Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

Grinning at his half-sister’s expression, Raphael took the biscuits from her, opened them and offered the tin to Robin, who shook her head. A torrent of indistinguishable words was pouring from Izzy’s earpiece.

“No… no, he’s gone… he only came over to say hello to Raff…”

The voice at the end of the phone seemed to become more strident.

“Back at DCMS, he’s got a meeting at ten,” said Izzy. “I can’t—well, because he’s very busy, you know, the Olymp—yes… goodbye.”

Izzy slammed the receiver down and struggled out of her jacket.

“She should take another rest cure. The last one doesn’t seem to have done her much good.”

“Izzy doesn’t believe in mental illness,” Raphael told Robin.

He was contemplating her, still slightly curious and, she guessed, trying to draw her out.

“Of course I believe in mental illness, Raff!” said Izzy, apparently stung. “Of course I do! I was sorry for her when it happened—I was, Raff—Kinvara had a stillbirth two years ago,” Izzy explained, “and of course that’s sad, of course it is, and it was quite understandable that she was a bit, you know, afterwards, but—no, I’m sorry,” she said crossly, addressing Raphael, “but she uses it. She does, Raff. She thinks it entitles her to everything she wants and—well, she’d have been a dreadful mother, anyway,” said Izzy defiantly. “She can’t stand not being the center of attention. When she’s not getting enough she starts her little girl act—don’t leave me alone, Jasper, I get scared when you’re not here at night. Telling stupid lies… funny phone calls to the house, men hiding in the flowerbeds, fiddling with the horses.”

“What?” said Raphael, half-laughing, but Izzy cut him short.

“Oh, Christ, look, Papa’s left his briefing papers.”

She hurried out from behind her desk, snatched a leather folder off the top of the radiator and called over her shoulder, “Raff, you can listen to the phone messages and transcribe them for me while I’m gone, OK?”

The heavy wooden door thudded shut behind her, leaving Robin and Raphael alone. If she had been hyperaware of Raphael before Izzy had gone, now he seemed to Robin to fill the entire room, his olive dark eyes on her.

He took Ecstasy and ran his car into a mother of a four-year-old. He barely served a third of his sentence and now his father’s put him on the taxpayer’s payroll.

“How do I do this, then?” asked Raphael, moving behind Izzy’s desk.

“Just press play, I expect,” Robin muttered, sipping her coffee and pretending to make notes on a pad.

Canned messages began to issue from the answering machine, drowning out the faint hum of conversation from the terrace beyond the net-curtained window.

A man named Rupert asked Izzy to call him back about “the AGM.”

A constituent called Mrs. Ricketts spoke for two solid minutes about traffic along the Banbury road.

An irate woman said crossly that she ought to have expected an answering machine and that MPs ought to be answering to the public personally, then spoke until cut off by the machine about her neighbors’ failure to lop overhanging branches from a tree, in spite of repeated requests from the council.

Then a man’s growl, almost theatrically menacing, filled the quiet office:

“They say they piss themselves as they die, Chiswell, is that true? Forty grand, or I’ll find out how much the papers will pay.”

20

We two have worked our way forward in complete companionship.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Strike had selected the Two Chairmen for his Wednesday evening catch-up with Robin because of its proximity to the Palace of Westminster. The pub was tucked away on a junction of centuries-old back streets—Old Queen Street, Cockpit Steps—amid a motley collection of quaint, sedate buildings that stood at oblique angles to each other. Only as he limped across the road and saw the hanging metal sign over the front door did Strike realize that the “two chairmen” for whom the pub was named were not, as he had assumed, joint managers of a board, but lowly servants carrying the heavy load of a sedan chair. Tired and sore as Strike was, the image seemed appropriate, although the occupant of the sedan chair in the pub sign was a refined lady in white, not a large, curmudgeonly minister with wiry hair and a short temper.

The bar was crowded with after-work drinkers and Strike had a sudden apprehension that he might not get a seat inside, an unwelcome prospect, because leg, back and neck were tight and sore after yesterday’s long drive and the hours he had spent in Harley Street today, watching Dodgy Doc.