Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

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?”