Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

“I don’t,” said Strike. “The timescale doesn’t fit, and if Jimmy knew a Tory minister had strangled a kid, he wouldn’t have waited twenty years to try and monetise it. But I’d still like to know whether Billy’s imagining that he saw someone throttled. I’m going to do a bit of digging on the names Wardle’s given me and if either seem credible I might ask you to sound Izzy out. She might remember something about a kid disappearing in the vicinity of Chiswell House.”

Robin said nothing.

“Like I said in the pub, Billy’s very ill. It’s probably nothing,” said Strike, with a trace of defensiveness. As he and Robin were both well aware, he had previously jettisoned paid cases and rich clients to pursue mysteries that others might have let lie. “I just—”

“—can’t rest easy until you’ve looked into it,” said Robin. “All right. I understand.”

Unseen by her, Strike grinned and rubbed his tired eyes.

“Well, best of luck tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be on my mobile if you need me.”

“What are you going to be up to?”

“Paperwork. Jimmy Knight’s ex doesn’t work Mondays. I’m off to Manchester to find her on Tuesday.”

Robin experienced a sudden wave of nostalgia for the previous year, when she and Strike had undertaken a road trip together to interrogate women left behind in the wake of dangerous men. She wondered whether he had thought about it while he planned this journey.

“Watching England–Italy?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Strike. “There’s nothing else, is there?”

“No,” said Robin hurriedly. She had not meant to sound as though she wanted to detain him. “Speak soon, then.”

She cut the call on his farewell and tossed the mobile aside onto the bed.

13

I am not going to let myself be beaten to the ground by the dread of what may happen.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

The following morning, Robin woke, gasping, her fingers at her own throat, trying to loosen a non-existent hold. She was already at the bedroom door when Matthew woke, confused.

“It’s nothing, I’m fine,” she muttered, before he could articulate a question, groping to find the handle that would let her out of the bedroom.

The surprise was that it hadn’t happened more often since she had heard the story of the strangled child. Robin knew exactly how it felt to have fingers close tightly around your neck, to feel your brain flood with darkness, to know that you were seconds from being blotted out of existence. She had been driven into therapy by sharp-edged fragments of recollection that were unlike normal memories and which had the power to drag her suddenly out of her body and plunge her back into a past where she could smell the strangler’s nicotine-stained fingers, and feel the stabber’s soft, sweatshirted belly against her back.

She locked the bathroom door and sat down on the floor in the loose T-shirt she had worn to bed, focusing on her breathing, on the feel of the cool tiles beneath her bare legs, observing, as she had been taught, the rapid beating of her heart, the adrenaline jolting through her veins, not fighting her panic, but watching it. After a while, she consciously noticed the faint smell of the lavender body wash she had used last night, and heard the distant passing of an airplane.

You’re safe. Just a dream. Just a dream.

Through two closed doors, she heard Matthew’s alarm go off. A few minutes later, he knocked on the door.

“You all right?”

“Fine,” Robin called back, over the running tap.

She opened the door.

“Everything OK?” he asked, watching her closely.

“Just needed a pee,” said Robin brightly, heading back to the bedroom for her colored contact lenses.

Before starting work with Strike, Robin had signed on with an agency called Temporary Solutions. The offices to which they had sent her were jumbled in her memory now, so that only anomalies, eccentrics and oddities remained. She remembered the alcoholic boss whose dictated letters she had reworded out of kindness, the desk drawer she had opened to find a complete set of dentures and a pair of stained underpants, the hopeful young man who had nicknamed her “Bobbie” and tried, ineptly, to flirt over their back-to-back monitors, the woman who had plastered the interior of her cubicle workspace with pictures of the actor Ian McShane and the girl who had broken up with her boyfriend on the telephone in the middle of the open-plan office, indifferent to the prurient hush falling over the rest of the room. Robin doubted whether any of the people with whom she had come into glancing contact remembered her any better than she remembered them, even the timid romancer who had called her “Bobbie.”