Lethal White

I have foreseen all contingencies—long ago.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
A twenty-minute Tube ride later, Robin emerged at Warwick Avenue
underground station in a part of London she barely knew. She had always felt a
vague curiosity about Little Venice, as her extravagant middle name, “Venetia,”
had been given to her because she had been conceived in the real Venice.
Doubtless she would henceforth associate this area with Matthew and the bitter,
tense meeting she was sure awaited her, down by the canal.
She walked down a street named Clifton Villas, where plane trees spread
leaves of translucent jade against square cream-colored houses, the walls of
which glowed gold in the evening sun. The quiet beauty of this soft summer
evening made Robin feel suddenly, overwhelmingly melancholy, because it
recalled just such a night in Yorkshire, a decade previously, when she had
hurried up the road from her parents’ house, barely seventeen years old and
wobbling on her high heels, desperately excited about her first date with
Matthew Cunliffe, who had just passed his driving test and would be taking her
into Harrogate for the evening.
And here she was walking towards him again, to arrange the permanent
disentanglement of their lives. Robin despised herself for feeling sad, for
remembering, when it was preferable to concentrate on his unfaithfulness and
unkindness, the joyful shared experiences that had led to love.
She turned left, crossed the street and walked on, now in the chilly shadow of
the brick that bordered the right-hand side of Blomfield Road, parallel to the
canal, and saw a police car speeding across the top of the street. The sight of it
gave her strength. It felt like a friendly wave from what she knew now was her
real life, sent to remind her what she was meant to be, and how incompatible that
was with being the wife of Matthew Cunliffe.
A pair of high black wooden gates was set into the wall, gates that Matthew’s
text had told her led to the canal-side bar, but when Robin pushed at them, they
were locked. She glanced up and down the road, but there was no sign of
Matthew, so she reached into her bag for her mobile, which, though muted was
already vibrating with a call. As she took it out, the electric gates opened and she
walked through them, raising the mobile to her ear as she did so.

---

“Hi, I’m just—”
Strike yelled in her ear.
“Get out of there, it isn’t Matthew—”
Several things happened at once.
The phone was torn out of her hand. In one frozen second, Robin registered
that there was no bar in sight, only an untidy patch of canal bank beneath a
bridge, hemmed by overgrown shrubs, and a dark barge, Odile, sitting squat and
shabby in the water below her. Then a fist hit her hard in the solar plexus, and
she jack-knifed, winded. Doubled over, she heard a splash as her phone was
lobbed into the canal, then somebody grabbed a fistful of her hair and the
waistband of her trousers and dragged her, while she still had no air in her lungs
to scream, towards the barge. Thrown through the open doorway of the boat, she
hit a narrow wooden table and fell to the floor.
The door slammed shut. She heard the scrape of a lock.
“Sit down,” said a male voice.
Still winded, Robin pulled herself up onto a wooden bench at the table,
which was covered in a thin cushioned pad, then turned, to find herself looking
into the barrel of a revolver.
Raphael lowered himself into the chair opposite her.
“Who just rang you?” he demanded and she deduced that in the physical
effort to get her on the boat, and his terror that she might make a noise that the
caller could hear, he had not had time or opportunity to check the screen on her
mobile.
“My husband,” lied Robin in a whisper.
Her scalp was burning where he had pulled her hair. The pain in her midriff
was such that she wondered whether he had cracked one of her ribs. Still
fighting to draw air into her lungs, Robin seemed for a few disoriented seconds
to see her predicament in miniature, from far away, encased in a trembling bead
of time. She foresaw Raphael tipping her weighted corpse into the dark water by
night, and Matthew, who had apparently lured her to the canal, being questioned
and maybe accused. She saw the distraught faces of her parents and her brothers
at her funeral in Masham, and she saw Strike standing at the back of the church,
as he had at her wedding, furious because the thing he had feared had come to
pass, and she was dead due to her own failings.
But as each gasp re-inflated Robin’s lungs, the illusion that she was watching
from afar dissolved. She was here, now, on this dingy boat, breathing in its fusty
smell, trapped within its wooden walls, with the dilated pupil of the revolver
staring at her, and Raphael’s eyes above it.
Her fear was a real, solid presence in the galley, but it must stand apart from

---

her, because it couldn’t help, and would only hinder. She must stay calm, and
concentrate. She chose not to speak. It would give her back some of the power
he had just taken from her if she refused to fill the silence. This was the trick of
the therapist: let the pause unspool; let the more vulnerable person fill it.
“You’re very cool,” Raphael said finally. “I thought you might get hysterical
and scream. That’s why I had to punch you. I wouldn’t have done that otherwise.
For what it’s worth, I like you, Venetia.”
She knew that he was trying to re-impersonate the man who had charmed her
against her will at the Commons. Clearly, he thought the old mixture of
ruefulness and remorse would make her forgive, and soften, even with her
burning scalp, and her bruised ribs, and the gun in her face. She said nothing.
His faint, imploring smile disappeared and he said bluntly:
“I need to know how much the police know. If I can still blag my way out of
what they’ve got, then I’m afraid you,” he raised the gun a fraction to point
directly at Robin’s forehead (and she thought of vets and the one clean shot that
the horse in the dell had been denied) “are done for. I’ll muffle the shot in a
cushion and put you overboard once it’s dark. But if they already know
everything, then I’ll end it, here, tonight, because I’m never going back to
prison. So you can see how it’s in your best interests to be honest, can’t you?
Only one of us is getting off this boat.”
And when she didn’t speak, he said fiercely:
“Answer me!”
“Yes,” she said. “I understand.”
“So,” he said quietly, “were you really just at Scotland Yard?”
“Yes.”
“Is Kinvara there?”
“Yes.”
“Under arrest?”
“I think so. She’s in an interrogation room with her solicitor.”
“Why have they arrested her?”
“They think the two of you are having an affair. That you were behind
everything.”
“What’s ‘everything’?”
“The blackmail,” said Robin, “and the murder.”
He advanced the gun so that it was pressing against her forehead. Robin felt
the small, cold ring of metal pressing into her skin.
“Sounds like a crock of shit to me. How’re we supposed to have had an
affair? She hated me. We were never alone together for two minutes.”
“Yes, you were,” said Robin. “Your father invited you down to Chiswell

---

House, right after you got out of jail. The night he was detained in London. You
and she were alone together, then. That’s when we think it started.”
“Proof?”
“None,” said Robin, “but I think you could seduce anyone if you really put
your—”
“Don’t try flattery, it won’t work. Seriously, ‘that’s when we think it started’?
Is that all you’ve got?”
“No. There were other signs of something going on.”
“Tell me the signs. All of them.”
“I’d be able to remember better,” said Robin steadily, “without you pressing
a gun into my forehead.”
He withdrew it, but still pointing the revolver at her face, he said:
“Go on. Quickly.”