“Photos,” he mused, returning to the central point. “Photos at the Foreign Office. What the hell can they show that would incriminate Chiswell? He’s never worked at the Foreign Office, has he?”
“No,” said Robin. “The highest post he’s ever held is Minister for Trade. He had to resign from there because of the affair with Raff’s mother.”
The wooden clock over the fireplace was telling her it was time to leave. She didn’t move.
“You’re liking Raff, then?” Strike said suddenly, catching her off guard.
“What?”
Robin was scared that she had blushed.
“What do you mean, I’m ‘liking’ him?”
“Just an impression I got,” said Strike. “You disapproved of him before you met him.”
“D’you want me to be antagonistic towards him, when I’m supposed to be his father’s goddaughter?” demanded Robin.
“No, of course not,” said Strike, though Robin had the sense that he was laughing at her, and resented it.
“I’d better get going,” she said, sweeping the headphones off the table and back into her bag. “I told Matt I’d be home for dinner.”
She got up, bade Strike goodbye and left the pub.
Strike watched her go, dimly sorry that he had commented on her manner when mentioning Raphael Chiswell. After a few minutes’ solitary beer consumption, he paid for his food and ambled out onto the pavement, where he lit a cigarette and called the Minister for Culture, who answered on the second ring.
“Wait there,” said Chiswell. Strike could hear a murmuring crowd behind him. “Crowded room.”
The clunk of a door closing and the noise of the crowd was muted.
“’M at a dinner,” said Chiswell. “Anything for me?”
“It isn’t good news, I’m afraid,” said Strike, walking away from the pub, up Queen Anne Street, between white painted buildings that gleamed in the dusk. “My partner succeeded in planting the listening device in Mr. Winn’s office this morning. We’ve got a recording of him talking to Jimmy Knight. Winn’s assistant—Aamir, is it?—is trying to get copies of those photographs you told me about. At the Foreign Office.”
The ensuring silence lasted so long that Strike wondered whether they had been cut off.
“Minist—?”
“I’m here!” snarled Chiswell. “That boy Mallik, is it? Dirty little bastard. Dirty little bastard. He’s already lost one job—let him try, that’s all. Let him try! Does he think I won’t—I know things about Aamir Mallik,” he said. “Oh yes.”
Strike waited, in some surprise, for elucidation of these remarks, but none were forthcoming. Chiswell merely breathed heavily into the telephone. Soft, muffled thuds told Strike that Chiswell was pacing up and down on carpet.
“Is that all you had to say to me?” demanded the MP at last.
“There was one other thing,” said Strike. “My partner says your wife’s seen a man or men trespassing on your property at night.”
“Oh,” said Chiswell, “yerse.” He did not sound particularly concerned. “My wife keeps horses and she takes their security very seriously.”
“You don’t think this has any connection with—?”
“Not in the slightest, not in the slightest. Kinvara’s sometimes—well, to be candid,” said Chiswell, “she can be bloody hysterical. Keeps a bunch of horses, always fretting they’re going to be stolen. I don’t want you wasting time chasing shadows through the undergrowth in Oxfordshire. My problems are in London. Is that everything?”
Strike said that it was and, after a curt farewell, Chiswell hung up, leaving Strike to limp towards St. James’s Park station.
Settled in a corner seat of the Tube ten minutes later, Strike folded his arms, stretched out his legs and stared unseeingly at the window opposite.
The nature of this investigation was highly unusual. He had never before had a blackmail case where the client was so unforthcoming about his offense—but then, Strike reasoned with himself, he had never had a government minister as a client before. Equally, it was not every day that a possibly psychotic young man burst into Strike’s office and insisted that he had witnessed a child murder, though Strike had certainly received his fair share of unusual and unbalanced communications since hitting the newspapers: what he had once called, over Robin’s occasional protests, “the nutter drawer,” now filled half a filing cabinet.
It was the precise relationship between the strangled child and Chiswell’s case of blackmail that was preoccupying Strike, even though, on the face of it, the connection was obvious: it lay in the fact of Jimmy and Billy’s brotherhood. Now somebody (and Strike thought it overwhelmingly likely to be Jimmy, judging from Robin’s account of the call) seemed to have decided to tie Billy’s story to Chiswell, even though the blackmailable offense that had brought Chiswell to Strike could not possibly have been infanticide, or Geraint Winn would have gone to the police. Like a tongue probing a pair of ulcers, Strike’s thoughts kept returning fruitlessly to the Knight brothers: Jimmy, charismatic, articulate, thuggishly good-looking, a chancer and a hothead, and Billy, haunted, filthy, unquestionably ill, bedeviled by a memory no less dreadful for the fact that it might be false.
They piss themselves as they die.
Who did? Again, Strike seemed to hear Billy Knight.
They buried her in a pink blanket, down in the dell by my dad’s house. But afterwards they said it was a boy…
He had just been specifically instructed by his client to restrict his investigations to London, not Oxfordshire.
As he checked the name of the station at which they had just arrived, Strike remembered Robin’s self-consciousness when talking about Raphael Chiswell. Yawning, he took out his mobile again and succeeded in Googling the youngest of his client’s offspring, of whom there were many pictures going up the courtroom steps to his trial for manslaughter.
As he scrolled through multiple pictures of Raphael, Strike felt a rising antipathy towards the handsome young man in his dark suit. Setting aside the fact that Chiswell’s son resembled an Italian model more than anything British, the images caused a latent resentment, rooted in class and personal injuries, to glow a little redder inside Strike’s chest. Raphael was of the same type as Jago Ross, the man whom Charlotte had married after splitting with Strike: upper class, expensively clothed and educated, their peccadillos treated more leniently for being able to afford the best lawyers, for resembling the sons of the judges deciding their fates.
The train set off again and Strike, losing his connection, stuffed his phone back into his pocket, folded his arms and resumed his blank stare at the dark window, trying to deny an uncomfortable idea headspace, but it nosed up against him like a dog demanding food, impossible to ignore.
He now realized that he had never imagined Robin being interested in any man other than Matthew, except, of course, for that moment when he himself had held her on the stairs at her wedding, when, briefly…
Angry with himself, he kicked the unhelpful thought aside, and forced his wandering mind back onto the curious case of a government minister, slashed horses and a body buried in a pink blanket, down in a dell.
21
… certain games are going on behind your back in this house.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
“Why are you so busy and I’ve got bugger all to do?” Raphael asked Robin, late on Friday morning.
She had just returned from tailing Geraint to Portcullis House. Observing him from a distance, she had seen how the polite smiles of the many young women he greeted turned to expressions of dislike as he passed. Geraint had disappeared into a meeting room on the first floor, so Robin had returned to Izzy’s office. Approaching Geraint’s room she had hoped she might be able to slip inside and retrieve the second listening device, but through the open door she saw Aamir working at his computer.