Lethal White

  On the point of doubling back towards the main road, her eye was caught by the opening in a brick wall, which was flanked by gateposts topped with the strangest finials she had ever seen.

  A pair of gigantic, crumbling stone skulls sat on top of carved bones on gateposts, beyond which a tall square tower rose. The finials would have looked at home, Robin thought, moving closer to examine the empty black eye sockets, garnishing the front of a pirate’s mansion in some fantasy film. Peering through the opening, Robin saw a church and mossy tombs lying amid an empty rose garden in full bloom.

  She finished her ice cream while wandering around St. Nicholas’s, a strange amalgam of an old red-brick school grafted onto the rough stone tower. Finally she sat down on a wooden bench that had grown almost uncomfortably hot in the sun, stretched her aching back, drank in the delicious scent of warm roses and was suddenly transported, entirely against her will, back to the hotel suite in Yorkshire, almost a year ago, where a blood-red bouquet of roses had witnessed the aftermath of her abandonment of Matthew on the dance floor at her wedding reception.

  Matthew, his father, his Aunt Sue, Robin’s parents and brother Stephen had all converged on the bridal suite where Robin had retreated to escape Matthew’s fury. She had been changing out of her wedding dress when they had burst in, one after another, all demanding to know what was going on.

  A cacophony had ensued. Stephen, first to grasp what Matthew had done in deleting Strike’s calls, started to shout at him. Geoffrey was drunkenly demanding to know why Strike had been allowed to stay for dinner given he hadn’t RSVPed. Matthew was bellowing at all of them to butt out, that this was between him and Robin, while Aunt Sue said over and over, “I’ve never seen a bride walk out of her first dance. Never! I’ve never seen a bride walk out of her first dance.”

  Then Linda had finally grasped what Matthew had done, and began telling him off, too. Geoffrey had leapt to his son’s defense, demanding to know why Linda wanted her daughter to go back to a man who allowed her to get stabbed. Martin had arrived, extremely drunk, and had taken a swing at Matthew for reasons that nobody had ever explained satisfactorily, and Robin had retreated to the bathroom where, incredibly, given that she had barely eaten all day, she had thrown up.

  Five minutes later, she had been forced to let Matthew in because his nose was bleeding and there, with their families still shouting at each other in the next door bedroom, Matthew had asked her, a wodge of toilet roll pressed to his nostrils, to come with him to the Maldives, not as a honeymoon, not anymore, but to sort things out in private, “away,” as he put it thickly, gesturing towards the source of the yelling, “from this. And there’ll be press,” he added, accusingly. “They’ll be after you, for the Ripper business.”

  He was cold-eyed over the bloody toilet paper, furious with her for humiliating him on the dance floor, livid with Martin for hitting him. There was nothing romantic in his invitation to board the plane. He was proposing a summit, a chance for calm discussion. If, after serious consideration, they came to the conclusion that the marriage was a mistake, they would come home at the end of the fortnight, make a joint announcement, and go their separate ways.

  And at that moment, the wretched Robin, arm throbbing, shaken to the core by the feelings that had risen inside when she had felt Strike’s arms around her, knowing that the press might even now be trying to track her down, had seen Matthew, if not as an ally, at least as an escape. The idea of getting on a plane, of flying out of reach of the tsunami of curiosity, gossip, anger, solicitude and unsought advice that she knew would engulf her as long as she remained in Yorkshire, was deeply appealing.

  So they had left, barely speaking during the flight. What Matthew had been thinking through those long hours, she had never inquired. She knew only that she had thought about Strike. Over and again, she had returned to the memory of their embrace as she watched the clouds slide past the window.

  Am I in love with him? she had asked herself repeatedly, but without reaching any firm conclusion.

  Her deliberations on the subject had lasted days, an inner torment she could not reveal to Matthew as they walked on white beaches, discussing the tensions and resentments that lay between the two of them. Matthew slept on the living-room sofa at night, Robin in the net-draped double bed upstairs. Sometimes they argued, at other times they retreated into hurt and furious silences. Matthew was keeping tabs on Robin’s phone, wanting to know where it was, constantly picking it up and checking it, and she knew that he was looking for messages or calls from her boss.

  What made things worse was that there were none. Apparently Strike wasn’t interested in talking to her. The hug on the stairs, to which her thoughts kept scampering back like a dog to a blissfully pungent lamppost, seemed to have meant far less to him than it had to her.

  Night after night, Robin walked by herself on the beach, listening to the sea’s deep breathing, her injured arm sweating beneath its rubber protective brace, her phone left at the villa so that Matthew had no excuse to tail her and find out whether she was talking secretly to Strike.

  But on the seventh night, with Matthew back at the villa, she had decided to call Strike. Almost without acknowledging it to herself, she had formulated a plan. There was a landline at the bar and she knew the office number off by heart. It would be diverted to Strike’s mobile automatically. What she was going to say when she reached him, she didn’t know, but she was sure that if she heard him speak, the truth about her feelings would be revealed to her. As the phone rang in distant London, Robin’s mouth had become dry.

  The phone was answered, but nobody spoke for a few seconds. Robin listened to the sounds of movement, then heard a giggle, and then at last somebody spoke.

  “Hello? This is Cormy-Warmy—”

  As the woman broke into loud, raucous laughter, Robin heard Strike somewhere in the background, half-amused, half-annoyed and certainly drunk:

  “Gimme that! Seriously, give it—”

  Robin had slammed the receiver back onto its rest. Sweat had broken out on her face and chest: she felt ashamed, foolish, humiliated. He was with another woman. The laughter had been unmistakably intimate. The unknown girl had been teasing him, answering his mobile, calling him (how revolting) “Cormy.”

  She would deny phoning him, she resolved, if ever Strike asked her about the dropped call. She would lie through her teeth, pretend not to know what he was talking about…

  The sound of the woman on the phone had affected her like a hard slap. If Strike could have taken somebody to bed so soon after their hug—and she would have staked her life on the fact that the girl, whoever she was, had either just slept with Strike, or was about to—then he wasn’t sitting in London torturing himself about his true feelings for Robin Ellacott.

  The salt on her lips made her thirsty as she trudged through the night, wearing a deep groove in the soft white sand as the waves broke endlessly beside her. Wasn’t it possible, she asked herself, when she was cried out at last, that she was confusing gratitude and friendship with something deeper? That she had mistaken her love of detection for love of the man who had given her the job? She admired Strike, of course, and was immensely fond of him. They had passed through many intense experiences together, so that it was natural to feel close to him, but was that love?

  Alone in the balmy, mosquito-buzzing night, while the waves sighed on the shore and she cradled her aching arm, Robin reminded herself bleakly that she had had very little experience with men for a woman approaching her twenty-eighth birthday. Matthew was all she had ever known, her only sexual partner, a place of safety to her for ten long years now. If she had developed a crush on Strike—she employed the old-fashioned word her mother might have used—mightn’t it also be the natural side effect of the lack of variety and experimentation most women of her age had enjoyed? For so long faithful to Matthew, hadn’t she been bound to look up one day and remember that there were other lives, other choices? Hadn’t she been long overdue to not
ice that Matthew was not the only man in the world? Strike, she told herself, was simply the one with whom she had been spending the most time, so naturally it had been he onto whom she projected her wondering, her curiosity, her dissatisfaction with Matthew.

  Having, as she told herself, talked sense into that part of her that kept yearning for Strike, she reached a hard decision on the eighth evening of her honeymoon. She wanted to go home early and announce their separation to their families. She must tell Matthew that it had nothing to do with anybody else, but after agonizing and serious reflection, she did not believe they were well suited enough to continue in the marriage.

  She could still remember her feeling of mingled panic and dread as she had pushed open the cabin door, braced for a fight that had never materialized. Matthew had been sitting slumped on the sofa and when he saw her, he mumbled, “Mum?”

  His face, arms and legs had been shining with sweat. As she moved towards him, she saw an ugly black tracing of veins up the inside of his left arm, as though somebody had filled them with ink.

  “Matt?”

  Hearing her, he had realized that she was not his dead mother.

  “Don’t… feel well, Rob…”

  She had dashed for the phone, called the hotel, asked for a doctor. By the time he arrived, Matthew was drifting in and out of delirium. They had found the scratch on the back of his hand and, worried, concluded that he might have cellulitis, which Robin could tell, from the faces of the worried doctor and nurse, was serious. Matthew kept seeing figures moving in the shadowy corners of the cabin, people who weren’t there.

  “Who’s that?” he kept asking Robin. “Who’s that over there?”

  “There’s nobody else here, Matt.”

  Now she was holding his hand while the nurse and doctor discussed hospitalization.

  “Don’t leave me, Rob.”

  “I’m not going to leave you.”

  She had meant that she was going nowhere just now, not that she would stay forever, but Matthew had begun to cry.

  “Oh, thank God. I thought you were going to walk… I love you, Rob. I know I fucked up, but I love you…”

  The doctor gave Matthew oral antibiotics and went to make telephone calls. Delirious, Matthew clung to his wife, thanking her. Sometimes he drifted into a state where, again, he thought he saw shadows moving in the empty corners of the room, and twice more he muttered about his dead mother. Alone in the velvety blackness of the tropical night, Robin listened to winged insects colliding with the screens at the windows, alternately comforting and watching over the man she had loved since she was seventeen.

  It hadn’t been cellulitis. The infection had responded, over the next twenty-four hours, to antibiotics. As he recovered from the sudden, violent illness, Matthew watched her constantly, weak and vulnerable as she had never seen him, afraid, she knew, that her promise to stay had been temporary.

  “We can’t throw it all away, can we?” he had asked her hoarsely from the bed where the doctor had insisted he stay. “All these years?”

  She had let him talk about the good times, the shared times, and she had reminded herself about the giggling girl who had called Strike “Cormy.” She envisioned going home and asking for an annulment, because the marriage had still not been consummated. She remembered the money her parents had spent on the wedding day she had hated.

  Bees buzzed in the churchyard roses around her as Robin wondered, for the thousandth time, where she would be right now if Matthew hadn’t scratched himself on coral. Most of her now-terminated therapy sessions had been full of her need to talk about the doubts that had plagued her ever since she had agreed to remain married.

  In the months that had followed, and especially when she and Matthew were getting on reasonably well, it seemed to her that it had been right to give the marriage a fair trial, but she never forgot to think of it in terms of a trial, and this in itself sometimes led her, sleepless at night, to castigate herself for the pusillanimous failure to pull herself free once Matthew had recovered.

  She had never explained to Strike what had happened, why she had agreed to try and keep the marriage afloat. Perhaps that was why their friendship had grown so cold and distant. When she had returned from her honeymoon, it was to find Strike changed towards her—and perhaps, she acknowledged, she had changed towards him, too, because of what she had heard on the line when she had called, in desperation, from the Maldives bar.

  “Sticking with it, then, are you?” he had said roughly, after a glance at her ring finger.

  His tone had nettled her, as had the fact that he had never asked why she was trying, never asked about her home life from that point onwards, never so much as hinted that he remembered the hug on the stairs.

  Whether because Strike had arranged matters that way or not, they had not worked a case together since that of the Shacklewell Ripper. Imitating her senior partner, Robin had retreated into a cool professionalism.

  But sometimes she was afraid that he no longer valued her as he once had, now that she had proven herself so conventional and cowardly. There had been an awkward conversation a few months ago in which he had suggested that she take time off, asked whether she felt she was fully recovered after the knife attack. Taking this as a slight upon her bravery, afraid that she would again find herself sidelined, losing the only part of her life that she currently found fulfilling, she had insisted that she was perfectly well and redoubled her professional efforts.

  The muted mobile in her bag vibrated. Robin slipped her hand inside and looked to see who was calling. Strike. She also noticed that he had called earlier, while she was saying a joyful goodbye to the Villiers Trust Clinic.

  “Hi,” she said. “I missed you earlier, sorry.”

  “Not a problem. Move gone all right?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Just wanted to let you know, I’ve hired us a new subcontractor. Name of Sam Barclay.”

  “Great,” said Robin, watching a fly shimmering on a fat, blush-pink rose. “What’s his background?”

  “Army,” said Strike.

  “Military police?”

  “Er—not exactly.”

  As he told her the story of Sam Barclay, Robin found herself grinning.

  “So you’ve hired a dope-smoking painter and decorator?”

  “Vaping, dope vaping,” Strike corrected her, and Robin could tell that he was grinning, too. “He’s on a health kick. New baby.”

  “Well, he sounds… interesting.”

  She waited, but Strike did not speak.

  “I’ll see you Saturday night, then,” she said.

  Robin had felt obliged to invite Strike to her and Matthew’s house-warming party, because she had given their most regular and reliable subcontractor, Andy Hutchins, an invitation, and felt it would be odd to leave out Strike. She had been surprised when he had accepted.

  “Yeah, see you then.”

  “Is Lorelei coming?” Robin asked, striving for casualness, but not sure she had succeeded.

  Back in central London, Strike thought he detected a sardonic note in the question, as though challenging him to admit that his girlfriend had a ludicrous moniker. He would once have pulled her up on it, asked what her problem was with the name “Lorelei,” enjoyed sparring with her, but this was dangerous territory.

  “Yeah, she’s coming. The invitation was to both—”

  “Yes, of course it was,” said Robin hastily. “All right, I’ll see you—”

  “Hang on,” said Strike.

  He was alone in the office, because he had sent Denise home early. The temp had not wanted to leave: she was paid by the hour, after all, and only after Strike had assured her that he would pay for a full day had she gathered up all her possessions, talking nonstop all the while.

  “Funny thing happened this afternoon,” said Strike.

  Robin listened intently, without interrupting, to Strike’s vivid account of the brief visit of Billy. By the end of it, she had forgotte
n to worry about Strike’s coolness. Indeed, he now sounded like the Strike of a year ago.

  “He was definitely mentally ill,” said Strike, his eyes on the clear sky beyond the window. “Possibly psychotic.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I know,” said Strike. He picked up the pad from which Billy had ripped his half-written address and turned it absently in his free hand. “Is he mentally ill, so he thinks he saw a kid strangled? Or is he mentally ill and he saw a kid strangled?”

  Neither spoke for a while, during which time both turned over Billy’s story in their minds, knowing that the other was doing the same. This brief, companionable spell of reflection ended abruptly when a cocker spaniel, which Robin had not noticed as it came snuffling through the roses, laid its cold nose without warning on her bare knee and she shrieked.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Nothing—a dog—”

  “Where are you?”

  “In a graveyard.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just exploring the area. I’d better go,” she said, getting to her feet. “There’s another flat-pack waiting for me at home.”

  “Right you are,” said Strike, with a return to his usual briskness. “See you Saturday.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said the cocker spaniel’s elderly owner, as Robin slid her mobile back into her bag. “Are you frightened of dogs?”

  “Not at all,” said Robin, smiling and patting the dog’s soft golden head. “He surprised me, that’s all.”

  As she headed back past the giant skulls towards her new home, Robin thought about Billy, whom Strike had described with such vividness that Robin felt as though she had met him, too.

  So deeply absorbed in her thoughts was she, that for the first time all week, Robin forgot to glance up at the White Swan pub as she passed it. High above the street, on the corner of the building, was a single carved swan, which reminded Robin, every time she passed it, of her calamitous wedding day.

  4

  But what do you propose to do in the town, then?

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm