Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

Vanessa’s one-bedroomed flat occupied the ground floor of a detached house a short distance from Wembley Stadium. Before leaving for work that morning, she had given Robin a spare key to her flat, along with a kindly assurance that she knew that it would take Robin longer than a couple of days to find a new place to live, and that she didn’t mind her staying until she managed to do so.

They had sat up late drinking the night before. Vanessa had told Robin the full story of finding out that her ex-fiancé had cheated on her, a story full of twists and counter-twists that Vanessa had never told before, which included the setting up of two fake Facebook pages as bait for both her ex and his lover, which had resulted, after three months of patient coaxing, in Vanessa receiving nude pictures from both of them. As impressed as she was shocked, Robin had laughed as Vanessa reenacted the scene in which she passed her ex the pictures, hidden inside the Valentine card she had handed across a table for two in their favorite restaurant.

“You’re too nice, girl,” said Vanessa, steely-eyed over her Pinot Grigio. “At a bare minimum I’d have kept her bleeding earring and turned it into a pendant.”

Vanessa was now at work. A spare duvet sat neatly folded at the end of the sofa on which Robin was sitting, with her laptop open in front of her. She had spent the entire afternoon scanning available rooms in shared properties, which were all she could possibly afford on the salary that Strike was paying her. The memory of the bunk bed in Flick’s flat kept recurring as she scanned the adverts in her price range, some of which featured stark, barrack-like rooms with multiple beds inside them, others with photographs that looked as though they ought to feature attached to news stories about reclusive hoarders discovered dead by neighbors. Last night’s laughter seemed remote now. Robin was ignoring the painful, hard lump in her throat that refused to dissolve, no matter how many cups of tea she consumed.

Matthew had tried to contact her twice that day. Neither time had she picked up and he hadn’t left a message. She would need to contact a lawyer about divorce soon, and that would cost money she didn’t have, but her first priority had to be finding herself a place to live and continuing to put in the usual number of hours on the Chiswell case, because if Strike had cause to feel she wasn’t pulling her weight she would be endangering the only part of her life that currently had worth.

You bailed out on uni. Now you’re bailing out on us. You even bailed on your therapist. You’re a fucking flake.

The photographs of grim rooms in unknown flats kept dissolving before her eyes as she pictured Matthew and Sarah in the heavy mahogany bed that her father-in-law had bought, and when this happened Robin’s insides seemed to turn to liquid lead and her self-control threatened to melt away and she wanted to phone Matthew back and scream at him, but she didn’t, because she refused to be what he wanted to make her, the irrational, incontinent, uncontrolled woman, the fucking flake.

And anyway, she had news for Strike, news she was keen to impart once he had finished his interview with Billy. Raphael Chiswell had answered his mobile at eleven o’clock that morning and, after some initial coldness, had agreed to talk to her, but only at a place of his choosing. An hour later, she had received a call from Tegan Butcher, who had not required much persuasion to agree to an interview. Indeed, she seemed disappointed to be talking to the famous Strike’s partner rather than the man himself.

Robin copied down the details of a room in Putney (live-in landlady, vegetarian household, must like cats), checked the time and decided to change into the only dress she had brought with her from Albury Street, which was hanging, ironed and ready, from the top of Vanessa’s kitchen door. It would take her over an hour to get from Wembley to the restaurant in Old Brompton Road, where she and Raphael had agreed to meet, and she feared that she needed more time than usual to make herself presentable.

The face staring out of Vanessa’s bathroom mirror was white, with eyes still puffy with lack of sleep. Robin was still trying to paint out the shadows with concealer when her mobile rang.

“Cormoran, hi,” said Robin, switching to speakerphone. “Did you see Billy?”

His account of the interview with Billy took ten minutes, during which time Robin finished her makeup, brushed her hair and pulled on the dress.

“You know,” Strike finished, “I’m starting to wonder whether we shouldn’t do what Billy wanted us to do in the first place: dig.”

“Mm,” said Robin, and then, “Wait—what? You mean… literally?”

“It might come to that,” said Strike.