Lethal White

volte-face. Robin knew that she had just remembered her hope that Raphael
would take over her job. “I’m just upset, making it sound worse than it—”

---

Her mobile rang. She read the caller’s name and let out a moan.
“Not TTS, not now, I can’t. Raff, you speak to her.”
She held out the mobile to him, but Raphael recoiled as though asked to hold
a tarantula.
“Please, Raff—please… ”
With extreme reluctance, Raphael took the phone.
“Hi, Kinvara. Raff here, Izzy’s out of the office. No… Venetia’s not here…
no… I’m at the office, obviously, I just picked up Izzy’s phone… He’s just gone
to the Olympic Park. No… no, I’m not… I don’t know where Venetia is, all I
know is, she’s not here… yes… yes… OK… bye, then—” He raised his
eyebrows. “Hung up.”
He pushed the phone back across the table to Izzy, who asked:
“Why’s she so interested in where Venetia is?”
“Three guesses,” said Raphael, amused. Catching his drift, Robin looked out
of the window, feeling the color rising in her face. She wondered whether Mitch
Patterson had called Kinvara, and planted this idea in her head.
“Oh, come orf it,” said Izzy. “She thinks Papa’s…? Venetia’s young enough
to be his daughter!”
“In case you haven’t noticed, so’s his wife,” said Raphael, “and you know
what she’s like. The further down the tubes their marriage goes, the more jealous
she gets. Dad’s not picking up his phone to her, so she’s drawing paranoid
conclusions.”
“Papa doesn’t pick up because she drives him crazy,” said Izzy, her
resentment towards her father suddenly submerged by dislike for her stepmother.
“For the last two years she’s refused to budge from home or leave her bloody
horses. Suddenly the Olympics are nearly here and London’s full of celebrities
and all she wants to do is come up to town, dressed up to the nines and play the
minister’s wife.”
She took another deep breath, blotted her face again, then stood up.
“I’d better get back, we’re so busy. Thanks, Raff,” she said, cuffing him
lightly on the shoulder.
She walked away. Raphael watched her go, then turned back to Robin.
“Izzy was the only one who bothered to visit me when I was inside, you
know.”
“Yes,” said Robin. “She said.”
“And when I used to have to go to bloody Chiswell House as a kid, she was
the only one who’d talk to me. I was the little bastard who’d broken up their
family, so they all hated my guts, but Izzy used to let me help her groom her
pony.”

---

He swilled the coffee in his cup, looking sullen.
“I suppose you were in love with swashbuckling Freddie, were you, like all
the other girls? He hated me. Used to call me ‘Raphaela’ and pretend Dad had
told the family I was another girl.”
“How horrible,” said Robin, and Raphael’s scowl turned into a reluctant
smile.
“You’re so sweet.”
He seemed to be debating with himself whether or not to say something.
Suddenly he asked:
“Ever meet Jack o’Kent when you were visiting?”
“Who?”
“Old boy who used to work for Dad. Lived in the grounds of Chiswell
House. Scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. He had a kind of sunken face
and mad eyes and he used to loom out of nowhere when I was in the gardens. He
never said a word except to swear at me if I got in his way.”
“I… vaguely remember someone like that,” lied Robin.
“Jack o’Kent was Dad’s nickname for him. Who was Jack o’Kent? Didn’t he
have something to do with the devil? Anyway, I used to have literal nightmares
about the old boy. One time he caught me trying to get into a barn and gave me
hell. He put his face up close to mine and said words to the effect of, I wouldn’t
like what I saw in there, or it was dangerous for little boys, or… I can’t
remember exactly. I was only a kid.”
“That sounds scary,” Robin agreed, her interest awakened now. “What was
he doing in there, did you ever find out?”
“Probably just storing farm machinery,” said Raphael, “but he made it sound
like he was conducting Satanic rituals.
“He was a good carpenter, mind you. He made Freddie’s coffin. An English
oak had come down… Dad wanted Freddie buried in wood from the estate…”
Again, he seemed to be wondering whether he ought to say what was on his
mind. He scrutinized her through his dark lashes and finally said:
“Does Dad seem… well, normal to you at the moment?”
“What d’you mean?”
“You don’t think he’s acting a bit strangely? Why’s he bawling Izzy out for
nothing?”
“Pressure of work?” suggested Robin.
“Yeah… maybe,” said Raphael. Then, frowning, he said, “He phoned me the
other night, which is strange in itself, because he can’t normally stand the sight
of me. Just to talk, he said, and that’s never happened before. Mind you, he’d
had a few too many, I could tell as soon as he spoke.

---

“Anyway, he started rambling on about Jack o’Kent. I couldn’t make out
what he was going on about. He mentioned Freddie dying, and Kinvara’s baby
dying and then,” Raphael leaned in closer. Robin felt his knees touch hers under
the table, “remember that phone call we got, my first day here? That bloody
creepy message about people pissing themselves as they die?”
“Yes,” said Robin.
“He said, ‘It’s all punishment. That was Jack o’Kent calling. He’s coming for
me.’”
Robin stared at him.
“But whoever it was on the phone,” said Raphael, “it can’t have been Jack
o’Kent. He died years ago.”
Robin said nothing. She had suddenly remembered Matthew’s delirium, the
depth of that subtropical night, when he had thought she was his dead mother.
Raphael’s knees seemed to press harder into hers. She moved her chair back
slightly.
“I was awake half the night wondering whether he’s cracking up. We can’t
afford to have Dad go bonkers as well, can we? We’ve already got Kinvara
hallucinating horse slashers and gravediggers—”
“Gravediggers?” repeated Robin sharply.
“Did I say gravediggers?” said Raphael restlessly. “Well, you know what I
mean. Men with spades in the woods.”
“You think she’s imagining them?” asked Robin.
“No idea. Izzy and the rest of them think she is, but then they’ve treated her
like a hysteric ever since she lost that kid. She had to go through labor even
though they knew it had died, did you know that? She wasn’t right afterwards,
but when you’re a Chiswell you’re supposed to suck that sort of thing up. Put on
a hat and go open a fête or something.”
He seemed to read Robin’s thoughts in her face, because he said:
“Did you expect me to hate her, just because the others do? She’s a pain in
the arse, and she thinks I’m a total waste of space, but I don’t spend my life
mentally subtracting everything she spends on her horses from my niece and
nephews’ inheritance. She’s not a gold-digger, whatever Izzy and Fizzy think,”
he said, laying arch emphasis on his other sister’s nickname. “They thought my
mother was a gold-digger, too. It’s the only motivation they understand. I’m not
supposed to know they’ve got cozy Chiswell family nicknames for me and my
mother, as well…” His dark skin flushed. “Unlikely as it might seem, Kinvara
genuinely fell for Dad, I could tell. She could have done a damn sight better if it
was money she was after. He’s skint.”
Robin, whose definition of “skint” did not comprise owning a large house in

---

Oxfordshire, nine horses, a mews flat in London or the heavy diamond necklace
she had seen around Kinvara’s neck in photographs, maintained an impassive
expression.
“Have you been to Chiswell House lately?”
“Not lately,” said Robin.
“It’s falling apart. Everything’s moth-eaten and miserable.”
“The one time I really remember being at Chiswell House, the grown-ups
were talking about a little girl who’d disappeared.”
“Really?” said Raphael, surprised.
“Yes, I can’t remember her name. I was young myself. Susan? Suki?
Something like that.”
“Doesn’t ring any bells,” said Raphael. His knees brushed hers again. “Tell
me, does everyone confide their dark family secrets to you after five minutes of
knowing you, or is it just me?”
“Tim always says I look sympathetic,” said Robin. “Perhaps I should forget
politics and go into counseling.”
“Yeah, maybe you should,” he said, looking into her eyes. “That isn’t a very
strong prescription. Why bother with glasses? Why not just wear contacts?”
“Oh, I… find these more comfortable,” said Robin, pushing the glasses back
up her nose and gathering her things. “You know, I really ought to get going.”
Raphael leaned back in his chair with a rueful smile.
“Message received… he’s a lucky man, your Tim. Tell him so, from me.”
Robin gave a half-laugh and stood up, catching herself on the corner of the
table as she did so. Self-conscious and slightly flustered, she walked out of the
tearoom.
Making her way back to Izzy’s office, she mulled over the Minister for
Culture’s behavior. Explosions of bad temper and paranoid ramblings were not,
she thought, surprising in a man currently at the mercy of two blackmailers, but
Chiswell’s suggestion that a dead man had telephoned him was undeniably odd.
He had not struck her on either of their two encounters as the kind of man who
would believe in either ghosts or divine retribution, but then, Robin reflected,
drink brought out strange things in people… and suddenly, she remembered
Matthew’s snarling face as he had shouted across the sitting room on Sunday.
She was almost level with Winn’s office door when she registered the fact
that it was standing ajar again. Robin peered into the room beyond. It seemed to
be empty. She knocked twice. Nobody answered.
It took her less than five seconds to reach the power socket beneath Geraint’s
desk. Unplugging the fan, she prized the recording device loose and had just
opened her handbag when Aamir’s voice said:

---

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Robin gasped, attempted to stand up, hit her head hard on the desk and
yelped in pain. Aamir had just unfolded himself from an armchair angled away
from the door, was taking headphones from his ears. He seemed to have been
taking a few minutes for himself, while listening to an iPod.
“I knocked!” Robin said, her eyes watering as she rubbed the top of her head.
The recording device was still in her hand and she hid it behind her back. “I
didn’t think anyone was in here!”
“What,” he repeated, advancing on her, “are you doing?”
Before she could answer, the door was pushed fully open. Geraint walked in.
There was no lipless grin this morning, no air of bustling self-importance, no
ribald comment at finding Robin on the floor of his office. Winn seemed
somehow smaller than usual, with purplish shadows beneath the lens-shrunken
eyes. In perplexity he turned from Robin to Aamir, and as Aamir began to tell
him that Robin had just walked in uninvited, the latter managed to stuff the
recording device into her handbag.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, getting to her feet, sweating profusely. Panic lapped
at the edges of her thought, but then an idea bobbed up like a life raft. “I really
am. I was going to leave a note. I was only going to borrow it.”
As the two men frowned at her, she gestured to the unplugged fan.
“Ours is broken. Our room’s like an oven. I didn’t think you’d mind,” she
said, appealing to Geraint. “I was just going to borrow it for thirty minutes.” She
smiled piteously. “Honestly, I felt faint earlier.”
She plucked the front of her shirt away from her skin, which was indeed
clammy. His gaze fell to her chest and the usual lecherous grin resurfaced.
“Though I shouldn’t say so, overheating rather suits you,” said Winn, with
the ghost of a smirk, and Robin forced a giggle.
“Well, well, we can spare it for thirty minutes, can’t we?” he said, turning to
Aamir. The latter said nothing, but stood ramrod straight, staring at Robin with
undisguised suspicion. Geraint lifted the fan carefully off the desk and passed it
to Robin. As she turned to go, he patted her lightly on the lower back.
“Enjoy.”
“Oh, I will,” she said, her flesh crawling. “Thank you so much, Mr. Winn.”

---

28