Lethal White

and it crucifies me…’ that’s Catullus again. A famous one.”
“Did you do Latin at university?”
“No.”
“Then how—?”
“Long story,” said Strike.
In fact, the story of his ability to read Latin wasn’t long, merely (to most
people) inexplicable. He didn’t feel like telling it in the middle of the night, nor
did he want to explain that Charlotte had studied Catullus at Oxford.
“‘I hate and I love,’” Robin repeated. “Why would Chiswell have written
that down?”
“Because he was feeling it?” Strike suggested.
His mouth was dry: he had smoked too much before falling asleep. He got
up, feeling achy and stiff, and picked his way carefully around the fallen notes,
heading for the sink in the other room, phone in hand.
“Feeling it for Kinvara?” asked Robin dubiously.
“Ever see another woman around while you were in close contact with him?”
“No. Of course, he might not have been talking about a woman.”
“True,” admitted Strike. “Plenty of man love in Catullus. Maybe that’s why
Chiswell liked him so much.”
He filled a mug with cold tap water, drank it down in one, then threw in a tea
bag and switched on the kettle, all the while peering down at the lit screen of his

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phone in the darkness.
“‘Mother,’ crossed out,” he muttered.
“Chiswell’s mother died twenty-two years ago,” said Robin. “I’ve just
looked her up.”
“Hmm,” said Strike. “‘Bill,’ circled.”
“Not Billy,” Robin pointed out, “but if Jimmy and Flick thought it meant his
brother, people must sometimes call Billy ‘Bill.’”
“Unless it’s the thing you pay,” said Strike. “Or a duck’s beak, come to
that… ‘Suzuki’… ‘Blanc de’… Hang on. Jimmy Knight’s got an old Suzuki
Alto.”
“It’s off the road, according to Flick.”
“Yeah. Barclay says it failed its MOT.”
“There was a Grand Vitara parked outside Chiswell House when we visited,
too. One of the Chiswells must own it.”
“Good spot,” said Strike.
He switched on the overhead light and crossed to the table by the window,
where he had left his pen and notebook.
“You know,” said Robin thoughtfully, “I think I’ve seen ‘Blanc de blanc’
somewhere recently.”
“Yeah? Been drinking champagne?” asked Strike, who had sat down to make
more notes.
“No, but… yeah, I suppose I must’ve seen it on a wine label, mustn’t I?
Blanc de blancs… what does it mean? ‘White from whites?’”
“Yeah,” said Strike.
For nearly a minute, neither of them spoke, both examining the note. “You
know, I hate to say this, Robin,” said Strike at last, “but I think the most
interesting thing about this is that Flick had it. Looks like a to-do list. Can’t see
anything here that proves wrongdoing or suggests grounds for blackmail or
murder.”
“Mother, crossed out,” Robin repeated, as though determined to wring
meaning out of the cryptic phrases. “Jimmy Knight’s mother died of asbestosis.
He just told me so, at Flick’s party.”
Strike tapped his notepad lightly with the end of his pen, thinking, until
Robin voiced the question that he was grappling with.
“We’re going to have to tell the police about this, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, we are,” sighed Strike, rubbing his eyes. “This proves she had access
to Ebury Street. Unfortunately, that means we’re going to have to pull you out of
the jewelry shop. Once the police search her bathroom, it won’t take her long to
work out who must’ve tipped them off.”

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“Bugger,” said Robin. “I really felt like I was getting somewhere with her.”
“Yeah,” Strike agreed. “This is the problem with having no official standing
in an inquiry. I’d give a lot to have Flick in an interrogation room… This bloody
case,” he said, yawning. “I’ve been going through the file all evening. This
note’s like everything else: it raises more questions than it answers.”
“Hang on,” said Robin, and he heard sounds of movement, “sorry—
Cormoran, I’m going to get off here, I can see a taxi rank—”
“OK. Great work tonight. I’ll call you tomorrow—later today, I mean.”
When she had hung up, Strike set his cigarette down in the ashtray, returned
to his bedroom to pick up the scattered case notes off the floor, and took them
back to the kitchen. Ignoring the freshly boiled kettle, he took a beer from the
fridge, sat back down at the table with the file and, as an afterthought, opened
the sash window beside him a few inches, to let some clean air into the room
while he kept smoking.
The Military Police had trained him to organize interrogations and findings
into three broad categories: people, places and things, and Strike had been
applying this sound old principle to the Chiswell file before falling asleep on the
bed. Now he spread the contents of the file out over the kitchen table and set to
work again, while a cold night breeze laden with petrol fumes blew across the
photographs and papers, so that their corners trembled.
“People,” Strike muttered.
He had written a list before he slept of the people who most interested him in
connection with Chiswell’s death. Now he saw that he had unconsciously ranked
the names according to their degree of involvement in the dead man’s blackmail.
Jimmy Knight’s name topped the list, followed by Geraint Winn’s, and then by
what Strike thought of as each man’s respective deputy, Flick Purdue and Aamir
Mallik. Next came Kinvara, who knew that Chiswell was being blackmailed, and
why; Della Winn, whose super-injunction had kept the blackmail out of the
press, but whose precise degree of involvement in the affair was otherwise
unknown to Strike, and then Raphael, who had by all accounts been ignorant
both of what his father had done, and of the blackmail itself. At the bottom of the
list was Billy Knight, whose only known connection with the blackmail was the
bond of blood between himself and the primary blackmailer.
Why, Strike asked himself, had he ranked the names in this particular order?
There was no proven link between Chiswell’s death and the blackmail, unless, of
course, the threat of exposure of his unknown crime had indeed pushed Chiswell
into killing himself.
It then occurred to Strike that a different hierarchy was revealed if he turned
the list on its head. In this case Billy sat on top, a disinterested seeker, not of

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money or another man’s disgrace, but of truth and justice. In the reversed order,
Raphael came in second, with his strange and, to Strike, implausible story of
being sent to his stepmother on the morning of his father’s death, which Henry
Drummond claimed grudgingly to have hidden some honorable motive as yet
unknown. Della rose to third place, a widely admired woman of impeccable
morality, whose true thoughts and feelings towards her blackmailing husband
and to his victim remained inscrutable.
Read backwards, it seemed to Strike that each suspect’s relation to the dead
man became cruder, more transactional, until the list terminated with Jimmy
Knight and his angry demand for forty thousand pounds.
Strike continued to pore over the list of names as though he might suddenly
see something emerging out of his dense, spiky handwriting, the way unfocused
eyes may spot the 3D image hidden in a series of brightly colored dots. All that
occurred to him, however, was the fact that there was an unusual number of pairs
connected to Chiswell’s death: couples—Geraint and Della, Jimmy and Flick;
pairs of full siblings—Izzy and Fizzy, Jimmy and Billy; the duo of blackmailing
collaborators—Jimmy and Geraint; and the subsets of each blackmailer and his
deputy—Flick and Aamir. There was even the quasi-parental pairing of Della
and Aamir. This left two people who formed a pair in being isolated within the
otherwise close-knit family: the widowed Kinvara and Raphael, the
unsatisfactory, outsider son.
Strike tapped his pen unconsciously against the notebook, thinking. Pairs.
The whole business had begun with a pair of crimes: Chiswell’s blackmail and
Billy’s allegation of infanticide. He had been trying to find the connection
between them from the start, unable to believe that they could be entirely
separate cases, even if on the face of it their only link was in the blood tie
between the Knight brothers.
Turning the page, he examined the notes he had headed “Places.” After a few
minutes spent examining his own jottings concerning access to the house in
Ebury Street, and the locations, in several cases unknown, of the suspects at the
time of Chiswell’s death, he made a note to remind himself that he still hadn’t
received from Izzy contact details for Tegan Butcher, the stable girl who could
confirm that Kinvara had been at home in Woolstone while Chiswell was
suffocating in a plastic bag in London.
He turned to the next page, headed “Things,” and now he set down his pen
and spread Robin’s photographs out so that they formed a collage of the death
scene. He scrutinized the flash of gold in the pocket of the dead man, and then
the bent sword, half hidden in shadow in the corner of the room.
It seemed to Strike that the case he was investigating was littered with

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objects that had been found in surprising places: the sword in the corner, the
lachesis pills on the floor, the wooden cross found in a tangle of nettles at the
bottom of the dell, the canister of helium and the rubber tubing in a house where
no child’s party had ever been held, but his tired mind could find neither answers
nor patterns here.
Finally, Strike downed the rest of his beer, lobbed the empty can across the
room into the kitchen bin, turned to a blank page in his notebook and began to
write a to-do list for the Sunday of which two hours had already elapsed.