Lethal White

… I had good reason enough for so jealously
drawing a veil of concealment over our compact.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
The Norfolk terrier was struggling in Kinvara’s arms, its paws muddy. At the
sight of Robin, Rattenbury set up a volley of barking again and struggled to get
free.
“Sorry, I was dying for the loo,” panted Robin, the bronze frog hidden
behind her back. The old cistern backed up her story, making loud gushing and
clanking noises that echoed through the stone-flagged hallway. “Any luck?”
Robin called to Strike, who was climbing back into the room behind Kinvara.
“Nothing,” said Strike, now haggard with pain. After waiting for the panting
Labrador to hop back into the room, he closed the window, the revolver in his
other hand. “There were definitely people out there, though. The dogs knew it,
but I think they’ve taken off. What were the odds of us passing just as they were
climbing over the wall?”
“Oh, do shut up, Rattenbury!” shouted Kinvara.
She set the terrier down and, when it refused to stop yapping at Robin, she
threatened it with a raised hand, at which it whimpered and retreated into a
corner to join the Labrador.
“Horses OK?” Robin asked, moving to the end table from which she had
taken the bronze paperweight.
“One of the stable doors wasn’t fastened properly,” said Strike, wincing as he
bent to feel his knee. “But Mrs. Chiswell thinks it might have been left like that.
Would you mind if I sat down, Mrs. Chiswell?”
“I—no, I suppose not,” Kinvara said gracelessly.
She headed to a table of bottles sitting in the corner of the room, uncorked
some Famous Grouse and poured herself a stiff measure of whisky. While her
back was turned, Robin slid the paperweight back onto the table. She tried to
catch Strike’s eyes, but he had sunk down onto the sofa with a faint groan, and
now turned to Kinvara.
“I wouldn’t say no, if you’re offering,” he said shamelessly, wincing again as
he massaged his right knee. “Actually, I think this is going to have to come off,
do you mind?”

---

“Well—no, I suppose not. What do you want?”
“I’ll have a Scotch as well, please,” said Strike, setting the revolver down on
the table beside the bronze frog, rolling up his trouser leg and signaling with his
eyes that Robin, too, should sit down.
While Kinvara sloshed another measure into a glass, Strike started to remove
the prosthesis. Turning to give him his drink, Kinvara watched in queasy
fascination as Strike worked on the false leg, averting her eyes at the point it left
the inflamed stump. Panting as he propped the prosthesis against the ottoman,
Strike allowed his trouser leg to fall back over his amputated leg.
“Thanks very much,” he said, accepting the whisky from her and taking a
swig.
Trapped with a man who couldn’t walk, to whom she ought in theory to be
grateful, and to whom she had just given a drink, Kinvara sat down, too, her
expression stony.
“Actually, Mrs. Chiswell, I was going to phone you to confirm a couple of
things we heard from Tegan earlier,” said Strike. “We could go through them
now if you like. Get them out of the way.”
With a slight shiver, Kinvara glanced at the empty fireplace, and Robin said
helpfully, “Would you like me to—?”
“No,” snapped Kinvara. “I can do it.”
She went to the deep basket standing beside the fireplace, from which she
grabbed an old newspaper. While Kinvara built a structure of small bits of wood
over a mound of newspaper and a firelighter, Robin succeeded in catching
Strike’s eye.
“There’s somebody upstairs,” she mouthed, but she wasn’t sure he had
understood. He merely raised his eyebrows quizzically, and turned back to
Kinvara.
A match flared. Flames erupted around the little pile of paper and sticks in
the fireplace. Kinvara picked up her glass and returned to the drinks table, where
she topped it up with more neat Scotch, then, coat wrapped more tightly around
herself, she returned to the log basket, selected a large piece of wood, dropped it
on top of the burgeoning fire, then fell back onto the sofa.
“Go on, then,” she said sullenly to Strike. “What do you want to know?”
“As I say, we spoke to Tegan Butcher today.”
“And?”
“And we now know what Jimmy Knight and Geraint Winn were
blackmailing your husband about.”
Kinvara evinced no surprise.
“I told those stupid girls you’d find out,” she said with a shrug. “Izzy and

---

Fizzy. Everyone round here knew what Jack o’Kent was doing in the barn. Of
course somebody was going to talk.”
She took a gulp of whisky.
“I suppose you know all of it, do you? The gallows? The boy in Zimbabwe?”
“You mean Samuel?” asked Strike, taking a punt.
“Exactly, Samuel Mu—Mudrap or something.”
The fire caught suddenly, flames leaping up past the log, which shifted in a
shower of sparks.
“Jasper was worried they were his gallows the moment we heard the boy had
been hanged. You know all of it, do you? That there were two sets? But only one
made it to the government. The other lot went astray, the lorry was hijacked or
something. That’s how they ended up in the middle of nowhere.
“The photographs are pretty grisly, apparently. The Foreign Office thinks it
was probably a case of mistaken identity. Jasper didn’t see how they could be
traced to him, but Jimmy said he could prove they were.
“I knew you’d find out,” said Kinvara, with an air of bitter satisfaction.
“Tegan’s a horrible gossip.”
“So, to be clear,” said Strike, “when Jimmy Knight first came here to see
you, he was asking for his and Billy’s share for two sets of gallows his father had
left completed when he died?”
“Exactly,” said Kinvara, sipping her whisky. “They were worth eighty
thousand for the pair. He wanted forty.”
“But presumably,” said Strike, who remembered that Chiswell had talked of
Jimmy returning a week after his first attempt to get money, and asking for a
reduced amount, “your husband told him he’d only ever received payment for
one of them, as one set got stolen en route?”
“Yes,” said Kinvara, with a shrug. “So then Jimmy asked for twenty, but
we’d spent it.”
“How did you feel about Jimmy’s request, when he first came asking for
money?” Strike asked.
Robin wasn’t sure whether Kinvara had turned a little pinker in the face, or
whether it was the effects of the whisky.
“Well, I saw his point, if you want the truth. I could see why he felt he had a
claim. Half the proceeds of the gallows belonged to the Knight boys. That had
been the arrangement while Jack o’Kent was alive, but Jasper took the view that
Jimmy couldn’t expect money for the stolen set, and given that he’d been storing
them in his barn, and bearing all the costs of transportation and so on… and he
said that Jimmy couldn’t sue him even if he wanted to. He didn’t like Jimmy.”
“No, well, I suppose their politics were very different,” said Strike.

---

Kinvara almost smirked.
“It was a bit more personal than that. Haven’t you heard about Jimmy and
Izzy? No… I suppose Tegan’s too young to have heard that story. Oh, it was only
once,” she said, apparently under the impression that Strike was shocked, “but
that was quite enough for Jasper. A man like Jimmy Knight, deflowering his
darling daughter, you know…
“But Jasper couldn’t have given Jimmy the money even if he’d wanted to,”
she went on. “He’d already spent it. It took care of our overdraft for a while and
repaired the stable roof. I never knew,” she added, as though sensing unspoken
criticism, “until Jimmy explained it to me that night, what the arrangement
between Jasper and Jack o’Kent had been. Jasper had told me the gallows were
his to sell and I believed him. Naturally I believed him. He was my husband.”
She got up again and headed back to the drinks table as the fat Labrador,
seeking warmth, left its distant corner, waddled around the ottoman and slumped
down in front of the now roaring fire. The Norfolk terrier trotted after it,
growling at Strike and Robin until Kinvara said angrily:
“Shut up, Rattenbury.”
“There’s are a couple more things I wanted to ask you about,” said Strike.
“Firstly, did your husband have a passcode on his phone?”
“Of course he did,” said Kinvara. “He was very security-conscious.”
“So he didn’t give it out to a lot of people?”
“He didn’t even tell me what it was,” said Kinvara. “Why are you asking?”
Ignoring the question, Strike said:
“Your stepson’s now told us a different story to account for his trip down
here, on the morning of your husband’s death.”
“Oh, really? What’s he saying this time?”
“That he was trying to stop you selling a necklace that’s been in the family
for—”
“Come clean, has he?” she interrupted, turning back towards them with a
fresh whisky in her hands. With her long red hair tangled from the night air, and
her flushed cheeks, she had a slight air of abandon now, forgetting to hold her
coat closed as she headed back to the sofa, the black nightdress revealing a
canyon of cleavage. She flopped back down on the sofa. “Yes, he wanted to stop
me doing a flit with the necklace, which, by the way, I’m perfectly entitled to do.
It’s mine under the terms of the will. Jasper should have been a bit more bloody
careful writing it if he didn’t want me to have it, shouldn’t he?”
Robin remembered Kinvara’s tears, the last time they had been in this room,
and how she had felt sorry for her, unlikable though she had shown herself to be
in other ways. Her attitude now had little of the grief-stricken widow about it,

---

but perhaps, Robin thought, that was the drink, and the recent shock of their
intrusion into her grounds.
“So you’re backing up Raphael’s story that he drove down here to stop you
taking off with the necklace?”
“Don’t you believe him?”
“Not really,” said Strike. “No.”
“Why not?”
“It rings false,” said Strike. “I’m not convinced your husband was in a fit
state that morning to remember what he had and hadn’t put in his will.”
“He was well enough to call me and demand to know whether I was really
walking out on him,” said Kinvara.
“Did you tell him you were going to sell the necklace?”
“Not in so many words, no. I said I was going to leave as soon as I could find
somewhere else for me and the horses. I suppose he might have wondered how
I’d manage that, with no real money of my own, which made him remember the
necklace.”
“So Raphael came here out of simple loyalty to the father who’d cut him off
without a penny?”
Kinvara subjected Strike to a long and penetrating look over her whisky
glass, then said to Robin:
“Would you throw another log on the fire?”
Noting the lack of a “please,” Robin nevertheless did as she was asked. The
Norfolk terrier, which had now joined the sleeping Labrador on the hearthrug,
growled at her until she had sat down again.
“All right,” said Kinvara, with an air of coming to a decision. “All right, here
it is. I don’t suppose it matters any more, anyway. Those bloody girls will find
out in the end and serve Raphael right.
“He did come down to try and stop me taking the necklace, but it wasn’t for
Jasper, Fizzy or Flopsy’s sake—I suppose,” she said aggressively to Robin, “you
know all the family nicknames, don’t you? You probably had a good giggle at
them, while you were working with Izzy?”
“Erm—”
“Oh, don’t pretend,” said Kinvara, rather nastily, “I know you’ll have heard
them. They call me ‘Tinky Two’ or something, don’t they? And behind his back,
Izzy, Fizzy and Torquil call Raphael ‘Rancid.’ Did you know that?”
“No,” said Robin, at whom Kinvara was still glaring.
“Sweet, isn’t it? And Raphael’s mother is known to all of them as the Orca,
because she dresses in black and white.
“Anyway… when the Orca realized Jasper wasn’t going to marry her,” said

---

Kinvara, now very red in the face, “d’you know what she did?”
Robin shook her head.
“She took the famous family necklace to the man who became her next lover,
who was a diamond merchant, and she had him prize out the really valuable
stones and replace them with cubic zirconias. Man-made diamond substitutes,”
Kinvara elucidated, in case Strike and Robin hadn’t understood. “Jasper never
realized what she’d done and I certainly didn’t. I expect Ornella’s been having a
jolly good laugh every time I’ve been photographed in the necklace, thinking
I’m wearing a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of stones.
“Anyway, when my darling stepson got wind of the fact that I was leaving
his father, and heard that I’d talked about having enough money to buy land for
the horses, he twigged that I might be about to get the necklace valued. So he
came hotfooting it down here, because the last thing he wanted was for the
family to find out what his mother had done. What would be the odds of him
wheedling his way back into his father’s good books after that?”
“Why haven’t you told anyone this?” asked Strike.
“Because Raphael promised me that morning that if I didn’t tell his father
what the Orca had done, he’d maybe manage to persuade his mother to give the
stones back. Or at least, give me their value.”
“And are you still trying to recover the missing stones?”
Kinvara squinted malevolently at Strike over the rim of her glass.
“I haven’t done anything about it since Jasper died, but that doesn’t mean I
won’t. Why should I let the bloody Orca waltz off with what’s rightfully mine?
It’s down in Jasper’s will, the contents of the house that haven’t been spefi—
specif—spe-cif-ically excluded,” she enunciated carefully, thick-tongued now,
“belong to me. So,” she said, fixing Strike with a gimlet stare, “does that sound
more like Raphael to you? Coming down here to try and cover up for his darling
mama?”
“Yes,” said Strike, “I’d have to say it does. Thank you for your honesty.”
Kinvara looked pointedly at the grandfather clock, which was now showing
three in the morning, but Strike refused to take the hint.
“Mrs. Chiswell, there’s one last thing I want to ask and I’m afraid it’s quite
personal.”
“What?” she said crossly.
“I spoke to Mrs. Winn recently. Della Winn, you know, the—”
“Della-Winn-the-Minister-for-Sport,” said Kinvara, just as her husband had
done, the first time Strike met him. “Yes, I know who she is. Very odd woman.”
“In what way?”
Kinvara wriggled her shoulders impatiently, as though it should be obvious.

---

“Never mind. What did she say?”
“That she met you in a state of considerable distress a year ago and that from
what she could gather, you were upset because your husband had admitted to an
affair.”
Kinvara opened her mouth then closed it again. She sat thus for a few
seconds, then shook her head as though to clear it and said:
“I… thought he was being unfaithful, but I was wrong. I got it all wrong.”
“According to Mrs. Winn, he’d said some fairly cruel things to you.”
“I don’t remember what I said to her. I wasn’t very well at the time. I was
overemotional and I got everything wrong.”
“Forgive me,” said Strike, “but, as an outsider, your marriage seemed—”
“What a dreadful job you’ve got,” said Kinvara shrilly. “What a really nasty,