29
There is a path vpon your left hand side,
That leadeth from a guiltie conscience
Vnto a forrest of distrust and feare,–
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie
In spite of their near-crash, Strike and Robin entered the Devonshire town of Tiverton shortly after twelve. Robin followed the sat nav’s instructions past quiet country houses topped with thick layers of glittering white, over a neat little bridge spanning a river the colour of flint and past a sixteenth-century church of unexpected grandeur to the far side of the town, where a pair of electric gates were discreetly set back from the road.
A handsome young Filipino man wearing what appeared to be deck shoes and an over-large coat was attempting to prise these open manually. When he caught sight of the Land Cruiser he mimed to Robin to wind down her window.
‘Frozen,’ he told her succinctly. ‘Wait a moment, please.’
They sat for five minutes until at last he had succeeded in unfreezing the gates and had dug a clearing in the steadily falling snow to allow the gates to swing open.
‘Do you want a lift back to the house?’ Robin asked him.
He climbed into the back seat beside Strike’s crutches.
‘You friends of Mr Chard?’
‘He’s expecting us,’ said Strike evasively.
Up a long and winding private driveway they went, the Land Cruiser making easy work of the heaped, crunchy overnight fall. The shiny dark green leaves of the rhododendrons lining the path had refused to bear their load of snow, so that the approach was all black and white: walls of dense foliage crowding in on the pale, powdery drive. Tiny spots of light had started popping in front of Robin’s eyes. It had been a very long time since breakfast and, of course, Strike had eaten all the biscuits.
Her feeling of seasickness and a slight sense of unreality persisted as she got down out of the Toyota and looked up at Tithebarn House, which stood beside a dark patch of wood that pressed close to one side of the house. The massive oblong structure in front of them had been converted by an adventurous architect: half of the roof had been replaced by sheet glass; the other seemed to be covered in solar panels. Looking up at the place where the structure became transparent and skeletal against the bright, light grey sky made Robin feel even giddier. It reminded her of the ghastly picture on Strike’s phone, the vaulted space of glass and light in which Quine’s mutilated body had lain.
‘Are you all right?’ said Strike, concerned. She looked very pale.
‘Fine,’ said Robin, who wanted to maintain her heroic status in his eyes. Taking deep lungfuls of the frosty air, she followed Strike, surprisingly nimble on his crutches, up the gravel path towards the entrance. Their young passenger had disappeared without another word to them.
Daniel Chard opened the front door himself. He was wearing a mandarin-collared, smock-like shirt in chartreuse silk and loose linen trousers. Like Strike, he was on crutches, his left foot and calf encased in a thick surgical boot and strapping. Chard looked down at Strike’s dangling, empty trouser leg and for several painful seconds did not seem able to look away.
‘And you thought you had problems,’ said Strike, holding out his hand.
The small joke fell flat. Chard did not smile. The aura of awkwardness, of otherness, that had surrounded him at his firm’s party clung to him still. He shook Strike’s hand without looking him in the eye and his welcoming words were:
‘I’ve been expecting you to cancel all morning.’
‘No, we made it,’ said Strike unnecessarily. ‘This is my assistant, Robin, who’s driven me down. I hope—’
‘No, she can’t sit outside in the snow,’ said Chard, though without noticeable warmth. ‘Come in.’
He backed away on his crutches to let them move over the threshold onto highly polished floorboards the colour of honey.
‘Would you mind removing your shoes?’
A stocky, middle-aged Filipina woman with her black hair in a bun emerged from a pair of swing doors set into the brick wall on their right. She was clothed entirely in black and holding two white linen bags into which Strike and Robin were evidently expected to put their footwear. Robin handed hers over; it made her feel strangely vulnerable to feel the boards beneath her soles. Strike merely stood there on his single foot.
‘Oh,’ said Chard, staring again. ‘No, I suppose… Mr Strike had better keep his shoe on, Nenita.’
The woman retired wordlessly into the kitchen.
Somehow, the interior of Tithebarn House increased Robin’s unpleasant sensation of vertigo. No walls divided its vast interior. The first floor, which was reached by a steel and glass spiral staircase, was suspended on thick metal cables from the high ceiling. Chard’s huge double bed, which seemed to be of black leather, was visible, high above them, with what looked like a huge crucifix of barbed wire hanging over it on the brick wall. Robin dropped her gaze hastily, feeling sicker than ever.
Most of the furniture on the lower level comprised cubes of white or black leather. Vertical steel radiators were interspersed with artfully simple bookshelves of more wood and metal. The dominant feature of the under-furnished room was a life-size white marble sculpture of an angel, perched on a rock and partially dissected to expose half of her skull, a portion of her guts and a slice of the bone in her leg. Her breast, Robin saw, unable to tear her eyes away, was revealed as a mound of fat globules sitting on a circle of muscle that resembled the gills of a mushroom.
Ludicrous to feel sick when the dissected body was made of cold, pure stone, mere insentient albescence, nothing like the rotting carcass preserved on Strike’s mobile… don’t think about that… she ought to have made Strike leave at least one biscuit… sweat had broken out on her upper lip, her scalp…
‘You all right, Robin?’ asked Strike sharply. She knew she must have changed colour from the look on the two men’s faces, and to her fear that she might pass out was added embarrassment that she was being a liability to Strike.
‘Sorry,’ she said through numb lips. ‘Long journey… if I could have a glass of water…’
‘Er – very well,’ said Chard, as though water were in short supply. ‘Nenita?’
The woman in black reappeared.
‘The young lady needs a glass of water,’ said Chard.
Nenita gestured to Robin to follow her. Robin heard the publisher’s crutches making a gentle thump, thump behind her on the wooden floor as she entered the kitchen. She had a brief impression of steel surfaces and whitewashed walls, and the young man to whom she had given a lift prodding at a large saucepan, then found herself sitting on a low stool.
Robin had assumed that Chard had followed to see that she was all right, but as Nenita pressed a cold glass into her hand she heard him speak somewhere above her.
‘Thanks for fixing the gates, Manny.’