Lethal White

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
“Bit overwhelming the first time you see it, eh?”
The man sounded kindly and not very young.
“Yes,” said Robin, barely knowing what she said. Breathe.
“Temporary, eh?” And then, “You all right, dear?”
“Asthma,” said Robin.
She had used the excuse before. It gave her an excuse to stop, to breathe
deeply, to re-anchor herself to reality.
“Got an inhaler?” asked the elderly steward in concern.
He wore a frock coat, white tie and tails and an ornate badge of office. In his
unexpected grandeur, Robin thought wildly of the white rabbit, popping up in the
middle of madness.
“I left it in my office. I’ll be fine. Just need a second…”
She had blundered into a blaze of gold and color that was increasing her
feeling of oppression. The Members’ Lobby, that familiar, ornate, Victorian-
gothic chamber she had seen on television, stood right outside the Commons,
and on the periphery of her vision loomed four gigantic bronze statues of
previous prime ministers—Thatcher, Atlee, Lloyd George and Churchill—while
busts of all the others lined the walls. They appeared to Robin like severed heads
and the gilding, with its intricate tracery and richly colored embellishments,

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danced around her, jeering at her inability to cope with its ornate beauty.
She heard the scraping of a chair’s legs. The steward had brought her a seat
and was asking a colleague to fetch a glass of water.
“Thank you… thank you…” said Robin numbly, feeling inadequate,
ashamed and embarrassed. Strike must never know about this. He would send
her home, tell her she wasn’t fit to do the job. Nor must she tell Matthew, who
treated these episodes as shameful, inevitable consequences of her stupidity in
continuing surveillance work.
The steward talked to her kindly while she recovered and within a few
minutes she was able to respond appropriately to his well-intentioned patter.
While her breathing returned to normal, he told her the tale of how Edward
Heath’s bust had begun to turn green on the arrival of the full-sized Thatcher
statue beside him, and how it had had to be treated to turn it back to its dark
brown bronze.
Robin laughed politely, got to her feet and handed him the empty glass with
renewed thanks.
What treatment would it take, she wondered as she set off again, to return her
to what she had once been?
14
… how happy I should feel if I could succeed in
bringing a little light into all this murky ugliness.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Strike rose early on Tuesday morning. After showering, putting on his
prosthesis and dressing, he filled a thermos with dark brown tea, took the
sandwiches he had made the previous evening out of the fridge, stowed them in
a carrier bag along with two packets of Club biscuits, chewing gum and a few
bags of salt and vinegar crisps, then headed out into the sunrise and off to the
garage where he kept his BMW. He had an appointment for a haircut at half past
twelve, with Jimmy Knight’s ex-wife, in Manchester.
Once settled in the car, his bag of provisions within easy reach, Strike pulled
on the trainers he kept in the car, which gave his fake foot better purchase on the
brake. He then took out his mobile and began to compose a text to Robin.
Starting with the names that Wardle had given him, Strike had spent much of
Monday researching, as best as he could, the two children the policemen had

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told him had vanished from the Oxfordshire area twenty years previously.
Wardle had misspelled the boy’s first name, which had cost Strike time, but
Strike had finally dug out archived press reports about Imamu Ibrahim, in which
Imamu’s mother had asserted that her estranged husband had kidnapped the boy
and taken him to Algeria. Strike had finally dredged up two lines about Imamu
and his mother on the website of an organization that worked to resolve
international custody issues. From this, Strike had to conclude that Imamu had
been found alive and well with his father.
The fate of Suki Lewis, the twelve-year-old runaway from a care home, was
more mysterious. Strike had finally discovered an image of her, buried in an old
news story. Suki had vanished from her residential care home in Swindon in
1992 and Strike could find no other mention of her since. Her blurry picture
showed a rather toothy, undersized child, fine-featured, with short dark hair.