“Well,” said Robin, navigating around a patch of nettles, “I can’t blame him, getting annoyed with Torquil.”
“No,” agreed Strike, “I think old Torks would grate on me, too.”
“Raphael seems really angry with his father, doesn’t he? He didn’t
“A bit of a shit,” agreed Strike. “He thought Chiswell had stolen those pills of Kinvara’s out of malice, too. That whole episode was bloody strange, actually. What made you so interested in those pills?”
“They seemed so out of place for Chiswell.”
“Well, it was a good call. Nobody else seems to have asked questions about them. So what does the psychologist make of Raphael denigrating his dead father?”
Robin shook her head, smiling, as she usually did when Strike referred to her in this way. She had dropped out of her psychology course at university, as he well knew.
“I’m serious,” said Strike, grimacing as his false foot skidded on fallen leaves and he saved himself, this time with the aid of Robin’s stick. “
“Well, I think he’s hurt and furious,” said Robin, weighing her words. “He and his father were getting on better than they ever had, from what he told me when I was at the House of Commons, but now Chiswell’s dead, Raphael’s never going to be able to get properly back on good terms with him, is he? He’s left with the fact he was written out of the will and no idea of how Chiswell really felt about him. Chiswell was quite inconsistent with Raphael. When he was drunk and depressed, he seemed to lean on him, but otherwise he was pretty rude to him. Although I can’t honestly say I saw Chiswell ever being nice to anybody, except maybe—”
She stopped short.
“Go on,” said Strike.
“Well, actually,” said Robin, “I was going to say he was quite nice to me, the day I found out all about the Level Playing Field.”
“This was when he offered you a job?”
“Yes, and he said he might have a bit more work for me, once I’d got rid of Winn and Knight.”
“Did he?” said Strike, curiously. “You never told me that.”
“Didn’t I? No, I don’t suppose I did.”
And like Strike, she remembered the week that he had been laid up at Lorelei’s, followed by the hours at the hospital with Jack.
“I went over to his office, as I told you, and he was on the phone to some hotel about a money clip he’d lost. It was Freddie’s. After Chiswell got off the phone, I told him about the Level Playing Field and he was happier than I ever saw him. ‘One by one, they trip themselves up,’” he said.
“Interesting,” panted Strike, whose leg was now killing him. “So you think Raphael’s smarting about the will, do you?”
Robin, who thought she caught a sardonic note in Strike’s voice, said:
“It isn’t just money—”
“People always say that,” he grunted. “It
“What else can he tell us?”
“I’d like a bit more clarity on that phone call Chiswell made to him, right before that bag went over his head,” panted Strike, who was now in considerable pain. “It doesn’t make much sense to me, because even if Chiswell knew he was about to kill himself, there were people far better placed to keep Kinvara company than a stepson she didn’t like who was miles away in London.
“Trouble is, the call makes even less sense if it was murder. There’s something,” said Strike, “we aren’t being t—ah. Thank Christ.”
Steda Cottage had just come into view in a clearing ahead of them. The garden, which was surrounded by a broken-down fence, was now almost as overgrown as its surroundings. The building was squat, made of dark stone and clearly derelict, with a yawning hole in the roof and cracks in most of the windows.
“Sit down,” Robin advised Strike, pointing him towards a large tree stump just outside the cottage fence. In too much pain to argue, he did as she instructed, while Robin picked her way towards the front door and gave it a little push, but found it locked. Wading through knee-length grass, she peered one by one through the grimy windows. The rooms were thick with dust and empty. The only sign of any previous occupant was in the kitchen, where a filthy mug bearing a picture of Johnny Cash sat alone on a stained surface.
“Doesn’t look as though anyone’s lived here for years, and no sign of anyone sleeping rough,” she informed Strike, emerging from the other side of the cottage.
Strike, who had just lit a cigarette, made no answer. He was staring down into a large hollow in the woodland floor, around twenty feet square, bordered with trees and full of nettles, tangled thorn and towering weeds.
“Would you call that a dell?” he asked her.
Robin peered down into the basin-like indentation.
“I’d say it’s more like a dell than anything else we’ve passed,” she said.
