Lethal White

Izzy isn’t his type, though.
The thought startled her a little. She felt slightly guilty for giving it
headspace and even more uncomfortable when it was jostled out of the way by
another.
All his girlfriends have been beautiful. Izzy isn’t.
Strike attracted remarkably good-looking women, when you considered his
generally bearlike appearance and what he himself had referred to in her hearing
as “pube-like” hair.
I bet I look gross, was Robin’s next, inconsequential thought. Puffy-faced
and pale when she had got in the Land Rover that morning, she had cried a lot
since. She was half-deliberating whether she had time to find a bathroom and at
least brush her hair, when she spotted Strike walking back towards her holding a
venison burger in each hand and a betting slip in his mouth.
“Izzy isn’t picking up,” he informed her through clenched teeth. “Left a
message. Grab one of these and come on. I’ve just put a tenner each way on

---

Brown Panther.”
“I didn’t realize you’re a betting man,” said Robin.
“I’m not,” said Strike, removing the betting slip from his teeth and pocketing
it, “but I’m feeling lucky today. Come on, we’ll watch the race.”
As Strike turned away, Robin slid the champagne cork discreetly into her
pocket.
“Brown Panther,” Strike said through a mouthful of burger, as they
approached the track. “Except he isn’t, is he? Black mane, so he’s—”
“—a bay, yes,” said Robin. “Are you upset he isn’t a panther, either?”
“Just trying to follow the logic. That stallion I found online—Blanc de
Blancs—was chestnut, not white.”
“Not gray, you mean.”
“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Strike, half-amused, half-exasperated.

---

65
I wonder how many there are who would do as
much—who dare do it?
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Brown Panther came in second. They spent Strike’s winnings among the
food and coffee tents, killing the hours of daylight until it was time to head for
Woolstone and the dell. While panic fluttered in Robin’s chest every time she
thought of the tools in the back of the Land Rover and the dark basin full of
nettles, Strike distracted her, whether intentionally or not, by a persistent refusal
to explain how the testimony of Della Winn and Raphael Chiswell fitted
together, or what conclusions he had drawn from it.
“Think,” he kept saying, “just think.”
But Robin was exhausted, and it was easier to simply push him to explain
over successive coffees and sandwiches, all the while savoring this unusual
interlude in their working lives, for she and Strike had never before spent hours
together unless at some time of crisis.
But as the sun sank ever closer to the horizon, Robin’s thoughts darted more
insistently towards the dell, and each time they did so her stomach did a small
backflip. Noticing her increasingly preoccupied silences, Strike suggested for the
second time that she stay in the Land Rover while he and Barclay dug.
“No,” said Robin tersely. “I didn’t come to sit in the car.”
It took them three-quarters of an hour to reach Woolstone. Color was
bleeding rapidly out of the sky to the west as they descended for the second time
into the Vale of the White Horse, and by the time they had reached their
destination a few feeble stars were spotting the dust-colored heavens. Robin
turned the Land Rover onto the overgrown track leading to Steda Cottage and
the car rocked and pitched its way over the deep furrows and tangled thorns and
branches, into the deeper darkness bestowed by the dense canopy above.
“Get as far in as you can,” Strike instructed her, checking the time on his
mobile. “Barclay’s got to park behind us. He should’ve been here already, I told
him nine o’clock.”
Robin parked and cut the engine, eyeing the thick woodland that lay between
the track and Chiswell House. Unseen they might be, but they were still
trespassing. Her anxiety about possible detection was as nothing, however, to her

---

very real fear of what lay beneath the tangled nettles at the bottom of that dark
basin outside Steda Cottage, and so she returned to the subject she had been
using as a distraction all afternoon.
“I’ve told you—think,” said Strike, for the umpteenth time. “Think about the
lachesis pills. You’re the one who thought they were significant. Think about all
those odd things Chiswell kept doing: taunting Aamir in front of everyone,
saying Lachesis ‘knew when everyone’s number would be up,’ telling you ‘one
by one, they trip themselves up,’ looking for Freddie’s money clip, which turned
up in his pocket.”
“I have thought about those things, but I still don’t see how—”
“The helium and tubing entering the house disguised as a crate of
champagne. Somebody knew he wouldn’t want to drink it, because he was
allergic. Ask yourself how Flick knew Jimmy had a claim on Chiswell. Think
about Flick’s row with her flatmate Laura—”
“How can that have anything to do with this?”
“Think!” said Strike, infuriatingly. “No amitriptyline was found in the empty
orange juice carton in Chiswell’s bin. Remember Kinvara, obsessing over
Chiswell’s whereabouts. Have a guess what little Francesca at Drummond’s art
gallery is going to tell me if I ever get her on the phone. Think about that call to
Chiswell’s constituency office about people ‘pissing themselves as they die’—
which isn’t conclusive in itself, I grant you, but it’s bloody suggestive when you
stop to think about it—”
“You’re winding me up,” said the incredulous Robin. “Your idea connects all
of that? And makes sense of it?”
“Yep,” said Strike smugly, “and it also explains how Winn and Aamir knew
there were photographs at the Foreign Office, presumably of Jack o’Kent’s
gallows in use, when Aamir hadn’t worked there in months and Winn, so far as
we know, had never set foot—”
Strike’s mobile rang. He checked the screen.
“Izzy calling back. I’ll take it outside. I want to smoke.”
He got out of the car. Robin heard him say, “Hi,” before he slammed the
door. She sat waiting for him, her mind buzzing. Either Strike had genuinely had
a brainwave, or he was taking the mickey, and she slightly inclined to the latter,
so utterly disconnected did the separate bits of information he had just listed
seem.
Five minutes later, Strike returned to the passenger seat.
“Our client’s unhappy,” he reported, slamming the door again. “Tegan was
supposed to be telling us that Kinvara crept back out that night to kill Chiswell,
not confirming her alibi and blabbing about Chiswell flogging gallows.”

---

“Izzy admitted it?”
“Didn’t have much choice, did she? But she didn’t like it. Very insistent on
telling me that exporting gallows was legal at the time. I put it to her that her
father had defrauded Jimmy and Billy out of their money, and you were right.
There were two sets of gallows built and ready to sell when Jack o’Kent died
and nobody bothered to tell his sons. She liked admitting that even less.”
“D’you think she’s worried they’ll mount a claim on Chiswell’s estate?”
“I can’t see that it’d do Jimmy’s reputation much good in the circles he
moves in, accepting money made from hanging people in the Third World,” said
Strike, “but you never know.”
A car sped past on the road behind them and Strike craned around hopefully.
“Thought that might be Barclay…” He checked his watch. “Maybe he’s
missed the turning.”
“Cormoran,” said Robin, who was far less interested in either Izzy’s mood or
Barclay’s whereabouts than in the theory Strike was withholding from her, “have
you seriously got an idea that explains everything you just told me?”
“Yeah,” said Strike, scratching his chin, “I have. Trouble is, it brings us
closer to who, but I’m still damned if I can see why they did it, unless it was
done out of blind hatred—but this doesn’t feel like a red-blooded crime of
passion, does it? This wasn’t a hammer round the head. This was a well-planned
execution.”
“What happened to ‘means before motive’?”
“I’ve been concentrating on means. That’s how I got here.”
“You won’t even tell me ‘he’ or ‘she’?”
“No good mentor would deprive you of the satisfaction of working it out for
yourself. Any biscuits left?”
“No.”
“Lucky I’ve still got this, then,” Strike said, producing a Twix from his
pocket, unwrapping it and handing her half, which she took with a bad grace that
amused him.
Neither spoke until they had finished eating. Then Strike said, far more
soberly than hitherto:
“Tonight’s important. If there’s nothing buried in a pink blanket at the bottom
of the dell, the whole Billy business is finished: he imagined the strangling,
we’ve set his mind at rest and I get to try and prove my theory about Chiswell’s
death, unencumbered by distractions, without worrying where a dead kid fits in
and who killed her.”
“Or him,” Robin reminded Strike. “You said Billy wasn’t sure which it was.”
As she said it, her unruly imagination showed her a small skeleton wrapped

---

in the rotten remains of a blanket. Would it be possible to tell whether the body
had been male or female from what was left? Would there be a hair grip or a
shoelace, buttons, a hank of long hair?