolly. “He isn’t a nice man.”
“Sorry,” said Strike. “In what way is he not a nice man?”
“Just take it from me,” said Robin. “I’ve met plenty of them in offices. He’s a pervert, but with creepy add-ons. He was just telling me,” she said, and her indignation showed in the rising tide of pink in her face, “that I remind him of his dead daughter. Then he touched my hair.”
“Touched your hair?” repeated Strike, unamused.
“Picked a bit of it off my shoulder and ran it through his fingers,” said Robin. “Then I think he saw what I thought of him and tried to pass it off as fatherly. Anyway, I said I needed the loo but asked him to stay put so we could keep chatting about charities. I nipped down the corridor and swapped the devices.”
“That was bloody good going, Robin.”
“I listened to it on the way here,” said Robin, pulling headphones out of her pocket, “and—”
Robin handed Strike the headphones.
“—I’ve cued up the interesting bit.”
Strike obediently inserted the earbuds and Robin switched on the tape in her handbag.
“… at three thirty, Aamir.”
The Welsh male voice was interrupted by the sound of a mobile phone ringing. Feet scuffled near the power point, the ring ceased and Geraint said:
“Oh, hello Jimmy… half a mo’—Aamir, close that door.”
More scuffling, footsteps.
“Jimmy, yes…?”
There followed a long stretch in which Geraint seemed to be attempting to stem the flow of a mounting tirade.
“Whoa—now, wai… Jimmy, lis… Jimmy, listen—listen! I know you’ve lost out, Jimmy, I understand how bitter you—Jimmy, please! We understand your feelings—that’s unfair, Jimmy, neither Della nor I grew up wealth—my father was a coalminer, Jimmy! Now listen, please! We’re close to getting the pictures!”
There followed a spell in which Strike thought he heard, very faintly, the rise and fall of Jimmy Knight’s fluent speech at the end of the telephone.
“I take your point,” said Geraint finally, “but I urge you to do nothing rash, Jimmy. He isn’t going to give you—Jimmy, listen! He isn’t going to give you your money, he’s made that perfectly clear. It’s the newspapers now or nothing, so… proof, Jimmy! Proof!”
Another, shorter period of unintelligible gabbling followed.
“I’ve just told you, haven’t I? Yes… no, but the Foreign Office… well, hardly… no, Aamir has a contact… yes… yes… all right then… I will, Jimmy. Good—yes, all right. Yes. Goodbye.”
The clunk of a mobile being set down was followed by Geraint’s voice.
“Stupid prick,” he said.
There were more footsteps. Strike glanced at Robin, who by a rolling gesture of the hand indicated that he should keep listening. After perhaps thirty seconds, Aamir spoke, diffident and strained.
“Geraint, Christopher didn’t promise anything about the pictures.”
Even on the tinny little tape, with the nearby shufflings of paper at Geraint’s desk, the silence sounded charged.
“Geraint, did you h—?”
“Yes, I heard!” snapped Winn. “Good God, boy, a first from the LSE and you can’t think of a way to persuade that bastard to give you pictures? I’m not asking you to take them out of the department, just to get copies. That shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man.”
“I don’t want more trouble,” muttered Aamir.
“Well, I should have thought,” said Geraint, “after everything Della in particular has done for you…”
“And I’m grateful,” said Aamir swiftly. “You know I am… all right, I’ll—I’ll try.”
For the next minute there were no sounds but scuffing footsteps and papers, followed by a mechanical click. The device automatically switched off after a minute of no talking, activated again when somebody spoke. The next voice was that of a different man asking whether Della would be attending “the sub-committee” this afternoon.
Strike removed the earbuds.
“Did you catch it all?” Robin asked.
“I think so,” said Strike.
She leaned back, watching Strike expectantly.
“The Foreign Office?” he repeated quietly. “What the hell can he have done that means the Foreign Office has got pictures?”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to be interested in what he did?” said Robin, eyebrows raised.
“I never said I wasn’t interested. Just that I’m not being paid to find out.”
Strike’s fish and chips arrived. He thanked the barmaid and proceeded to add a generous amount of ketchup to his plate.
“Izzy was completely matter of fact about whatever it is,” said Robin, thinking back. “She couldn’t possibly have spoken about it the way she did if he’d—you know—murdered anybody.”
She deliberately avoided the word “strangled.” Three panic attacks in three days were quite sufficient.
“Got to say,” said Strike, now chewing chips, “that anonymous call makes you—unless,” he said, struck by a thought, “Jimmy’s had the bright idea of trying to drag Chiswell into the Billy business on top of whatever else he’s genuinely done. A child-killing doesn’t have to be true to make trouble for a government minister who’s already got the press on his tail. You know the internet. Plenty of people out there think being a Tory as tantamount to being a child killer. This might be Jimmy’s idea of adding pressure.”
Strike stabbed a few chips moodily with his fork.
“I’d be glad to know where Billy is, if we had somebody free to look for him. Barclay hasn’t seen any sign of him and says Jimmy hasn’t mentioned having a brother.”
“Billy said he was being held captive,” Robin said tentatively.
“Don’t think we can set much store on anything Billy’s saying right now, to be honest. I knew a guy in the Shiners who had a psychotic episode on exercises. Thought he had cockroaches living under his skin.”
“In the—?”
“Shiners. Fusiliers. Want a chip?”
“I’d better not,” sighed Robin, though she was hungry. Matthew, whom she had warned by text that she would be late, had told her he would wait for her to get home, so they could eat dinner together. “Listen, I haven’t told you everything.”
“Suki Lewis?” asked Strike, hopefully.
“I haven’t been able to work her into the conversation yet. No, it’s that Chiswell’s wife claims men have been lurking in the flowerbeds and fiddling with her horses.”
“Men?” Strike repeated. “In the plural?”
“That’s what Izzy said—but she also says Kinvara’s hysterical and attention-seeking.”
“Getting to be a bit of a theme, that, isn’t it? People who’re supposed to be too crazy to know what they’ve seen.”
“D’you think that could have been Jimmy, as well? In the garden?”
Strike thought it over as he chewed.
“I can’t see what he’s got to gain from lurking in the garden or fiddling with horses, unless he’s at the point where he just wants to frighten Chiswell. I’ll check with Barclay and see whether Jimmy’s got a car or mentioned going to Oxfordshire. Did Kinvara call the police?”
“Raff asked that, when Izzy got back,” said Robin, and once again, Strike thought he detected a trace of self-consciousness as she spoke the man’s name. “Kinvara claims the dogs barked, she saw the shadow of a man in the garden, but he ran away. She says there were footprints in the horses’ field next morning and that one of them had been cut with a knife.”
“Did she call a vet?”
“I don’t know. It’s harder to ask questions with Raff in the office. I don’t want to look too nosy, because he doesn’t know who I am.”
Strike pushed his plate away from him and felt for his cigarettes.