Lethal White

… I believe two different kinds of will can exist at
the same time in one person.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Nam Long Le Shaker had the feeling of a decadent, colonial-era bar. Dimly
lit, with leafy plants and assorted paintings and prints of beautiful women, the
décor mixed Vietnamese and European styles. When Robin entered the
restaurant at five past seven, she found Raphael leaning up against the bar,
wearing a dark suit and tieless white shirt, already halfway down a drink and
talking to the long-haired beauty who stood in front of a glittering wall of
bottles.
“Hi,” said Robin.
“Hello,” he responded with a trace of coolness, and then, “Your eyes are
different. Were they that color at Chiswell House?”
“Blue?” asked Robin, shrugging off the coat she had worn because she felt
shivery, even though the evening was warm. “Yes.”
“S’pose I didn’t notice because half the bloody lightbulbs are missing. What
are you drinking?”
Robin hesitated. She ought not to drink while conducting an interview, but at
the same time, she suddenly craved alcohol. Before she could decide, Raphael
said with a slight edge in his voice:
“Been undercover again today, have we?”
“Why d’you ask?”
“Your wedding ring’s gone again.”
“Were your eyes this sharp in the office?” asked Robin, and he grinned,
reminding her why she had liked him, even against her will.
“I noticed your glasses were fake, remember?” he said. “I thought at the time
you were trying to be taken seriously, because you were too pretty for politics.
So these,” he indicated his deep brown eyes, “may be sharp, but this,” he tapped
his head, “not so much.”
“I’ll have a glass of red,” said Robin, smiling, “and I’ll pay, obviously.”
“If this is all on Mr. Strike, let’s have dinner,” said Raphael at once. “I’m
starving and skint.”
“Really?”

---

After a day of trawling through the available rooms for rent on her agency
salary, she was not in the mood to hear the Chiswell definition of poverty again.
“Yeah, really, little though you might believe it,” said Raphael, with a
slightly acid smile, and Robin suspected he knew what she had been thinking.
“Seriously, are we eating, or what?”
“Fine,” said Robin, who had barely touched food all day, “let’s eat.”
Raphael took his bottle of beer off the bar and led her through to the
restaurant where they took a table for two beside the wall. It was so early that
they were the only diners.
“My mother used to come here in the eighties,” said Raphael. “It was well
known because the owner liked telling the rich and famous to sod off if they
weren’t dressed properly to come in, and they all loved it.”
“Really?” said Robin, her thoughts miles away. It had just struck her that she
would never again have dinner with Matthew like this, just the two of them. She
remembered the very last time, at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. What had he
been thinking while he ate in silence? Certainly he had been furious at her for
continuing to work with Strike, but perhaps he had also been weighing in his
mind the competing attractions of Sarah, with her well-paid job at Christie’s, her
endless fund of stories about other people’s wealth, and her no doubt self-
confident performance in bed, where the diamond earrings her fiancé had bought
her snagged on Robin’s pillow.
“Listen, if eating with me’s going to make you look like that, I’m fine with
going back to the bar,” said Raphael.
“What?” said Robin, surprised out of her thoughts. “Oh—no, it isn’t you.”
A waiter brought over Robin’s wine. She took a large slug.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was just thinking about my husband. I left him last
night.”
As she watched Raphael freeze in surprise with the bottle at his lips, Robin
knew herself to have crossed an invisible boundary. In her whole time at the
agency, she had never used truths about her private life to gain another’s
confidence, never blended the private and the professional to win another person
over. In turning Matthew’s infidelity into a device to manipulate Raphael, she
knew that she was doing something that would appall and disgust her husband.
Their marriage, he would have thought, ought to be sacrosanct, a world apart
from what he saw as her seedy, ramshackle job.
“Seriously?” said Raphael.
“Yes,” said Robin, “but I don’t expect you to believe me, not after all the
crap I told you when I was Venetia. Anyway,” she took her notebook out of her
handbag, “you said you were OK with me asking some questions?”

---

“Er—yeah,” he said, apparently unable to decide whether he was more
amused or disconcerted. “Is this real? Your marriage broke up last night?”
“Yes,” said Robin. “Why are you looking so shocked?”
“I don’t know,” said Raphael. “You just seem so… Girl Guidey.” His eyes
moved over her face. “It’s part of the appeal.”
“Could I just ask my questions?” said Robin, determinedly unfazed.
Raphael drank some beer and said:
“Always busy with the job. Turns a man’s thoughts to what it would take to
distract you.”
“Seriously—”
“Fine, fine, questions—but let’s order first. Fancy some dim sum?”
“Whatever’s good,” said Robin, opening her notebook.
Ordering food seemed to cheer Raphael up.
“Drink up,” he said.
“I shouldn’t be drinking at all,” she replied, and indeed, she hadn’t touched
the wine since her first gulp. “OK, I wanted to talk about Ebury Street.”
“Go on,” said Raphael.
“You heard what Kinvara said about the keys. I wondered whether—”
“—I ever had one?” asked Raphael with equanimity. “Guess how many
times I was ever in that house.”
Robin waited.
“Once,” said Raphael. “Never went there as a kid. When I got out of—you
know—Dad, who hadn’t visited me once while I was inside, invited me down to
Chiswell House to see him, so I did. Brushed my hair, put on a suit, got all the
way down to that hellhole and he didn’t bother turning up. Detained by a late
vote at the House or some crap. Picture how happy Kinvara was to have me on
her hands for the night, in that bloody depressing house that I’ve had bad dreams
about ever since I was a kid. Welcome home, Raff.
“I took the early train back to London. Following week, no contact from Dad
until I get another summons, this time to go to Ebury Street. I considered just not
bloody turning up. Why did I go?”
“I don’t know,” said Robin. “Why did you?”
He looked directly into her eyes.
“You can bloody hate someone and still wish they gave a shit about you and
hate yourself for wishing it.”
“Yes,” said Robin quietly, “of course you can.”
“So round I trot to Ebury Street, thinking I might get—not a heart to heart, I
mean, you met my father—but maybe, you know, some human emotion. He
opened the door, said ‘There you are,’ shunted me into the sitting room and there

---

was Henry Drummond and I realized I was there for a job interview. Drummond
said he’d take me on, Dad barked at me not to fuck it up and shoved me back out
onto the street. First and last time I was ever inside the place,” said Raphael, “so
I can’t say I’ve got fond associations with it.”
He paused to consider what he’d just said, then let out a short laugh.
“And my father killed himself there, of course. I was forgetting that.”
“No key,” said Robin, making a note.
“No, among the many things I didn’t get that day were a spare key and an
invitation to let myself in whenever I fancied it.”
“I need to ask you something that might seem as though it’s slightly out of
left field,” said Robin cautiously.
“This sounds interesting,” said Raphael, leaning forwards.
“Did you ever suspect that your father was having an affair?”
“What?” he said, almost comically taken aback. “No—but—what?”
“Over the last year or so?” said Robin. “While he was married to Kinvara?”
He seemed incredulous.
“OK,” said Robin, “if you don’t—”
“What on earth makes you think he was having an affair?”
“Kinvara was always very possessive, very concerned about your father’s
whereabouts, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah,” said Raphael, now smirking, “but you know why that was. That was
you.”
“I heard that she broke down months before I went to work in the office. She
told somebody that your father had cheated on her. She was distraught, by all
accounts. It was around the time her mare was put down and she—”
“—hit Dad with the hammer?” He frowned. “Oh. I thought that was because
of her not wanting the horse put down. Well, I suppose Dad was a ladies’ man
when he was younger. Hey—maybe that’s what he was up to, the night I went
down to Chiswell House and he stayed up in London? Kinvara was definitely
expecting him back and she was furious when he cried off at the last minute.”
“Yes, maybe,” said Robin, making a note. “Can you remember what date that
was?”
“Er—yeah, as a matter of fact, I can. You don’t tend to forget the day you’re
released from jail. I got out on Wednesday the sixteenth of February last year,
and Dad asked me to go down to Chiswell House on the following Saturday,
so… the nineteenth.”
Robin made a note.
“You never saw or heard signs there was another woman?”
“Come on,” said Raphael, “you were there, at the Commons. You saw how

---

little I had to do with him. Was he going to tell me he was playing around?”
“He told you about seeing the ghost of Jack o’Kent roaming the grounds at
night.”
“That was different. He was drunk then, and—morbid. Weird. Banging on
about divine retribution… I don’t know, I suppose he could’ve been talking
about an affair. Maybe he’d grown a conscience at last, three wives down the
line.”
“I didn’t think he married your mother?”
Raphael’s eyes narrowed.
“Sorry. Momentarily forgot I’m the bastard.”
“Oh, come on,” said Robin gently, “you know I didn’t mean—”
“All right, sorry,” he muttered. “Being touchy. Being left out of a parent’s
will does that to a person.”
Robin remembered Strike’s dictum about inheritance: It is the money, and it
isn’t, and in an uncanny echo of her thoughts, Raphael said:
“It isn’t the money, although God knows I could use the money. I’m jobless,
and I don’t think old Henry Drummond’s going to give me a reference, do you?
And now my mother looks like she’s going to settle permanently in Italy, so
she’s talking about selling the London flat, which means I’ll be homeless. It’ll
come to this, you know,” he said bitterly. “I’ll end up as Kinvara’s bloody stable
boy. No one else will work for her and no one else’ll employ me…
“But it’s not just the money. When you’re left out of the will… well, left out,
that says it all. The last statement of a dead man to his family and I didn’t rate a
single mention and now I’ve got fucking Torquil advising me to piss off to Siena
with my mother and ‘start again.’ Tosser,” said Raphael, with a dangerous
expression.
“Is that where your mother lives? Siena?”
“Yeah. She’s shacked up with an Italian count these days, and believe me, the
last thing he wants is her twenty-nine-year-old son moving in. He’s showing no
sign of wanting to marry her and she’s starting to worry about her old age, hence
the idea of flogging the flat here. She’s getting a bit long in the tooth to pull the
trick she did on my father.”
“What d’you—?”
“She got pregnant on purpose. Don’t look so shocked. My mother doesn’t
believe in shielding me from the realities of life. She told me the story years ago.
I’m a gamble that didn’t come off. She thought he’d marry her if she got
pregnant, but as you’ve just pointed out—”
“I said I’m sorry,” said Robin. “I am. It was really insensitive and—and
stupid.”

---

She thought perhaps Raphael was about to tell her to go to hell, but instead
he said quietly:
“See, you are sweet. You weren’t entirely acting, were you? In the office?”
“I don’t know,” said Robin. “I suppose not.”
Feeling his legs shift under the table, she moved very slightly backwards
again.
“What’s your husband like?” Raphael asked.
“I don’t know how to describe him.”
“Does he work for Christie’s?”
“No,” said Robin. “He’s an accountant.”
“Christ,” said Raphael, appalled. “Is that what you like?”
“He wasn’t an accountant when I met him. Can we go back over your father
calling you on the morning he died?”
“If you like,” said Raphael, “but I’d much rather talk about you.”
“Well, why don’t you tell me what happened that morning and then you can
ask me whatever you like,” said Robin.
A fleeting smile passed over Raphael’s face. He took a swig of beer and said:
“Dad called me. Told me he thought Kinvara was about to do something
stupid and told me to go straight down to Woolstone and stop it. I did ask why it
had to be me, you know.”
“You didn’t tell us that at Chiswell House,” said Robin, looking up from her
notes.
“Of course I didn’t, because the others were there. Dad said he didn’t want to
ask Izzy. He was quite rude about her on the phone… he was an ungrateful shit,
really he was,” said Raphael. “She worked her fingers to the bloody bone and
you saw how he treated her.”
“What do you mean, rude?”
“He said she’d shout at Kinvara, upset her and make it worse or something.
Pot and bloody kettle, but there you are. But the truth is,” said Raphael, “that he
saw me as a kind of upper servant and Izzy as proper family. He didn’t mind me
getting my hands dirty and it didn’t matter if I pissed off his wife by barging into
her house and stopping her—”
“Stopping her what?”
“Ah,” said Raphael, “food.”
The dim sum placed on the table before them, the waitress retreated.
“What did you stop Kinvara doing?” Robin repeated. “Leaving your father?
Hurting herself?”
“I love this stuff,” said Raphael, examining a prawn dumpling.
“She left a note,” persisted Robin, “saying she was leaving. Did your father

---

send you down there to persuade her not to go? Was he afraid Izzy would egg
her on to leave him?”
“D’you seriously think I could persuade Kinvara to stay in the marriage?
Never having to lay eyes on me again would’ve been one more incentive to go.”
“Then why did he send you to her?”
“I’ve told you,” said Raphael. “He thought she was going to do something
stupid.”
“Raff,” said Robin, “you can keep playing silly buggers—”
He corpsed.
“Christ, you sound Yorkshire when you say that. Say it again.”
“The police think there’s something fishy about your story of what you were
up to that morning,” said Robin. “And so do we.”
That seemed to sober him up.
“How do you know what the police are thinking?”
“We’ve got contacts on the force,” said Robin. “Raff, you’ve given everyone
the impression that your father was trying to stop Kinvara hurting herself, but
nobody really buys that. The stable girl was there. Tegan. She could have
prevented Kinvara from hurting herself.”
Raphael chewed for a while, apparently thinking.
“All right,” he sighed. “All right, here it is. You know how Dad had sold off
everything that would raise a few hundred quid, or given it to Peregrine?”
“Who?”
“All right, Pringle,” said Raphael, exasperated. “I prefer not to use their
stupid bloody nicknames.
“He didn’t sell off everything of value,” said Robin.
“What d’you mean?”
“That picture of the mare and foal is worth five to eight—”
Robin’s mobile rang. She knew from the ringtone that it was Matthew.
“Aren’t you going to get that?”
“No,” said Robin.
She waited until the phone had stopped ringing, then took it out of her bag.
“‘Matt,’” said Raphael, reading the name upside down. “That’s the
accountant, is it?”
“Yes,” said Robin, silencing the phone, but it immediately began to vibrate in
her hand instead. Matthew had called back.
“Block him,” suggested Raphael.
“Yes,” said Robin, “good idea.”
All that was important to her right now was keeping Raphael cooperative. He
seemed to enjoy watching her block Matthew. She put the mobile back in her

---

bag and said:
“Go on about the paintings.”
“Well, you know how Dad had offloaded all the valuable ones through
Drummond?”
“Some of us think five thousand pounds worth of picture is quite valuable,”
said Robin, unable to help herself.
“Fine, Ms. Lefty,” said Raphael, suddenly nasty. “You can keep sneering
about how people like me don’t know the value of money—”
“Sorry,” said Robin quickly, cursing herself. “I am, seriously. Look, I’ve—
well, I’ve been trying to find a room to rent this morning. Five thousand pounds
would change my life right now.”
“Oh,” said Raphael, frowning. “I—OK. Actually, if it comes to that I’d leap
at the chance of five grand in my pocket right now, but I’m talking about