“Your stepdaughter’s worried that he may have had something to do with your husband’s death,” said Strike, watching her for a reaction.
“I know,” said Kinvara, with apparent indifference, her eyes following Raphael, who had just walked away from the grate to fetch a pack of Marlboro Lights that lay beside a table lamp. “I never knew Jimmy Knight. The first time I ever laid eyes on him was when he turned up at the house a year ago to speak to Jasper. There’s an ashtray beneath that magazine, Raphael.”
Her stepson lit his cigarette and returned, carrying the ashtray, which he placed on a table beside Robin, before resuming his position in front of the empty fireplace.
“That was the start of it,” Kinvara continued. “The blackmail. Jasper wasn’t actually there that night, so Jimmy talked to me. Jasper was furious when he came home and I told him.”
Strike waited. He suspected that he wasn’t the only one in the room who thought Kinvara might break the family vow of omerta and blurt out what Jimmy had come to say. She refrained, however, so Strike drew out his notebook.
“Would you mind if I run through a few routine questions? I doubt there’ll be anything you haven’t already been asked by the police. Just a couple of points I’d like clarified, if you don’t mind.
“How many keys are there, to the house in Ebury Street?”
“Three, as far as I’m aware,” said Kinvara. The emphasis suggested that the rest of the family might have been hiding keys from her.
“And who had them?” asked Strike.
“Well, Jasper had his own,” she said, “and I had one and there was a spare that Jasper had given to the cleaning woman.”
“What’s her name?”
“I’ve no idea. Jasper let her go a couple of weeks before he—he died.”
“Why did he sack her?” asked Strike.
“Well, if you must know, we got rid of her because we were tightening our belts.”
“Had she come from an agency?”
“Oh no. Jasper was old-fashioned. He put up a card up in a local shop and she applied. I think she was Romanian or Polish or something.”
“Have you got her details?”
“No. Jasper hired and fired her. I never even met her.”
“What happened to her key?”
“It was in the kitchen drawer at Ebury Street, but after he died we found out that Jasper had removed it and locked it up in his desk at work,” said Kinvara. “It was handed back by the ministry, with all his other personal effects.”
“That seems odd,” Strike said. “Anyone know why he’d have done that?”
The rest of the family looked blank, but Kinvara said:
“He was always security conscious and he’d been paranoid lately—except when it came to the horses, of course. All the keys to Ebury Street are a special kind. Restricted. Impossible to copy.”
“Tricky to copy,” said Strike, making a note, “but not impossible, if you know the right people. Where were the other two keys at the time of death?”
“Jasper’s was in his jacket pocket and mine was here, in my handbag,” said Kinvara.
“The canister of helium,” said Strike, moving on. “Does anybody know when it was purchased?”
Total silence greeted these words.
“Was there ever a party,” Strike asked, “perhaps for one of the children—?”
“Never,” said Fizzy. “Ebury Street was the place Papa used for work. He never hosted a party there that I can remember.”
“You, Mrs. Chiswell,” Strike asked Kinvara. “Can you remember any occasion—?”
“No,” she said, cutting across him. “I’ve already told the police this. Jasper must have bought it himself, there’s no other explanation.”
“Has a receipt been found? A credit card bill?”
“He probably paid cash,” said Torquil helpfully.
“Another thing I’d like to clear up,” Strike said, working down the list he had made himself, “is this business of the phone calls the minister made on the morning of his death. Apparently he called you, Mrs. Chiswell, and then you, Raphael.”
Raphael nodded. Kinvara said:
“He wanted to know whether I meant it when I said I was leaving and I said yes, I did. It wasn’t a long conversation. I didn’t know—I didn’t know who your assistant really was. She appeared out of nowhere and Jasper was odd in his manner when I asked about her and I—I was very upset. I thought there was something going on.”
“Were you surprised that your husband waited until the morning to call you about the note you’d left?” asked Strike.
“He told me he hadn’t spotted it when he came in.”
“Where had you left it?”
“On his bedside table. He was probably drunk when he got back. He’s been—he was—drinking heavily. Ever since the blackmail business started.”
The Norfolk terrier that had been shut out of the house suddenly popped up at one of the long windows and began barking at them again.
“Bloody dog,” said Torquil.
“He misses Jasper,” said Kinvara. “He was Jasper’s d-dog—”
She stood up abruptly and walked away to snatch some tissues from a box sitting on top of the gardening books. Everybody looked uncomfortable. The terrier barked on and on. The sleeping Labrador woke and let out a single deep bark in return, before one of the tow-headed children reappeared on the lawn, shouting for the Norfolk terrier to come and play ball. It bounded off again.
“Good boy, Pringle!” shouted Torquil.
In the absence of barking, Kinvara’s small gulps and the sounds of the Labrador flopping down to sleep again filled the room. Izzy, Fizzy and Torquil exchanged awkward glances, while Raphael stared rather stonily ahead. Little though she liked Kinvara, Robin found the family’s inaction unfeeling.
“Where did that picture come from?” asked Torquil, with an artificial air of interest, squinting at the equine painting over Raphael’s head. “New, isn’t it?”
“That was one of Tinky’s,” said Fizzy, squinting up at it. “She brought a bunch of horsey junk over from Ireland with her.”
“See that foal?” said Torquil, staring critically at the picture. “You know what it looks like? Lethal white syndrome. Heard of it?” he asked his wife and sister-in-law. “You’ll know all about that, Kinvara,” he said, clearly under the impression that he was graciously offering a way back into polite conversation. “Pure white foal, seems healthy when it’s born, but defective bowel. Can’t pass feces. M’father bred horses,” he explained to Strike. “They can’t survive, lethal whites. The tragedy is that they’re born alive, so the mare feeds them, gets attached and then—”
“Torks,” said Fizzy tensely, but it was too late. Kinvara blundered out of the room. The door slammed.
“What?” said Torquil, surprised. “What have I—?”
“Baby,” whispered Fizzy.
“Oh, Lord,” he said, “I clean forgot.”
He got to his feet, hitched up his mustard corduroys, embarrassed and defensive.
“Oh, come on,” he said, to the room at large. “I couldn’t expect her to take it that way. Horses in a bloody painting!”
“You know what she’s like,” said Fizzy, “about anything connected with birth. Sorry,” she said to Strike and Robin. “She had a baby that didn’t survive, you see. Very sensitive on the subject.”
Torquil approached the painting and squinted over Raphael’s head at words etched on a small plaque set into the frame.
“‘Mare Mourning,’” he read. “There you are, you see,” he said, with an air of triumph. “Foal is dead.”
“Kinvara likes it,” said Raphael unexpectedly, “because the mare reminds her of Lady.”
“Who?” said Torquil.
“The mare that got laminitis.”
“What’s laminitis?” asked Strike.
“A disease of the hoof,” Robin told him.
“Oh, do you ride?” asked Fizzy keenly.
“I used to.”
“Laminitis is serious,” Fizzy told Strike. “It can cripple them. They need a lot of care, and sometimes nothing can be done, so it’s kindest—”
“My stepmother had been nursing this mare for weeks,” Raphael told Strike, “getting up in the middle of the night and so on. My father waited—”
“Raff, this really hasn’t got anything to do with anything,” said Izzy.