Lethal White

PART TWO

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36
What has happened can be hushed up—or at any
rate can be explained away…
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
The Chiswell case maintained its singular character even when their client
was no more.
As the usual cumbersome procedures and formalities enveloped the corpse,
Strike and Robin were escorted from Ebury Street to Scotland Yard, where they
were separately interviewed. Strike knew that a tornado of speculation must be
whirling through the newsrooms of London at the death of a government
minister, and sure enough, by the time they emerged from Scotland Yard six
hours later, the colorful details of Chiswell’s private life were being broadcast
across TV and radio, while opening the internet browsers on their phones
revealed brief news items from news sites, as a tangle of baroque theories spread
across blogs and social media, in which a multitude of cartoonish Chiswells died
at the hand of myriad nebulous foes. As he rode in a taxi back to Denmark
Street, Strike read how Chiswell the corrupt capitalist had been murdered by the
Russian mafia after failing to pay back interest on some seedy, illegal
transaction, while Chiswell the defender of solid English values had surely been
dispatched by vengeful Islamists after his attempts to resist the rise of sharia law.
Strike returned to his attic flat only to collect his belongings, and decamped
to the house of his old friends Nick and Ilsa, respectively a gastroenterologist
and a lawyer. Robin, who at Strike’s insistence had taken a taxi directly home to
Albury Street, was given a peremptory hug by Matthew, whose tissue-thin
pretense of sympathy was worse, Robin felt, than outright fury.
When he heard that Robin had been summoned back to Scotland Yard for
further interrogation the next day, Matthew’s self-control crumbled.
“Anyone could have seen this coming!”
“Funny, it seemed to take most people by surprise,” Robin said. She had just
ignored her mother’s fourth call of the morning.
“I don’t mean Chiswell killing himself—”
“—it’s pronounced ‘Chizzle’—”
“—I mean you getting yourself into trouble for sneaking around the Houses
of Parliament!”

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“Don’t worry, Matt. I’ll make sure the police know you were against it.
Wouldn’t want your promotion prospects compromised.”
But she wasn’t sure that her second interviewer was a policeman. The softly
spoken man in a dark gray suit didn’t reveal whom he worked for. Robin found
this gentleman far more intimidating than yesterday’s police, even though they
had, at times, been forceful to the point of aggression. Robin told her new
interviewer everything she had seen and heard in the Commons, omitting only
the strange conversation between Della Winn and Aamir Mallik, which had been
captured on the second listening device. As the interaction had taken place
behind a closed door after normal working hours, she could only have heard it
by using surveillance equipment. Robin assuaged her conscience by telling
herself that this conversation could not possibly have anything to do with
Chiswell’s death, but squirming feelings of guilt and terror pursued her as she
left the building for the second time. So consumed was she by what she hoped
was paranoia by this brush with the security services, that she called Strike from
a payphone near the Tube, instead of using her mobile.
“I’ve just had another interview. I’m pretty sure it was MI5.”
“Bound to happen,” said Strike, and she took solace from his matter-of-fact
tone. “They’ve got to check you out, make sure you are who you claim to be.
Isn’t there anywhere you can go, other than home? I can’t believe the press
aren’t onto us yet, but it must be imminent.”
“I could go back to Masham, I suppose,” Robin said, “but they’re bound to
try there if they want to find me. That’s where they came after the Ripper stuff.”
Unlike Strike, she had no friends of her own into whose anonymous homes
she felt she could vanish. All her friends were Matthew’s, too, and she had no
doubt that, like her husband, they would be scared of harboring anybody who
was of interest to the security services. At a loss as to what to do, she went back
to Albury Street.
Yet the press didn’t come for her, even though the newspapers were hardly
holding back on the subject of Chiswell. The Mail had already run a double-page
spread on the various tribulations and scandals that had plagued Jasper
Chiswell’s life. “Once mentioned as a possible prime minister,” “sexy Italian