Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

“But Jasper couldn’t have given Jimmy the money even if he’d wanted to,” she went on. “He’d already spent it. It took care of our overdraft for a while and repaired the stable roof. I never knew,” she added, as though sensing unspoken criticism, “until Jimmy explained it to me that night, what the arrangement between Jasper and Jack o’Kent had been. Jasper had told me the gallows were his to sell and I believed him. Naturally I believed him. He was my husband.”

She got up again and headed back to the drinks table as the fat Labrador, seeking warmth, left its distant corner, waddled around the ottoman and slumped down in front of the now roaring fire. The Norfolk terrier trotted after it, growling at Strike and Robin until Kinvara said angrily:

“Shut up, Rattenbury.”

“There’s are a couple more things I wanted to ask you about,” said Strike. “Firstly, did your husband have a passcode on his phone?”

“Of course he did,” said Kinvara. “He was very security-conscious.”

“So he didn’t give it out to a lot of people?”

“He didn’t even tell me what it was,” said Kinvara. “Why are you asking?”

Ignoring the question, Strike said:

“Your stepson’s now told us a different story to account for his trip down here, on the morning of your husband’s death.”

“Oh, really? What’s he saying this time?”

“That he was trying to stop you selling a necklace that’s been in the family for—”

“Come clean, has he?” she interrupted, turning back towards them with a fresh whisky in her hands. With her long red hair tangled from the night air, and her flushed cheeks, she had a slight air of abandon now, forgetting to hold her coat closed as she headed back to the sofa, the black nightdress revealing a canyon of cleavage. She flopped back down on the sofa. “Yes, he wanted to stop me doing a flit with the necklace, which, by the way, I’m perfectly entitled to do. It’s mine under the terms of the will. Jasper should have been a bit more bloody careful writing it if he didn’t want me to have it, shouldn’t he?”

Robin remembered Kinvara’s tears, the last time they had been in this room, and how she had felt sorry for her, unlikable though she had shown herself to be in other ways. Her attitude now had little of the grief-stricken widow about it, but perhaps, Robin thought, that was the drink, and the recent shock of their intrusion into her grounds.

“So you’re backing up Raphael’s story that he drove down here to stop you taking off with the necklace?”

“Don’t you believe him?”

“Not really,” said Strike. “No.”

“Why not?”

“It rings false,” said Strike. “I’m not convinced your husband was in a fit state that morning to remember what he had and hadn’t put in his will.”

“He was well enough to call me and demand to know whether I was really walking out on him,” said Kinvara.

“Did you tell him you were going to sell the necklace?”

“Not in so many words, no. I said I was going to leave as soon as I could find somewhere else for me and the horses. I suppose he might have wondered how I’d manage that, with no real money of my own, which made him remember the necklace.”

“So Raphael came here out of simple loyalty to the father who’d cut him off without a penny?”

Kinvara subjected Strike to a long and penetrating look over her whisky glass, then said to Robin:

“Would you throw another log on the fire?”

Noting the lack of a “please,” Robin nevertheless did as she was asked. The Norfolk terrier, which had now joined the sleeping Labrador on the hearthrug, growled at her until she had sat down again.

“All right,” said Kinvara, with an air of coming to a decision. “All right, here it is. I don’t suppose it matters any more, anyway. Those bloody girls will find out in the end and serve Raphael right.

“He did come down to try and stop me taking the necklace, but it wasn’t for Jasper, Fizzy or Flopsy’s sake—I suppose,” she said aggressively to Robin, “you know all the family nicknames, don’t you? You probably had a good giggle at them, while you were working with Izzy?”

“Erm—”

“Oh, don’t pretend,” said Kinvara, rather nastily, “I know you’ll have heard them. They call me ‘Tinky Two’ or something, don’t they? And behind his back, Izzy, Fizzy and Torquil call Raphael ‘Rancid.’ Did you know that?”

“No,” said Robin, at whom Kinvara was still glaring.

“Sweet, isn’t it? And Raphael’s mother is known to all of them as the Orca, because she dresses in black and white.

“Anyway… when the Orca realized Jasper wasn’t going to marry her,” said Kinvara, now very red in the face, “d’you know what she did?”

Robin shook her head.