Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

Jasper Chiswell turned to glare at her, his wiry mass of gray hair sticking out around his pink face. Izzy was standing behind her desk. The stranger was still there. In her shaken state, Robin would have preferred not to be the focus of three pairs of curious eyes.

“What just happened?” Chiswell demanded of Robin.

“Nothing,” said Robin, feeling cold sweat erupting again under her dress.

“You ran out of the room. Did he—” Chiswell pointed at the dark man, “—do something to you? Make a pass?”

“Wha—? No! I didn’t realize he was in here, that’s all—he spoke and I jumped. And,” she could feel herself blushing harder than ever, “then I needed the loo.”

Chiswell rounded on the dark man.

“So why are you here so early, eh?”

Now, at last, Robin realized that this was Raphael. She had known from the pictures she had found online that this half-Italian was an exotic in a family that was otherwise uniformly blond and very English in appearance, but had been wholly unprepared for how handsome he was in the flesh. His charcoal-gray suit, white shirt and a conventional dark blue spotted tie were worn with an air that none of the other men along the corridor could muster. So dark-skinned as to appear swarthy, he had high cheekbones, almost black eyes, dark hair worn long and floppy, and a wide mouth that, unlike his father’s, had a full upper lip that added vulnerability to his face.

“I thought you liked punctuality, Dad,” he said, raising his arms and letting them fall in a slightly hopeless gesture.

His father turned to Izzy. “Give him something to do.”

Chiswell marched out. Mortified, Robin headed for her desk. Nobody spoke until Chiswell’s footsteps had died away, then Izzy spoke.

“He’s under all kinds of stress just now, Raff, babes. It isn’t you. He’s honestly going berserk about the smallest things.”

“I’m so sorry,” Robin forced herself to say to Raphael. “I completely overreacted.”

“No problem,” he replied, in the kind of accent that is routinely described as “public school.” “For the record, I’m not, in fact, a sex offender.”

Robin laughed nervously.

“You’re the goddaughter I didn’t know about? Nobody tells me anything. Venetia, yeah? I’m Raff.”

“Um—yes—hi.”

They shook hands and Robin retook her seat, busying herself with some pointless paper shuffling. She could feel her color fluctuating.

“It’s just crazy at the moment,” Izzy said, and Robin knew that she was trying, for not entirely unselfish reasons, to persuade Raphael that their father wasn’t as bad to work with as he might appear. “We’re understaffed, we’ve got the Olympics coming up, TTS is constantly going off on Papa—”

“What’s going off on him?” asked Raphael, dropping down into the sagging armchair, loosening his tie and crossing his long legs.

“TTS,” Izzy repeated. “Lean over and put on the kettle while you’re there, Raff, I’m dying for a coffee. TTS. It stands for Tinky the Second. It’s what Fizz and I call Kinvara.”

The many nicknames of the Chiswell family had been explained to Robin during her office interludes with Izzy. Izzy’s older sister Sophia was “Fizzy,” while Sophia’s three children rejoiced in the pet names of “Pringle,” “Flopsy” and “Pong.”

“Why ‘Tinky the Second’?” asked Raff, unscrewing a jar of instant coffee with long fingers. Robin was still very aware of all his movements, though keeping her eyes on her supposed work. “What was Tinky the First?”

“Oh, come on, Raff, you must have heard about Tinky,” said Izzy. “That ghastly Australian nurse Grampy married last time round, when he was getting senile. He blew most of the money on her. He was the second silly old codger she’d married. Grampy bought her a dud racehorse and loads of horrible jewelry. Papa nearly had to go to court to get her out of the house when Grampy died. She dropped dead of breast cancer before it got really expensive, thank God.”

Startled by this sudden callousness, Robin looked up.

“How d’you take it, Venetia?” Raphael asked as he spooned coffee into mugs.

“White, no sugar, please,” said Robin. She thought it best if she maintained a low profile for a while, after her recent incursion into Winn’s office.

“TTS married Papa for his dosh,” Izzy plowed on, “and she’s horse-mad like Tinky. You know she’s got nine now? Nine!”

“Nine what?” said Raphael.

“Horses, Raff!” said Izzy impatiently. “Bloody uncontrollable, bad-mannered, hot-blooded horses that she mollycoddles and keeps as child substitutes and spends all the money on! God, I wish Papa would leave her,” said Izzy. “Pass the biscuit tin, babes.”

He did so. Robin, who could feel him looking at her, maintained the pretense of absorption in her work.

The telephone rang.

“Jasper Chiswell’s office,” said Izzy, trying to prize off the lid of the biscuit tin one-handed, the receiver under her chin. “Oh,” she said, suddenly cool. “Hello, Kinvara. You’ve just missed Papa…”