Lethal White

“So you’re Geraint’s alibi for the time Jasper Chiswell died?”

“I suppose so.”

“And he’s yours.”

“Why would I want Jasper Chiswell dead?” asked Aamir.

“That’s a good question,” said Strike.

“I barely knew the man,” said Aamir.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“So what made him quote Catullus at you, and mention Fate, and intimate in front of a room full of people that he knew things about your private life?”

There was a long pause. Again, Aamir’s eye twitched.

“That didn’t happen,” he said.

“Really? My partner—”

“She’s lying. Chiswell didn’t know anything about my private life. Nothing.”

Strike heard the numb drone of a hoover next door. He had been right. The walls were not thick.

“I’ve seen you once before,” Strike told Mallik, who looked more frightened than ever. “Jimmy Knight’s meeting in East Ham, couple of months ago.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mallik. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else.” Then, unconvincingly, “Who’s Jimmy Knight?”

“OK, Aamir,” said Strike, “if that’s how you want to play it, there’s no point going on. Could I use your bathroom?”

“What?”

“Need a pee. Then I’ll clear out, leave you in peace.”

Mallik clearly wanted to refuse, but seemed unable to find a reason to do so.

“All right,” said Aamir. “But—”

A thought seemed to have occurred to him.

“—wait. I need to move—I was soaking some socks in the sink. Stay here.”

“Right you are,” said Strike.

Aamir left the room. Strike wanted an excuse to poke around upstairs for clues to the entity or activity that might have caused animal noises loud enough to disturb the neighbors, but the sound of Aamir’s footsteps told him that the bathroom lay beyond the kitchen on the ground floor.

A couple of minutes later, Aamir returned.

“It’s through here.”

He led Strike down the hall, through a nondescript, bare kitchen, and pointed him into the bathroom.

Strike entered, closed and locked the door, then placed his hand at the bottom of the sink. It was dry. The walls of the bathroom were pink and matched the pink bathroom suite. Grab rails beside the toilet and a floor-to-ceiling rail at the end of the bath suggested that this had been, some time in the recent past, the home of a frail or disabled person.

What was it that Aamir had wanted to remove or conceal before the detective entered? Strike opened the bathroom cabinet. It contained very little other than a young man’s basic necessities: shaving kit, deodorant and aftershave.

Closing the cabinet, Strike saw his own reflection swing into view and, over his shoulder, the back of the door, where a thick navy toweling robe had been hung up carelessly, suspended from the arm hole rather than the loop designed for that purpose.

Flushing the toilet to maintain the fiction that he was too busy to nose around, Strike approached the dressing gown and felt the empty pockets. As he did so, the precariously placed robe slid off the hook.

Strike took a step backwards, the better to appreciate what had just been revealed. Somebody had gouged a crude, four-legged figure into the bathroom door, splintering the wood and paint. Strike turned on the cold tap, in case Aamir was listening, took a picture of the carving with his mobile, turned off the tap and replaced the toweling robe as he had found it.

Aamir was waiting at the end of the kitchen.

“All right if I take those papers with me?” Strike asked, and without waiting for an answer he returned to the sitting room and picked up the Facebook pages.

“What made you leave the Foreign Office, anyway?” he asked casually.

“I… didn’t enjoy it.”

“How did it come about, you working for the Winns?”

“We’d met,” said Aamir. “Della offered me a job. I took it.”

It happened, very occasionally, that Strike felt scruples about what he was driven to ask during an interview.

“I couldn’t help noticing,” he said, holding up the wad of printed material, “that you seemed to drop out of sight of your family for quite a long time after you left the Foreign Office. No more appearances in group shots, not even on your mother’s seventieth birthday. Your sister stopped mentioning you, for a long time.”

Aamir said nothing.

“It was as if you’d been disowned,” said Strike.

“You can get out, now,” said Aamir, but Strike didn’t move.

“When your sister posted this picture of the pair of you in the pizza place,” Strike continued, unfolding the last sheet again, “the responses were—”

“I want you to leave,” repeated Aamir, more loudly.

“‘What you doing with that scumbag?’ ‘Your dad know you still seeing him?’” Strike read aloud from the messages beneath the picture of Aamir and his sister. “‘If my brother permitted liwat—’”

Aamir charged at him, sending a wild right-handed punch to the side of Strike’s head that the detective parried. But the studious-looking Aamir was full of the kind of blind rage that could make a dangerous opponent of almost any man. Tearing a nearby lamp from its socket he swung it so violently that had Strike not ducked in time, the lamp base could have shattered, not on the wall that half-divided the sitting room, but on his face.

“Enough!” bellowed Strike, as Aamir dropped the remnants of the lamp and came at him again. Strike fended off the windmilling fists, hooked his prosthetic leg around the back of Aamir’s leg, and threw him to the floor. Swearing under his breath, because this action had done his aching stump no good at all, Strike straightened up, panting, and said:

“Any more and I’ll fucking deck you.”

Aamir rolled out of Strike’s reach and got to his feet. His glasses were hanging from one ear. Hands shaking, he took them off and examined the broken hinge. His eyes were suddenly huge.

“Aamir, I’m not interested in your private life,” panted Strike, “I’m interested in who you’re covering up for—”

“Get out,” whispered Aamir.

“—because if the police decide it’s murder, everything you’re trying to hide will come out. Murder inquiries respect no one’s privacy.”

“Get out!”

“All right. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

At the front door, Strike turned one last time to face Aamir, who had followed him into the hall, and braced himself as Strike came to a halt.

“Who carved that mark on the inside of your bathroom door, Aamir?”

“Out!”

Strike knew there was no point persisting. As soon as he had crossed the threshold, the front door slammed behind him.

Several houses away, the wincing Strike leaned up against a tree to take the weight off his prosthesis, and texted Robin the picture he had just taken, along with the message:

Remind you of anything?

He lit a cigarette and waited for Robin’s response, glad of an excuse to remain stationary, because quite apart from the pain in his stump, the side of his head was throbbing. In dodging the lamp he had hit it against the wall, and his back was aching because of the effort it had taken to throw the younger man to the floor.

Strike glanced back at the turquoise door. If he was honest, something else was hurting: his conscience. He had entered Mallik’s house with the intention of shocking or intimidating him into the truth about his relationship with Chiswell and the Winns. While a private detective could not afford the doctor’s dictum “first, do no harm,” Strike generally attempted to extract truth without causing unnecessary damage to the host. Reading out the comments at the bottom of that Facebook post had been a low blow. Brilliant, unhappy, undoubtedly tied to the Winns by something other than choice, Aamir Mallik’s eruption into viol

ence had been the reaction of a desperate man. Strike didn’t need to consult the papers in his pocket to recall the picture of Mallik standing proudly in the Foreign Office, about to embark on a stellar career with his first-class degree with his mentor, Sir Christopher Barrowclough-Burns, by his side.

His mobile rang.

“Where on earth did you find that carving?” said Robin.

“The back of Aamir’s bathroom door, hidden under a dressing gown.”

“You’re joking.”

“No. What does it look like to you?”

“The white horse on the hill over Woolstone,” said Robin.

“Well, that’s a relief,” said Strike, elbowing himself off the supporting tree and limping off along the street again. “I was worried I’d started hallucinating the bloody things.”

47

… I want to try and play my humble part in the struggles of life.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Robin emerged from Camden Town station at half past eight on Friday morning and set off for the jewelry shop where she was to have her day’s trial, furtively checking her appearance in every window that she passed.

In the months following the trial of the Shacklewell Ripper, she had become adept at makeup techniques such as altering the shape of her eyebrows or over-painting her lips in vermillion, which made a significant difference to her appearance when coupled with wigs and colored contact lenses, but she had never before worn as much makeup as today. Her eyes, in which she was wearing dark brown contact lenses, were heavily rimmed with black kohl, her lips painted pale pink, her nails a metallic gray. Having only one conventional hole in each earlobe, she had bought a couple of cheap ear cuffs to simulate a more adventurous approach to piercing. The short black second-hand dress she had bought at the local Oxfam shop in Deptford still smelled slightly fusty, even though she had run it through the washing machine the previous day, and she wore it with thick black tights and a pair of flat black lace-up boots in spite of the warmth of the morning. Thus attired, she hoped that she resembled the other goth and emo girls who frequented Camden, an area of London that Robin had rarely visited and which she associated mainly with Lorelei and her vintage clothes store.

She had named her new alter ego Bobbi Cunliffe. When undercover, it was best to assume names with a personal association, to which you responded instinctively. Bobbi sounded like Robin, and indeed people had sometimes tried to abbreviate her name that way, most notably her long-ago flirt in a temporary office, and her brother, Martin, when he wished to annoy her. Cunliffe was Matthew’s surname.

To her relief, he had left for work early that day, because he was auditing an office out in Barnet, leaving Robin free to complete her physical transformation without undermining remarks and displeasure that she was, again, going undercover. Indeed, she thought she might derive a certain pleasure from using her married name—the first time she had ever offered it as her own—while embodying a girl whom Matthew would instinctively dislike. The older he got, the more Matthew was aggravated by and contemptuous of people who did not dress, think or live as he did.

The Wiccan’s jewelry shop, Triquetra, was tucked away in Camden Market. Arriving outside at a quarter to nine, Robin found the stallholders of Camden Lock Place already busy, but the store locked up and empty. After a five-minute wait, her employer arrived, puffing slightly. A large woman whom Robin guessed to be in her late fifties, she had straggly dyed black hair that showed half an inch of silver root, had the same savage approach to eyeliner as Bobbi Cunliffe and wore a long green velvet dress.

During the cursory interview that had led to today’s trial, the shop owner had asked very few questions, instead speaking at length about the husband of thirty years who had just left her to live in Thailand, the neighbor who was suing her over a boundary dispute and the stream of unsatisfactory and ungrateful employees who had walked out on Triquetra to take other jobs. Her undisguised desire to extract the maximum amount of work for the minimum amount of pay, coupled with her outpourings of self-pity, made Robin wonder why anybody had ever wanted to work for her in the first place.

“You’re punctual,” she observed, when within earshot. “Good. Where’s the other one?”

“I don’t know,” said Robin.

“I don’t need this,” said the owner, with a slight note of hysteria. “Not on the day I’ve got to meet Brian’s lawyer!”

She unlocked the door and showed Robin into the shop, which was the size of a large kiosk, and as she raised her arms to start pulling up blinds, the smell of body odor and patchouli mingled with the dusty, incense-scented air. Daylight fell into the shop like a solid thing, rendering everything there more insubstantial and shabby by comparison. Dull silver necklaces and earrings hung in racks on the dark purple walls, many of them featuring pentagrams, peace symbols and marijuana leaves, while glass hookahs mingled with tarot cards, black candles, essential oils and ceremonial daggers on black shelves behind the counter.

“We’ve got millions of extra tourists coming through Camden right now,” said the owner, bustling around the back of the counter, “and if she doesn’t turn—there you are,” she said, as Flick, who looked sulky, sloped inside. Flick was wearing a yellow and green Hezbollah T-shirt and ripped jeans, and carrying a large leather messenger bag.

“Tube was late,” she said.

“Well, I managed to get here all right, and so did Bibi!”

“Bobbi,” Robin corrected her, deliberately broadening her Yorkshire accent.

She didn’t want to pretend to be a Londoner this time. It was best not to have to talk about schools and locales that Flick might know.

“—well, I need you two to be on top of things all—the—time,” said the owner, beating out the last three words with one hand against the other. “All right, Bibi—”

“—Bobbi—”

“—yes, come here and see how the till works.”

Robin had no difficulty grasping how the till worked, because she had had a Saturday job in her teens at a clothes shop in Harrogate. It was just as well that she did not need longer instruction, because a steady stream of shoppers began to arrive about ten minutes after they opened. To Robin’s slight surprise, because there was nothing in the shop that she would have cared to buy, many visitors to Camden seemed to feel that their trip would be incomplete without a pair of pewter earrings, or a pentagram-embossed candle, or one of the small hessian bags that lay in a basket beside the till, each of which purported to contain a magic charm.

“All right, I need to be off,” the owner announced at eleven, while Flick was serving a tall German woman who was dithering between two packs of tarot cards. “Don’t forget: one of you needs to be focused on stock all the time, in case of pilfering. My friend Eddie will be keeping an eye out,” she said, pointing at the stall selling old LPs just outside. “Twenty minutes each for lunch, taken separately. Don’t forget,” she repeated ominously, “Eddie’s watching.”

She left in a whirl of velvet and body odor. The German customer departed with her tarot cards and Flick slammed the till drawer shut, the noise echoing in the temporarily empty shop.

“Old Steady Eddie,” she said venomously. “He doesn’t give a shit. He could rob her blind and he wouldn’t care. Cow,” added Flick for good measure.

Robin laughed and Flick seemed gratified.

“What’s tha name?” asked Robin, in broad Yorkshire. “She never said.”

“Flick,” said Flick. “You’re Bobbi, yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Robin.

Flick took out her mobile from her messenger bag, which she had stowed beneath the counter, checked it, appeared not to see what she had hoped to see, then stuffed it out of sight again.

“You must’ve been hard up for work, were you?” she asked Robin.

“Had to take what I could,” Robin said. “I were sacked.”

“Yeah?”

“Fookin’ Amazon,” said Robin.

“Those tax-do

dging bastards,” said Flick, slightly more interested. “What happened?”

“Didn’t make my daily rate.”

Robin had lifted her story directly from a recent news report about working conditions in one of the retail company’s warehouses: the relentless pressure to make targets, packing and scanning thousands of products a day under unforgiving pressure from supervisors. Flick’s expression wavered between sympathy and anger as Robin talked.

“That’s outrageous!” she said, when Robin had finished.

“Yeah,” said Robin, “and no union or nothing, obviously. Me dad were a big trade union man back in Yorkshire.”

“Bet he was furious.”

“He’s dead,” said Robin, unblushingly. “Lungs. Ex-miner.”

“Oh, shit,” said Flick. “Sorry.”

She was looking upon Robin with respect and interest now.

“See, you’ll have been a worker, not an employee. That’s how the bastards get away with it.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Fewer statutory rights,” said Flick. “You might have a case against them if they deducted from your wages, though.”

“Dunno if I could prove that,” said Robin. “How come you know all this?”

“I’m pretty active in the labor movement,” said Flick, with a shrug. She hesitated, “And my mother’s an employment lawyer.”

“Yeah?” said Robin, allowing herself to sound politely surprised.

“Yeah,” said Flick, picking her nails, “but we don’t get on. I don’t see any of my family, actually. They don’t like my partner. Or my politics.”

She smoothed out the Hezbollah T-shirt and showed Robin.

“What, are they Tories?” asked Robin.

“Might as well be,” said Flick. “They loved bloody Blair.”

Robin felt her phone vibrate in the pocket of her second-hand dress.

“Is there a bog anywhere here?”

“Through here,” said Flick, pointing to a well-hidden purple painted door with more racks of jewelry nailed to it.

Beyond the purple door Robin found a small cubbyhole with a cracked, dirty window. A safe sat beside a dilapidated kitchen unit with a kettle, a couple of cleaning products and a stiff J-cloth on top. There was no room to sit down and barely room to stand, because a grubby toilet had been plumbed into the corner.