Lethal White

“We’ll play it by ear. Robin, they know you were the one inside the Houses of Parliament. You became the story while he was alive and you’re sure as hell the story now they know who you really are, and he’s dead.”

She said nothing.

“How’re you getting on with the accounts?” he asked.

She had insisted on being given this job, little though either of them enjoyed it.

“They’d look a lot healthier if Chiswell had paid his bill.”

“I’ll try and tap the family,” said Strike, rubbing his eyes, “but it feels tasteless asking for money before the funeral.”

“I’ve been looking through the photos again,” said Robin. In daily contact since finding the body, every one of their conversations wound its way back to the pictures of Chiswell’s corpse and the room in which they had found him.

“Me too. Notice anything new?”

“Yes, two little brass hooks on the wall. I think the sword was usually—”

“—displayed beneath the missing painting?”

“Exactly. D’you think it was Chiswell’s, from the army?”

“Very possibly. Or some ancestor’s.”

“I wonder why it was taken down? And how it got bent?”

“You think Chiswell grabbed it off the wall to try and defend himself against his murderer?”

“That’s the first time,” said Robin quietly, “you’ve said it. ‘Murderer.’”

A wasp swooped low over Strike but, repelled by his cigarette smoke, buzzed away again.

“I was joking.”

“Were you?”

Strike stretched out his legs in front of him, contemplating his feet. Stuck in the house, which was warm, he had not bothered with shoes and socks. His bare foot, which rarely saw sunlight, was pale and hairy. The prosthetic foot, a single piece of carbon fiber with no individual toes, had a dull gleam in the sunshine.

“There are odd features,” Strike said, as he waggled his remaining toes, “but it’s been a week and no arrest. The police will have noticed everything we did.”

“Hasn’t Wardle heard anything? Vanessa’s dad’s ill. She’s on compassionate leave, or I’d’ve asked her.”

“Wardle’s deep in anti-terrorist stuff for the Olympics. Considerately spared the time to call my voicemail and piss himself laughing at my client dying on me, though.”

“Cormoran, did you notice the name on those homeopathic pills I trod on?”

“No,” said Strike. This wasn’t one of the photographs he had isolated. “What was it?”

“Lachesis. I saw it when I enlarged the picture.”

“Why’s that significant?”

“When Chiswell came into our office and quoted that Latin poem at Aamir, and said something about a man of your habits, he mentioned Lachesis. He said she was—”

“One of the Fates.”

“—exactly. The one who ‘knew when everyone’s number was up.’”

Strike smoked in silence for a few seconds.

“Sounds like a threat.”

“I know.”

“You definitely can’t remember which poem it was? Author, perhaps?”

“I’ve been trying, but no—wait—” said Robin suddenly. “He gave it a number.”

“Catullus,” said Strike, sitting up straighter on the iron garden chair.

“How d’you know?”

“Because Catullus’s poems are numbered, not titled, there was an old copy on Chiswell’s coffee table. Catullus described plenty of interesting habits: incest, sodomy, child rape… he might’ve missed out bestiality. There’s a famous one about a sparrow, but nobody buggers it.”

“Funny coincidence, isn’t it?” said Robin, ignoring the witticism.

“Maybe Chiswell was prescribed the pills and that put him in mind of the Fate?”

“Did he seem to you like the kind of man who’d trust homeopathy?”

“No,” admitted Strike, “but if you’re suggesting the killer dropped a tube of lachesis as an artistic flourish—”

He heard a distant trill of bells.

“There’s someone at the door,” said Robin, “I’d better—”

“Check who it is, before you answer,” said Strike. He had had a sudden presentiment.

Her footsteps were muffled by what he knew was carpet.

“Oh, God.”

“Who is it?”

“Mitch Patterson.”

“Has he seen you?”

“No, I’m upstairs.”

“Then don’t answer.”

“I won’t.”

But her breathing had become noisy and ragged.

“You all right?”

“Fine,” she said, her voice constricted.

“What’s he—?”

“I’m going to go. I’ll call you later.”

The line went dead.

Strike lowered the mobile. Feeling a sudden heat in the fingers of the hand not holding his phone, he realized his cigarette had burned to the filter. Stubbing it out on the hot paving stone, he flicked it over the wall into the garden of a neighbor whom Nick and Ilsa disliked, and immediately lit another, thinking about Robin.

He was concerned about her. It was to be expected, of course, that she was experiencing anxiety and stress after finding a body and being interviewed by the security services, but he had noticed lapses in concentration over the phone, where she asked him the same thing two or three times. There was also what he considered her unhealthy eagerness to get back to the office, or out on the street.

Convinced that she ought to be taking some time out, Strike hadn’t told Robin about a line of investigation he was currently pursuing, because he was sure she would insist on being allowed to help.

The fact was that, for Strike, the Chiswell case had begun, not with the dead man’s story of blackmail, but with Billy Knight’s tale of a strangled child wrapped in a pink blanket in the ground. Ever since Billy’s last plea for help, Strike had been phoning the telephone number from which it had been made. Finally, on the previous morning, he had got an answer from a curious passerby, who had confirmed the phone box’s position on the edge of Trafalgar Square.

Strike. That bastard soldier with the one leg. Billy’s fixated on him. Thinks he’s going to rescue him.

Surely there was a chance, however tiny, that Billy might gravitate back to the place where he had last sought help? Strike had spent a few hours wandering Trafalgar Square on the previous afternoon, knowing how remote was the possibility that Billy would show up, yet feeling compelled to do something, however pointless.

Strike’s other decision, which was even harder to justify, because it cost money the agency could currently ill afford, was to keep Barclay embedded with Jimmy and Flick.

“It’s your money,” the Glaswegian said, when the detective gave him this instruction, “but what’m I looking for?”

“Billy,” said Strike, “and in the absence of Billy, anything strange.”

Of course, the next lot of accounts would show Robin exactly what Barclay was up to.

Strike had a sudden feeling that he was being watched. Ossie, the bolder of Nick and Ilsa’s kittens, was sitting at the kitchen window, beside the kitchen taps, staring through the window with eyes of pale jade. His gaze felt judgmental.

37

I shall never conquer this completely. There will always be a doubt confronting me—a question.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Wary of breaching the conditions of the super-injunction, photographers stayed away from Chiswell’s funeral in Woolstone. News organizations restricted themselves to brief, factual announcements that the service had taken place. Strike, who had considered sending flowers, had decided against it on the basis that the gesture might be taken as a tasteless reminder that his bill remained unpaid. Meanwhile the inquest into Chiswell’s death was opened and adjourned, pending further investigations.

And then, quite suddenly, nobody was very interested in Ja

sper Chiswell. It was as though the corpse that had been borne aloft for a week upon a swell of newsprint, gossip and rumor, now sank beneath stories of sportsmen and women, of Olympic preparations and predictions, the country in the grip of an almost universal preoccupation, for whether they approved or disapproved of the event, it was impossible to ignore or avoid.

Robin was still phoning Strike daily, pressuring him to let her come back to work, but Strike continued to refuse. Not only had Mitch Patterson twice more appeared in her street, but an unfamiliar young busker had spent the whole week playing on the pavement opposite Strike’s office, missing chord changes every time he saw the detective and regularly breaking off halfway through songs to answer his mobile. The press, it seemed, had not forgotten that the Olympics would eventually end, and that there was still a juicy story to be run on the reason Jasper Chiswell had hired private detectives.

None of Strike’s police contacts knew anything about the progress of their colleagues’ investigation into the case. Usually able to fall asleep under even the most unpropitious conditions, Strike found himself unusually restless and wakeful by night, listening to the increased noise from the London now heaving with Olympics visitors. The last time he had endured such a long stretch of sleeplessness had been his first week of consciousness after his leg had been borne off by the IED in Afghanistan. Then he had been kept awake by a tormenting itch impossible to scratch, because he felt it on his missing foot.

Strike hadn’t seen Lorelei since the night of the Paralympic reception. After leaving Charlotte in the street, he had set off for Trafalgar Square to try and locate Billy, with the result that he had been even later to dinner with Lorelei than he had expected. Tired, sore, frustrated at his failure to find Billy and jarred by the unexpected meeting with his ex, he had arrived at the curry house in the expectation, and perhaps the hope, that Lorelei would have already left.

However, she had not only been waiting patiently at the table, she had immediately wrong-footed him with what he mentally characterized as a strategic retreat. Far from forcing a discussion about the future of their relationship, she had apologized for what she claimed to have been a foolish and precipitate declaration of love in bed, which she knew had embarrassed him and which she sincerely regretted.

Strike, who had drunk most of a pint on sitting down, bolstering himself, as he had imagined, for the unpleasant task of explaining that he did not want their relationship to become either more serious or permanent, was stymied. Her claim that she had said “I love you” as a kind of cri de joie rendered his prepared speech useless, and given that she had looked very lovely in the lamp-lit restaurant, it had been easier and pleasanter to accept her explanation at face value rather than force a rupture that, clearly, neither of them wanted. They had texted and spoken a few times during the subsequent week apart, though nowhere near as often as he had talked to Robin. Lorelei had been perfectly understanding about his need to keep a low profile for a while once he explained that his late client had been the government minister who had suffocated in a plastic bag.

Lorelei had even been unfazed when he refused her invitation to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics with her, because he’d already agreed to spend the evening at Lucy and Greg’s. Strike’s sister was as yet unwilling to let Jack out of her sight, and had therefore declined Strike’s offer to take him to the Imperial War Museum over the weekend, offering dinner instead. When he explained to Lorelei how matters stood, Strike could tell that she was hoping that he would ask her to come with him to meet some of his family for the first time. He said, truthfully, that his motive for going alone was to spend time with the nephew whom he felt he had neglected, and Lorelei accepted this explanation good-naturedly, merely asking whether he was free the following night.

As the taxi bore him from Bromley South station towards Lucy and Greg’s, Strike found himself mulling the situation with Lorelei, because Lucy usually demanded a bulletin on his love life. This was one of the reasons he avoided these kinds of get-togethers. It troubled Lucy that her brother was still, at the age of nearly thirty-eight, unmarried. She had gone so far, on one embarrassing occasion, as to invite to dinner a woman whom she imagined he might fancy, which had taught him only that his sister grossly misjudged his taste and needs.

As the taxi bore him deeper and deeper into middle-class suburbia, Strike found himself face to face with the uncomfortable truth, which was that Lorelei’s willingness to accept the casualness of their current arrangement did not stem from a shared sense of disengagement, but from a desperation to keep him on almost any terms.

Staring out of the window at the roomy houses with double garages and neat lawns, his thoughts drifted to Robin, who called him daily when her husband was out, and then to Charlotte, holding lightly to his arm as she walked down the Lancaster House staircase in her spike-heeled boots. It had been convenient and pleasurable to have Lorelei in his life these past ten and a half months, affectionately undemanding, erotically gifted and pretending not to be in love with him. He could let the relationship continue, tell himself that he was, in that meaningless phrase, “seeing how things went,” or he could face the fact that he had merely postponed what must be done, and the longer he let things drift, the more mess and pain would result.

These reflections were hardly calculated to cheer him up, and as the taxi drew up outside his sister’s house, with the magnolia tree in the front garden, and the net curtain twitching excitedly, he felt an irrational resentment towards his sister, as though all of it was her fault.

Jack opened the front door before Strike could even knock. Given his state the last time Strike had seen him, Jack looked remarkably well, and the detective was torn between pleasure at his recovery, and annoyance that he hadn’t been allowed to take his nephew out, rather than making the long and inconvenient journey to Bromley.

However, Jack’s delight in Strike’s arrival, his eager questions about everything Strike remembered about their time together in hospital, because he himself had been glamorously unconscious, were touching, as was the fact that Jack insisted upon sitting next to his uncle at dinner, and monopolized his attention throughout. It was clear that Jack felt that they had become more closely bonded for each having passed through the tribulation of emergency surgery. He demanded so many details of Strike’s amputation that Greg put down his knife and fork and pushed away his plate with a nauseated expression. Strike had previously formed the impression that Jack, the middle son, was Greg’s least favorite. He took a slightly malicious pleasure in satisfying Jack’s curiosity, especially as he knew that Greg, who would usually have shut the conversation down, was exercising unusual restraint given Jack’s convalescent state. Unconscious of all undercurrents, Lucy beamed throughout, her eyes barely leaving Strike and Jack. She asked Strike nothing about his private life. All she seemed to ask was that he would be kind and patient with her son.

Uncle and nephew left the dinner table on excellent terms, Jack choosing a seat next to Strike on the sofa to watch the Olympics opening ceremony and chattering nonstop while they waited for the live broadcast to start, expressing the hope, among other things, that there would be guns, cannons and soldiers.

This innocent remark reminded Strike of Jasper Chiswell and his annoyance, reported by Robin, that Britain’s military prowess was not to be celebrated on this largest of national stages. This made Strike wonder whether Jimmy Knight was sitting in front of a TV somewhere, readying himself to sneer at what he had castigated as a carnival of capitalism.

Greg handed Strike a bottle of Heineken.

“Here we go!” said Lucy excitedly.

The live broadcast began with a countdown. A few seconds in, a numbered balloon failed to burst. Let it not be shit, thought Strike, suddenly forgetting everything else in an upsurge of patriotic paranoia.

But the opening ceremony had been so very much the reverse of shit that Strike stayed to watch the whole thing, voluntarily missing his last train, accepting the offer

of the sofa bed and breakfasting on Saturday morning with the family.

“Agency doing well, is it?” Greg asked him over the fry-up Lucy had cooked.

“Not bad,” said Strike.

He generally avoided discussing his business with Greg, who seemed to have been wrong-footed by Strike’s success. His brother-in-law had always given the impression of being irritated by Strike’s distinguished military career. As he fielded Greg’s questions about the structure of the business, the rights and responsibilities of his freelance hires, Robin’s special status as salaried partner and the potential for expansion, Strike detected, not for the first time, Greg’s barely disguised hope that there might be something Strike had forgotten or overlooked, too much the soldier to easily navigate the civilian business world.

“What’s the ultimate aim, though?” he asked, while Jack sat patiently at Strike’s side, clearly hoping to talk more about the military. “I suppose you’ll be looking to build up the business so that you don’t need to be out on the street? Direct them all from the office?”

“No,” said Strike. “If I’d wanted a desk job I’d’ve stayed in the army. The aim is to build up enough reliable employees that we can sustain a steady workload, and make some decent money. Short term, I want to build up enough money in the bank to see us through the lean times.”

“Seems under-ambitious,” said Greg. “With the free advertising you got after the Ripper case—”

“We’re not talking about that case now,” said Lucy sharply, from beside the frying pan, and with a glance at his son Greg fell silent, permitting Jack to re-enter the conversation with a question about assault courses.

Lucy, who had loved every moment of her brother’s visit, glowed with pleasure as she hugged him goodbye after breakfast.

“Let me know when I can take Jack out,” said Strike, while his nephew beamed up at him.

“I will, and thanks so much, Stick. I’ll never forget what you—”

“I didn’t do anything,” Strike said, thumping her gently on the back. “He did it himself. He’s tough, aren’t you, Jack? Thanks for a nice evening, Luce.”