Lethal White

seriously valuable stuff, worth tens and hundreds of thousands, things that my
father wanted to keep in the family. He’d already handed them on to little
Pringle to avoid death duties. There was a Chinese lacquer cabinet, an ivory
workbox and a couple of other things, but there was also the necklace.”
“Which—?”
“It’s a big ugly diamond thing,” said Raphael, and with the hand not spearing
dumplings he mimed a thick collar. “Important stones. It’s come down through
five generations or something and the convention was that it went to the eldest
daughter on her twenty-first, but my father’s father, who as you might have
heard was a bit of a playboy—”
“This is the one who married Tinky the nurse?”
“She was his third or fourth,” said Raphael, nodding. “I can never remember.
Anyway, he only had sons, so he let all his wives wear the thing in turn, then left
it to my father, who kept the new tradition going. His wives got to wear it—even
my mother got a shot—and he forgot about the handing on to the daughter on her
twenty-first bit, Pringle didn’t get it and he didn’t mention it in his will.”
“So—wait, d’you mean it’s now—?”
“Dad called me up that morning and told me I had to get hold of the bloody
thing. Simple job, kind of thing anyone would enjoy,” he said, sarcastically.
“Bust in on a stepmother who hates my guts, find out where she’s keeping a
valuable necklace, then steal it from under her nose.”
“So you think your father believed that she was leaving him, and was
worried that she was going to take it with her?”
“I suppose so,” said Raphael.
“How did he sound on the phone?”
“I told you this. Groggy. I thought it was a hangover. After I heard he’d

---

killed himself,” Raphael faltered, “… well.”
“Well?”
“To tell you the truth,” said Raphael, “I couldn’t get it out of my head that
the last thing Dad wanted to say to me in this life was, ‘run along and make sure
your sister gets her diamonds.’ Words to treasure forever, eh?”
At a loss for anything to say, Robin took another sip of wine, then asked
quietly:
“Do Izzy and Fizzy realize the necklace is Kinvara’s now?”
Raphael’s lips twisted in an unpleasant smile.
“Well, they know it is legally, but here’s the really funny thing: they think
she’s going to hand it over to them. After everything they’ve said about her, after
calling her a gold-digger for years, slagging her off at every possible
opportunity, they can’t quite grasp that she won’t hand the necklace over to
Fizzy for Flopsy—damn it—Florence—because,” he affected a shrill upper-class
voice, “‘Darling, even TTS wouldn’t do that, it belongs in the family, she must
realize she can’t sell it.’
“Bullets would bounce off their self-regard. They think there’s a kind of
natural law in operation, where Chiswells get what they want and lesser beings
just fall into line.”
“How did Henry Drummond know you were trying to stop Kinvara keeping
the necklace? He told Cormoran you went to Chiswell House for noble reasons.”
Raphael snorted.
“Cat’s really out of the bag, isn’t it? Yeah, apparently Kinvara left a message
for Henry the day before Dad died, asking where she could get a valuation on the
necklace.”
“Is that why he phoned your father that morning?”
“Exactly. To warn him what she was up to.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police all this?”
“Because once the others find out she’s planning to sell it, the whole thing’s
going to turn nuclear. There’ll be an almighty row and the family’ll go to
lawyers and expect me to join them in kicking the shit out of Kinvara, and
meanwhile I’m still treated like a second-class citizen, like a fucking courier,
driving all the old paintings up to Drummond in London and hearing how much
Dad was getting for them, and not a penny of that did I ever see—I’m not
getting caught up in the middle of the great necklace scandal, I’m not playing
their bloody game. I should’ve told Dad to stuff it, the day he phoned,” said
Raphael, “but he didn’t sound well, and I suppose I felt sorry for him, or
something, which only goes to prove they’re right, I’m not a proper bloody
Chiswell.”

---

He had run out of breath. Two couples had joined them in the restaurant now.
Robin watched in the mirror as a well-groomed blonde did a double take at
Raphael as she sat down with her florid, overweight companion.
“So, why did you leave Matthew?” Raphael asked.
“He cheated,” said Robin. She didn’t have the energy to lie.
“Who with?”
She had the impression he was seeking to redress some kind of power
balance. However much anger and contempt he had displayed during the
outburst about his family, she had heard the hurt, too.
“With a friend of his from university,” said Robin.
“How did you find out?”
“A diamond earring, in our bed.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously,” said Robin.
She felt a sudden wave of depression and fatigue at the idea of traveling all
the way back to that hard sofa in Wembley. She had not yet called her parents to
tell them what had happened.
“Under normal circumstances,” said Raphael, “I’d be putting the moves on
you. Well, not right now. Not tonight. But give it a couple of weeks…
“Trouble is, I look at you,” he raised a forefinger, and pointed first to her,
and then to an imaginary figure behind her, “and I see your one-legged boss
looming over your shoulder.”
“Is there any particular reason you feel the need to mention him being one-
legged?”
Raphael grinned.
“Protective, aren’t you?”
“No, I—”
“It’s all right. Izzy fancies him, too.”
“I never—”
“Defensive, too.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Robin, half-laughing, and Raphael grinned.
“I’m having another beer. Drink that wine, why don’t you?” he said,
indicating her glass, which was still two-thirds full.
When he had procured another bottle, he said with a malevolent grin, “Izzy’s
always liked bits of rough. Did you notice the charged look from Fizzy to Izzy
when Jimmy Knight’s name was mentioned?”
“I did, actually,” said Robin. “What was that about?”
“Freddie’s eighteenth birthday party,” said Raphael, smirking. “Jimmy
crashed it with a couple of mates and Izzy—how do I put this delicately?—lost

---

something in his company.”
“Oh,” said Robin, astonished.
“She was blind drunk. It’s passed into family legend. I wasn’t there. I was
too young.
“Fizzy’s so amazed at the idea that her sister could have slept with the estate
carpenter’s son that she thinks he must have some sort of supernatural, demonic
sex appeal. That’s why she thinks Kinvara was slightly on his side, when he
turned up asking for money.”
“What?” said Robin sharply, reaching for her notebook again, which had
fallen closed.
“Don’t get too excited,” said Raphael, “I still don’t know what he was
blackmailing Dad about, I never did. Not a full member of the family, you see,
so not to be fully trusted.
“Kinvara told you this at Chiswell House, don’t you remember? She was
alone at home, the first time Jimmy turned up. Dad was in London again. From
what I’ve pieced together, when she and Dad first talked it over, she argued
Jimmy’s case. Fizzy thinks that’s down to Jimmy’s sex appeal. Would you say
he’s got any?”
“I suppose some people might think he has,” said Robin indifferently, who
was making notes. “Kinvara thought your father should pay Jimmy his money,
did she?”
“From what I understand,” said Raphael, “Jimmy didn’t frame it as
blackmail on the first approach. She thought Jimmy had a legitimate claim and
argued for giving him something.”
“When was this, d’you know?”
“Search me,” said Raphael, shaking his head. “I think I was in jail at the
time. Bigger things to worry about…
“Guess,” he said, for the second time, “how often any of them have asked me
what it was like in jail?”
“I don’t know,” said Robin cautiously.
“Fizzy, never. Dad, never—”
“You said Izzy visited.”
“Yeah,” he acknowledged, with a tip of the bottle to his sister. “Yeah, she
did, bless her. Good old Torks has made a couple of jokes about not wanting to
bend over in the shower. I suggested,” said Raphael, with a hard smile, “that
he’d know all about that kind of thing, what with his old pal Christopher sliding
his hand between young men’s legs at the office. Turns out it’s serious stuff
when some hairy old convict tries it, but harmless frolics for public schoolboys.”
He glanced at Robin.

---

“I suppose you know now why Dad was taunting that poor bloke Aamir?”
She nodded.
“Which Kinvara thought was a motive for murder,” said Raphael, rolling his
eyes. “Projection, pure projection—they’re all at it.
“Kinvara thinks Aamir killed Dad, because Dad had been cruel to him in
front of a room full of people. Well, you should have heard some of the things
Dad was saying to Kinvara by the end.
“Fizzy thinks Jimmy Knight might’ve done it because he was angry about
money. She’s bloody angry about all the family money that’s vanished, but she
can’t say that in so many words, not when her husband’s half the reason it’s
gone.
“Izzy thinks Kinvara must have killed Dad because Kinvara felt unloved and
sidelined and disposable. Dad never thanked Izzy for a damn thing she did for
him, and didn’t give a toss when she said she was leaving. You get the picture?
“None of them have got the guts to say that they all felt like killing Dad at
times, not now he’s dead, so they project it all onto someone else. And that,”
said Raphael, “is why none of them are talking about Geraint Winn. He gets
double protection, because Saint Freddie was involved in Winn’s big grudge. It’s
staring them in the face that he had a real motive, but we’re not supposed to
mention that.”
“Go on,” said Robin, her pen at the ready. “Mention.”
“No, forget it,” said Raphael, “I shouldn’t have—”
“I don’t think you say much accidentally, Raff. Out with it.”
He laughed.
“I’m trying to stop fucking over people who don’t deserve it. It’s all part of
the great redemption project.”
“Who doesn’t deserve it?”
“Francesca, the little girl I—you know—at the gallery. She’s the one who
told me. She got it from her older sister, Verity.”
“Verity,” repeated Robin.
Sleep-deprived, she struggled to remember where she had heard that name. It
was very like “Venetia,” of course… and then she remembered.
“Wait,” she said, frowning in her effort to concentrate. “There was a Verity
on the fencing team with Freddie and Rhiannon Winn.”
“Right in one,” said Raphael.
“You all know each other,” said Robin wearily, unknowingly echoing
Strike’s thought as she started writing again.
“Well, that’s the joy of the public school system,” said Raphael. “In London,
if you’ve got the money, you meet the same three hundred people everywhere

---

you go… Yeah, when I first arrived at Drummond’s gallery, Francesca couldn’t
wait to tell me that her big sister had once dated Freddie. I think she thought that
made the pair of us predestined, or something.
“When she realized I thought Freddie was a bit of a shit,” said Raphael, “she
changed tack and told me a nasty story.
“Apparently, at his eighteenth, Freddie, Verity and a couple of others decided
to mete out some punishment to Rhiannon for having dared to replace Verity on
the fencing team. In their view she was—I don’t know—a bit common, a bit
Welsh?—so they spiked her drink. All good fun. Sort of stuff that goes on the
dorm, you know.
“But she didn’t react too well to neat vodka—or maybe, from their point of
view, she reacted really well. Anyway, they managed to take some nice pictures
of her, to pass around among themselves… this was in the early days of the
internet. These days I suppose half a million people would have viewed them in
the first twenty-four hours, but Rhiannon only had to endure the whole fencing
team and most of Freddie’s mates having a good gloat.
“Anyway,” said Raphael, “about a month later, Rhiannon killed herself.”
“Oh my God,” said Robin quietly.
“Yeah,” said Raphael. “After little Franny told me the story, I asked Izzy
about it. She got very upset, told me not to repeat it, ever—but she didn’t deny it.
I got lots of ‘nobody kills themselves because of a silly joke at a party’ bluster
and she told me I mustn’t talk about Freddie like that, it would break Dad’s
heart…
“Well, the dead don’t have hearts to break, do they? And personally, I think
it’s about time somebody pissed on Freddie’s eternal flame. If he hadn’t been
born a Chiswell, the bastard would’ve been in borstal. But I suppose you’ll say I
can talk, after what I did.”
“No,” said Robin gently. “That isn’t what I was going to say.”
The pugnacious expression faded from his face. He checked his watch.
“I’m going to have to go. I’ve got to be somewhere at nine.”
Robin raised her hand to signal for the bill. When she turned back to
Raphael, she saw his eyes moving in routine fashion over both the other women
in the restaurant, and in the mirror she saw how the blonde tried to hold his gaze.
“You can go,” she said, handing over her credit card to the waitress. “I don’t
want to make you late.”
“No, I’ll walk you out.”
While she was still putting her credit card back into her handbag, he picked
up her coat and held it up for her.
“Thank you.”

---

“No problem.”
Out on the pavement, he hailed a taxi.
“You take this one,” he said. “I fancy a walk. Clear my head. I feel as though
I’ve had a bad therapy session.”
“No, it’s all right,” said Robin. She didn’t want to charge a taxi all the way
back to Wembley to Strike. “I’m going to get the Tube. Goodnight.”
“’Night, Venetia,” he said.
Raphael got into the taxi, which glided away, and Robin pulled her coat more
tightly around herself as she walked off in the opposite direction. It had been a
chaotic interview, but she had managed to get much more than she had expected
out of Raphael. Taking out her mobile again, she phoned Strike.
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