Lethal White

haven’t you got enough problems without worrying about Strike’s love life, it’s
nothing whatsoever to do with you…
She felt a sudden guilty prickle around her lips, where Strike’s missed kiss
had landed outside the hospital. As though she could wash it away, she downed
the dregs of her coffee, got up and left the café for the broad, straight street,
which comprised two symmetrical lines of identical nineteenth-century houses.
She walked briskly, not because she was in any hurry to bear the brunt of
Chiswell’s anger and disappointment, but because activity helped dispel her
uncomfortable thoughts.
Arriving outside Chiswell’s house precisely on time, she lingered for a few
hopeful seconds beside the glossy black front door, just in case Strike were to
appear at the last moment. He didn’t. Robin therefore steadied herself, walked up
the three clean white steps from the pavement and knocked on the front door,
which was on the latch and opened a few inches. A man’s muffled voice shouted
something that might have been “come in.”
Robin passed into a small, dingy hall dominated by vertiginous stairs. The
olive-green wallpaper was drab and peeling in places. Leaving the front door as

---

she had found it, she called out:
“Minister?”
He didn’t answer. Robin knocked gently on the door to the right, and opened
it.
Time froze. The scene seemed to fold in upon her, crashing through her
retinas into a mind unprepared for it, and shock kept her standing in the
doorway, her hand still on the handle and her mouth slightly open, trying to
comprehend what she was seeing.
A man was sitting in a Queen Anne chair, his legs splayed, his arms
dangling, and he seemed to have a shiny gray turnip for a head, in which a
carved mouth gaped, but no eyes.
Then Robin’s struggling comprehension grasped the fact that it was not a
turnip, but a human head shrink-wrapped in a clear plastic bag, into which a tube
ran from a large canister. The man looked as though he had suffocated. His left
foot lay sideways on the rug, revealing a small hole in the sole, his thick fingers
dangled, almost touching the carpet, and there was a stain at his groin where his
bladder had emptied.
And next she understood that it was Chiswell himself who sat in the chair,
and that his thick mass of gray hair was pressed flat against his face in the
vacuum created by the bag, and that the gaping mouth had sucked the plastic
into itself, which was why it gaped so darkly.
35
… the White Horse! In broad daylight!
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Somewhere in the distance, outside the house, a man shouted. He sounded
like a workman, and in some part of her brain Robin knew that that was who she
had heard when she was expecting to hear “come in.” Nobody had invited her
into the house. The door had simply been left ajar.
Now, when it might have been expected, she didn’t panic. There was no
threat here, however horrifying the sight of that awful dummy, with the turnip
head and the tube, this poor lifeless figure could not hurt her. Knowing that she
must check that life was extinct, Robin approached Chiswell and gently touched
his shoulder. It was easier, not being able to see his eyes, because of the coarse
hair that obscured them like a horse’s forelock. The flesh felt hard beneath his

---

striped shirt and cooler than she had expected.
But then she imagined the gaping mouth speaking, and took several quick
steps backwards, until her foot landed with a crunch on something hard on the
carpet and she slipped. She had cracked a pale blue plastic tube of pills lying on
the carpet. She recognized them as the sort of homeopathic tablets sold in her
local chemist.
Taking out her mobile, she called 999 and asked for the police. After
explaining that she had found a body and giving the address, she was told that
someone would be with her shortly.
Trying not to focus on Chiswell, she took in the frayed curtains, which were
of an indeterminate dun color, trimmed with sad little bobbles, the antiquated TV
in its faux wood cladding, the patch of darker wallpaper over the mantelpiece
where a painting had once hung, and the silver-framed photographs. But the
shrink-wrapped head, the rubber piping and the cold glint of the canister seemed
to turn all of this everyday normality into pasteboard. The nightmare alone was
real.
So Robin turned her mobile onto its camera function and began to take
photographs. Putting a lens between herself and the scene mitigated the horror.
Slowly and methodically, she documented the scene.
A glass sat on the coffee table in front of the body, with a few millimeters of
what looked like orange juice in it. Scattered books and papers lay beside it.
There was a piece of thick cream writing paper headed with a red Tudor rose,
like a drop of blood, and the printed address of the house in which Robin stood.
Somebody had written in a rounded, girlish hand.