Lethal White

particularly close.”
The thought of this distant friend seemed to make her uneasy.
“He studied at the LSE, so that’s an area of London he knows well.”
“He’s on good terms with one of his sisters, isn’t he?”
“Oh, no,” said Della, at once. “No, no, they all disowned him. No, he’s got
nobody, really, other than me, which is what makes this situation so dangerous.”
“The sister posted a picture on Facebook of the two of them fairly recently. It
was in that pizza joint opposite your house.”
Della’s expression betrayed not merely surprise, but displeasure.
“Aamir told me you’d been snooping online. Which sister was it?”
“I’d have to ch—”
“But I doubt he’d be staying with her,” said Della, talking over him. “Not

---

with the way the family as a whole has treated him. He might have contacted her,
I suppose. You might see what she knows.”
“I will,” said Strike. “Any other ideas about where he might go?”
“He really doesn’t have anyone else,” she said. “That’s what worries me.
He’s vulnerable. It’s essential I find him.”
“Well, I’ll certainly do my best,” Strike promised her. “Now, you said on the
phone that you’d answer a few questions.”
Her expression became slightly more forbidding.
“I doubt I can tell you anything of interest, but go on.”
“Can we start with Jasper Chiswell, and your and your husband’s
relationship with him?”
By her expression, she managed to convey that she found the question both
impertinent and slightly ludicrous. With a cold smile and raised eyebrows, she
responded:
“Well, Jasper and I had a professional relationship, obviously.”
“And how was that?” asked Strike, adding sugar to his coffee, stirring it and
taking a sip.
“Given,” said Della, “that Jasper hired you to try and discover disreputable
information about us, I think you already know the answer to that question.”
“You maintain that your husband wasn’t blackmailing Chiswell, then, do
you?”
“Of course I do.”
Strike knew that pushing on this particular point, when Della’s super-
injunction had already shown what lengths she would go to in her own defense,
would only alienate her. A temporary retreat seemed indicated.
“What about the rest of the Chiswells? Did you ever run across any of
them?”
“Some,” she said, a little warily.
“And how did you find them?”
“I barely know them. Geraint says Izzy was hardworking.”
“Chiswell’s late son was on the junior British fencing team with your
daughter, I think?”
The muscles of her face seemed to contract. He was reminded of an anemone
shutting in on itself when it senses a predator.
“Yes,” she said.
“Did you like Freddie?”
“I don’t think I ever spoke to him. Geraint was the one who ferried Rhiannon
around to her tournaments. He knew the team.”
The shadow stems of the roses closest to the window stretched like bars

---

across the carpet. The Brahms symphony crashed stormily on in the background.
Della’s opaque lenses contributed to a feeling of inscrutable menace and Strike,
though wholly unintimidated, was put in mind of the blind oracles and seers that
peopled ancient myths, and the particular supernatural aura attributed by the
able-bodied to this one particular disability.
“What was it that made Jasper Chiswell so eager to find out things to your
disadvantage, would you say?”
“He didn’t like me,” said Della simply. “We disagreed frequently. He came
from a background that finds anything that deviates from its own conventions
and norms to be suspect, unnatural, even dangerous. He was a rich white
Conservative male, Mr. Strike, and he felt the corridors of power were best
populated exclusively by rich white Conservative males. He sought, in
everything, to restore a status quo he remembered in his youth. In pursuit of that
objective, he was frequently unprincipled and certainly hypocritical.”
“In what way?”
“Ask his wife.”
“You know Kinvara, do you?”
“I wouldn’t say I ‘know’ her. I had an encounter with her a while ago that
was certainly interesting in the light of Chiswell’s public proclamations about
the sanctity of marriage.”
Strike had the impression that beneath the lofty language, and in spite of her
genuine anxiety about Aamir, Della was deriving pleasure from saying these
things.
“What happened?” Strike asked.
“Kinvara turned up unexpectedly late one afternoon at the ministry, but
Jasper had already left for Oxfordshire. I think it was her aim to surprise him.”
“When was this?”
“I should say… a year ago, at least. Shortly before Parliament went into
recess, I think. She was in a state of great distress. I heard a commotion outside
and went to find out what was going on. I could tell by the silence of the outer
office that they were all agog. She was very emotional, demanding to see her
husband. Initially I thought she must have had dreadful news and perhaps
needed Jasper as a source of comfort and support. I took her into my office.
“Once it was just the two of us, she broke down completely. She was barely
coherent, but from the little I could understand,” said Della, “she’d just found
out there was another woman.”
“Did she say who?”
“I don’t think so. She may have done, but she was—well, it was quite
disturbing,” said Della austerely. “More as though she had suffered a

---

bereavement than the end of a marriage. ‘I was just part of his game,’ ‘He never
loved me’ and so forth.”
“What game did you take her to mean?” asked Strike.
“The political game, I suppose. She spoke of being humiliated, of being told,
in so many words, that she had served her purpose…
“Jasper Chiswell was a very ambitious man, you know. He’d lost his career
once over infidelity. I imagine he cast around quite clinically for the kind of new
wife who’d burnish his image. No more Italian fly-by-nights now he was trying
to get back into the cabinet. He probably thought Kinvara would go down very
well with the county Conservatives. Well-bred. Horsey.
“I heard, later, that Jasper had bundled her off into some kind of psychiatric
clinic not long afterwards. That’s how families like the Chiswells deal with
excessive emotion, I suppose,” said Della, taking another sip of wine. “Yet she
stayed with him. Of course, people do stay, even when they’re treated
abominably. He talked about her within my hearing as though she was a
deficient, needy child. I remember him saying Kinvara’s mother would be
‘babysitting’ her for her birthday, because he had to be in Parliament for a vote.
He could have paired his vote, of course—found a Labor MP and struck a deal.
Simply couldn’t be bothered.
“Women like Kinvara Chiswell, whose entire self-worth is predicated on the
status and success of marriage, are naturally shattered when everything goes
wrong. I think all those horses of hers were an outlet, a substitute and—oh yes,”
said Della, “I’ve just remembered—the very last thing she said to me that day
was that in addition to everything else, she now had to go home to put down a
beloved mare.”
Della felt for the broad, soft head of Gwynn, who was lying beside her chair.
“I felt very sorry for her, there. Animals have been an enormous consolation
to me in my life. One can hardly overstate the comfort they give, sometimes.”
The hand that caressed the dog still sported a wedding ring, Strike noticed,
along with a heavy amethyst ring that matched her housecoat. Somebody, he
supposed Geraint, must have told her that it was the same color and again, he felt
an unwelcome pang of pity.
“Did Kinvara tell you how or when she’d found out that her husband had
been unfaithful?”
“No, no, she simply gave way to an almost incoherent outpouring of rage
and grief, like a small child. Kept saying, ‘I loved him and he never loved me, it
was all a lie.’ I’ve never heard such a raw explosion of grief, even at a funeral or
a deathbed. I never spoke to her again except for hello. She acted as though she
had no memory of what had passed between us.”

---

Della took another sip of wine.
“Can we return to Mallik?” Strike asked.
“Yes, of course,” she said at once.
“The morning that Jasper Chiswell died—the thirteenth—you were here, at
home?”
There was a lengthy silence.
“Why are you asking me that?” Della said, in a changed tone.
“Because I’d like to corroborate a story I’ve heard,” said Strike.
“You’re mean, that Aamir was here with me, that morning?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, that’s quite true. I’d slipped downstairs and sprained my wrist. I called
Aamir and he came over. He wanted me to go to casualty, but there was no need.
I could still move all my fingers. I simply needed some help managing breakfast
and so on.”
“You called Mallik?”
“What?” she said.
It was the age-old, transparent “what?” of the person who is afraid they’ve
made a mistake. Strike guessed that some very rapid thinking was going on
behind the dark glasses.
“You called Aamir?”
“Why? What does he say happened?”
“He says your husband went in person to fetch him from his house.”
“Oh,” said Della and then, “of course, yes, I forgot.”
“Did you?” asked Strike gently. “Or are you backing up their story?”
“I forgot,” Della repeated firmly. “When I said I ‘called’ him I wasn’t talking
about the telephone. I meant that I called ‘on’ him. Via Geraint.”
“But if Geraint was here when you slipped, couldn’t he have helped you with
your breakfast?”
“I think Geraint wanted Aamir to help persuade me to go to casualty.”
“Right. So it was Geraint’s idea to go to Aamir, rather than yours?”
“I can’t remember now,” she said, but then, contradicting herself, “I’d fallen
rather heavily. Geraint has a bad back, naturally he wanted help and I thought of
Aamir, and then the pair of them nagged me to go to A&E, but there was no
need. It was a simple sprain.”
The light was now fading beyond the net curtains. Della’s black lenses
reflected the neon red of the dying sun above the rooftops.
“I’m extremely worried about Aamir,” she said again, in a strained voice.
“A couple more questions and I’m done,” Strike replied. “Jasper Chiswell
hinted in front of a roomful of people that he knew something disreputable about

---

Mallik. What can you tell me anything about that?”
“Yes, well, it was that conversation,” said Della quietly, “that first made
Aamir think about resigning. I could feel him pulling away from me after it
happened. And then you finished the job, didn’t you? You went to his house, to
taunt him further.”
“There was no taunting, Mrs. Winn—”
“Liwat, Mr. Strike, did you never learn what that meant all the time you were
in the Middle East?”
“Yeah, I know what it means,” said Strike matter-of-factly. “Sodomy.
Chiswell seemed to be threatening Aamir with exposure—”
“Aamir wouldn’t suffer from exposure of the truth, I assure you!” said Della
fiercely. “Not that it matters a jot, but he doesn’t happen to be gay!”
The Brahms symphony continued on what, to Strike, was its gloomy and
intermittently sinister course, horns and violins competing to jar the nerves.
“You want the truth?” said Della loudly. “Aamir objected to being groped
and harassed, felt up by a senior civil servant, whose inappropriate touching of
young men passing through his office is an open secret, even a joke! And when a
comprehensive-educated Muslim boy loses his cool and smacks a senior civil
servant, which of the two do you imagine finds themselves smeared and
stigmatized? Which of them, do you think, becomes the subject of derogatory
rumors, and is forced out of a job?”
“I’m guessing,” said Strike, “not Sir Christopher Barrowclough-Burns.”
“How did you know whom I was talking about?” said Della sharply.
“Still in the post, is he?” asked Strike, ignoring the question.
“Of course he is! Everybody knows about his harmless little ways, but
nobody wants to go on the record. I’ve been trying to get something done about
Barrowclough-Burns for years. When I heard Aamir had left the diversity
program in murky circumstances, I made it my business to find him. He was in a
pitiable state when I first made contact with him, absolutely pitiable. Quite apart
from the derailing of what should have been a stellar career, there was a
malicious cousin who’d heard some gossip and spread the rumor that Aamir had
been fired for homosexual activity at work.
“Well, Aamir’s father isn’t the sort of man to look kindly on a gay son.
Aamir had been resisting his parents’ pressure to marry a girl they thought
suitable. There was a terrible row and a complete breach. This brilliant young
man lost everything, family, home and job, in the space of a couple of weeks.”
“So you stepped in?”
“Geraint and I had an empty property around the corner. Both our mothers
used to live there. Neither Geraint nor I have siblings. It had become too difficult

---

to manage our mothers’ care from London, so we brought them up from Wales
and housed them together, around the corner. Geraint’s mother died two years
ago, mine this, so the house was empty. We didn’t need the rent. It seemed only
sensible to let Aamir stay there.”
“And this was nothing but disinterested kindness?” Strike said. “You weren’t
thinking of how useful he might be to you, when you gave him a job and a
house?”
“What d’you mean, ‘useful’? He’s a very intelligent young man, any office
would be—”
“Your husband was pressuring Aamir to get incriminating information on
Jasper Chiswell from the Foreign Office, Mrs. Winn. Photographs. He was
pressuring Aamir to go to Sir Christopher for pictures.”
Della reached out for her glass of wine, missed the stem by inches and hit the
glass with her knuckles. Strike lunged forwards to try and catch it, but too late: a
whip-like trail of red wine described a parabola in the air and spattered the beige
carpet, the glass falling with a thud beside it. Gwynn got up and approached the
spill with mild interest, sniffing the spreading stain.
“How bad is it?” asked Della urgently, her fingers grasping the arms of her
chair, her face inclined to the floor.
“Not good,” said Strike.
“Salt, please… put salt on it. In the cupboard to the right of the cooker!”
Turning on the light as he entered the kitchen, Strike’s attention was caught
for the first time by an odd something he had failed to spot on his previous entry
into the room: an envelope stuck high up on a wall-mounted cabinet to the right,
too high for Della to reach. Having grabbed the salt out of the cupboard he made
a detour to read the single word written on it: Geraint.
“To the right of the cooker!” Della called a little desperately from the sitting
room.
“Ah, the right!” Strike shouted back, as he tugged down the envelope and slit
it open.
Inside was a receipt from “Kennedy Bros. Joiners,” for the replacement of a
bathroom door. Strike licked his finger, dampened down the envelope flap,
resealed it as best he could and stuck it back where he had found it.
“Sorry,” he told Della, re-entering the room. “It was right in front of me and I
didn’t notice.”
He twisted the top of the cardboard tub and poured salt liberally over the
purple stain. The Brahms symphony came to an end as he straightened up,
dubious as to the likely success of the home remedy.
“Have you done it?” Della whispered into the silence.

---

“Yeah,” said Strike, watching the wine rising into the white and turning it a
dirty gray. “I think you’re still going to need a carpet cleaner, though.”
“Oh dear… the carpet was new this year.”
She seemed deeply shaken, though whether this was entirely due to the
spilled wine was, Strike thought, debatable. As he returned to the sofa and set
down the salt beside the coffee, music started up again, this time a Hungarian air
that was no more restful than the symphony, but weirdly manic.
“Would you like more wine?” he asked her.
“I—yes, I think I would,” she said.
He poured her another and passed it directly into her hand. She drank a little,
then said shakily:
“How could you know what you just told me, Mr. Strike?”
“I’d rather not answer that, but I assure you it’s true.”
Clutching her wine in both hands Della said:
“You have to find Aamir for me. If he thought I sanctioned Geraint telling
him to go to Barrowclough-Burns for favors, it’s no wonder he—”
Her self-control was visibly disintegrating. She tried to set the wine down on
the arm of her chair and had to feel for it with the other hand before doing so
successfully, all the while shaking her head in little jerks of disbelief.
“No wonder he what?” asked Strike quietly.
“Accused me of… of smothering… controlling… well, of course, this
explains everything… we were so close—you wouldn’t understand—it’s hard to
explain—but it was remarkable, how soon we became—well, like family.
Sometimes, you know, there’s an instant affinity—a connection that years
couldn’t forge, with other people—
“But these past few weeks, it all changed—I could feel it—starting when
Chiswell made that jibe in front of everyone—Aamir became distant. It was as
though he no longer trusted me… I should have known… oh Lord, I should have
known… you have to find him, you have to…”
Perhaps, Strike thought, the depth of her burning sense of need was sexual in
origin, and perhaps on some subconscious level it had indeed been tinged with
appreciation of Aamir’s youthful masculinity. However, as Rhiannon Winn
watched over them from her cheap gilt frame, wearing a smile that didn’t reach
her wide, anxious eyes, her teeth glinting with heavy braces, Strike thought it far
more likely that Della was a woman possessed of that which Charlotte so
conspicuously lacked: a burning, frustrated maternal drive tinged, in Della’s
case, with unassuageable regret.
“This as well,” she whispered. “This as well. What hasn’t he ruined?”
“You’re talking about—”

---

“My husband!” said Della numbly. “Who else? My charity—our charity—
but you know that, of course? It was you who told Chiswell about the missing
twenty-five thousand, wasn’t it? And the lies, the stupid lies, Geraint’s been
telling people? David Beckham, Mo Farah—all those impossible promises?”
“My partner found out.”
“Nobody will believe me,” said Della distractedly, “but I didn’t know, I had
no idea. I’ve missed the last four board meetings—preparations for the
Paralympics. Geraint only told me the truth after Chiswell threatened him with
the press. Even then he claimed it was the accountant’s fault, but he swore to me
the other things weren’t true. Swore it, on his mother’s grave.”
She twisted the wedding ring on her finger, apparently distracted.
“I suppose your wretched partner tracked down Elspeth Lacey-Curtis, as
well?”
“Afraid so,” lied Strike, judging that a gamble was indicated. “Did Geraint
deny that, too?”
“If he’d said anything to make the girls uncomfortable he felt awful, but he
swore there was nothing else to it, no touching, just a couple of risqué jokes. But
in this climate,” said Della furiously, “a man ought to damned well think about
what jokes he makes to a bunch of fifteen-year-old girls!”
Strike leaned forwards and grabbed Della’s wine, which was in danger of
being upended again.
“What are you doing?”
“Moving your glass onto the table,” said Strike.
“Oh,” said Della, “thank you.” Making a noticeable effort to control herself,
she continued, “Geraint was representing me at that event, and it will go the way
it always goes in the press when it all comes out: it will have been my fault, all
of it! Because men’s crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren’t they, Mr.
Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have
stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. Your failings are
really our failings, aren’t they? Because the proper role of the woman is carer,
and there’s nothing lower in this whole world than a bad mother.”
Breathing hard, she pressed her trembling fingers to her temples. Beyond the
net curtains night, deep blue, was inching like a veil over the glaring red of
sunset and as the room grew darker, Rhiannon Winn’s features faded gradually
into the twilight. Soon all that would be visible was her smile, punctuated by the
ugly braces.
“Give me back my wine, please.”
Strike did so. Della drank most of it down at once and continued to clasp the
glass as she said bitterly:

---

“There are plenty of people ready to think all kinds of odd things about a
blind woman. Of course, when I was younger, it was worse. There was often a
prurient interest in one’s private life. It was the first place some men’s minds
went. Perhaps you’ve experienced it, too, have you, with your one leg?”
Strike found that he didn’t resent the blunt mention of his disability from
Della.
“Yeah, I’ve had a bit of that,” he admitted. “Bloke I was at school with.
Hadn’t seen him in years. It was my first time back in Cornwall since I got
blown up. Five pints in, he asked me at what point I warned women my leg was
going to come off with my trousers. He thought he was being funny.”
Della smiled thinly.
“Never occurs to some people that it is we who should be making the jokes,
does it? But it will be different for you, as a man… most people seem to think it
in the natural order of things that the able-bodied woman should look after the
disabled man. Geraint had to deal with that for years… people assuming there
was something peculiar about him, because he chose a disabled wife. I think I
may have tried to compensate for that. I wanted him to have a role… status…
but it would have been better for both of us, in retrospect, if he had done
something unconnected to me.”
Strike thought she was a little drunk. Perhaps she hadn’t eaten. He felt an
inappropriate desire to check her fridge. Sitting here with this impressive and
vulnerable woman, it was easy to understand how Aamir had become so
entangled with her both professionally and privately, without ever intending to
become so.
“People assume I married Geraint because there was nobody else who
wanted me, but they’re quite wrong,” said Della, sitting up straighter in her
chair. “There was a boy I was at school with who was smitten with me, who
proposed when I was nineteen. I had a choice and I chose Geraint. Not as a carer,
or because, as journalists have sometimes implied, my limitless ambition made a
husband necessary… but because I loved him.”
Strike remembered the day he had followed Della’s husband to the stairwell
in King’s Cross, and the tawdry things that Robin had told him about Geraint’s
behavior at work, yet nothing that Della had just said struck him as incredible.
Life had taught him that a great and powerful love could be felt for the most
apparently unworthy people, a circumstance that ought, after all, to give
everybody consolation.
“Are you married, Mr. Strike?”
“No,” he said.
“I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people

---

inside it. It took this… all of this mess… to make me realize I can’t go on. I
don’t really know when I stopped loving him, but at some point after Rhiannon
died, it slipped—”
Her voice broke.
“—slipped away from us.” She swallowed. “Please will you pour me another
glass of wine?”
He did so. The room was very dark now. The music had changed again, to a
melancholy violin concerto which at last, in Strike’s opinion, was appropriate to
the conversation. Della had not wanted to talk to him, but now seemed reluctant
to let the conversation end.
“Why did your husband hate Jasper Chiswell so much?” Strike asked quietly.
“Because of Chiswell’s political clashes with you, or—?”
“No, no,” said Della Winn wearily. “Because Geraint has to blame somebody
other than himself for the misfortunes that befall him.”
Strike waited, but she merely drank more wine, and said nothing.
“What exactly—?”
“Never mind,” she said loudly. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”
But a moment later, after another large gulp of wine, she said:
“Rhiannon didn’t really want to do fencing. Like most little girls, what she
wanted was a pony, but we—Geraint and I—we didn’t come from pony-owning
backgrounds. We didn’t have the first idea what one does with horses. As I think
back, I suppose there were ways around that, but we were both terribly busy and
felt it would be impractical, so she took up fencing instead, and very good she
was at it, too…
“Have I answered enough of your questions, Mr. Strike?” she asked a little
thickly. “Will you find Aamir?”
“I’ll try,” Strike promised her. “Could you give me his number? And yours,
so I can keep you updated?”
She had both numbers off by heart, and he copied them down before closing
his notebook and getting back to his feet.
“You’ve been very helpful, Mrs. Winn. Thank you.”
“That sounds worrying,” she said, with a faint crease between the eyebrows.
“I’m not sure I meant to be.”
“Will you be—?”
“Perfectly,” said Della, enunciating over-clearly. “You’ll call me when you
find Aamir, won’t you?”
“If you don’t hear from me before then, I’ll update you in a week’s time,”
Strike promised. “Er—is anyone coming in tonight, or—?”
“I see you aren’t quite as hardened as your reputation would suggest,” said

---

Della. “Don’t worry about me. My neighbor will be in to walk Gwynn for me
shortly. She checks the gas dials and so forth.”
“In that case, don’t get up. Good night.”
The near-white dog raised her head as he walked towards the door, sniffing
the air. He left Della sitting in the darkness, a little drunk, with nothing else for
company but the picture of the dead daughter she had never seen.
Closing the front door, Strike couldn’t remember the last time he had felt
such a strange mixture of admiration, sympathy and suspicion.

---

55