“Correct. So those are three people we know could have got in that morning,” said Strike, “but this took much more than simply being able to get in through the door. The killer also had to know which anti-depressants Kinvara was taking, and arrange for the helium canister and rubber tubing to be there, which suggests close contact with the Chiswells, access to the house to get the stuff inside, or insider knowledge of the fact that the helium and tubing were already in there.”
“As far as we know, Raphael hadn’t been in Ebury Street lately and wasn’t on terms with Kinvara to know what pills she was taking, though I suppose his father might have mentioned it to him,” said Robin. “Judged on opportunity alone, the Winns and Aamir seem to be ruled out… so, assuming she
Strike heaved a sigh and closed his eyes.
“Bollocks to it,” he muttered, as he passed a hand across his face, “I keep circling back to motive.”
Opening his eyes again, he stubbed out his cigarette on his dinner plate and immediately lit another one.
“I’m not surprised MI5 are interested, because there’s no obvious gain here. Oliver was right—blackmailers don’t generally kill their victims, it’s the other way around. Hatred’s a picturesque idea, but a hot-blooded hate killing is a hammer or a lamp to the head, not a meticulously planned fake suicide. If it was murder, it was more like a clinical execution, planned in every detail. Why? What did the killer get out of it? Which also makes me wonder, why
“It was surely in Jimmy and Flick’s best interests for Chiswell to stay alive until they could produce evidence that forced him to come across with the money they wanted. Same with Raphael: he’d been written out of the will, but his relationship with his father was showing some signs of improvement. It was in his interest for his father to stay alive.
“But Chiswell had covertly threatened Aamir with exposure of something unspecified, but probably sexual, given the Catullus quotation, and he’d recently come into possession of information about the Winns’ dodgy charity. We shouldn’t forget that Geraint Winn wasn’t really a blackmailer: he didn’t want money, he wanted Chiswell’s resignation and disgrace. Is it beyond the realms of possibility that Winn or Mallik took a different kind of revenge when they realized the first plan had failed?”
Strike dragged heavily on his cigarette and said:
“We’re missing something, Robin. The thing that ties all this together.”
“Maybe it doesn’t tie together,” said Robin. “That’s life, isn’t it? We’ve got a group of people who all had their own personal tribulations and secrets. Some of them had reason not to like Chiswell, to resent him, but that doesn’t mean it all joins up neatly. Some of it must be irrelevant.”
“There’s still something we don’t know.”
“There’s a lot we don’t—”
“No, something big, something… fundamental. I can smell it. It keeps almost showing itself. Why did Chiswell say he might have more work for us after he’d scuppered Winn and Knight?”
“I don’t know,” said Robin.
“‘One by one, they trip themselves up,’” Strike quoted. “Who’d tripped themselves up?”
“Geraint Winn. I’d just told him about the missing money from the charity.”
“Chiswell had been on the phone, trying to find a money clip, you said. A money clip that belonged to Freddie.”
“That’s right,” said Robin.
“Freddie,” repeated Strike, scratching his chin.
And for a moment he was back in the communal TV room of a German military hospital, with the television muted in the corner and copies of the
“… the convoy stopped, Major Chiswell told me to get out, see what was going on. I told him I could see movement up on the ridge. He told me to fucking well do as I was told.
“I hadn’t gone more than a couple of feet when I got the bullet in the back. The last thing I remember was him yelling out of the lorry at me. Then the sniper took the top of his head off.”
The lieutenant had asked Strike for a cigarette. He wasn’t supposed to be smoking, but Strike had given him the half pack he had on him.
“Chiswell was a cunt,” said the young man in the wheelchair.
In Strike’s imagination he saw tall, blond Freddie swaggering up a country lane, slumming it with Jimmy Knight and his mates. He saw Freddie in fencing garb, out on the piste, watched by the indistinct figure of Rhiannon Winn, who was perhaps already entertaining suicidal thoughts.
