Continuing to search the boards, Robin stopped at the last one to examine the faded photograph of a large party.
It had been taken in a marquee, from what seemed to be a stage. Many bright blue helium balloons in the shape of the number eighteen danced over the crowd’s heads. A hundred or so teenagers had clearly been bidden to face the camera. Robin scanned the scene carefully and found Freddie easily enough, surrounded by a large group of both boys and girls whose arms were slung around each other’s shoulders, beaming and, in some cases, braying with laughter. After nearly a minute, Robin spotted the face she had instinctively sought: Rhiannon Winn, thin, pale and unsmiling beside the drinks table. Close behind her, half-hidden in shadow, were a couple of boys who were not in black tie, but jean and T-shirts. One in particular was darkly handsome and long-haired, his T-shirt bearing a picture of The Clash.
Robin got out her mobile and took a picture of both the fencing team and the eighteenth birthday party photographs, then carefully replaced the stack of Perspex boards as she had found them, and left the bathroom.
She thought for a second that the silent hall was deserted. Then she saw that Raphael was leaning up against a hall table, his arms folded.
“Well, goodbye,” said Robin, starting to walk towards the front door.
“Hang on a minute.”
As she paused, he pushed himself off the table and approached her.
“I’ve been quite angry with you, you know.”
“I can understand why,” said Robin quietly, “but I was doing what your father hired me to do.”
He moved closer, coming to a halt beneath an old glass lantern hanging from the ceiling. Half the lightbulbs were missing.
“I’d say you’re bloody good at it, are you? Getting people to trust you?”
“That’s the job,” said Robin.
“You’re married,” he said, eyes on her left hand.
“Yes,” she said.
“To Tim?”
“No… there isn’t any Tim.”
“You’re not married to him?” said Raphael quickly, pointing outside.
“No. We just work together.”
“And that’s your real accent,” said Raphael. “Yorkshire.”
“Yes,” she said. “This is it.”
She thought he was going to say something insulting. The olive dark eyes moved over her face, then he shook his head slightly.
“I quite like the voice, but I preferred ‘Venetia.’ Made me think of masked orgies.”
He turned and walked away, leaving Robin to hurry back out into the sunshine to rejoin Strike, who she presumed would be waiting impatiently in the Land Rover.
She was wrong. He was still standing beside the car’s bonnet, while Izzy, who was standing very close to him, talked rapidly in an undertone. When she heard Robin’s feet on the gravel behind her, Izzy took a step backwards with what, to Robin, seemed a slightly guilty, embarrassed air.
“Lovely to see you again,” Izzy said, kissing Robin on both cheeks, as though this had been a simple social call. “And you’ll ring me, won’t you?” she said to Strike.
“Yep, I’ll keep you updated,” he said, moving around to the passenger seat.
Neither Strike nor Robin spoke as she turned the car around. Izzy waved them off, a slightly pathetic figure in her loose shirt dress. Strike raised a hand to her as they took the bend in the drive that hid her from their sight.
Trying not to upset the skittish stallions, Robin drove at a snail’s pace. Glancing left, Strike saw that the injured horse had been removed from the field, but in spite of Robin’s best intentions, as the noisy old car lurched past its field, the black stallion took off again.
“Who d’you reckon,” said Strike, watching the horse plunge and buck, “first took a look at something like that and thought, ‘I should get on its back’?”
“There’s an old saying,” said Robin, trying to steer around the worst of the potholes, “‘the horse is your mirror.’ People say dogs resemble their owners, but I think it’s truer of horses.”
“Making Kinvara highly strung and prone to lash out on slight provocation? Sounds about right. Turn right here. I want to get a look at Steda Cottage.”
A bare two minutes later, he said:
“Here. Go up here.”
The track to Steda Cottage was so overgrown that Robin had missed it entirely the first time they had passed it. It led deep into the woodland that lay hard up against the gardens of Chiswell House, but unfortunately, the Land Rover was only able to proceed for ten yards before the track became impassable by car. Robin cut the engine, privately worried about how Strike was going to manage a barely discernible path of earth and fallen leaves, overgrown with brambles and nettles, but as he was already getting out, she followed suit, slamming the driver’s door behind her.
The ground was slippery, the tree canopy so dense that the track was in deep shade, dank and moist. A pungent, green, bitter smell filled their nostrils, and the air was alive with the rustle of birds and small creatures whose habitat was being rudely invaded.
“So,” said Strike, as they struggled through the bushes and weeds. “Christopher Barrowclough-Burns. That’s a new name.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Robin.
Strike looked sideways at her, grinning, and immediately tripped on a root, remaining upright at some cost to his sore knee.
“Shit… I wondered whether you remembered.”
“‘Christopher didn’t promise anything about the pictures,’” quoted Robin promptly. “He’s a civil servant who mentored Aamir Mallik at the Foreign Office. Fizzy just told me.”
“We’re back to ‘a man of your habits,’ aren’t we?”
Neither spoke for a short spell as they concentrated on a particularly treacherous stretch of path where whip-like branches clung willingly to fabric and skin. Robin’s skin was a pale, dappled green in the sun filtered by the ceiling of leaves above them.
“See any more of Raphael, after I went outside?”
“Er—yes, actually,” said Robin, feeling slightly self-conscious. “He came out of the sitting room as I was coming out of the loo.”
“Didn’t think he’d pass up another chance of talking to you,” said Strike.
“It wasn’t like that,” Robin said untruthfully, remembering the remark about masked orgies. “Izzy whispering anything interesting, back there?” she asked.
Amused by the reciprocal jab, Strike took his eyes off the path, thereby failing to spot a muddy stump. He tripped for a second time, this time saving himself from a painful fall by grabbing a tree covered in a prickly climbing plant.
“Fuck—”
“Are you—?”
“I’m fine,” he said, angry with himself, examining the palm that was now full of thorns and starting to pull them out with his teeth. He heard a loud snap of wood behind him and turned to see Robin holding out a fallen branch, which she had broken to make a rough walking stick.
“Use this.”
“I don’t—” he began, but catching sight of her stern expression, he gave in. “Thanks.”
They set off again, Strike finding the stick more useful than he wanted to admit.
“Izzy was just trying to convince me that Kinvara could have sneaked back to Oxfordshire, after bumping off Chiswell between six and seven in the morning. I don’t know whether she realizes there are multiple witnesses to every stage of Kinvara’s journey from Ebury Street. The police probably haven’t gone into detail with the family yet, but I think, once the penny drops that Kinvara can’t have done it in person, Izzy’ll start suggesting she hired a hitman. What did you make of Raphael’s various outbursts?”
“Well,” said Robin, navigating around a patch of nettles, “I can’t blame him, getting annoyed with Torquil.”
“No,” agreed Strike, “I think old Torks would grate on me, too.”
“Raphael seems really angry with his father, doesn’t he? He didn’t have to tell us about Chiswell putting that mare down. I thought he was almost going out of his way to paint his father as… well…”
“A bit of a shit,” agreed Strike. “He thought Chiswell had stolen those pills of Kinvara’s out of malice, too. That whole episode was bloody strange, actually. What made you so interested in those pills?”