Lethal White

Dirty little bastard. He’s already lost one job—let him try, that’s all. Let him try!
Does he think I won’t—I know things about Aamir Mallik,” he said. “Oh yes.”
Strike waited, in some surprise, for elucidation of these remarks, but none
were forthcoming. Chiswell merely breathed heavily into the telephone. Soft,
muffled thuds told Strike that Chiswell was pacing up and down on carpet.
“Is that all you had to say to me?” demanded the MP at last.
“There was one other thing,” said Strike. “My partner says your wife’s seen a
man or men trespassing on your property at night.”
“Oh,” said Chiswell, “yerse.” He did not sound particularly concerned. “My
wife keeps horses and she takes their security very seriously.”
“You don’t think this has any connection with—?”
“Not in the slightest, not in the slightest. Kinvara’s sometimes—well, to be
candid,” said Chiswell, “she can be bloody hysterical. Keeps a bunch of horses,
always fretting they’re going to be stolen. I don’t want you wasting time chasing
shadows through the undergrowth in Oxfordshire. My problems are in London.
Is that everything?”
Strike said that it was and, after a curt farewell, Chiswell hung up, leaving
Strike to limp towards St. James’s Park station.
Settled in a corner seat of the Tube ten minutes later, Strike folded his arms,
stretched out his legs and stared unseeingly at the window opposite.

---

The nature of this investigation was highly unusual. He had never before had
a blackmail case where the client was so unforthcoming about his offense—but
then, Strike reasoned with himself, he had never had a government minister as a
client before. Equally, it was not every day that a possibly psychotic young man
burst into Strike’s office and insisted that he had witnessed a child murder,
though Strike had certainly received his fair share of unusual and unbalanced
communications since hitting the newspapers: what he had once called, over
Robin’s occasional protests, “the nutter drawer,” now filled half a filing cabinet.
It was the precise relationship between the strangled child and Chiswell’s
case of blackmail that was preoccupying Strike, even though, on the face of it,
the connection was obvious: it lay in the fact of Jimmy and Billy’s brotherhood.
Now somebody (and Strike thought it overwhelmingly likely to be Jimmy,
judging from Robin’s account of the call) seemed to have decided to tie Billy’s
story to Chiswell, even though the blackmailable offense that had brought
Chiswell to Strike could not possibly have been infanticide, or Geraint Winn
would have gone to the police. Like a tongue probing a pair of ulcers, Strike’s
thoughts kept returning fruitlessly to the Knight brothers: Jimmy, charismatic,
articulate, thuggishly good-looking, a chancer and a hothead, and Billy, haunted,
filthy, unquestionably ill, bedeviled by a memory no less dreadful for the fact
that it might be false.
They piss themselves as they die.
Who did? Again, Strike seemed to hear Billy Knight.
They buried her in a pink blanket, down in the dell by my dad’s house. But
afterwards they said it was a boy…
He had just been specifically instructed by his client to restrict his
investigations to London, not Oxfordshire.
As he checked the name of the station at which they had just arrived, Strike
remembered Robin’s self-consciousness when talking about Raphael Chiswell.
Yawning, he took out his mobile again and succeeded in Googling the youngest
of his client’s offspring, of whom there were many pictures going up the
courtroom steps to his trial for manslaughter.
As he scrolled through multiple pictures of Raphael, Strike felt a rising
antipathy towards the handsome young man in his dark suit. Setting aside the
fact that Chiswell’s son resembled an Italian model more than anything British,
the images caused a latent resentment, rooted in class and personal injuries, to
glow a little redder inside Strike’s chest. Raphael was of the same type as Jago
Ross, the man whom Charlotte had married after splitting with Strike: upper
class, expensively clothed and educated, their peccadillos treated more leniently
for being able to afford the best lawyers, for resembling the sons of the judges

---

deciding their fates.
The train set off again and Strike, losing his connection, stuffed his phone
back into his pocket, folded his arms and resumed his blank stare at the dark
window, trying to deny an uncomfortable idea headspace, but it nosed up against
him like a dog demanding food, impossible to ignore.
He now realized that he had never imagined Robin being interested in any
man other than Matthew, except, of course, for that moment when he himself
had held her on the stairs at her wedding, when, briefly…
Angry with himself, he kicked the unhelpful thought aside, and forced his
wandering mind back onto the curious case of a government minister, slashed
horses and a body buried in a pink blanket, down in a dell.

---

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