Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

“Don’t like our chances if she lets them oot,” said Barclay, wiping his mouth on his arm. “Terrier’ll get straight through those bushes. They’ve got fuckin’ good hearin’, terriers.”

“Better hope she doesn’t let them out, then,” said Strike, but he added, “Give it five, Robin,” and turned off the torch.

Robin, too, climbed out of the basin and accepted a fresh bottle of water from Barclay. Now that she was no longer digging, the chill made her exposed flesh creep. The fluttering and scurrying of small creatures in the grass and trees seemed extraordinarily loud in the darkness. Still the dog barked, and, distantly, Robin thought she heard a woman shout.

“Did you hear that?”

“Aye. Sounded like she was telling it to shut up,” said Barclay.

They waited. At last, the terrier stopped barking.

“Give it a few more minutes,” said Strike. “Let it fall asleep.”

They waited, the whispering of every leaf magnified in the darkness, until Robin and Barclay lowered themselves back into the dell and began to dig again.

Robin’s muscles were now begging for mercy, her palms beginning to blister beneath the gloves. The deeper they dug, the harder the job became, the soil compacted and full of rocks. Barclay’s end of the trench was considerably deeper than Robin’s.

“Let me do a bit,” Strike suggested.

“No,” she snapped, too tired to be anything but blunt. “You’ll bugger your leg completely.”

“She’s nae wrong, pal,” panted Barclay. “Gie’s another drink of water, I’m gaspin’.”

An hour later, Barclay was standing waist deep in soil and Robin’s palms were bleeding beneath the overlarge gloves, which were rubbing away layers of skin as she used the blunt end of the mattock to try and prize a heavy rock out of the ground.

“Come—on—you—bloody—thing—”

“Want a hand?” offered Strike, readying himself to descend.

“Stay there,” she told him angrily. “I’m not going to be able to help carry you back to the car, not after this—”

A final, involuntary yelp escaped her as she succeeded in overturning the small boulder. A couple of tiny, wriggling insects attached to the underside slid away from the torchlight. Strike directed the beam back on Barclay.

“Cormoran,” said Robin sharply.

“What?”

“I need light.”

Something in her voice made Barclay stop digging. Rather than direct the beam back at her, and disregarding her warning of a moment ago, Strike slid back down into the pit, landing on the loose earth. The torchlight swung around, blinding Robin for a second.

“What’ve you seen?”

“Shine it here,” she said. “On the rock.”

Barclay clambered towards them, his jeans covered from hem to pockets in soil.

Strike did as Robin asked. The three of them peered down at the encrusted surface of the rock. There, stuck to the mud, was a strand of what was plainly not vegetable matter, but wool fibers, faintly but distinctly pink.

They turned in unison to examine the indentation left in the ground where the rock had sat, Strike directing the torchlight into the hole.

“Oh, shit,” gasped Robin, and without thinking she clapped two muddy garden gloves to her face. A couple of inches of filthy material had been revealed, and in the strong beam of the torch, it, too, was pink.

“Give me that,” said Strike, tugging the mattock out of her hand.

“No—!”

But he almost pushed her aside. By the deflected torchlight she could see his expression, forbidding, furious, as though the pink blanket had grievously wronged him, as though he had suffered a personal affront.

“Barclay, you take this.”

He thrust the mattock at his subcontractor.

“Break this up, as much as you can. Try not to puncture the blanket. Robin, go to the other end. Use the fork. And mind my hands,” Strike told Barclay. Sticking the torch in his mouth so that he could see by its light, he fell to his knees in the dirt and began to move earth aside with his fingers.

“Listen,” whispered Robin, freezing.

The sound of the terrier’s frenzied barking reached them once again through the night air.

“I yelled, didn’t I, when I overturned the rock?” whispered Robin. “I think I woke it up again.”

“Never mind that now,” said Strike, his fingers prizing dirt away from the blanket. “Dig.”

“But what if—?”

“We’ll deal with that if it happens. Dig.”

Robin plied the fork. After a couple of minutes, Barclay swapped the mattock for a shovel. Slowly, the length of the pink blanket, its contents still buried too deep to remove, was revealed.

“That’s no adult,” said Barclay, surveying the stretch of filthy blanket.

And still, the terrier continued to yap, distantly, from the direction of Chiswell House.

“We should call the polis, Strike,” said Barclay, pausing to wipe sweat and mud out of his eyes. “Are we no disturbing a crime scene, here?”

Strike didn’t answer. Feeling slightly sick, Robin watched his fingers feeling the shape of the thing that was hidden beneath the filthy blanket.

“Go up to my kit bag,” he told her. “There’s a knife in there. Stanley knife. Quickly.”