“Yeah,” said Raphael, now smirking, “but you know why that was. That was you.”
“I heard that she broke down months before I went to work in the office. She told somebody that your father had cheated on her. She was distraught, by all accounts. It was around the time her mare was put down and she—”
“—hit Dad with the hammer?” He frowned. “Oh. I thought that was because of her not wanting the horse put down. Well, I suppose Dad was a ladies’ man when he was younger. Hey—maybe that’s what he was up to, the night I went down to Chiswell House and he stayed up in London? Kinvara was definitely expecting him back and she was furious when he cried off at the last minute.”
“Yes, maybe,” said Robin, making a note. “Can you remember what date that was?”
“Er—yeah, as a matter of fact, I can. You don’t tend to forget the day you’re released from jail. I got out on Wednesday the sixteenth of February last year, and Dad asked me to go down to Chiswell House on the following Saturday, so… the nineteenth.”
Robin made a note.
“You never saw or heard signs there was another woman?”
“Come on,” said Raphael, “you were there, at the Commons. You saw how little I had to do with him. Was he going to tell me he was playing around?”
“He told you about seeing the ghost of Jack o’Kent roaming the grounds at night.”
“That was different. He was drunk then, and—morbid. Weird. Banging on about divine retribution… I don’t know, I suppose he could’ve been talking about an affair. Maybe he’d grown a conscience at last, three wives down the line.”
“I didn’t think he married your mother?”
Raphael’s eyes narrowed.
“Sorry. Momentarily forgot I’m the bastard.”
“Oh, come on,” said Robin gently, “you know I didn’t mean—”
“All right, sorry,” he muttered. “Being touchy. Being left out of a parent’s will does that to a person.”
Robin remembered Strike’s dictum about inheritance: It is the money, and it isn’t, and in an uncanny echo of her thoughts, Raphael said:
“It isn’t the money, although God knows I could use the money. I’m jobless, and I don’t think old Henry Drummond’s going to give me a reference, do you? And now my mother looks like she’s going to settle permanently in Italy, so she’s talking about selling the London flat, which means I’ll be homeless. It’ll come to this, you know,” he said bitterly. “I’ll end up as Kinvara’s bloody stable boy. No one else will work for her and no one else’ll employ me…
“But it’s not just the money. When you’re left out of the will… well, left out, that says it all. The last statement of a dead man to his family and I didn’t rate a single mention and now I’ve got fucking Torquil advising me to piss off to Siena with my mother and ‘start again.’ Tosser,” said Raphael, with a dangerous expression.
“Is that where your mother lives? Siena?”
“Yeah. She’s shacked up with an Italian count these days, and believe me, the last thing he wants is her twenty-nine-year-old son moving in. He’s showing no sign of wanting to marry her and she’s starting to worry about her old age, hence the idea of flogging the flat here. She’s getting a bit long in the tooth to pull the trick she did on my father.”
“What d’you—?”
“She got pregnant on purpose. Don’t look so shocked. My mother doesn’t believe in shielding me from the realities of life. She told me the story years ago. I’m a gamble that didn’t come off. She thought he’d marry her if she got pregnant, but as you’ve just pointed out—”
“I said I’m sorry,” said Robin. “I am. It was really insensitive and—and stupid.”
She thought perhaps Raphael was about to tell her to go to hell, but instead he said quietly:
“See, you are sweet. You weren’t entirely acting, were you? In the office?”
“I don’t know,” said Robin. “I suppose not.”
Feeling his legs shift under the table, she moved very slightly backwards again.
“What’s your husband like?” Raphael asked.
“I don’t know how to describe him.”
“Does he work for Christie’s?”
“No,” said Robin. “He’s an accountant.”
“Christ,” said Raphael, appalled. “Is that what you like?”
“He wasn’t an accountant when I met him. Can we go back over your father calling you on the morning he died?”
“If you like,” said Raphael, “but I’d much rather talk about you.”
“Well, why don’t you tell me what happened that morning and then you can ask me whatever you like,” said Robin.
A fleeting smile passed over Raphael’s face. He took a swig of beer and said:
“Dad called me. Told me he thought Kinvara was about to do something stupid and told me to go straight down to Woolstone and stop it. I did ask why it had to be me, you know.”
“You didn’t tell us that at Chiswell House,” said Robin, looking up from her notes.
“Of course I didn’t, because the others were there. Dad said he didn’t want to ask Izzy. He was quite rude about her on the phone… he was an ungrateful shit, really he was,” said Raphael. “She worked her fingers to the bloody bone and you saw how he treated her.”
“What do you mean, rude?”
“He said she’d shout at Kinvara, upset her and make it worse or something. Pot and bloody kettle, but there you are. But the truth is,” said Raphael, “that he saw me as a kind of upper servant and Izzy as proper family. He didn’t mind me getting my hands dirty and it didn’t matter if I pissed off his wife by barging into her house and stopping her—”
“Stopping her what?”
“Ah,” said Raphael, “food.”
The dim sum placed on the table before them, the waitress retreated.
“What did you stop Kinvara doing?” Robin repeated. “Leaving your father? Hurting herself?”
“I love this stuff,” said Raphael, examining a prawn dumpling.
“She left a note,” persisted Robin, “saying she was leaving. Did your father send you down there to persuade her not to go? Was he afraid Izzy would egg her on to leave him?”
“D’you seriously think I could persuade Kinvara to stay in the marriage? Never having to lay eyes on me again would’ve been one more incentive to go.”
“Then why did he send you to her?”
“I’ve told you,” said Raphael. “He thought she was going to do something stupid.”
“Raff,” said Robin, “you can keep playing silly buggers—”
He corpsed.
“Christ, you sound Yorkshire when you say that. Say it again.”
“The police think there’s something fishy about your story of what you were up to that morning,” said Robin. “And so do we.”
That seemed to sober him up.
“How do you know what the police are thinking?”
“We’ve got contacts on the force,” said Robin. “Raff, you’ve given everyone the impression that your father was trying to stop Kinvara hurting herself, but nobody really buys that. The stable girl was there. Tegan. She could have prevented Kinvara from hurting herself.”
Raphael chewed for a while, apparently thinking.
“All right,” he sighed. “All right, here it is. You know how Dad had sold off everything that would raise a few hundred quid, or given it to Peregrine?”
“Who?”
“All right, Pringle,” said Raphael, exasperated. “I prefer not to use their stupid bloody nicknames.
“He didn’t sell off everything of value,” said Robin.
“What d’you mean?”
“That picture of the mare and foal is worth five to eight—”