Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

He released her at once, as she had known he would, with an expression compounded of anger and triumph. Suddenly, she knew that she had not fooled him when they had had sex on their anniversary weekend, and paradoxically that made her feel tender towards him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m tired.”

“Yeah,” said Matthew. “So am I.”

And he had walked out of the room, leaving Robin with a chill down her back where the green dress had torn.

Where the hell was Strike? It was five past nine and she wanted company. She also wanted to know what had happened after he left the reception with Charlotte. Anything would be preferable to sitting here, thinking about Matthew.

As though the thought had summoned him, her phone rang.

“Sorry,” he said, before she could speak. “Suspicious package at bloody Green Park. I’ve been stuck on the Tube for twenty minutes and I’ve only just got reception. I’ll be there as quick as I can, but you might have to start without me.”

“Oh, God,” said Robin, closing her tired eyes.

“Sorry,” Strike repeated, “I’m on my way. Got something to tell you, actually. Funny thing happened last night—oh, hang on, we’re moving. See you shortly.”

He hung up, leaving Robin with the prospect of having to deal alone with the first effusions of Jasper Chiswell’s anger, and still grappling formless feelings of dread and misery that swirled around a dark, graceful woman who was sixteen years’ worth of knowledge and memories ahead of her when it came to Cormoran Strike, which, Robin told herself, shouldn’t matter, for God’s sake, haven’t you got enough problems without worrying about Strike’s love life, it’s nothing whatsoever to do with you…

She felt a sudden guilty prickle around her lips, where Strike’s missed kiss had landed outside the hospital. As though she could wash it away, she downed the dregs of her coffee, got up and left the café for the broad, straight street, which comprised two symmetrical lines of identical nineteenth-century houses.

She walked briskly, not because she was in any hurry to bear the brunt of Chiswell’s anger and disappointment, but because activity helped dispel her uncomfortable thoughts.

Arriving outside Chiswell’s house precisely on time, she lingered for a few hopeful seconds beside the glossy black front door, just in case Strike were to appear at the last moment. He didn’t. Robin therefore steadied herself, walked up the three clean white steps from the pavement and knocked on the front door, which was on the latch and opened a few inches. A man’s muffled voice shouted something that might have been “come in.”

Robin passed into a small, dingy hall dominated by vertiginous stairs. The olive-green wallpaper was drab and peeling in places. Leaving the front door as she had found it, she called out:

“Minister?”

He didn’t answer. Robin knocked gently on the door to the right, and opened it.

Time froze. The scene seemed to fold in upon her, crashing through her retinas into a mind unprepared for it, and shock kept her standing in the doorway, her hand still on the handle and her mouth slightly open, trying to comprehend what she was seeing.

A man was sitting in a Queen Anne chair, his legs splayed, his arms dangling, and he seemed to have a shiny gray turnip for a head, in which a carved mouth gaped, but no eyes.

Then Robin’s struggling comprehension grasped the fact that it was not a turnip, but a human head shrink-wrapped in a clear plastic bag, into which a tube ran from a large canister. The man looked as though he had suffocated. His left foot lay sideways on the rug, revealing a small hole in the sole, his thick fingers dangled, almost touching the carpet, and there was a stain at his groin where his bladder had emptied.

And next she understood that it was Chiswell himself who sat in the chair, and that his thick mass of gray hair was pressed flat against his face in the vacuum created by the bag, and that the gaping mouth had sucked the plastic into itself, which was why it gaped so darkly.

35

… the White Horse! In broad daylight!

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Somewhere in the distance, outside the house, a man shouted. He sounded like a workman, and in some part of her brain Robin knew that that was who she had heard when she was expecting to hear “come in.” Nobody had invited her into the house. The door had simply been left ajar.