Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

But she wasn’t sure that her second interviewer was a policeman. The softly spoken man in a dark gray suit didn’t reveal whom he worked for. Robin found this gentleman far more intimidating than yesterday’s police, even though they had, at times, been forceful to the point of aggression. Robin told her new interviewer everything she had seen and heard in the Commons, omitting only the strange conversation between Della Winn and Aamir Mallik, which had been captured on the second listening device. As the interaction had taken place behind a closed door after normal working hours, she could only have heard it by using surveillance equipment. Robin assuaged her conscience by telling herself that this conversation could not possibly have anything to do with Chiswell’s death, but squirming feelings of guilt and terror pursued her as she left the building for the second time. So consumed was she by what she hoped was paranoia by this brush with the security services, that she called Strike from a payphone near the Tube, instead of using her mobile.

“I’ve just had another interview. I’m pretty sure it was MI5.”

“Bound to happen,” said Strike, and she took solace from his matter-of-fact tone. “They’ve got to check you out, make sure you are who you claim to be. Isn’t there anywhere you can go, other than home? I can’t believe the press aren’t onto us yet, but it must be imminent.”

“I could go back to Masham, I suppose,” Robin said, “but they’re bound to try there if they want to find me. That’s where they came after the Ripper stuff.”

Unlike Strike, she had no friends of her own into whose anonymous homes she felt she could vanish. All her friends were Matthew’s, too, and she had no doubt that, like her husband, they would be scared of harboring anybody who was of interest to the security services. At a loss as to what to do, she went back to Albury Street.

Yet the press didn’t come for her, even though the newspapers were hardly holding back on the subject of Chiswell. The Mail had already run a double-page spread on the various tribulations and scandals that had plagued Jasper Chiswell’s life. “Once mentioned as a possible prime minister,” “sexy Italian Ornella Serafin, with whom he had the affair that broke up his first marriage,” “voluptuous Kinvara Hanratty, who was thirty years his junior,” “Lieutenant Freddie Chiswell, eldest son, died in the Iraq war his father had staunchly supported,” “youngest child Raphael, whose drug-filled joy ride ended in the death of a young mother.”

Broadsheets contained tributes from friends and colleagues: “a fine mind, a supremely able minister, one of Thatcher’s bright young men,” “but for a somewhat tumultuous private life, there were no heights he might not have reached,” “the public persona was irascible, even abrasive, but the Jasper Chiswell I knew at Harrow was a witty and intelligent boy…”

Five days of lurid press coverage passed, yet still, the press’s mysterious restraint on the subject of Strike and Robin’s involvement held, and still, nobody had printed a word about blackmail.

On the Friday morning following the discovery of Chiswell’s body, Strike was sitting quietly at Nick and Ilsa’s kitchen table, sunlight pouring through the window behind him.

His host and hostess were at work. Nick and Ilsa, who had been trying for some years to have a baby, had recently adopted a pair of kittens whom Nick had insisted on calling Ossie and Ricky, after the two Spurs players he had revered in his teens. The cats, who had only recently consented to sit on the knees of their adoptive parents, had not appreciated the arrival of the large and unfamiliar Strike. Finding themselves alone with him, they had sought refuge on top of a kitchen wall cabinet. He was currently conscious of the scrutiny of four pale green eyes, which followed his every movement from on high.