Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel) полностью

“See that foal?” said Torquil, staring critically at the picture. “You know what it looks like? Lethal white syndrome. Heard of it?” he asked his wife and sister-in-law. “You’ll know all about that, Kinvara,” he said, clearly under the impression that he was graciously offering a way back into polite conversation. “Pure white foal, seems healthy when it’s born, but defective bowel. Can’t pass feces. M’father bred horses,” he explained to Strike. “They can’t survive, lethal whites. The tragedy is that they’re born alive, so the mare feeds them, gets attached and then—”

“Torks,” said Fizzy tensely, but it was too late. Kinvara blundered out of the room. The door slammed.

“What?” said Torquil, surprised. “What have I—?”

“Baby,” whispered Fizzy.

“Oh, Lord,” he said, “I clean forgot.”

He got to his feet, hitched up his mustard corduroys, embarrassed and defensive.

“Oh, come on,” he said, to the room at large. “I couldn’t expect her to take it that way. Horses in a bloody painting!”

“You know what she’s like,” said Fizzy, “about anything connected with birth. Sorry,” she said to Strike and Robin. “She had a baby that didn’t survive, you see. Very sensitive on the subject.”

Torquil approached the painting and squinted over Raphael’s head at words etched on a small plaque set into the frame.

“‘Mare Mourning,’” he read. “There you are, you see,” he said, with an air of triumph. “Foal is dead.”

“Kinvara likes it,” said Raphael unexpectedly, “because the mare reminds her of Lady.”

“Who?” said Torquil.

“The mare that got laminitis.”

“What’s laminitis?” asked Strike.

“A disease of the hoof,” Robin told him.

“Oh, do you ride?” asked Fizzy keenly.

“I used to.”

“Laminitis is serious,” Fizzy told Strike. “It can cripple them. They need a lot of care, and sometimes nothing can be done, so it’s kindest—”

“My stepmother had been nursing this mare for weeks,” Raphael told Strike, “getting up in the middle of the night and so on. My father waited—”

“Raff, this really hasn’t got anything to do with anything,” said Izzy.

“—waited,” continued Raphael doggedly, “until Kinvara went out one day, called in the vet without telling her and had the horse put down.”

“Lady was suffering,” said Izzy. “Papa told me what a state she was in. It was pure selfishness, keeping her alive.”

“Yeah, well,” said Raphael, his eyes on the lawn beyond the windows, “if I’d gone out and come back to the corpse of an animal I loved, I might’ve reached for the nearest blunt instrument as well.”

“Raff,” said Izzy, “please!”

“You’re the one who wanted this, Izzy,” he said, with grim satisfaction. “D’you really think Mr. Strike and his glamorous assistant aren’t going to find Tegan and talk to her? They’ll soon know what a shit Dad could—”

“Raff!” said Fizzy sharply.

“Steady on, old chap,” said Torquil, something that Robin had never thought to hear outside a book. “This whole thing’s been bloody upsetting, but there’s no need for that.”

Ignoring all of them, Raphael turned back to Strike.

“I suppose your next question was going to be, what did my father say to me, when he called me that morning?”

“That’s right,” said Strike.

“He ordered me down here,” said Raphael.

“Here?” repeated Strike. “Woolstone?”

“Here,” said Raphael. “This house. He told me he thought Kinvara was going to do something stupid. He sounded wooly. A bit odd. Like he had a heavy hangover.”

“What did you understand by ‘something stupid’?” asked Strike, his pen poised over his pad.

“Well, she’s got form at threatening to top herself,” said Raff, “so that, I suppose. Or he might’ve been afraid she was going to torch what little he had left.” He gestured around the shabby room. “As you can see, that wasn’t much.”

“Did he tell you she was leaving him?”

“I got the impression that things were bad between them, but I can’t remember his exact words. He wasn’t very coherent.”

“Did you do as he asked?” asked Strike.

“Yep,” said Raphael. “Got in my car like an obedient son, drove all the way here and found Kinvara alive and well in the kitchen, raging about Venetia—Robin, I mean,” he corrected himself. “As you may have gathered, Kinvara thought Dad was fucking her.”

“Raff!” said Fizzy, sounding outraged.

“There’s no need,” said Torquil, “for that kind of language.”

Everybody was carefully avoiding catching Robin’s eye. She knew she had turned red.

“Seems odd, doesn’t it?” Strike asked. “Your father asking you to come all the way down to Oxfordshire, when there were people far closer he could have asked to keep an eye on his wife? Didn’t I hear that there was someone here overnight?”

Izzy piped up before Raphael could answer.