Lethal White

pictures!”
There followed a spell in which Strike thought he heard, very faintly, the rise
and fall of Jimmy Knight’s fluent speech at the end of the telephone.
“I take your point,” said Geraint finally, “but I urge you to do nothing rash,
Jimmy. He isn’t going to give you—Jimmy, listen! He isn’t going to give you
your money, he’s made that perfectly clear. It’s the newspapers now or nothing,
so… proof, Jimmy! Proof!”
Another, shorter period of unintelligible gabbling followed.
“I’ve just told you, haven’t I? Yes… no, but the Foreign Office… well,
hardly… no, Aamir has a contact… yes… yes… all right then… I will, Jimmy.
Good—yes, all right. Yes. Goodbye.”
The clunk of a mobile being set down was followed by Geraint’s voice.
“Stupid prick,” he said.
There were more footsteps. Strike glanced at Robin, who by a rolling gesture
of the hand indicated that he should keep listening. After perhaps thirty seconds,
Aamir spoke, diffident and strained.
“Geraint, Christopher didn’t promise anything about the pictures.”
Even on the tinny little tape, with the nearby shufflings of paper at Geraint’s
desk, the silence sounded charged.
“Geraint, did you h—?”
“Yes, I heard!” snapped Winn. “Good God, boy, a first from the LSE and you
can’t think of a way to persuade that bastard to give you pictures? I’m not asking
you to take them out of the department, just to get copies. That shouldn’t be
beyond the wit of man.”
“I don’t want more trouble,” muttered Aamir.
“Well, I should have thought,” said Geraint, “after everything Della in
particular has done for you…”
“And I’m grateful,” said Aamir swiftly. “You know I am… all right, I’ll—I’ll
try.”
For the next minute there were no sounds but scuffing footsteps and papers,
followed by a mechanical click. The device automatically switched off after a
minute of no talking, activated again when somebody spoke. The next voice was
that of a different man asking whether Della would be attending “the sub-
committee” this afternoon.
Strike removed the earbuds.
“Did you catch it all?” Robin asked.
“I think so,” said Strike.

---

She leaned back, watching Strike expectantly.
“The Foreign Office?” he repeated quietly. “What the hell can he have done
that means the Foreign Office has got pictures?”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to be interested in what he did?” said Robin,
eyebrows raised.
“I never said I wasn’t interested. Just that I’m not being paid to find out.”
Strike’s fish and chips arrived. He thanked the barmaid and proceeded to add
a generous amount of ketchup to his plate.
“Izzy was completely matter of fact about whatever it is,” said Robin,
thinking back. “She couldn’t possibly have spoken about it the way she did if
he’d—you know—murdered anybody.”
She deliberately avoided the word “strangled.” Three panic attacks in three
days were quite sufficient.
“Got to say,” said Strike, now chewing chips, “that anonymous call makes
you—unless,” he said, struck by a thought, “Jimmy’s had the bright idea of
trying to drag Chiswell into the Billy business on top of whatever else he’s
genuinely done. A child-killing doesn’t have to be true to make trouble for a
government minister who’s already got the press on his tail. You know the
internet. Plenty of people out there think being a Tory as tantamount to being a
child killer. This might be Jimmy’s idea of adding pressure.”
Strike stabbed a few chips moodily with his fork.
“I’d be glad to know where Billy is, if we had somebody free to look for
him. Barclay hasn’t seen any sign of him and says Jimmy hasn’t mentioned
having a brother.”
“Billy said he was being held captive,” Robin said tentatively.
“Don’t think we can set much store on anything Billy’s saying right now, to
be honest. I knew a guy in the Shiners who had a psychotic episode on exercises.
Thought he had cockroaches living under his skin.”
“In the—?”
“Shiners. Fusiliers. Want a chip?”
“I’d better not,” sighed Robin, though she was hungry. Matthew, whom she
had warned by text that she would be late, had told her he would wait for her to
get home, so they could eat dinner together. “Listen, I haven’t told you
everything.”
“Suki Lewis?” asked Strike, hopefully.
“I haven’t been able to work her into the conversation yet. No, it’s that
Chiswell’s wife claims men have been lurking in the flowerbeds and fiddling
with her horses.”
“Men?” Strike repeated. “In the plural?”

---

“That’s what Izzy said—but she also says Kinvara’s hysterical and attention-
seeking.”
“Getting to be a bit of a theme, that, isn’t it? People who’re supposed to be
too crazy to know what they’ve seen.”
“D’you think that could have been Jimmy, as well? In the garden?”
Strike thought it over as he chewed.
“I can’t see what he’s got to gain from lurking in the garden or fiddling with
horses, unless he’s at the point where he just wants to frighten Chiswell. I’ll
check with Barclay and see whether Jimmy’s got a car or mentioned going to
Oxfordshire. Did Kinvara call the police?”
“Raff asked that, when Izzy got back,” said Robin, and once again, Strike
thought he detected a trace of self-consciousness as she spoke the man’s name.
“Kinvara claims the dogs barked, she saw the shadow of a man in the garden,
but he ran away. She says there were footprints in the horses’ field next morning
and that one of them had been cut with a knife.”
“Did she call a vet?”
“I don’t know. It’s harder to ask questions with Raff in the office. I don’t
want to look too nosy, because he doesn’t know who I am.”
Strike pushed his plate away from him and felt for his cigarettes.
“Photos,” he mused, returning to the central point. “Photos at the Foreign
Office. What the hell can they show that would incriminate Chiswell? He’s never
worked at the Foreign Office, has he?”
“No,” said Robin. “The highest post he’s ever held is Minister for Trade. He
had to resign from there because of the affair with Raff’s mother.”
The wooden clock over the fireplace was telling her it was time to leave. She
didn’t move.
“You’re liking Raff, then?” Strike said suddenly, catching her off guard.
“What?”
Robin was scared that she had blushed.
“What do you mean, I’m ‘liking’ him?”
“Just an impression I got,” said Strike. “You disapproved of him before you
met him.”
“D’you want me to be antagonistic towards him, when I’m supposed to be
his father’s goddaughter?” demanded Robin.
“No, of course not,” said Strike, though Robin had the sense that he was
laughing at her, and resented it.
“I’d better get going,” she said, sweeping the headphones off the table and
back into her bag. “I told Matt I’d be home for dinner.”
She got up, bade Strike goodbye and left the pub.

---

Strike watched her go, dimly sorry that he had commented on her manner
when mentioning Raphael Chiswell. After a few minutes’ solitary beer
consumption, he paid for his food and ambled out onto the pavement, where he
lit a cigarette and called the Minister for Culture, who answered on the second
ring.
“Wait there,” said Chiswell. Strike could hear a murmuring crowd behind
him. “Crowded room.”
The clunk of a door closing and the noise of the crowd was muted.
“’M at a dinner,” said Chiswell. “Anything for me?”
“It isn’t good news, I’m afraid,” said Strike, walking away from the pub, up
Queen Anne Street, between white painted buildings that gleamed in the dusk.
“My partner succeeded in planting the listening device in Mr. Winn’s office this
morning. We’ve got a recording of him talking to Jimmy Knight. Winn’s
assistant—Aamir, is it?—is trying to get copies of those photographs you told
me about. At the Foreign Office.”
The ensuring silence lasted so long that Strike wondered whether they had
been cut off.
“Minist—?”
“I’m here!” snarled Chiswell. “That boy Mallik, is it? Dirty little bastard.