Chapter Text
Robin stood outside the regal frontage of Chiswell's Ebury Street residence, and pulled out her phone. She knew they were no longer on quite such thin ice with Chiswell, but she didn't think they'd remain in his good graces long if they started pissing him off by being late. Not that she was especially eager for the client, especially after last night. Last night . She stared at her phone, Strike's entry in her call history staring back at her, and even as she stood physically on Ebury Street, she was mentally in the back of a cab with a London night sweeping past outside the window, Strike all over her, her hands on parts of him they hand no business ever being. She blinked back into her body and listened to the call waiting to connect.
"Cormoran, are you close? It’s just he's got a real thing about punctuality…" she asked when she heard Strike answer.
"Go in, tell him I'm stuck in traffic, I'll explain when I see you," Strike said, and he sounded stressed enough to be blocked in a jam, but that clearly wasn't the whole story. The call ended abruptly, and she put the phone back in her pocket and turned towards the house.
What did she expect? He wasn't going to broach the topic of the cab ride then, was he? She walked up the porch steps to the door, briefly considering if he had cut the call with more curtness than usual and dismissing that as nonsense before raising her hand to press the bell, hearing it chime in the half light beyond. She waited. No response.
All thoughts of her inner turbulence were forgotten as the door creaked open an inch in response to the knocking motion of her hand. The house was quiet and dark, and the eerie motion of the unlocked door sent a shiver through Robin.
"Hello?" She called into the silence. There was no answer, and she stepped across the threshold carefully, as though there might be hidden tripwires and booby traps. "Minister?” Still silence, so heavy it buzzed. She crept forward, the sense of foreboding increasing with each step she took with no challenge or response. She turned into the first room on her left, the door ajar, books and assorted wizened paraphernalia on display, leather armchairs visible in the half light.
“Minster? It’s Robin, from the agency,” she said softly into the gloom.
The wooden shutters were half closed, and it took her a moment to make out that someone seemed to be sitting in one of the chairs. Recognizing a human form made her jump, then relax, and then tense up again as she registered the uncanny stillness of the form, none of the usual cues that her brain would have unconsciously registered as life. Almost at the same time as she noticed that, she saw the plastic wrapped around his head, and the wide open mouth, caught in an eternally pointless gasp for air.
The horror of it rose up in her throat, and she felt the hit and pinch of panic cannoning towards her. Usually CBT would assist her here, but looking around at the reality of her present surroundings was providing nothing that would easily soothe her racing heart.
When Strike arrived, she grasped the opportunity to go into the hallway, away from the dead horror in the chair, and he needed only a glance to know all was not well.
“Are you ok?” He asked as he walked towards her.
“Yeah,” she lied, avoiding his eyes.
“Where’s Chiswell?”
“He’s, um,” she began, but what do you call that? Dead, yes, she’d checked, but it seemed an inadequate term for a human slumped casually in his own pee, head swaddled in clingfilm; monstrous.
“How’d you get in?” Strike asked, unfazed. Of course he was, Robin thought. None of this was a huge departure for him. Death, intrigue, kisses in the backs of cars. She felt churlish and small for thinking of that now and focused on his questions. No, she hadn’t called the police, yes, she did have a spare pair of gloves.
“I’m going to have a quick look around, in case anyone is still here,” he said, and the combination of the hushed, library voice he used, the dead man a few feet away, and the sudden, awful thought that she might actually have been standing here in danger all this time, did nothing to steady her breath. She listened to Strike’s steadier tone calling the police as he walked out of the room, and she focused on doing something useful, taking pictures on her phone, though viewing the scene through a camera lens did little to ease her.
A letter from Kinvara Chiswell, announcing she was leaving her husband, residue in the glass, and, Strike confirmed, crushed up pills in the kitchen. A suicide, door left open for discovery when it was done? It was a sudden shift into despair from Chiswell’s gleeful spite last night, but Robin was well aware how quickly things can change if an emotional connection is broken or forged.
Two weeks passed, and after the initial press of police interviews, and questions from other agencies that were inevitable in the death of a government minister, the detectives found themselves frozen out of the official channels. Strike knew this was inevitable and understandable, but his connection to this case wasn’t entirely about Jasper Chiswell, and he kept close tabs on Billy’s progress in hospital. He got a text to tell him Billy was out of critical care the morning he and Robin drove to meet Izzy in a pub called The White Horse.
Robin walked beside him in the car park, and was grateful she had managed to keep the car journey light and professional, talking about the parts of the case that they still had elements of to work with: photos of the body, the scene and the note.
It was the first time they had been in any vehicle together since the bewildering taxi ride, and the fact was lost on neither of them. Robin had been endeavouring to maintain a careful distance, not lingering at the office, but home was no comfort, either. Every time she sat to eat with Matthew, she found herself issuing clipped replies to his conversation, the combination of wariness after his ham-fisted drunken seduction, and the stronger sense of guilt because of falling into Strike with such abandon, stunting her attempt to play act some kind of normal. Strike had watched her leave every day, grateful she was still so obviously committed to their work, but painfully aware that she had left his embrace once more to go back to her husband. He remembered the hug on the stairs at her wedding, when he had thought mad thoughts about asking her to come with him, and now, watching her pull further away from him after sharing the kind of impulsive passion with which he had considered stealing another man’s bride in the first place, he wondered if he was simply never what she actually wanted. All this trailed along between them as they entered the pub.
Strike was unsurprised by Izzy’s insistence that Kinvara had murdered Jasper Chiswell, though he noted Izzy's willingness to excuse behaviour that she herself found reprehensible in her deceased brother. Strike wondered if it was connected to respect for the dead, or if she was always willing to overlook the things her other siblings did. He filed the thought away for his analytical subconscious to work on.
The revelation that the pink blanket concealed, not a small child, but a small pony, was enough to cover the journey from the White Horse pub to the Chiswell estate, but for some reason, the definitive answer about there not being a dead human where they had feared there would be seemed to inflame Robin, rather than soothe her.
“Horse bones,” he said lugubriously. “I suppose you might bury a pet in the middle of the night if you’re in a hurry to get rid of it.”
“Yeah, because you’ve used it as target practice when you’ve run out of women to humiliate!” Robin snapped with so vehemently that Strike flinched. She was barely containing the simmering ire. “And his father protected him!”
“We don’t know that,” Strike tried to counter, but he could already see something in Robin that strained at the bonds of her normally excellent level-headed self control. Something not nearly as exhilarating as the last time he’d been in a car with her when that happened.
“Yeah, well you didn’t hear the way that Chiswell talked to Izzy and Kinvara. They’re not men so they just didn’t matter to him,” she spat, and Strike looked at her, certain only that her tone was coming from more than a feminist impulse, and unsure of he was part of the cause. There was a pause in which she seemed to collect herself.
“Billy still saw a girl strangled, though, didn’t he? I mean, if he was close enough to see her wet herself, he can’t have been wrong about that,” she said, abruptly shifting focus. The familiar Robin who loved solving puzzles as much as he did was a welcome sound.
“Yeah, I still believe him,” Strike replied, finding it slightly harder than he expected to follow her back into the case, aware now that Robin herself was possibly a puzzle to be solved too.
After the strained meeting with the Chiswell family, Strike and Robin tried to get to see Billy, but found themselves stymied by his incapacity. The medic who saw them was gracious enough, but as she walked away, firmly declining access, Strike and Robin stood in the gloomy corridor feeling like every door was closed.
“Our one lead can’t talk to us,” Strike said, aware of needing a smoke, “the police won’t let us near the evidence. Not sure where that leaves us.”
He looked at Robin who still seemed to be pondering.
“I could talk to Vanessa Ekwensi,” she suggested, “She won’t be on McMurran’s radar in the same way your contacts are.”
Robin felt a rush of excitement at having an in where Strike did not, but it wasn’t from a sense of competition, more like one more opportunity to prove her worth and usefulness to the business. Almost immediately she felt a pang of insecurity, as though her confidence was misplaced and she would be exposed if Vanessa was unable to help. “It’d be a big ask, though.”
Strike didn’t pick up the insecurity, instead thinking what an excellent idea it was.
“She’s a detective sergeant now, isn’t she?” He asked, intrigued. When Robin nodded, he added, “Maybe ask her if she’s angling for a promotion…”
“Can we offer her that?”
“I think maybe we can.”
Vanessa gave them everything she had in exchange for the information Strike procured from Shanker, and Robin felt the relief as she said goodbye to her friend, and turned back to Strike.
“She’s great, isn’t she?” Robin said, looking at him in the inadequate light of the office. He was clearly turning the new information over in his mind, and issued a hum of affirmation, nothing more. She had hoped for more enthusiasm about her helping them to a breakthrough, but Strike was too busy processing everything. As she joined him in piecing what they now knew together, she actually began to feel a sense of lightness at being here, doing what they did best together.
Strike’s mind ticked over and from its recesses, he remembered Flick's use of conversational Polish and her complaint about scrubbing toilets. He looked at Robin, and an idea formed.
“Maybe she could use a friend to talk to?” He suggested.
“Couldn’t we all?” Robin replied, slightly ruefully, and Strike’s mouth twisted into a half smile.
“It’s not going to be Venetia or anyone like her,” Strike mused. “Needs to be someone that a leftie class warrior type would warm to.”
“Ok, leave it with me,” Robin said, already rolling disguise and persona ideas around.
“You sure?” Strike asked
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Robin asked, a little irritated.
“No reason, I just… No, great. Let me know what you’re doing so I can let Barclay know in case you cross paths,” he replied, and that seemed to be the end of the evening. Strike would have suggested getting some food in a few weeks previously, but Robin was already getting her coat.
“Will do,” she said, and paused at the door. He thought she was going to say something, but she didn’t.
“Is everything ok?” He asked, and Robin thought how much she didn’t want to go home, she just wanted to sit in the office with Strike and just be for a bit, but that option seemed impossible when the memory of a taxi ride and hug on some stairs loomed so large in her mind.
“Yeah,” she managed. “Just tired. I’ll message you.”
And she left.
Strike slumped down in his chair and rubbed the back of his neck. He really didn’t know what to do, and this uneasy status quo was killing him.