Lethal White

Course he’s going to bloody live. The nurse said—
He’s in intensive fucking care. They don’t put you in here for hiccups.
He’s tough. Wants to join the military. He’ll be OK.
He’d fucking better be. I never even sent him a text to say thank you for his
pictures.
It took Strike a while to drop back into an uneasy doze.
He was woken by early morning sunshine penetrating his eyelids. Squinting
against the light, he heard footsteps squeaking on the floor. Next came a loud
rattle as the curtain was pulled back, opening Jack’s bed to the ward again and
revealing more motionless figures, lying in beds all around them. A new nurse
stood beaming at him, younger, with a long dark ponytail.
“Hi!” she said brightly, taking Jack’s clipboard. “It’s not often we get anyone
famous in here! I know all about you, I read everything about how you caught
that serial—”
“This is my nephew, Jack,” he said coldly. The idea of discussing the
Shacklewell Ripper now was repugnant to him. The nurse’s smile faltered.
“Would you mind waiting outside the curtain? We need to take bloods,
change his drips and his catheter.”
Strike dragged himself back onto his crutches and made his way laboriously
out of the ward again, trying not to focus on any of the other inert figures wired
to their own buzzing machines.
The canteen was already half-full when he got there. Unshaven and heavy-
eyed, he had slid his tray all the way to the till and paid before he realized he
could not carry it and manage his crutches. A young girl clearing tables spotted
his predicament and came to help.
“Cheers,” said Strike gruffly, when she had placed the tray on a table beside
a window.
“No probs,” said the girl. “Leave it there after, I’ll get it.”
The small kindness made Strike feel disproportionately emotional. Ignoring
the fry-up he had just bought, he took out his phone and texted Lucy again.
All fine, nurse changing his drip, will be back with him shortly. X
As he had half-expected, his phone rang as soon as he had cut into his fried
egg.
“We’ve got a flight,” Lucy told him without preamble, “but it’s not until
eleven.”

---

“No problem,” he told her. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Is he awake yet?”
“No, still sedated.”
“He’ll be so chuffed to see you, if he wakes up before—before—”
She burst into tears. Strike could hear her still trying to talk through her sobs.
“… just want to get home… want to see him…”
For the first time in Strike’s life, he was glad to hear Greg, who now took the
phone from his wife.
“We’re bloody grateful, Corm. This is our first weekend away together in
five years, can you believe it?”
“Sod’s law.”
“Yeah. He said his belly was sore, but I thought he was at it. Thought he
didn’t want us to go away. I feel a right bastard now, I can tell you.”
“Don’t worry,” said Strike, and again, “I’m going nowhere.”
After a few more exchanges and a tearful farewell from Lucy, Strike was left
to his full English. He ate methodically and without pleasure amid the clatter and
jangle of the canteen, surrounded by other miserable and anxious people tucking
into fatty, sugar-laden food.
As he was finishing the last of his bacon, a text from Robin arrived.
I’ve been trying to call with an update on Winn. Let me know when it’s
convenient to talk.
The Chiswell case seemed a remote thing to Strike just now, but as he read
her text he suddenly had a simultaneous craving for nicotine and to hear Robin’s
voice. Abandoning his tray with thanks to the kind girl who had helped him to
his table, he set off again on his crutches.
A cluster of smokers stood around the entrance to the hospital, hunch-
shouldered like hyenas in the clean morning air. Strike lit up, inhaled deeply, and
called Robin back.
“Hi,” he said, when she answered. “Sorry I haven’t been in touch, I’ve been
at a hospital—”
“What’s happened? Are you OK?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s my nephew, Jack. His appendix burst yesterday and he
—he’s got—”
To Strike’s mortification, his voice cracked. As he fought to conquer himself,
he wondered how long it had been since he had cried. Perhaps not since the tears
of pain and rage he had shed in the hospital in Germany to which he had been
airlifted away from the patch of bloody ground where the IED had ripped off his
leg.

---

“Fuck,” he muttered at last, the only syllable he seemed able to manage.
“Cormoran, what’s happened?”
“He’s—they’ve got him in intensive care,” said Strike, his face crumpled up
in the effort to hold himself together, to speak normally. “His mum—Lucy and
Greg are stuck in Rome, so they asked me—”
“Who’s with you? Is Lorelei there?”
“Christ, no.”
Lorelei saying “I love you” seemed weeks in the past, though it was only two
nights ago.
“What are the doctors saying?”
“They think he’ll be OK, but, you know, he’s—he’s in intensive care. Shit,”
croaked Strike, wiping his eyes, “sorry. It’s been a rough night.”
“Which hospital is it?”
He told her. Rather abruptly, she said goodbye and rang off. Strike was left to
finish his cigarette, intermittently wiping his face and nose on the sleeve of his
shirt.
The quiet ward was bright with sun when he returned. He propped his
crutches against the wall, sat down again at Jack’s bedside with the day-old
newspaper he had just pilfered from the waiting room and read an article about
how Arsenal might soon be losing Robin van Persie to Manchester United.
An hour later, the surgeon and the anesthetist in charge of the ward arrived at
the foot of Jack’s bed to inspect him, while Strike listened uneasily to their
muttered conversation.
“… haven’t managed to get his oxygen levels below fifty percent…
persistent pyrexia… urine outputs have tailed off in the last four hours…”
“… another chest X-ray, check there’s nothing going on in the lungs…”
Frustrated, Strike waited for somebody to throw him digestible information.
At last the surgeon turned to speak to him.
“We’ll be keeping him sedated just now. He’s not ready to come off the
oxygen and we need to get his fluid balance right.”
“What does that mean? Is he worse?”
“No, it often goes like this. He had a very nasty infection. We had to wash
out the peritoneum pretty thoroughly. I’d just like to X-ray the chest as a
precaution, make sure we haven’t punctured anything resuscitating him. I’ll pop
in to see him again later.”
They walked away to a heavily bandaged teenager covered in even more
tubes and lines than Jack, leaving Strike anxious and destabilized in their wake.
Through the hours of the night Strike had come to see the machines as
essentially friendly, assisting his nephew to recovery. Now they seemed

---

implacable judges holding up numbers indicating that Jack was failing.
“Fuck,” Strike muttered again, shifting the chair nearer to the bed. “Jack…
your mum and dad…” He could feel a traitorous prickle behind the eyelids. Two
nurses were walking past. “… shit…”
With an almighty effort he controlled himself and cleared his throat.
“… sorry, Jack, your mum wouldn’t like me swearing in your ear… it’s
Uncle Cormoran here, by the way, if you didn’t… anyway, Mum and Dad are on
their way back, OK? And I’ll be with you until they—”
He stopped mid-sentence. Robin was framed in the distant doorway of the
ward. He watched her asking directions from a ward sister, and then she came
walking towards him, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, her eyes their usual blue-gray
and her hair loose, and holding two polystyrene cups.
Seeing Strike’s unguarded expression of happiness and gratitude, Robin felt
amply repaid for the bruising argument with Matthew, the two changes of bus
and the taxi it had taken to get here. Then the slight prone figure beside Strike
came into view.
“Oh no,” she said softly, coming to a halt at the foot of the bed.
“Robin, you didn’t have to—”
“I know I didn’t,” said Robin. She pulled a chair up beside Strike’s. “But I
wouldn’t want to have to deal with this alone. Be careful, it’s hot,” she added,
passing him a tea.
He took the cup from her, set it down on the bedside cabinet, then reached
out and gripped her hand painfully tightly. He had released her before she could
squeeze back. Then both sat staring at Jack for a few seconds, until Robin, her
fingers throbbing, asked:
“What’s the latest?”
“He still needs the oxygen and he’s not peeing enough,” said Strike. “I don’t
know what that means. I’d rather have a score out of ten or—I don’t fucking
know. Oh, and they want to X-ray his chest in case they punctured his lungs
putting that tube in.”
“When was the operation?”
“Yesterday afternoon. He collapsed doing cross-country at school. Some
friend of Greg and Lucy’s who lives right by the school came with him in the
ambulance and I met them here.”
Neither spoke for a while, their eyes on Jack.
Then Strike said, “I’ve been a bloody terrible uncle. I don’t know any of
their birthdays. I couldn’t have told you how old he was. The dad of his mate’s
who brought him in knew more than me. Jack wants to be a soldier, Luce says he
talks about me and he draws me pictures and I never even bloody thank him.”

---

“Well,” said Robin, pretending not to see that Strike was dabbing roughly at
his eyes with his sleeve, “you’re here for him right now when he needs you and
you’ve got plenty of time to make it up to him.”
“Yeah,” said Strike, blinking rapidly. “You know what I’ll do if he—? I’ll
take him to the Imperial War Museum. Day trip.”
“Good idea,” said Robin kindly.
“Have you ever been?”
“No,” said Robin.
“Good museum.”
Two nurses, one male, one the woman whom Strike had earlier snubbed, now
approached.
“We need to X-ray him,” said the girl, addressing Robin rather than Strike.
“Would you mind waiting outside the ward?”
“How long will you be?” asked Strike.
“Half an hour. Forty minutes-ish.”
So Robin fetched Strike’s crutches and they went to the canteen.
“This is really good of you, Robin,” Strike said over two more pallid teas and
some ginger biscuits, “but if you’ve got things to do—”
“I’ll stay until Greg and Lucy come,” said Robin. “It’ll be awful for them,
being so far away. Matt’s twenty-seven and his dad was still worried sick when
Matt was so ill in the Maldives.”
“Was he?”
“Yeah, you know, when he—oh, of course. I never told you, did I?”
“Told me what?”
“He got a nasty infection on our honeymoon. Scratched himself on some
coral. They were talking about airlifting him off to hospital at one point, but it
was OK. Wasn’t as bad as they first thought.”
As she said it, she remembered pushing open the wooden door still hot from
the daylong sun, her throat constricted with fear as she prepared to tell Matthew
she wanted an annulment, little knowing what she was about to face.
“You know, Matt’s mum died not that long ago, so Geoffrey was really
scared about Matt… but it was all OK,” Robin repeated, taking a sip of her tepid
tea, her eyes on the woman behind the counter, who was ladling baked beans
onto a skinny teenager’s plate.
Strike watched her. He had sensed omissions in her story. Blame sea-borne