Lethal White

… let us stifle all memories in our sense of
freedom, in joy, in passion.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Lorelei Bevan lived in an eclectically furnished flat over her thriving vintage
clothes store in Camden. Strike arrived that night at half past seven, a bottle of
Pinot Noir in one hand and his mobile clamped to his ear with the other. Lorelei
opened the door, smiled good-naturedly at the familiar sight of him on the
phone, kissed him on the mouth, relieved him of his wine and returned to the
kitchen, from which a welcome smell of Pad Thai was issuing.
“… or try and get into CORE itself,” Strike told Barclay, closing the door
behind him and proceeding to Lorelei’s sitting room, which was dominated by a
large print of Warhol’s Elizabeth Taylors. “I’ll send you everything I’ve got on
Jimmy. He’s involved with a couple of different groups. No idea whether he’s
working. His local’s the White Horse in East Ham. Think he’s a Hammers fan.”
“Could be worse,” said Barclay, who was speaking quietly, as he had just got
the teething baby to sleep. “Could be Chelsea.”
“You’ll have to admit to being ex-army,” said Strike, sinking into an
armchair and hoisting his leg up onto a conveniently positioned square pouf.
“You look like a squaddie.”
“Nae problem,” said Barclay. “I’ll be the poor wee laddie who didnae know
whut he was gettin’ himself intae. Hard lefties love that shit. Let ’em patronize
me.”
Grinning, Strike took out his cigarettes. For all his initial doubts, he was
starting to think that Barclay might have been a good hire.
“All right, hang fire till you hear from me again. Should be sometime
Sunday.”
As Strike rang off, Lorelei appeared with a glass of red for him.
“Want some help in the kitchen?” Strike asked, though without moving.
“No, stay there. I won’t be long,” she replied, smiling. He liked her fifties-
style apron.
As she returned to the kitchen, he lit up. Although Lorelei did not smoke, she
had no objection to Strike’s Benson & Hedges as long as he used the kitsch
ashtray, decorated with cavorting poodles, that she had provided for the purpose.

---

Smoking, he admitted to himself that he envied Barclay infiltrating Knight
and his band of hard-left colleagues. It was the kind of job Strike had relished in
the Military Police. He remembered the four soldiers in Germany who had
become enamored of a local far-right group. Strike had managed to persuade
them that he shared their belief in a white ethno-nationalist super-state,
infiltrated a meeting and secured four arrests and prosecutions that had given
him particular satisfaction.
Turning on the TV, he watched Channel 4 News for a while, drinking his
wine, smoking in pleasurable anticipation of Pad Thai and other sensual delights,
and for once enjoying what so many of his fellow workers took for granted, but
which he had rarely experienced: the relief and release of a Friday night.
Strike and Lorelei had met at Eric Wardle’s birthday party. It had been an
awkward evening in some ways, because Strike had seen Coco there for the first
time since telling her by phone that he had no interest in another date. Coco had
got very drunk; at one in the morning, while he was sitting on a sofa deep in
conversation with Lorelei, she had marched across the room, thrown a glass of
wine over both of them and stormed off into the night. Strike had not been aware
that Coco and Lorelei were old friends until the morning after he woke up in
Lorelei’s bed. He considered that this was really more Lorelei’s problem than
his. She seemed to think the exchange, for Coco wanted nothing more to do with
her, more than fair.
“How d’you do it?” Wardle had asked, the next time they met, genuinely
puzzled. “Blimey, I’d like to know your—”
Strike raised his heavy eyebrows and Wardle appeared to gag on what had
come perilously close to a compliment.
“There’s no secret,” said Strike. “Some women just like fat one-legged pube-
headed men with broken noses.”
“Well, it’s a sad indictment of our mental health services that they’re loose
on the streets,” Wardle had said, and Strike had laughed.
Lorelei was her real name, taken not from the mythical siren of the Rhine,
but from Marilyn Monroe’s character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, her mother’s
favorite film. Men’s eyes swiveled when she passed them in the street, but she
evoked neither the profound longing nor the searing pain that Charlotte had
caused Strike. Whether this was because Charlotte had stunted his capacity to
feel so intensely, or because Lorelei lacked some essential magic, he did not
know. Neither Strike nor Lorelei had said “I love you.” In Strike’s case this was
because, desirable and amusing though he found her, he could not have said it
honestly. It was convenient to him to assume that Lorelei felt the same way.
She had recently ended a five-year-long live-in relationship when, after

---

several lingering looks across Wardle’s dark sitting room, he had strolled across
to talk to her. He had wanted to believe her when she had told him how glorious
it was to have her flat to herself and her freedom restored, yet lately he had felt
tiny spots of displeasure when he had told her he had to work weekends, like the
first heavy drops of rain that presage a storm. She denied it when challenged: no,