Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

She had walked from him straight into the arms of the man she thought would hurt Strike worst, and indeed, it had hurt, because Ross was the absolute antithesis of him and had dated Charlotte before Strike had even met him. Yet Strike remained certain her flight to Ross had been self-immolation, done purely for spectacular effect, a Charlottian form of sati.

Difficile est longum subito deponere amorem,

Difficile est, verum hoc qua lubet efficias.

It is hard to abruptly shrug off a long-established love

Hard, but this, somehow, you must do.

Strike turned off the light, closed his eyes and sank, once more, into uneasy dreams of the empty house where squares of unfaded wallpaper bore witness to the removal of everything of value, but this time he walked alone, with the strange sensation that hidden eyes were watching.

53

And then, in the end, the poignant misery of her victory…

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Robin arrived home just before 2 a.m. As she crept around the kitchen, making herself a sandwich, she noticed on the kitchen calendar that Matthew was planning to play five-a-side football later that morning. Accordingly, when she slipped into bed with him twenty minutes later, she set the alarm on her phone for eight o’clock before plugging it in to charge. As part of her effort to try and keep the atmosphere amicable, she wanted to get up to see him before he left.

He seemed happy that she’d made the effort to join him for breakfast, but when she asked whether he wanted her to come and cheer from the sidelines, or meet him for lunch afterwards, he declined both offers.

“I’ve got paperwork to do this afternoon. I don’t want to drink at lunchtime. I’ll come straight back,” he said, so Robin, secretly delighted, because she was so tired, told him to have a good time and kissed him goodbye.

Trying not to focus on how much lighter of heart she felt once Matthew had left the house, Robin occupied herself with laundry and other essentials until, shortly after midday, while she was changing the sheets on their bed, Strike called.

“Hi,” said Robin, gladly abandoning her task, “any news?”

“Plenty. Ready to write some stuff down?”

“Yes,” said Robin, hurriedly grabbing notebook and pen off the top of her dressing table and sitting down on the stripped mattress.

“I’ve been making some calls. First off, Wardle. Very impressed with your work in getting hold of that note—”

Robin smiled at her reflection in the mirror.

“—though he’s warned me the police won’t take kindly to us, as he put it, ‘clodhopping all over an open case.’ I’ve asked him not to say where he got the tip-off about the note, but I expect they’ll put two and two together, given that Wardle and I are mates. Still, that’s unavoidable. The interesting bit is that the police are still worried about the same features of the death scene as we are and they’ve been going deeper into Chiswell’s finances.”

“Looking for evidence of blackmail?”

“Yeah, but they haven’t got anything, because Chiswell never paid out. Here’s the interesting bit. Chiswell got an unexplained payment in cash of forty thousand pounds last year. He opened a separate bank account for it, then seems to have spent it all on house repairs and other sundries.”

“He received forty thousand pounds?”

“Yep. And Kinvara and the rest of the family are claiming total ignorance. They say they don’t know where the money came from or why Chiswell would’ve opened a separate account to take receipt of it.”

“The same amount Jimmy asked for before he scaled down his request,” said Robin. “That’s odd.”

“Certainly is. So then I called Izzy.”

“You’ve been busy,” said Robin.

“You haven’t heard the half of it. Izzy denies knowledge of where the forty grand came from, but I’m not sure I believe her. Then I asked her about the note Flick stole. She’s appalled that Flick might’ve been posing as her father’s cleaner. Very shaken up. I think for the first time she’s considering the possibility that Kinvara isn’t guilty.”

“I take it she never met this so-called Polish woman?”

“Correct.”

“What did she make of the note?”

“She thinks it looks like a to-do list, as well. She assumes ‘Suzuki’ meant the Grand Vitara, which was Chiswell’s. No thoughts on ‘mother.’ The one thing of interest I got from her was in relation to ‘blanc de blanc.’ Chiswell was allergic to champagne. Apparently it made him go bright red and hyperventilate. What’s odd about that is, there was a big empty box labeled Moët & Chandon in the kitchen when I checked it, the morning Chiswell died.”

“You never told me that.”

“We’d just found the body of a government minister. An empty box seemed relatively uninteresting at the time, and it never occurred to me it might be relevant to anything until I spoke to Izzy today.”