“And you’re…”
“… am going to interview Billy Knight and Della Winn.”
“What?” said Robin, amazed. “How’re you going to get into the hosp—and she’ll never agree—”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” said Strike. “Izzy dug Della’s number out of Chiswell’s records for me. I just rang her. I admit, I was expecting her to tell me to piss off—”
“—in slightly more elevated language, if I know Della,” Robin suggested.
“—and she sounded initially as though she wanted to,” admitted Strike, “but Aamir’s disappeared.”
“What?” said Robin, sharply.
“Calm down. ‘Disappeared’ is Della’s word. In reality, he resigned the day before yesterday and vacated his house, which hardly makes him a missing person. He’s not picking up the phone to her. She’s blaming me, because—her words again—I did ‘a fine job’ on him when I went round to question him. She says he’s very fragile and it’ll be my fault if he ends up doing himself a mischief. So—”
“You’ve offered to find him in exchange for her answering questions?”
“Right in one,” said Strike. “She jumped at the offer. Says I’ll be able to reassure him that he’s not in trouble and that nothing unsavory I might have heard about him will go any further.”
“I hope he’s all right,” said Robin, concerned. “He really didn’t like me, but that just proves he’s smarter than any of the rest of them. When are you meeting Della?”
“Seven o’clock this evening, at her house in Bermondsey. And tomorrow afternoon, if all goes to plan, I’m going to be talking to Billy. I checked with Barclay, and Jimmy’s got no plans to visit then, so I called the hospital. I’m waiting for Billy’s psychiatrist to call me back now and confirm.”
“You think they’ll let you question him?”
“Supervised, yeah, I think they will. They’re interested in seeing how lucid he is if he gets to talk to me. He’s back on his meds and greatly improved, but he’s still telling the story of the strangled kid. If the psychiatric team’s in agreement, I’m going to be visiting the locked ward tomorrow.”
“Well, great. It’s good to have things to be getting on with. God knows, we could use a breakthrough—even if it is about the death we’re not being paid to investigate,” she sighed.
“There might not be a death at the bottom of Billy’s story at all,” said Strike, “but it’s going to bug me forever unless we find out. I’ll let you know how I get on with Della.”
Robin wished him luck, bade him goodbye and ended the call, though she remained lying on her half-made bed. After a few seconds, she said aloud:
“Blanc de blancs.”
Once again, she had the sense of a buried memory shifting, issuing a gust of low mood. Where on earth had she seen that phrase, while feeling miserable?
“Blanc de blancs,” she repeated, getting off the bed. “Blanc d—ow!”
She had put her bare foot down on something small and very sharp. Bending down, she picked up a backless diamond stud earring.
At first, she merely stared at it, her pulse unaltered. The earring wasn’t hers. She owned no diamond studs. She wondered why she hadn’t trodden on it when she climbed into bed with a sleeping Matthew in the early hours of the morning. Perhaps her bare foot had missed it, or, more probably, the earring had been in the bed and displaced only when Robin pulled off the undersheet.
Of course, there were many diamond stud earrings in the world. The fact remained that the pair to which Robin’s attention had most recently been drawn had been Sarah Shadlock’s. Sarah had been wearing them the last time Robin and Matthew had gone to dinner, the night that Tom had attacked Matthew with sudden and apparently unwarranted ferocity.
For what felt like a very long time, but was in reality little over a minute, Robin sat contemplating the diamond in her hand. Then she laid the earring carefully on her bedside cabinet, picked up her mobile, entered “Settings,” removed her caller ID, then phoned Tom’s mobile.
He answered within a couple of rings, sounding grumpy. In the background, a presenter was wondering aloud what the forthcoming Olympic closing ceremony would be like.
“Yah, hello?”
Robin hung up. Tom wasn’t playing five-a-side football. She continued to sit, motionless, her phone in her hand, on the heavy matrimonial bed that had been so difficult to move up the narrow stairs of this lovely rented house, while her mind moved back over the clear signs that she, the detective, had willfully ignored.
“I’m so stupid,” Robin said quietly to the empty, sunlit room. “So bloody stupid.”
54
Your gentle and upright disposition, your polished mind, your unimpeachable honor, are known to and appreciated by everyone…
Though the early evening was still bright, Della’s front garden lay in shadow, which gave it a placid, melancholy air in contrast to the busy, dusty road that ran beyond the gates. As Strike rang the doorbell, he noted two large dog turds on the otherwise immaculate front lawn and he wondered who was helping Della with such mundane tasks now that her marriage was over.
The door opened, revealing the Minister for Sport in her impenetrable black glasses. She was wearing what Strike’s elderly aunt back in Cornwall would have called a housecoat, a knee-length purple fleece robe that buttoned to the high neck, giving her a vaguely ecclesiastic air. The guide dog stood behind her, looking up at Strike with dark, mournful eyes.
“Hi, it’s Cormoran Strike,” said the detective, without moving. Given that she could neither recognize him by sight nor examine any of the identification he carried, the only way she could know whom she was admitting to her house was by the sound of his voice. “We spoke on the phone earlier and you asked me to come and see you.”
“Yes,” she said, unsmiling. “Come in, then.”
She stepped back to let him pass, one hand on the Labrador’s collar. Strike entered, wiping his feet on the doormat. A swell of music, loud strings and woodwind instruments, cut through by the pounding of a kettle drum, issued from what Strike assumed was the sitting room. Strike, who had been raised by a mother who listened mainly to metal bands, knew very little about classical music, but there was a looming, ominous quality about this music that he didn’t particularly care for. The hall was dark, because the lights hadn’t been turned on, and otherwise nondescript, with a dark brown patterned carpet that, while practical, was rather ugly.
“I’ve made coffee,” said Della. “I’ll need you to carry the tray into the sitting room for me, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“No problem,” said Strike.
He followed the Labrador, which padded along at Della’s heels, its tail wagging vaguely. The symphony grew louder as they passed the sitting room, the doorframe of which Della touched lightly as she passed, feeling for familiar markers to orient herself.
“Is that Beethoven?” asked Strike, for something to say.
“Brahms. Symphony Number One, C Minor.”
The edges of every surface in the kitchen were rounded. The knobs on the oven, Strike noticed, had raised numbers stuck to them. On a cork noticeboard was a list of phone numbers headed IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, that he imagined were for the use of a cleaner or home help. While Della crossed to the worktop opposite, Strike extracted his mobile from his coat pocket and took a picture of Geraint Winn’s number. Della’s outstretched hand reached the rim of the deep ceramic sink, and she moved sideways, where a tray sat already laden with a mug and a cafetière of freshly brewed coffee. Two bottles of wine stood beside it. Della felt for both of these, turned and held them out to Strike, still unsmiling.