Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

“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 violence 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.