Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

“You want the truth?” said Della loudly. “Aamir objected to being groped and harassed, felt up by a senior civil servant, whose inappropriate touching of young men passing through his office is an open secret, even a joke! And when a comprehensive-educated Muslim boy loses his cool and smacks a senior civil servant, which of the two do you imagine finds themselves smeared and stigmatized? Which of them, do you think, becomes the subject of derogatory rumors, and is forced out of a job?”

“I’m guessing,” said Strike, “not Sir Christopher Barrowclough-Burns.”

“How did you know whom I was talking about?” said Della sharply.

“Still in the post, is he?” asked Strike, ignoring the question.

“Of course he is! Everybody knows about his harmless little ways, but nobody wants to go on the record. I’ve been trying to get something done about Barrowclough-Burns for years. When I heard Aamir had left the diversity program in murky circumstances, I made it my business to find him. He was in a pitiable state when I first made contact with him, absolutely pitiable. Quite apart from the derailing of what should have been a stellar career, there was a malicious cousin who’d heard some gossip and spread the rumor that Aamir had been fired for homosexual activity at work.

“Well, Aamir’s father isn’t the sort of man to look kindly on a gay son. Aamir had been resisting his parents’ pressure to marry a girl they thought suitable. There was a terrible row and a complete breach. This brilliant young man lost everything, family, home and job, in the space of a couple of weeks.”

“So you stepped in?”

“Geraint and I had an empty property around the corner. Both our mothers used to live there. Neither Geraint nor I have siblings. It had become too difficult to manage our mothers’ care from London, so we brought them up from Wales and housed them together, around the corner. Geraint’s mother died two years ago, mine this, so the house was empty. We didn’t need the rent. It seemed only sensible to let Aamir stay there.”

“And this was nothing but disinterested kindness?” Strike said. “You weren’t thinking of how useful he might be to you, when you gave him a job and a house?”

“What d’you mean, ‘useful’? He’s a very intelligent young man, any office would be—”

“Your husband was pressuring Aamir to get incriminating information on Jasper Chiswell from the Foreign Office, Mrs. Winn. Photographs. He was pressuring Aamir to go to Sir Christopher for pictures.”

Della reached out for her glass of wine, missed the stem by inches and hit the glass with her knuckles. Strike lunged forwards to try and catch it, but too late: a whip-like trail of red wine described a parabola in the air and spattered the beige carpet, the glass falling with a thud beside it. Gwynn got up and approached the spill with mild interest, sniffing the spreading stain.

“How bad is it?” asked Della urgently, her fingers grasping the arms of her chair, her face inclined to the floor.

“Not good,” said Strike.

“Salt, please… put salt on it. In the cupboard to the right of the cooker!”

Turning on the light as he entered the kitchen, Strike’s attention was caught for the first time by an odd something he had failed to spot on his previous entry into the room: an envelope stuck high up on a wall-mounted cabinet to the right, too high for Della to reach. Having grabbed the salt out of the cupboard he made a detour to read the single word written on it: Geraint.

“To the right of the cooker!” Della called a little desperately from the sitting room.

“Ah, the right!” Strike shouted back, as he tugged down the envelope and slit it open.

Inside was a receipt from “Kennedy Bros. Joiners,” for the replacement of a bathroom door. Strike licked his finger, dampened down the envelope flap, resealed it as best he could and stuck it back where he had found it.

“Sorry,” he told Della, re-entering the room. “It was right in front of me and I didn’t notice.”

He twisted the top of the cardboard tub and poured salt liberally over the purple stain. The Brahms symphony came to an end as he straightened up, dubious as to the likely success of the home remedy.

“Have you done it?” Della whispered into the silence.

“Yeah,” said Strike, watching the wine rising into the white and turning it a dirty gray. “I think you’re still going to need a carpet cleaner, though.”

“Oh dear… the carpet was new this year.”

She seemed deeply shaken, though whether this was entirely due to the spilled wine was, Strike thought, debatable. As he returned to the sofa and set down the salt beside the coffee, music started up again, this time a Hungarian air that was no more restful than the symphony, but weirdly manic.

“Would you like more wine?” he asked her.

“I—yes, I think I would,” she said.

He poured her another and passed it directly into her hand. She drank a little, then said shakily:

“How could you know what you just told me, Mr. Strike?”

“I’d rather not answer that, but I assure you it’s true.”