Pausing beside the black marble exterior of the gallery, he saw himself reflected in the window and straightened his tie. He was wearing his best Italian suit. Behind his reflection, tastefully illuminated, a single painting in an ornate golden frame stood on an easel behind the spotless glass. It featured a pair of what, to Strike, looked like unrealistic horses with giraffe-like necks and staring eyes, ridden by eighteenth-century jockeys.
The gallery beyond the heavy door was cool and silent, with a floor of highly polished white marble. Strike walked carefully with his stick among the sporting and wildlife paintings, which were illuminated discreetly around the white walls, all of them in heavy gilded frames, until a well-groomed young blonde in a tight black dress emerged from a side door.
“Oh, good afternoon,” she said, without asking his name, and walked away towards the back of the gallery, her stilettos making a metallic click on the tiles. “Henry! Mr. Strike’s here!”
A concealed door opened, and Drummond emerged: a curious-looking man, whose ascetic features of pinched nose and black brows were enclosed by rolls of fat around chin and neck, as though a puritan had been engulfed by the body of a jolly squire. With his mutton-chop whiskers and dark gray suit and waistcoat he had a timeless, irrefutably upper-class, appearance.
“How do you do?” he said, offering a warm, dry hand. “Come into the office.”
“Henry, Mrs. Ross just called,” said the blonde, as Strike walked into the small room beyond the discreet door, which was book-lined, mahogany-shelved and very tidy. “She’d like to see the Munnings before we close. I’ve told her it’s reserved, but she’d still like—”
“Let me know when she arrives,” said Drummond. “And could we have some tea, Lucinda? Or coffee?” he inquired of Strike.
“Tea would be great, thank you.”
“Do sit down,” said Drummond, and Strike did so, grateful for a large and sturdy leather chair. The antique desk between them was bare but for a tray of engraved writing paper, a fountain pen and an ivory and silver letter opener. “So,” said Henry Drummond heavily, “you’re looking into this appalling business for the family?”
“That’s right. D’you mind if I take notes?”
“Carry on.”
Strike took out his notebook and pen. Drummond swiveled gently from side to side in his rotating chair.
“Terrible shock,” he said softly. “Of course, one thought immediately of foreign interference. Government minister, eyes of the world on London with the Olympics and so forth…”
“You didn’t think he could have committed suicide?” asked Strike.
Drummond sighed heavily.
“I knew him for forty-five years. His life had not been devoid of vicissitudes. To have come through everything—the divorce from Patricia, Freddie’s death, resignation from the government, Raphael’s ghastly car accident—to end it now, when he was Minister for Culture, when everything seemed back on track…
“Because the Conservative Party was his life’s blood, you know,” said Drummond. “Oh, yes. He’d bleed blue. Hated being out, delighted to get back in again, rise to minister… we joked of him becoming PM in our younger days, of course, but that dream was gone. Jasper always said, ‘Tory faithful likes bastards or buffoons,’ and that he was neither one nor the other.”
“So you’d say he was in generally good spirits around the time he died?”
“Ah… well, no, I couldn’t say that. There were stresses, worries—but suicidal? Definitely not.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“The last time we met face to face was here, at the gallery,” said Drummond. “I can tell you exactly what date it was: Friday the twenty-second of June.”
This, Strike knew, was the day that he had met Chiswell for the first time. He remembered the minister walking away towards Drummond’s gallery after their lunch at Pratt’s.
“And how did he seem to you that day?”
“Extremely angry,” said Drummond, “but that was inevitable, given what he walked in on, here.”
Drummond picked up the letter opener and turned it delicately in his thick fingers.
“His son—Raphael—had just been caught, for the second time—ah—”
Drummond balked for a second.
“—in flagrante,” he said, “with the other young person I employed at that time, in the bathroom behind me.”
He indicated a discreet black door.
“I had already caught them in there, a month prior to that. I hadn’t told Jasper the first time, because I felt he had quite enough on his plate.”
“In what way?”
Drummond fingered the ornate ivory, cleared his throat and said:
“Jasper’s marriage isn’t—wasn’t… I mean to say, Kinvara is a handful. Difficult woman. She was badgering Jasper to put one of her mares in foal to Totilas at the time.”
When Strike looked blank, Drummond elucidated:
“Top dressage stallion. Nigh on ten thousand for semen.”
“Christ,” said Strike.
“Well, quite,” said Drummond. “And when Kinvara doesn’t get what she wants… one doesn’t know whether it’s temperament or something deeper—actual mental instability—anyway, Jasper had a very difficult time with her.
“Then he’d been through the ghastly business of Raphael’s, ah, accident—that poor young mother killed—the press, and so on and so forth, his son in jail… as a friend, I didn’t want to add to his troubles.
“I’d told Raphael the first time it happened that I wouldn’t inform Jasper, but I also said he was on a final warning and if he stepped out of line again, he would be out on his ear, old friend of his father’s or not. I had Francesca to consider, too. She’s my goddaughter, eighteen years old and completely smitten with him. I didn’t want to have to tell her parents.
“So when I walked in and heard them, I really had no choice. I’d thought I was safe to leave Raphael in charge for an hour because Francesca wasn’t at work that day, but of course, she’d sneaked in specially to see him, on her day off.
“Jasper arrived to find me pounding on the door. There was no way to hide what was going on. Raphael was trying to block my entrance to the bathroom here while Francesca climbed out of the window. She couldn’t face me. I rang her parents, told them everything. She never came back.
“Raphael Chiswell,” said Drummond heavily, “is a Bad Lot. Freddie, the son who died—my godchild too, incidentally—was worth a million of… well, well,” he said, turning the penknife over and over in his fingers, “one shouldn’t say it, I know.”
The office door opened and the young blonde in the black dress entered with a tea tray. Strike compared it mentally to the tea he had in the office as she set down two silver pots, one containing hot water, bone china cups and saucers and a sugar bowl complete with tongs.
“Mrs. Ross has just arrived, Henry.”
“Tell her I’m tied up for the next twenty minutes or so. Ask her to wait, if she’s got time.”
“So I take it,” said Strike, when Lucinda had left, “that there wasn’t much time for conversation that day?”
“Well, no,” said Drummond, unhappily. “Jasper had come to see Raphael at work, believing that all was going splendidly, and to arrive in the middle of that scene… Totally on my side, obviously, once he grasped what was going on. He was the one who actually shoved the boy out of the way to get the bathroom door open. Then he turned a nasty color. He had a heart problem, you know, it had been grumbling on for years. Sat down on the toilet rather suddenly. I was very worried, but he wouldn’t let me call Kinvara…
“Raphael had the decency to be ashamed of himself, then. Tried to help his father. Jasper told him to get out of it, made me close the door, leave him in there…”
Now sounding gruff, Drummond broke off and poured himself and Strike tea. He was evidently in some distress. As he added three lumps to his own cup, the teaspoon rattled against the cup.
“’Pologise. Last time I ever saw Jasper, you see. He came out of the bathroom, ghastly color, still, shook my hand, apologized, said he’d let his oldest friend… let me down.”
Drummond coughed again, swallowed and continued with what seemed an effort: