Arriving outside Chiswell’s house precisely on time, she lingered for a few hopeful seconds beside the glossy black front door, just in case Strike were to appear at the last moment. He didn’t. Robin therefore steadied herself, walked up the three clean white steps from the pavement and knocked on the front door, which was on the latch and opened a few inches. A man’s muffled voice shouted something that might have been “come in.”
Robin passed into a small, dingy hall dominated by vertiginous stairs. The olive-green wallpaper was drab and peeling in places. Leaving the front door as she had found it, she called out:
“Minister?”
He didn’t answer. Robin knocked gently on the door to the right, and opened it.
Time froze. The scene seemed to fold in upon her, crashing through her retinas into a mind unprepared for it, and shock kept her standing in the doorway, her hand still on the handle and her mouth slightly open, trying to comprehend what she was seeing.
A man was sitting in a Queen Anne chair, his legs splayed, his arms dangling, and he seemed to have a shiny gray turnip for a head, in which a carved mouth gaped, but no eyes.
Then Robin’s struggling comprehension grasped the fact that it was not a turnip, but a human head shrink-wrapped in a clear plastic bag, into which a tube ran from a large canister. The man looked as though he had suffocated. His left foot lay sideways on the rug, revealing a small hole in the sole, his thick fingers dangled, almost touching the carpet, and there was a stain at his groin where his bladder had emptied.
And next she understood that it was Chiswell himself who sat in the chair, and that his thick mass of gray hair was pressed flat against his face in the vacuum created by the bag, and that the gaping mouth had sucked the plastic into itself, which was why it gaped so darkly.
35
… the White Horse! In broad daylight!
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Somewhere in the distance, outside the house, a man shouted. He sounded like a workman, and in some part of her brain Robin knew that that was who she had heard when she was expecting to hear “come in.” Nobody had invited her into the house. The door had simply been left ajar.
Now, when it might have been expected, she didn’t panic. There was no threat here, however horrifying the sight of that awful dummy, with the turnip head and the tube, this poor lifeless figure could not hurt her. Knowing that she must check that life was extinct, Robin approached Chiswell and gently touched his shoulder. It was easier, not being able to see his eyes, because of the coarse hair that obscured them like a horse’s forelock. The flesh felt hard beneath his striped shirt and cooler than she had expected.
But then she imagined the gaping mouth speaking, and took several quick steps backwards, until her foot landed with a crunch on something hard on the carpet and she slipped. She had cracked a pale blue plastic tube of pills lying on the carpet. She recognized them as the sort of homeopathic tablets sold in her local chemist.
Taking out her mobile, she called 999 and asked for the police. After explaining that she had found a body and giving the address, she was told that someone would be with her shortly.
Trying not to focus on Chiswell, she took in the frayed curtains, which were of an indeterminate dun color, trimmed with sad little bobbles, the antiquated TV in its faux wood cladding, the patch of darker wallpaper over the mantelpiece where a painting had once hung, and the silver-framed photographs. But the shrink-wrapped head, the rubber piping and the cold glint of the canister seemed to turn all of this everyday normality into pasteboard. The nightmare alone was real.
So Robin turned her mobile onto its camera function and began to take photographs. Putting a lens between herself and the scene mitigated the horror. Slowly and methodically, she documented the scene.
A glass sat on the coffee table in front of the body, with a few millimeters of what looked like orange juice in it. Scattered books and papers lay beside it. There was a piece of thick cream writing paper headed with a red Tudor rose, like a drop of blood, and the printed address of the house in which Robin stood. Somebody had written in a rounded, girlish hand.
Tonight was the final straw. How stupid do you think I am, putting that girl in your office right under my nose? I hope you realize how ridiculous you look, how much people are laughing at you, chasing a girl who’s younger than your daughters.
I’ve had enough. Make a fool of yourself, I don’t care anymore, it’s over.
I’ve gone back to Woolstone. Once I’ve made arrangements for the horses, I’ll clear out for good. Your bloody horrible children will be happy, but will you, Jasper? I doubt it, but it’s too late.
K
As Robin bent to take a picture of the note, she heard the front door snap shut, and with a gasp, she spun around. Strike was standing on the threshold, large, unshaven, still in the suit he had worn to the reception. He was staring at the figure in the chair.
“The police are on their way,” said Robin. “I just called them.”
Strike moved carefully into the room.
“Holy shit.”
He spotted the cracked tube of pills on the floor, stepped over them, and scrutinized the tubing and the plastic-covered face.
“Raff said he was behaving strangely,” said Robin, “but I don’t think he ever dreamed…”
Strike said nothing. He was still examining the body.
“Was that there yesterday evening?”
“What?”
“That,” said Strike, pointing.
There was a semi-circular mark on the back of Chiswell’s hand, dark red against the coarse, pallid skin.
“I can’t remember,” said Robin.
The full shock of what had happened was starting to hit her and she was finding it hard to arrange her thoughts, which floated, unmoored and disconnected, through her head: Chiswell barking through the car window to persuade the police to let Strike into last night’s reception, Chiswell calling Kinvara a stupid bitch, Chiswell demanding that they meet him here this morning. It was unreasonable to expect her to remember the backs of his hands.
“Hmm,” said Strike. He noticed the mobile in Robin’s hand. “Have you taken pictures of everything?”
She nodded.
“All of this?” he asked, waving a hand over the table. “That?” he added, pointing at the cracked pills on the carpet.
“Yes. That was my fault. I trod on them.”
“How did you get in?”
“The door was open. I thought he’d left it on the latch for us,” said Robin. “A workman shouted in the street and I thought it was Chiswell saying ‘come in.’ I was expecting—”
“Stay here,” said Strike.
He left the room. She heard him climbing the stairs and then his heavy footsteps on the ceiling above, but she knew that there was nobody there. She could feel the house’s essential lifelessness, its flimsy cardboard unreality, and, sure enough, Strike returned less than five minutes later, shaking his head.
“Nobody.”
He walked past her through a door that led off the sitting room and, hearing his footsteps hit tile, Robin knew that it was the kitchen.
“Completely empty,” Strike said, re-emerging.
“What happened last night?” Robin asked. “You said something funny happened.”
She wanted to discuss a subject other than the awful form that dominated the room in its grotesque lifelessness.
“Billy called me. He said people were trying to kill him—chasing him. He claimed to be in a phone box in Trafalgar Square. I went to try and find him, but he wasn’t there.”
“Oh,” said Robin.
So he hadn’t been with Charlotte. Even in this extremity, Robin registered the fact, and was glad.
“The hell?” said Strike quietly, looking past her into a corner of the room.
A buckled sword was leaning against the wall in a dark corner. It looked as though it had been forced or stood on and deliberately bent. Strike walked carefully around the body to examine it, but then they heard the police car pulling up outside the house and he straightened up.
“We’ll tell them everything, obviously,” said Strike.
“Yes,” said Robin.
“Except the surveillance devices. Shit—they’ll find them in your office—”
“They won’t,” said Robin. “I took them home yesterday, in case we decided I needed to clear out because of the Sun.”