Lethal White

… I am afraid it will not be long before we hear
something of the family ghost.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Robin asked whether she might use the bathroom before they departed from
Chiswell House and was shown across the hall by Fizzy, who was still fuming at
Kinvara.
“How dare she,” said Fizzy, as they crossed the hall. “How dare she? This is
Pringle’s house, not hers.” And, in the next breath, “Please don’t pay any
attention to what she said about Christopher, she’s simply trying to get a rise out
of Torks, it was a disgusting thing to do, he’s simply livid.”
“Who is Christopher?” Robin asked.
“Well—I don’t know whether I should say,” replied Fizzy. “But I suppose, if
you—of course, he can’t have anything to do with it. It’s just Kinvara’s spite.
She’s talking about Sir Christopher Barrowclough-Burns. Old friend of Torks’
family. Christopher’s a senior civil servant and he was that boy Mallik’s mentor
at the Foreign Office.”
The lavatory was chilly and antiquated. As she bolted the door, Robin heard
Fizzy striding back to the drawing room, doubtless to placate the angry Torquil.
She looked around: the chipped, painted stone walls were bare except for many
small dark holes in which the occasional nail still stuck out. Robin presumed
Kinvara was responsible for the removal of a large number of Perspex frames
from the wall, which now stood stacked on the floor facing the toilet. They
contained a jumble of family photographs in messy collages.
After drying her hands on a damp towel that smelled of dog, Robin crouched
down to flick through these frames. Izzy and Fizzy had been almost
indistinguishable as children, making it impossible to tell which of them was
cartwheeling on the croquet lawn, or jumping a pony at a local gymkhana,
dancing in front of a Christmas tree in the hall or embracing the young Jasper
Chiswell at a shooting picnic, the men all in tweeds and Barbours.
Freddie, however, was immediately recognizable, because unlike his sisters
he had inherited his father’s protuberant lower lip. As white-blond in youth as
his niece and nephews, he featured frequently, beaming for the camera as a
toddler, stony-faced as a child in a new prep school uniform, muddy and

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triumphant in rugby kit.
Robin paused to examine a group shot of teenagers, all dressed head to toe in
white fencing jackets, Union Jacks ran down the sides of everyone’s breeches.
She recognized Freddie, who was standing in the middle of the group, holding a
large silver cup. At the far end of the group was a miserable-looking girl whom
Robin recognized immediately as Rhiannon Winn, older and thinner than she
had been in the photograph her father had shown Robin, her slightly cringing air
at odds with the proud smiles on every other face.
Continuing to search the boards, Robin stopped at the last one to examine the
faded photograph of a large party.
It had been taken in a marquee, from what seemed to be a stage. Many bright
blue helium balloons in the shape of the number eighteen danced over the
crowd’s heads. A hundred or so teenagers had clearly been bidden to face the
camera. Robin scanned the scene carefully and found Freddie easily enough,
surrounded by a large group of both boys and girls whose arms were slung
around each other’s shoulders, beaming and, in some cases, braying with
laughter. After nearly a minute, Robin spotted the face she had instinctively
sought: Rhiannon Winn, thin, pale and unsmiling beside the drinks table. Close
behind her, half-hidden in shadow, were a couple of boys who were not in black
tie, but jean and T-shirts. One in particular was darkly handsome and long-
haired, his T-shirt bearing a picture of The Clash.
Robin got out her mobile and took a picture of both the fencing team and the
eighteenth birthday party photographs, then carefully replaced the stack of
Perspex boards as she had found them, and left the bathroom.
She thought for a second that the silent hall was deserted. Then she saw that
Raphael was leaning up against a hall table, his arms folded.
“Well, goodbye,” said Robin, starting to walk towards the front door.
“Hang on a minute.”
As she paused, he pushed himself off the table and approached her.
“I’ve been quite angry with you, you know.”
“I can understand why,” said Robin quietly, “but I was doing what your
father hired me to do.”
He moved closer, coming to a halt beneath an old glass lantern hanging from
the ceiling. Half the lightbulbs were missing.
“I’d say you’re bloody good at it, are you? Getting people to trust you?”
“That’s the job,” said Robin.
“You’re married,” he said, eyes on her left hand.
“Yes,” she said.
“To Tim?”

---

“No… there isn’t any Tim.”
“You’re not married to him?” said Raphael quickly, pointing outside.
“No. We just work together.”
“And that’s your real accent,” said Raphael. “Yorkshire.”
“Yes,” she said. “This is it.”
She thought he was going to say something insulting. The olive dark eyes
moved over her face, then he shook his head slightly.
“I quite like the voice, but I preferred ‘Venetia.’ Made me think of masked
orgies.”
He turned and walked away, leaving Robin to hurry back out into the
sunshine to rejoin Strike, who she presumed would be waiting impatiently in the
Land Rover.
She was wrong. He was still standing beside the car’s bonnet, while Izzy,
who was standing very close to him, talked rapidly in an undertone. When she
heard Robin’s feet on the gravel behind her, Izzy took a step backwards with
what, to Robin, seemed a slightly guilty, embarrassed air.
“Lovely to see you again,” Izzy said, kissing Robin on both cheeks, as
though this had been a simple social call. “And you’ll ring me, won’t you?” she
said to Strike.
“Yep, I’ll keep you updated,” he said, moving around to the passenger seat.
Neither Strike nor Robin spoke as she turned the car around. Izzy waved
them off, a slightly pathetic figure in her loose shirt dress. Strike raised a hand to
her as they took the bend in the drive that hid her from their sight.
Trying not to upset the skittish stallions, Robin drove at a snail’s pace.
Glancing left, Strike saw that the injured horse had been removed from the field,
but in spite of Robin’s best intentions, as the noisy old car lurched past its field,
the black stallion took off again.
“Who d’you reckon,” said Strike, watching the horse plunge and buck, “first
took a look at something like that and thought, ‘I should get on its back’?”
“There’s an old saying,” said Robin, trying to steer around the worst of the
potholes, “‘the horse is your mirror.’ People say dogs resemble their owners, but
I think it’s truer of horses.”
“Making Kinvara highly strung and prone to lash out on slight provocation?
Sounds about right. Turn right here. I want to get a look at Steda Cottage.”
A bare two minutes later, he said:
“Here. Go up here.”
The track to Steda Cottage was so overgrown that Robin had missed it
entirely the first time they had passed it. It led deep into the woodland that lay
hard up against the gardens of Chiswell House, but unfortunately, the Land

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Rover was only able to proceed for ten yards before the track became impassable
by car. Robin cut the engine, privately worried about how Strike was going to
manage a barely discernible path of earth and fallen leaves, overgrown with
brambles and nettles, but as he was already getting out, she followed suit,
slamming the driver’s door behind her.
The ground was slippery, the tree canopy so dense that the track was in deep
shade, dank and moist. A pungent, green, bitter smell filled their nostrils, and the
air was alive with the rustle of birds and small creatures whose habitat was being
rudely invaded.
“So,” said Strike, as they struggled through the bushes and weeds.
“Christopher Barrowclough-Burns. That’s a new name.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Robin.
Strike looked sideways at her, grinning, and immediately tripped on a root,
remaining upright at some cost to his sore knee.
“Shit… I wondered whether you remembered.”
“‘Christopher didn’t promise anything about the pictures,’” quoted Robin
promptly. “He’s a civil servant who mentored Aamir Mallik at the Foreign
Office. Fizzy just told me.”
“We’re back to ‘a man of your habits,’ aren’t we?”
Neither spoke for a short spell as they concentrated on a particularly
treacherous stretch of path where whip-like branches clung willingly to fabric
and skin. Robin’s skin was a pale, dappled green in the sun filtered by the ceiling
of leaves above them.
“See any more of Raphael, after I went outside?”
“Er—yes, actually,” said Robin, feeling slightly self-conscious. “He came
out of the sitting room as I was coming out of the loo.”
“Didn’t think he’d pass up another chance of talking to you,” said Strike.
“It wasn’t like that,” Robin said untruthfully, remembering the remark about
masked orgies. “Izzy whispering anything interesting, back there?” she asked.
Amused by the reciprocal jab, Strike took his eyes off the path, thereby
failing to spot a muddy stump. He tripped for a second time, this time saving
himself from a painful fall by grabbing a tree covered in a prickly climbing
plant.
“Fuck—”
“Are you—?”
“I’m fine,” he said, angry with himself, examining the palm that was now
full of thorns and starting to pull them out with his teeth. He heard a loud snap of
wood behind him and turned to see Robin holding out a fallen branch, which she
had broken to make a rough walking stick.

---

“Use this.”
“I don’t—” he began, but catching sight of her stern expression, he gave in.
“Thanks.”
They set off again, Strike finding the stick more useful than he wanted to
admit.
“Izzy was just trying to convince me that Kinvara could have sneaked back
to Oxfordshire, after bumping off Chiswell between six and seven in the
morning. I don’t know whether she realizes there are multiple witnesses to every
stage of Kinvara’s journey from Ebury Street. The police probably haven’t gone
into detail with the family yet, but I think, once the penny drops that Kinvara
can’t have done it in person, Izzy’ll start suggesting she hired a hitman. What did
you make of Raphael’s various outbursts?”
“Well,” said Robin, navigating around a patch of nettles, “I can’t blame him,
getting annoyed with Torquil.”
“No,” agreed Strike, “I think old Torks would grate on me, too.”
“Raphael seems really angry with his father, doesn’t he? He didn’t have to
tell us about Chiswell putting that mare down. I thought he was almost going out
of his way to paint his father as… well…”
“A bit of a shit,” agreed Strike. “He thought Chiswell had stolen those pills
of Kinvara’s out of malice, too. That whole episode was bloody strange, actually.
What made you so interested in those pills?”
“They seemed so out of place for Chiswell.”
“Well, it was a good call. Nobody else seems to have asked questions about
them. So what does the psychologist make of Raphael denigrating his dead
father?”
Robin shook her head, smiling, as she usually did when Strike referred to her
in this way. She had dropped out of her psychology course at university, as he
well knew.
“I’m serious,” said Strike, grimacing as his false foot skidded on fallen
leaves and he saved himself, this time with the aid of Robin’s stick. “Bollocks…
go on. What d’you make of him putting the boot into Chiswell?”
“Well, I think he’s hurt and furious,” said Robin, weighing her words. “He
and his father were getting on better than they ever had, from what he told me
when I was at the House of Commons, but now Chiswell’s dead, Raphael’s
never going to be able to get properly back on good terms with him, is he? He’s
left with the fact he was written out of the will and no idea of how Chiswell
really felt about him. Chiswell was quite inconsistent with Raphael. When he
was drunk and depressed, he seemed to lean on him, but otherwise he was pretty
rude to him. Although I can’t honestly say I saw Chiswell ever being nice to

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anybody, except maybe—”
She stopped short.
“Go on,” said Strike.
“Well, actually,” said Robin, “I was going to say he was quite nice to me, the
day I found out all about the Level Playing Field.”
“This was when he offered you a job?”
“Yes, and he said he might have a bit more work for me, once I’d got rid of
Winn and Knight.”
“Did he?” said Strike, curiously. “You never told me that.”
“Didn’t I? No, I don’t suppose I did.”
And like Strike, she remembered the week that he had been laid up at
Lorelei’s, followed by the hours at the hospital with Jack.
“I went over to his office, as I told you, and he was on the phone to some
hotel about a money clip he’d lost. It was Freddie’s. After Chiswell got off the
phone, I told him about the Level Playing Field and he was happier than I ever
saw him. ‘One by one, they trip themselves up,’” he said.
“Interesting,” panted Strike, whose leg was now killing him. “So you think
Raphael’s smarting about the will, do you?”
Robin, who thought she caught a sardonic note in Strike’s voice, said:
“It isn’t just money—”
“People always say that,” he grunted. “It is the money, and it isn’t. Because
what is money? Freedom, security, pleasure, a fresh chance… I think there’s
more to be got out of Raphael,” said Strike, “and I think you’re going to have to
be the one to do it.”
“What else can he tell us?”
“I’d like a bit more clarity on that phone call Chiswell made to him, right
before that bag went over his head,” panted Strike, who was now in considerable
pain. “It doesn’t make much sense to me, because even if Chiswell knew he was
about to kill himself, there were people far better placed to keep Kinvara
company than a stepson she didn’t like who was miles away in London.
“Trouble is, the call makes even less sense if it was murder. There’s
something,” said Strike, “we aren’t being t—ah. Thank Christ.”
Steda Cottage had just come into view in a clearing ahead of them. The
garden, which was surrounded by a broken-down fence, was now almost as
overgrown as its surroundings. The building was squat, made of dark stone and
clearly derelict, with a yawning hole in the roof and cracks in most of the
windows.
“Sit down,” Robin advised Strike, pointing him towards a large tree stump
just outside the cottage fence. In too much pain to argue, he did as she instructed,

---

while Robin picked her way towards the front door and gave it a little push, but
found it locked. Wading through knee-length grass, she peered one by one
through the grimy windows. The rooms were thick with dust and empty. The
only sign of any previous occupant was in the kitchen, where a filthy mug
bearing a picture of Johnny Cash sat alone on a stained surface.
“Doesn’t look as though anyone’s lived here for years, and no sign of anyone
sleeping rough,” she informed Strike, emerging from the other side of the
cottage.
Strike, who had just lit a cigarette, made no answer. He was staring down
into a large hollow in the woodland floor, around twenty feet square, bordered
with trees and full of nettles, tangled thorn and towering weeds.
“Would you call that a dell?” he asked her.
Robin peered down into the basin-like indentation.
“I’d say it’s more like a dell than anything else we’ve passed,” she said.
“‘He strangled the kid and they buried it, down in the dell by our dad’s
house,’” quoted Strike.
“I’ll have a look,” said Robin. “You stay here.”
“No,” said Strike, raising a hand to stop her, “you’re not going to find
anything—”
But Robin was already sliding her way down the steep edges of the “dell,”
the thorns snagging at her jeans as she descended.
It was extremely difficult to move around once she reached the bottom.
Nettles came up almost to her waist and she held up her hands to avoid scratches
and stings. Milk parsley and wood avens speckled the dark green with white and
yellow. The long thorny branches of wild roses curled like barbed wire
everywhere she trod.
“Watch yourself,” said Strike, feeling impotent as he watched her struggle
along, scratching or stinging herself at every other step.
“I’m fine,” said Robin, peering at the ground beneath the wild vegetation. If
anything had been buried here, it had long since been covered by plants, and
digging would be a very difficult business. She said as much to Strike, as she
bent low to see what lay underneath a dense patch of bramble.
“Doubt Kinvara would be happy with us digging, anyway,” said Strike, and
as he said it, he remembered Billy’s words: She wouldn’t let me dig, but she’d let
you.
“Wait,” said Robin, sounding tense.
In spite of the fact that he knew perfectly well she could not have found
anything, Strike tensed.
“What?”

---

“There’s something in there,” said Robin, moving her head from side to side,
the better to see into a thick patch of nettles, right in the center of the dell.
“Oh God.”
“What?” Strike repeated. Although far higher up than her, he could make out
nothing whatsoever in the nettle patch. “What can you see?”
“I don’t know… I might be imagining it.” She hesitated. “You haven’t got
gloves, I suppose?”
“No. Robin, don’t—”
But she had already walked into the patch of nettles, her hands raised,
stamping them down at the base wherever she could, flattening them as much as
possible. Strike saw her bend over and pull something out of the ground.
Straightening up, she stood quite still, her red-gold head bowed over whatever
she had found, until Strike said impatiently:
“What is it?”
Her hair fell away from a face that looked pale against the morass of dark
green in which she stood, as she held up a small, wooden cross.
“No, stay there,” she ordered him, as he moved automatically towards the
edge of the dell to help her climb out. “I’m fine.”
She was, in fact, covered in scratches and nettle stings, but deciding that a
few more would hardly count, Robin pushed her way more forcefully out of the
dell, using her hands to pull herself up the steep sides until she came close
enough for Strike to reach out a hand and help her the last few feet.
“Thanks,” she said breathlessly.
“Looks like it’s been there years,” she said, rubbing earth from the bottom,
which was pointed, the better to stick into the ground. The wood was damp and
stained.
“Something was written on it,” said Strike, taking it from her and squinting
at the slimy surface.
“Where?” said Robin. Her hair grazed his cheek as they stood close beside
each other, staring at the very faint residue of what looked like felt tip, long since
washed away by rain and dew.
“That looks like a kid’s writing,” said Robin quietly.
“That’s an ‘S,’” said Strike, “and at the end… is that a ‘g’ or a ‘y’?”
“I don’t know,” whispered Robin.
They stood in silence, contemplating the cross, until the faint, echoing barks
of Rattenbury the Norfolk terrier pierced their reverie.
“We’re still on Kinvara’s property,” said Robin nervously.
“Yeah,” said Strike, keeping hold of the cross as he began to lumber back the
way they had come, teeth gritted against the pain in his leg. “Let’s find a pub.

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I’m starving.”

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44