Lethal White

Part of Robin wanted to succumb to her body’s desire to dissolve, to carry
her off into blissful unconsciousness. Her hands were numb, her muscles felt like
soft wax. The place where Raphael had pressed the gun into her skin felt cold, a
ring of white fire for a third eye. He hadn’t turned on the lights in the boat. They
were facing each other in the deepening darkness and perhaps, by the time he
shot her, she would no longer be able to see him clearly…
Focus, said a small, clear voice through the panic. Focus. The longer you
keep him talking, the more time they’ll have to find you. Strike knows you were
tricked.
She suddenly remembered the police car speeding across the top of
Blomfield Road and wondered whether it had been circling, looking for her,
whether the police, knowing that Raphael had lured her to the area, had already
dispatched officers to search for them. The fake address had been some distance
away along the canal bank, reached, so Raphael’s texts had said, through the
black gates. Would Strike guess that Raphael was armed?
She took a deep breath.
“Kinvara broke down in Della Winn’s office last summer and said that
someone had told her she’d never been loved, that she was used as part of a
game.”
She must speak slowly. Don’t rush it. Every second might count, every
second that she could keep Raphael hanging on her words, was another second
in which somebody might come to her aid.
“Della assumed she was talking about your father, but we checked and Della
can’t remember Kinvara actually saying his name. We think you seduced
Kinvara as an act of revenge towards your father, kept the affair going for a
couple of months, but when she got clingy and possessive, you ditched her.”

---

“All supposition,” said Raphael harshly, “and therefore bullshit. What else?”
“Why did Kinvara go up to town on the day her beloved mare was likely to
be put down?”
“Maybe she couldn’t face seeing the horse shot. Maybe she was in denial
about how sick it was.”
“Or,” said Robin, “maybe she was suspicious about what you and Francesca
were up to in Drummond’s gallery.”
“No proof. Next.”
“She had a kind of breakdown when she got back to Oxfordshire. She
attacked your father and was hospitalized.”
“Still grieving her stillborn, excessively attached to her horses, generally
depressed,” Raphael rattled off. “Izzy and Fizzy will fight to take the stand and
explain how unstable she is. What else?”
“Tegan told us that one day Kinvara was manically happy again, and she lied
when asked why. She said your father had agreed to put her other mare in foal to
Totilas. We think the real reason was that you’d resumed the affair with her, and
we don’t think the timing was coincidental. You’d just driven the latest batch of
paintings up to Drummond’s gallery for valuation.”
Raphael’s face became suddenly slack, as though his essential self had
temporarily vacated it. The gun twitched in his hand and the fine hairs on
Robin’s arms lifted gently as though a breeze had rippled over them. She waited
for Raphael to speak, but he didn’t. After a minute, she continued:
“We think that when you loaded up the paintings for valuation, you saw
‘Mare Mourning’ close up for the first time and realized that it might be a
Stubbs. You decided to substitute a different painting of a mare and foal for
valuation.”
“Evidence?”
“Henry Drummond’s now seen the photograph I took of ‘Mare Mourning’ on
the spare bed at Chiswell House. He’s ready to testify that it wasn’t among the
pictures he valued for your father. The painting he valued at five to eight
thousand pounds was by John Frederick Herring, and it showed a black and
white mare and foal. Drummond’s also ready to testify that you’re sufficiently
knowledgable about art to have spotted that ‘Mare Mourning’ might be a
Stubbs.”
Raphael’s face had lost its mask-like cast. Now his near-black irises swiveled
fractionally from side to side, as though he were reading something only he
could see.
“I must’ve accidentally taken the Frederick Herring inste—”
A police siren sounded a few streets away. Raphael’s head turned: the siren

---

wailed for a few seconds, then, as abruptly as it had started, was shut off.
He turned back to face Robin. He didn’t seem overly worried by the siren
now it had stopped. Of course, he thought that it had been Matthew on the phone
when he grabbed her.
“Yeah,” he said, regaining the thread of his thought. “That’s what I’ll say. I
took the painting of the piebald to be valued by mistake, never saw ‘Mare
Mourning,’ had no idea it might be a Stubbs.”
“You can’t have taken the piebald picture by mistake,” said Robin quietly. “It
didn’t come from Chiswell House and the family’s prepared to say so.”
“The family,” said Raphael, “don’t notice what’s under their fucking noses.
A Stubbs has been hanging in a damp spare bedroom for nigh on twenty years
and nobody noticed, and you know why? Because they’re such fucking arrogant
snobs… ‘Mare Mourning’ was old Tinky’s. She inherited it from the broken-
down, alcoholic, gaga old Irish baronet she married before my grandfather. She
had no idea what it was worth. She kept it because it was horsey and she loved
horses.
“When her first husband died, she hopped over to England and pulled the
same trick, became my grandfather’s expensive private nurse and then his even
more expensive wife. She died intestate and all her crap—it was mostly crap—
got absorbed into the Chiswell estate. The Frederick Herring could easily have
been one of hers and nobody noticed it, stuck away in some filthy corner of that
bloody house.”
“What if the police trace the piebald picture?”
“They won’t. It’s my mother’s. I’ll destroy it. When the police ask me, I’ll
say my father told me he was going to flog it now he knew it was worth eight
grand. ‘He must’ve sold it privately, officer.’”
“Kinvara doesn’t know the new story. She won’t be able to back you up.”
“This is where her well-known instability and unhappiness with my father
works in my favor. Izzy and Fizzy will line up to tell the world that she never
paid much attention to what he was up to, because she didn’t love him and was
only in it for the money. Reasonable doubt is all I need.”
“What’s going to happen when the police put it to Kinvara that you only
restarted the affair because you realized she might be about to become
fantastically wealthy?”
Raphael let out a long, slow hiss.
“Well,” he said quietly, “if they can make Kinvara believe that, I’m fucked,
aren’t I? But right now, Kinvara believes her Raffy loves her more than anything
in the world, and she’s going to take a lot of convincing that’s not true, because
her whole life’s going to fall apart otherwise. I drilled it into her: if they don’t

---

know about the affair, they can’t touch us. I virtually had her reciting it while I
fucked her. And I warned her they’d try and turn us against each other if either
one of us was suspected. I’ve got her very well-schooled and I said, when in
doubt, cry your eyes out, tell them nobody ever tells you anything and act bloody
confused.”
“She’s already told one silly lie to try and protect you, and the police know
about it,” said Robin.
“What lie?”
“About the necklace, in the early hours of Sunday morning. Didn’t she tell
you? Maybe she realized you’d be angry.”
“What did she say?”
“Strike told her he didn’t buy the new explanation for you going down to
Chiswell House the morning your father died—”
“What d’you mean, he didn’t buy it?” said Raphael, and Robin saw outraged
vanity mingled with his panic.
“I thought it was convincing,” she assured him. “Clever, to tell a story that
you’d appear to give up only unwillingly. Everyone’s always more disposed to
believe something they believe they’ve uncovered for themsel—”
Raphael raised the gun so that it was close to her forehead again and even
though the cold ring of metal had not yet touched her skin again, she felt it there.
“What lie did Kinvara tell?”
“She claimed you came to tell her that your mother removed diamonds from
the necklace and replaced them with fakes.”
Raphael appeared horrified.
“What the fuck did she say that for?”
“Because she’d had a shock, I suppose, finding Strike and me in the grounds
when you were hiding upstairs. Strike said he didn’t believe the necklace story,
so she panicked and made up a new version. The trouble is, this one’s
checkable.”
“The stupid cunt,” said Raphael quietly, but with a venom that made the back
of Robin’s neck prickle. “That stupid, stupid cunt… why didn’t she just stick to
our story? And… no, wait…” he said, with the air of a man suddenly making a
welcome connection, and to Robin’s mingled consternation and relief, he
withdrew the gun from where it had been almost touching her, and laughed
softly. “That’s why she hid the necklace on Sunday afternoon. She gave me some
fucking guff about not wanting Izzy or Fizzy to sneak in and take it… well, she’s
stupid, but she’s not hopeless. Unless someone checks the stones, we’re still in
the clear… And they’ll have to take apart the stable block to find it. OK,” he
said, as though talking to himself, “OK, I think all of that’s recoverable.

---

“Is that it, Venetia? Is that all you’ve got?”
“No,” said Robin. “There’s Flick Purdue.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Yes, you do. You picked her up months ago, and fed her the truth about the
gallows, knowing she’d pass the information to Jimmy.”
“What a busy boy I’ve been,” said Raphael lightly. “So what? Flick won’t
admit to shagging a Tory minister’s son, especially if Jimmy might find out.
She’s as besotted with him as Kinvara is with me.”
“That’s true, she didn’t want to admit it, but somebody must have spotted
you creeping out of her flat next morning. She tried to pretend you were an
Indian waiter.”
Robin thought she saw a minute wince of surprise and displeasure. Raphael’s