Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

He left the room. She heard him climbing the stairs and then his heavy footsteps on the ceiling above, but she knew that there was nobody there. She could feel the house’s essential lifelessness, its flimsy cardboard unreality, and, sure enough, Strike returned less than five minutes later, shaking his head.

“Nobody.”

He walked past her through a door that led off the sitting room and, hearing his footsteps hit tile, Robin knew that it was the kitchen.

“Completely empty,” Strike said, re-emerging.

“What happened last night?” Robin asked. “You said something funny happened.”

She wanted to discuss a subject other than the awful form that dominated the room in its grotesque lifelessness.

“Billy called me. He said people were trying to kill him—chasing him. He claimed to be in a phone box in Trafalgar Square. I went to try and find him, but he wasn’t there.”

“Oh,” said Robin.

So he hadn’t been with Charlotte. Even in this extremity, Robin registered the fact, and was glad.

“The hell?” said Strike quietly, looking past her into a corner of the room.

A buckled sword was leaning against the wall in a dark corner. It looked as though it had been forced or stood on and deliberately bent. Strike walked carefully around the body to examine it, but then they heard the police car pulling up outside the house and he straightened up.

“We’ll tell them everything, obviously,” said Strike.

“Yes,” said Robin.

“Except the surveillance devices. Shit—they’ll find them in your office—”

“They won’t,” said Robin. “I took them home yesterday, in case we decided I needed to clear out because of the Sun.”

Before Strike could express admiration for this clear-eyed foresight, somebody rapped hard on the front door.

“Well, it’s been nice while it’s lasted, hasn’t it?” Strike said, with a grim smile, as he moved towards the hall. “Being out of the papers?”

PART TWO

36

What has happened can be hushed up—or at any rate can be explained away…

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

The Chiswell case maintained its singular character even when their client was no more.

As the usual cumbersome procedures and formalities enveloped the corpse, Strike and Robin were escorted from Ebury Street to Scotland Yard, where they were separately interviewed. Strike knew that a tornado of speculation must be whirling through the newsrooms of London at the death of a government minister, and sure enough, by the time they emerged from Scotland Yard six hours later, the colorful details of Chiswell’s private life were being broadcast across TV and radio, while opening the internet browsers on their phones revealed brief news items from news sites, as a tangle of baroque theories spread across blogs and social media, in which a multitude of cartoonish Chiswells died at the hand of myriad nebulous foes. As he rode in a taxi back to Denmark Street, Strike read how Chiswell the corrupt capitalist had been murdered by the Russian mafia after failing to pay back interest on some seedy, illegal transaction, while Chiswell the defender of solid English values had surely been dispatched by vengeful Islamists after his attempts to resist the rise of sharia law.

Strike returned to his attic flat only to collect his belongings, and decamped to the house of his old friends Nick and Ilsa, respectively a gastroenterologist and a lawyer. Robin, who at Strike’s insistence had taken a taxi directly home to Albury Street, was given a peremptory hug by Matthew, whose tissue-thin pretense of sympathy was worse, Robin felt, than outright fury.

When he heard that Robin had been summoned back to Scotland Yard for further interrogation the next day, Matthew’s self-control crumbled.

“Anyone could have seen this coming!”

“Funny, it seemed to take most people by surprise,” Robin said. She had just ignored her mother’s fourth call of the morning.

“I don’t mean Chiswell killing himself—”

“—it’s pronounced ‘Chizzle’—”

“—I mean you getting yourself into trouble for sneaking around the Houses of Parliament!”

“Don’t worry, Matt. I’ll make sure the police know you were against it. Wouldn’t want your promotion prospects compromised.”