Lethal White

“I’ve got Andy trying to find the sister he’s still on good terms with.”

“And what are you up to?”

“I’ve just been reading the Real Socialist Party website.”

“Why?”

“Jimmy gives quite a lot away in his blog posts. Places he’s been and things he’s seen. You OK to stay on Dodgy until Friday?”

“Actually,” said Robin, “I was going to ask whether I could take a couple of days off to deal with some personal business.”

“Oh,” said Strike, brought up short.

“I’ve got a couple of appointments I need—I’d rather not miss,” said Robin.

It wasn’t convenient to Strike to have to cover Dodgy Doc himself, partly because of the continuing pain in his leg, but mainly because he was eager to continue chasing down confirmation of his theory on the Chiswell case. This was also very short notice to ask for two days’ leave. On the other hand, Robin had just indicated a willingness to sacrifice her weekend to a probable wildgoose chase into the dell.

“Yeah, OK. Everything all right?”

“Fine, thanks. I’ll let you know if anything interesting happens with Dodgy. Otherwise, we should probably leave London at elevenish on Saturday.”

“Barons Court again?”

“Would it be all right if you meet me at Wembley Stadium station? It would just be easier, because of where I’m going to be on Friday night.”

This, too, was inconvenient: a journey for Strike of twice the length and involving a change of Tube.

“Yeah, OK,” he said again.

After Robin had hung up, he remained in her chair for a while, pondering their conversation.

She had been noticeably tight-lipped about the nature of the appointments that were so important that she didn’t want to miss them. He remembered how particularly angry Matthew had sounded in the background of his calls to Robin, to discuss their pressured, unstable and occasionally dangerous job. She had twice sounded distinctly underwhelmed about the prospect of digging in the hard ground at the bottom of the dell, and now asked to drive the BMW rather than the tank-like Land Rover.

He had almost forgotten his suspicion of a couple of months ago, that Robin might be trying to get pregnant. Into his mind swam the vision of Charlotte’s swollen belly at the dinner table. Robin wasn’t the kind of woman who’d be able to walk away from her child as soon as it left the womb. If Robin was pregnant…

Logical and methodical as he usually was, and aware in one part of himself that he was theorizing on scant data, Strike’s imagination nevertheless showed him Matthew, the father-to-be, listening in on Robin’s tense request for time off for scans and medical checks, gesticulating angrily at her that the time had come to stop, to go easy on herself, to take better care.

Strike turned back to Jimmy Knight’s blog, but it took him a little longer than usual to discipline his troubled mind back into obedience.

61

Oh, you can tell me. You and I are such friends, you know.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Fellow Tube travelers gave Strike a slightly wider berth than was necessary on Saturday morning, even allowing for his kit bag. He generally managed to cut a path easily through crowds, given his bulk and his boxer’s profile, but the way he was muttering and cursing as he struggled up the stairs at Wembley Stadium station—the lifts weren’t working—made passersby extra careful to neither jostle nor impede him.

The primary reason for Strike’s bad mood was Mitch Patterson, whom he had spotted that morning from the office window, skulking in a doorway, dressed in jeans and a hoodie entirely unsuited to his age and bearing. Puzzled and angered by the private detective’s reappearance, but having no route out of the building except by the front door, Strike had called a cab to wait for him at the end of the street, and left the building only once it was in position. Patterson’s expression when Strike had said “Morning, Mitch” might have amused Strike, if he hadn’t been so insulted that Patterson had thought he could get away with watching the agency in person.

All the way to Warren Street station, where he asked the cab to drop him, Strike had been hyper-alert, worried that Patterson had been there as a distraction or decoy, enabling a second, less obtrusive tail to follow him. Even now, as he clambered, panting, off the top of the stairs at Wembley, he turned to scrutinize the travelers for the one who ducked down, turned back or hastily concealed their face. None of them did so. On balance, Strike concluded that Patterson had been working alone; victim, perhaps, of one of the manpower problems so familiar to Strike. The fact that Patterson had chosen to cover the job rather than forgo it suggested that somebody was paying him well.

Strike hoisted his kit bag more securely onto his shoulder and set off towards the exit.

Having pondered the question during his inconvenient journey to Wembley, Strike could think of three reasons why Patterson had reappeared. The first was that the press had got wind of some interesting new development in the Met investigation into Chiswell’s death, and that this had led a newspaper to rehire Patterson, his remit to find out what Strike was up to and how much he knew.

The second possibility was that someone had paid Patterson to stalk Strike, in the hopes of impeding his movements or hampering his business. That suggested that Patterson’s employer was somebody that Strike was currently investigating, in which case, Patterson doing the job himself made sense: the whole point would be to destabilize Strike by letting him know that he was being watched.

The third possible reason for Patterson’s renewed interest in him was the one that bothered Strike most, because he had a feeling it was most likely to be the true one. He now knew that he had been spotted in Franco’s with Charlotte. His informant was Izzy, whom he had called in the hope of fleshing out details of the theory he hadn’t yet confided to anyone.

“So, I hear you had dinner with Charlotte!” she had blurted, before he had managed to pose a question.

“There was no dinner. I sat with her for twenty minutes because she was feeling ill, then left.”

“Oh—sorry,” said Izzy, cowed by his tone. “I—I wasn’t prying—Roddy Fforbes was in Franco’s and he spotted the pair of you…”

If Roddy Fforbes, whoever he was, was spreading it around London that Strike was taking his heavily pregnant, married ex-fiancée out for dinner while her husband was in New York, the tabloids would definitely be interested, because wild, beautiful and aristocratic Charlotte was news. Her name had peppered gossip columns since she was sixteen years old, her various tribulations—running away from school, the stints in rehab and in psychiatric clinics—were well documented. It was even possible that Patterson had been hired by Jago Ross, who could certainly afford it. If the side effect of policing his wife’s movements was ruining Strike’s business, Ross would undoubtedly consider that a bonus.

Robin, who was sitting a short distance away from the station in the Land Rover, saw Strike emerge onto the pavement, kit bag over his shoulder, and registered that he looked as bad-tempered as she had ever seen him. He lit a cigarette, scanning the street until his eye found the Land Rover at the end of a series of parked vehicles and he began to limp, unsmiling, towards her. Robin, whose own mood was perilously low, could only assume that he was angry at having to make the long trip to Wembley with what appeared to be a heavy bag and a sore leg.

She had been awake since four o’clock that morning, unable to get back to sleep, cramped and unhappy on Vanessa’s hard sofa, thinking about her future, and about the row she had had with her mother by phone. Matthew had called the house in Masham, trying to reach her, and Linda was not only desperately worried, but furious that Robin hadn’t told her what was going on first.

“Where are you staying? With Strike?”

“Of course I’m not staying with Strike, why on earth would I be—?”

“Where, then?”

“With a different friend.”

“Who? Why didn’t you tell us? Wha

t are you going to do? I want to come down to London to see you!”

“Please don’t,” said Robin through gritted teeth.

Her guilt about the expense of the wedding she and Matthew had put her parents to, and about the embarrassment her mother and father were about to endure in explaining to their friends that her marriage was over barely a year after it had begun, weighed heavily on her, but she couldn’t bear the prospect of Linda badgering and cajoling, treating her as though she were fragile and damaged. The last thing she needed right now was her mother suggesting that she go back to Yorkshire, to be cocooned in the bedroom that had witnessed some of the worst times of her life.

After two days viewing a multitude of densely packed houses, Robin had put down a deposit on a box room in a house in Kilburn, where she would have five other housemates, and into which she would be able to move the following week. Every time she thought of the place, her stomach turned over in trepidation and misery. At the age of almost twenty-eight, she would be the oldest housemate.

Trying to propitiate Strike, she got out of the car and offered to help him with the kit bag, but he grunted at her that he could manage. As the canvas hit the metal floor of the Land Rover she heard a loud clattering of heavy metal tools and experienced a nervous spasm in her stomach.

Strike, who had taken fleeting stock of Robin’s appearance, had his worst suspicions strengthened. Pale, with shadows beneath her eyes, she managed to look both puffy and drawn and also seemed to have lost weight in the few days since he’d last seen her. The wife of his old army friend Graham Hardacre had been hospitalized in the early stages of pregnancy because of persistent vomiting. Perhaps one of Robin’s important appointments had been to address that problem.

“You all right?” Strike asked Robin roughly, buckling up his seatbelt.

“Fine,” she said, for what felt like the umpteenth time, taking his shortness as annoyance at his long Tube journey.

They drove out of London without talking. Finally, when they had reached the M40, Strike said:

“Patterson’s back. He was watching the office this morning.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Has there been anyone round your place?”

“Not that I know of,” said Robin, after an almost imperceptible hesitation. Perhaps this was what Matthew had been calling her about, when he had tried to reach her in Masham.

“You didn’t have any trouble getting away this morning?”

“No,” said Robin, honestly enough.

In the days that had elapsed since she’d walked out, she had imagined telling Strike that her marriage was over, but had not yet been able to find a form of words that she knew she would be able to deliver with the requisite calm. This frustrated her: it ought, she told herself, to be easy. He was the friend and colleague who had been there when she’d called off the wedding and who knew about Matthew’s previous infidelity with Sarah. She ought to be able to tell him casually mid-conversation, as she had with Raphael.

The problem was that on the rare occasions when she and Strike had shared revelations about their love lives, it had been when one of them had been drunk. Otherwise, a profound reserve on such matters had always lain between them, in spite of Matthew’s paranoid conviction that they spent most of their working lives in flirtation.

But there was more to it than that. Strike was the man she had hugged on the stairs at her wedding reception, the man with whom she had imagined walking out on her husband before the marriage could be consummated, the man for whom she had spent nights of her honeymoon wearing a groove in the white sand as she paced alone, wondering whether she was in love with him. She was afraid of giving herself away, afraid of betraying what she had thought and felt, because she was sure that if he ever had the merest suspicion of what a disruptive factor he had been, in both the beginning and the end of her marriage, it would surely taint their working relationship, as certainly as it would surely prejudice her job if he ever knew about the panic attacks.

No, she must appear to be what he was—self-contained and stoic, able to absorb trauma and limp on, ready to face whatever life flung at her, even what lay at the bottom of the dell, without flinching or turning away.

“So what d’you think Patterson’s up to?” she asked.

“Time will tell. Did your appointments go all right?”

“Yes,” said Robin, and to distract herself from the thought of her tiny new rented room, and the student couple who had shown her around, casting sideways glances at the strangely grown-up woman who was coming to live with them, she said, “There are biscuits in the bag back there. No tea, sorry, but we can stop if you like.”

The thermos was back in Albury Street, one of the things she had forgotten to sneak out of the house when she had returned while Matthew was at work.

“Thanks,” said Strike, though without much enthusiasm. He was wondering whether the reappearance of snacks, given his self-proclaimed diet, might not be further proof of his partner’s pregnancy.

Robin’s phone rang in her pocket. She ignored it. Twice that morning, she had received calls from the same unknown number and she was afraid that it might be Matthew who, finding himself blocked, had borrowed another phone.

“D’you want to get that?” asked Strike, watching her pale, set profile.

“Er—not while I’m driving.”

“I can answer it, if you want.”

“No,” she said, a little too quickly.

The mobile stopped ringing but, almost at once, began again. More than ever convinced that it was Matthew, Robin took the phone out of her jacket, saying:

“I think I know who it is, and I don’t want to talk to them just now. Once they hang up, could you mute it?”

Strike took the mobile.

“It’s been put through from the office number. I’ll turn it to speakerphone,” said Strike helpfully, given that the ancient Land Rover didn’t have a functioning heater, let alone Bluetooth, and he did so, holding the mobile close to her mouth, so that she could make herself heard over the rattle and growl of the drafty vehicle.

“Hello, Robin here. Who’s this?”

“Robin? Don’t you mean Venetia?” said a Welsh voice.

“Is that Mr. Winn?” said Robin, eyes on the road, while Strike held the mobile steady for her.

“Yes, you nasty little bitch, it is.”

Robin and Strike glanced at each other, startled. Gone was the unctuous, lascivious Winn, keen to charm and impress.

“Got what you were after, haven’t you, eh? Wriggling up and down that corridor, sticking your tits in where they weren’t wanted, ‘oh, Mr. Winn—’” he imitated her the same way Matthew did, high-pitched and imbecilic, “‘—oh, help me, Mr. Winn, should I do charity or should I do politics, let me bend a bit lower over the desk, Mr. Winn.’ How many men have you trapped that way, how far do you go—?”

“Have you got something to tell me, Mr. Winn?” asked Robin loudly, talking over him. “Because if you’ve just called to insult me—”

“Oh, I’ve got plenty to bloody tell you, plenty to bloody tell you,” shouted Winn. “You are going to pay, Miss Ellacott, for what you’ve done to me, pay for the damage you’ve done to me and my wife, you don’t get off that easily, you broke the law in this office and I’m going to see you in court, do you understand me?” He was becoming almost hysterical. “We’ll see how well your wiles work on a judge, shall we? Low-cut top and ‘oh, I think I’m overheating—’”

A white light seemed to be encroaching on the edges of Robin’s vision, so that the road ahead turned tunnel-like.

“NO!” she shouted, taking both hands off the wheel before slamming them back down again, her arms shaking. It was the “no” she had given Matthew, a “no” of such vehemence and force that it brought Geraint Winn up short in exactly the same way.

“Nobody made you stroke my hair and pat my back and ogle my chest, Mr. Winn, that wasn’t what I wanted, though I’m sure it gives you a bit

of a kick to think it was—”

“Robin!” said Strike, but he might as well have been one more creak of the car’s ancient chassis, and she ignored, too, Geraint’s sudden interjection, “Who else is there? Was that Strike?”

“—you’re a creep, Mr. Winn, a thieving creep who stole from a charity and I’m not only happy I got the goods on you, I’ll be delighted to tell the world you’re flicking out pictures of your dead daughter while you’re trying to peer down young women’s shirts—”

“How dare you!” gasped Winn, “are there no depths—you dare mention Rhiannon—it’s all going to come out, Samuel Murape’s family—”

“Screw you and screw your bloody grudges!” shouted Robin. “You’re a pervy, thieving—”

“If you’ve got anything else to say, I suggest you put it in writing, Mr. Winn,” Strike shouted into the mobile, while Robin, hardly knowing what she was doing, continued to yell insults at Winn from a distance. Ending the call with a jab of the finger, Strike grabbed the wheel as Robin again removed both hands from it to gesticulate.

“Fuck’s sake!” said Strike, “pull over—pull over, now!”

She did as he told her automatically, the adrenaline disorientating her like alcohol, and when the Land Rover lurched to a halt she threw off her seatbelt and got out on the hard shoulder, cars whizzing past her. Hardly knowing what she was doing she began to stumble away from the Land Rover, tears of rage sliding down her face, trying to outpace the panic now lapping at her, because she had just irrevocably alienated a man they might need to talk to again, a man who had already been talking about revenge, who might even be the one paying Patterson…

“Robin!”

Now, she thought, Strike, too, would think her a flake, a damaged fool who should never have taken on this line of work, the one who ran when things got tough. It was that which made her wheel around to face him as he hobbled along the hard shoulder after her, and she wiped her face roughly on her sleeve and said, before he could tell her off, “I know I shouldn’t have lost it, I know I’ve fucked up, I’m sorry.” But his answer was lost in the pounding in her ears and, as though it had been waiting for her to stop running, the panic now engulfed her. Dizzy, unable to order her thoughts, she collapsed on the verge, dry bristles of grass prickling through her jeans as, eyes shut and head in hands, she tried to breathe herself back to normality as the traffic zoomed past.