Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

As the two men frowned at her, she gestured to the unplugged fan.

“Ours is broken. Our room’s like an oven. I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said, appealing to Geraint. “I was just going to borrow it for thirty minutes.” She smiled piteously. “Honestly, I felt faint earlier.”

She plucked the front of her shirt away from her skin, which was indeed clammy. His gaze fell to her chest and the usual lecherous grin resurfaced.

“Though I shouldn’t say so, overheating rather suits you,” said Winn, with the ghost of a smirk, and Robin forced a giggle.

“Well, well, we can spare it for thirty minutes, can’t we?” he said, turning to Aamir. The latter said nothing, but stood ramrod straight, staring at Robin with undisguised suspicion. Geraint lifted the fan carefully off the desk and passed it to Robin. As she turned to go, he patted her lightly on the lower back.

“Enjoy.”

“Oh, I will,” she said, her flesh crawling. “Thank you so much, Mr. Winn.”

28

Do I take it to heart, to find myself so hampered and thwarted in my life’s work?

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

The long hike to and around Chelsea Physic Garden the previous day had not benefited Strike’s hamstring injury. As his stomach was playing up from a constant diet of Ibuprofen, he had eschewed painkillers for the past twenty-four hours, with the result that he was in what his doctors liked to describe as “some discomfort” as he sat with his one and a half legs up on the office sofa on Thursday afternoon, his prosthesis leaning against the wall nearby while he reviewed the Chiswell file.

Silhouetted like a headless watchman against the window of his inner office was Strike’s best suit, plus a shirt and tie, which hung from the curtain rail, shoes and clean socks sitting below the limp trouser legs. He was going out to dinner with Lorelei tonight and had organized himself so that he need not climb the stairs to his attic flat again before bed.

Lorelei had been typically understanding about his lack of communication during Jack’s hospitalization, saying with only the slightest edge to her voice that it must have been a horrible thing to go through on his own. Strike had too much sense to tell her that Robin had been there, too. Lorelei had then requested, sweetly and without rancor, dinner, “to talk a few things through.”

They had been dating for just over ten months and she had just nursed him through five days of incapacity. Strike felt that it was neither fair, nor decent, to ask her to say what she had to say over the phone. Like the hanging suit, the prospect of having to find an answer to the inevitable question “where do you see this relationship going?” loomed ominously on the periphery of Strike’s consciousness.

Dominating his thoughts, however, was what he saw as the perilous state of the Chiswell case, for which he had so far seen not a penny in payment, but which was costing him a significant outlay in salaries and expenses. Robin might have succeeded in neutralizing the immediate threat of Geraint Winn, but after a promising start Barclay had nothing whatsoever to use against Chiswell’s first blackmailer, and Strike foresaw disastrous consequences should the Sun newspaper find its way to Jimmy Knight. Balked of the mysterious photographs at the Foreign Office that Winn had promised him, and notwithstanding Chiswell’s assertion that Jimmy would not want the story in the press, Strike thought an angry and frustrated Jimmy was overwhelmingly likely to try and profit from a chance that seemed to be slipping through his fingers. His history of litigation told its own story: Jimmy was a man prone to cutting off his own nose to spite his face.

To compound Strike’s bad mood, after several straight days and nights hanging out with Jimmy and his mates, Barclay had told Strike that unless he went home soon, his wife would be initiating divorce proceedings. Strike, who owed Barclay expenses, had told him to come into the office for a check, after which he could take a couple of days off. To his extreme annoyance, the normally reliable Hutchins had then caviled at having to take over the tailing of Jimmy Knight at short notice, rather than hanging around Harley Street, where Dodgy Doc was once again consulting patients.

“What’s the problem?” Strike had asked roughly, his stump throbbing. Much as he liked Hutchins, he had not forgotten that the ex-policeman had recently taken time off for a family holiday and to drive his wife to hospital when she broke her wrist. “I’m asking you to switch targets, that’s all. I can’t follow Knight, he knows me.”

“Yeah, all right, I’ll do it.”

“Decent of you,” Strike had said, angrily. “Thanks.”

The sound of Robin and Barclay climbing the metal stairs to the office at half past five made a welcome distraction from Strike’s increasingly dark mood.