“Well, I saw his point, if you want the truth. I could see why he felt he had a claim. Half the proceeds of the gallows belonged to the Knight boys. That had been the arrangement while Jack o’Kent was alive, but Jasper took the view that Jimmy couldn’t expect money for the stolen set, and given that he’d been storing them in his barn, and bearing all the costs of transportation and so on… and he said that Jimmy couldn’t sue him even if he wanted to. He didn’t like Jimmy.”
“No, well, I suppose their politics were very different,” said Strike.
Kinvara almost smirked.
“It was a bit more personal than that. Haven’t you heard about Jimmy and Izzy? No… I suppose Tegan’s too young to have heard that story. Oh, it was only once,” she said, apparently under the impression that Strike was shocked, “but that was quite enough for Jasper. A man like Jimmy Knight, deflowering his darling daughter, you know…
“But Jasper couldn’t have given Jimmy the money even if he’d wanted to,” she went on. “He’d already spent it. It took care of our overdraft for a while and repaired the stable roof. I never knew,” she added, as though sensing unspoken criticism, “until Jimmy explained it to me that night, what the arrangement between Jasper and Jack o’Kent had been. Jasper had told me the gallows were his to sell and I believed him. Naturally I believed him. He was my husband.”
She got up again and headed back to the drinks table as the fat Labrador, seeking warmth, left its distant corner, waddled around the ottoman and slumped down in front of the now roaring fire. The Norfolk terrier trotted after it, growling at Strike and Robin until Kinvara said angrily:
“Shut up, Rattenbury.”
“There’s are a couple more things I wanted to ask you about,” said Strike. “Firstly, did your husband have a passcode on his phone?”
“Of course he did,” said Kinvara. “He was very security-conscious.”
“So he didn’t give it out to a lot of people?”
“He didn’t even tell me what it was,” said Kinvara. “Why are you asking?”
Ignoring the question, Strike said:
“Your stepson’s now told us a different story to account for his trip down here, on the morning of your husband’s death.”
“Oh, really? What’s he saying this time?”
“That he was trying to stop you selling a necklace that’s been in the family for—”
“Come clean, has he?” she interrupted, turning back towards them with a fresh whisky in her hands. With her long red hair tangled from the night air, and her flushed cheeks, she had a slight air of abandon now, forgetting to hold her coat closed as she headed back to the sofa, the black nightdress revealing a canyon of cleavage. She flopped back down on the sofa. “Yes, he wanted to stop me doing a flit with the necklace, which, by the way, I’m perfectly entitled to do. It’s mine under the terms of the will. Jasper should have been a bit more bloody careful writing it if he didn’t want me to have it, shouldn’t he?”
Robin remembered Kinvara’s tears, the last time they had been in this room, and how she had felt sorry for her, unlikable though she had shown herself to be in other ways. Her attitude now had little of the grief-stricken widow about it, but perhaps, Robin thought, that was the drink, and the recent shock of their intrusion into her grounds.
“So you’re backing up Raphael’s story that he drove down here to stop you taking off with the necklace?”
“Don’t you believe him?”
“Not really,” said Strike. “No.”
“Why not?”
“It rings false,” said Strike. “I’m not convinced your husband was in a fit state that morning to remember what he had and hadn’t put in his will.”
“He was well enough to call me and demand to know whether I was really walking out on him,” said Kinvara.
“Did you tell him you were going to sell the necklace?”
“Not in so many words, no. I said I was going to leave as soon as I could find somewhere else for me and the horses. I suppose he might have wondered how I’d manage that, with no real money of my own, which made him remember the necklace.”
“So Raphael came here out of simple loyalty to the father who’d cut him off without a penny?”
Kinvara subjected Strike to a long and penetrating look over her whisky glass, then said to Robin:
“Would you throw another log on the fire?”
Noting the lack of a “please,” Robin nevertheless did as she was asked. The Norfolk terrier, which had now joined the sleeping Labrador on the hearthrug, growled at her until she had sat down again.
“All right,” said Kinvara, with an air of coming to a decision. “All right, here it is. I don’t suppose it matters any more, anyway. Those bloody girls will find out in the end and serve Raphael right.
“He did come down to try and stop me taking the necklace, but it wasn’t for Jasper, Fizzy or Flopsy’s sake—I suppose,” she said aggressively to Robin, “you know all the family nicknames, don’t you? You probably had a good giggle at them, while you were working with Izzy?”
“Erm—”
“Oh, don’t pretend,” said Kinvara, rather nastily, “I know you’ll have heard them. They call me ‘Tinky Two’ or something, don’t they? And behind his back, Izzy, Fizzy and Torquil call Raphael ‘Rancid.’ Did you know that?”
“No,” said Robin, at whom Kinvara was still glaring.
“Sweet, isn’t it? And Raphael’s mother is known to all of them as the Orca, because she dresses in black and white.
“Anyway… when the Orca realized Jasper wasn’t going to marry her,” said Kinvara, now very red in the face, “d’you know what she did?”
Robin shook her head.
“She took the famous family necklace to the man who became her next lover, who was a diamond merchant, and she had him prize out the really valuable stones and replace them with cubic zirconias. Man-made diamond substitutes,” Kinvara elucidated, in case Strike and Robin hadn’t understood. “Jasper never realized what she’d done and I certainly didn’t. I expect Ornella’s been having a jolly good laugh every time I’ve been photographed in the necklace, thinking I’m wearing a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of stones.
“Anyway, when my darling stepson got wind of the fact that I was leaving his father, and heard that I’d talked about having enough money to buy land for the horses, he twigged that I might be about to get the necklace valued. So he came hotfooting it down here, because the last thing he wanted was for the family to find out what his mother had done. What would be the odds of him wheedling his way back into his father’s good books after that?”
“Why haven’t you told anyone this?” asked Strike.
“Because Raphael promised me that morning that if I didn’t tell his father what the Orca had done, he’d maybe manage to persuade his mother to give the stones back. Or at least, give me their value.”
“And are you still trying to recover the missing stones?”
Kinvara squinted malevolently at Strike over the rim of her glass.
“I haven’t done anything about it since Jasper died, but that doesn’t mean I won’t. Why should I let the bloody Orca waltz off with what’s rightfully mine? It’s down in Jasper’s will, the contents of the house that haven’t been spefi—specif—spe-cif-ically excluded,” she enunciated carefully, thick-tongued now, “belong to me. So,” she said, fixing Strike with a gimlet stare, “does that sound more like Raphael to you? Coming down here to try and cover up for his darling mama?”
“Yes,” said Strike, “I’d have to say it does. Thank you for your honesty.”