“Would it have made him groggy?” Robin asked Oliver.

“Probably, especially if he wasn’t used to taking it, but people can have unexpected reactions. He might’ve become agitated.”

“Any sign of how or where the pills were crushed up?” asked Strike.

“In the kitchen. There were traces of powder found on the pestle and mortar there.”

“Prints?”

“His.”

“D’you know whether they tested the homeopathic pills?” asked Robin.

“The what?” said Oliver.

“There was a tube of homeopathic pills on the floor. I trod on them,” Robin explained. “Lachesis.”

“I don’t know anything about them,” said Oliver, and Robin felt a little foolish for mentioning them.

“There was a mark on the back of his left hand.”

“Yes,” said Oliver, turning back to his notes. “Abrasions to face and a small mark on the hand.”

“On the face, too?” said Robin, freezing with her sandwich in her hand.

“Yes,” said Oliver.

“Any explanation?” asked Strike.

“You’re wondering whether the bag was forced over his head,” said Oliver; it was a statement, not a question. “So did MI5. They know he didn’t make the marks himself. Nothing under his own nails. On the other hand, there was no bruising to the body to show force, nothing disarranged in the room, no signs of a struggle—”

“Other than the bent sword,” said Strike.

“I keep forgetting you were there,” said Oliver. “You know all this.”

“Marks on the sword?”

“It had been cleaned recently, but Chiswell’s prints were on the handle.”

“What time of death are we looking at?”

“Between 6 and 7 a.m.,” said Oliver.

“But he was fully dressed,” mused Robin.

“From what I’ve heard about him, he was quite literally the kind of bloke who wouldn’t have been caught dead in pajamas,” said Oliver drily.

“Met’s inclining to suicide, then?” asked Strike.

“Off the record, I think an open verdict is quite likely. There are a few discrepancies that need explaining. You know about the open front door, of course. It’s warped. It won’t close unless you shut it with force, but it sometimes jumps back open again if you slam it too hard. So it could have been accidental, the fact that it was open. Chiswell might not have realized he’d left it ajar, but equally, a killer might not have known the trick to closing it.”

“You don’t happen to know how many keys to the door there were?” asked Strike.

“No,” said Oliver. “As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, Van and I had to sound only casually interested, asking all these questions.”

“He’s a dead government minister,” said Strike. “Surely you didn’t have to sound too casual?”

“I know one thing,” said Oliver. “He had plenty of reasons to kill himself.”

“Such as?” inquired Strike, pen poised over his notebook.

“His wife was leaving him—”

“Allegedly,” said Strike, writing.

“—they’d lost a baby, his eldest son died in Iraq, the family say he was acting strangely, drinking heavily and so on, and he had serious money problems.”

“Yeah?” said Strike. “Like what?”

“He was almost wiped out in the 2008 crash,” said Oliver. “And then there was… well, that business you two were investigating.”

“D’you know where the blackmailers were, at the time of—?”

Oliver made a swift, convulsive movement that nearly knocked over his coffee. Leaned towards Strike he hissed:

“There’s a super-injunction out, in case you haven’t—”

“Yeah, we’ve heard,” said Strike.

“Well, I happen to like my job.”

“OK,” said Strike, unperturbed, but lowering his voice. “I’ll rephrase my question. Have they looked into the movements of Geraint Winn and Jimmy—?”

“Yes,” said Oliver curtly, “and both have alibis.”

“What are they?”

“The former was in Bermondsey with—”

“Not Della?” blurted Robin, before she could stop herself. The idea of his blind wife being Geraint’s alibi had struck her, somehow, as indecent. She had formed the impression, whether naively or not, that Della stood apart from Geraint’s criminal activity.

“No,” said Oliver tersely, “and do we have to use names?”

“Who, then?” asked Strike.

“Some employee. He claims he was with the employee and the bloke confirmed it.”

“Were there other witnesses?”

“I don’t know,” said Oliver, with a trace of frustration. “I assume so. They’re happy with the alibi.”

“What about Ji—the other man?”

“He was in East Ham with his girlfriend.”

“Was he?” said Strike, making a note of it. “I saw him being marched off to a police van, the night before Chiswell died.”

“He was let off with a caution. But,” Oliver said quietly, “blackmailers don’t generally kill their victims, do they?”

“Not if they’re getting money out of them,” said Strike, still writing. “But Knight wasn’t.”

Oliver looked at his watch.

“Couple more things,” said Strike equably, his elbow still planted on the envelope containing Ian Nash’s details. “Does Vanessa know anything about a phone call to his son that Chiswell made on the morning of his death?”

“Yeah, she said something about that,” said Oliver, flicking backwards and forwards through his notebook to find the information. “Yeah, he made two calls just after 6 a.m. First to his wife, then to his son.”

Strike and Robin looked at each other again.

“We knew about the call to Raphael. He called his wife as well?”

“Yeah, he called her first.”

Oliver seemed to read their reaction correctly, because he said:

“The wife’s totally in the clear. She was the first person they investigated, once they were satisfied it wasn’t politically motivated, obviously.

“A neighbor saw her go into the house on Ebury Street the evening before and come out shortly afterwards with a bag, two hours before her husband came back. A taxi driver picked her up halfway down the street and took her to Paddington. She was caught on camera on the train back to wherever she lives—is it Oxfordshire?—and apparently there was someone at the house when she got home, who can vouch for the fact that she arrived there before midnight and never left again until the police came round to tell her Chiswell was dead. Multiple witnesses to her whole journey.”

“Who was at the house with her?”

“That, I don’t know.” Oliver’s eyes moved to the envelope still lying beneath Strike’s elbow. “And that really is everything I’ve got.”

Strike had asked everything he had wanted to know, and had gained a couple of bits of information he had not expected, including the abrasions to Chiswell’s face, his poor finances and the phone call to Kinvara in the early morning.