Lethal White

Strike. That bastard soldier with the one leg. Billy’s fixated on him. Thinks
he’s going to rescue him.
Surely there was a chance, however tiny, that Billy might gravitate back to

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the place where he had last sought help? Strike had spent a few hours wandering
Trafalgar Square on the previous afternoon, knowing how remote was the
possibility that Billy would show up, yet feeling compelled to do something,
however pointless.
Strike’s other decision, which was even harder to justify, because it cost
money the agency could currently ill afford, was to keep Barclay embedded with
Jimmy and Flick.
“It’s your money,” the Glaswegian said, when the detective gave him this
instruction, “but what’m I looking for?”
“Billy,” said Strike, “and in the absence of Billy, anything strange.”
Of course, the next lot of accounts would show Robin exactly what Barclay
was up to.
Strike had a sudden feeling that he was being watched. Ossie, the bolder of
Nick and Ilsa’s kittens, was sitting at the kitchen window, beside the kitchen
taps, staring through the window with eyes of pale jade. His gaze felt
judgmental.

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37
I shall never conquer this completely. There will
always be a doubt confronting me—a question.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Wary of breaching the conditions of the super-injunction, photographers
stayed away from Chiswell’s funeral in Woolstone. News organizations
restricted themselves to brief, factual announcements that the service had taken
place. Strike, who had considered sending flowers, had decided against it on the
basis that the gesture might be taken as a tasteless reminder that his bill remained
unpaid. Meanwhile the inquest into Chiswell’s death was opened and adjourned,
pending further investigations.
And then, quite suddenly, nobody was very interested in Jasper Chiswell. It
was as though the corpse that had been borne aloft for a week upon a swell of
newsprint, gossip and rumor, now sank beneath stories of sportsmen and women,
of Olympic preparations and predictions, the country in the grip of an almost
universal preoccupation, for whether they approved or disapproved of the event,
it was impossible to ignore or avoid.
Robin was still phoning Strike daily, pressuring him to let her come back to
work, but Strike continued to refuse. Not only had Mitch Patterson twice more
appeared in her street, but an unfamiliar young busker had spent the whole week
playing on the pavement opposite Strike’s office, missing chord changes every
time he saw the detective and regularly breaking off halfway through songs to
answer his mobile. The press, it seemed, had not forgotten that the Olympics
would eventually end, and that there was still a juicy story to be run on the
reason Jasper Chiswell had hired private detectives.
None of Strike’s police contacts knew anything about the progress of their
colleagues’ investigation into the case. Usually able to fall asleep under even the
most unpropitious conditions, Strike found himself unusually restless and
wakeful by night, listening to the increased noise from the London now heaving
with Olympics visitors. The last time he had endured such a long stretch of
sleeplessness had been his first week of consciousness after his leg had been
borne off by the IED in Afghanistan. Then he had been kept awake by a
tormenting itch impossible to scratch, because he felt it on his missing foot.

---

Strike hadn’t seen Lorelei since the night of the Paralympic reception. After
leaving Charlotte in the street, he had set off for Trafalgar Square to try and
locate Billy, with the result that he had been even later to dinner with Lorelei
than he had expected. Tired, sore, frustrated at his failure to find Billy and jarred
by the unexpected meeting with his ex, he had arrived at the curry house in the
expectation, and perhaps the hope, that Lorelei would have already left.
However, she had not only been waiting patiently at the table, she had
immediately wrong-footed him with what he mentally characterized as a
strategic retreat. Far from forcing a discussion about the future of their
relationship, she had apologized for what she claimed to have been a foolish and
precipitate declaration of love in bed, which she knew had embarrassed him and
which she sincerely regretted.
Strike, who had drunk most of a pint on sitting down, bolstering himself, as
he had imagined, for the unpleasant task of explaining that he did not want their
relationship to become either more serious or permanent, was stymied. Her
claim that she had said “I love you” as a kind of cri de joie rendered his prepared
speech useless, and given that she had looked very lovely in the lamp-lit
restaurant, it had been easier and pleasanter to accept her explanation at face
value rather than force a rupture that, clearly, neither of them wanted. They had
texted and spoken a few times during the subsequent week apart, though
nowhere near as often as he had talked to Robin. Lorelei had been perfectly
understanding about his need to keep a low profile for a while once he explained
that his late client had been the government minister who had suffocated in a
plastic bag.
Lorelei had even been unfazed when he refused her invitation to watch the
opening ceremony of the Olympics with her, because he’d already agreed to
spend the evening at Lucy and Greg’s. Strike’s sister was as yet unwilling to let
Jack out of her sight, and had therefore declined Strike’s offer to take him to the
Imperial War Museum over the weekend, offering dinner instead. When he
explained to Lorelei how matters stood, Strike could tell that she was hoping that
he would ask her to come with him to meet some of his family for the first time.
He said, truthfully, that his motive for going alone was to spend time with the
nephew whom he felt he had neglected, and Lorelei accepted this explanation
good-naturedly, merely asking whether he was free the following night.
As the taxi bore him from Bromley South station towards Lucy and Greg’s,
Strike found himself mulling the situation with Lorelei, because Lucy usually
demanded a bulletin on his love life. This was one of the reasons he avoided
these kinds of get-togethers. It troubled Lucy that her brother was still, at the age
of nearly thirty-eight, unmarried. She had gone so far, on one embarrassing

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occasion, as to invite to dinner a woman whom she imagined he might fancy,
which had taught him only that his sister grossly misjudged his taste and needs.
As the taxi bore him deeper and deeper into middle-class suburbia, Strike
found himself face to face with the uncomfortable truth, which was that Lorelei’s
willingness to accept the casualness of their current arrangement did not stem
from a shared sense of disengagement, but from a desperation to keep him on
almost any terms.
Staring out of the window at the roomy houses with double garages and neat
lawns, his thoughts drifted to Robin, who called him daily when her husband
was out, and then to Charlotte, holding lightly to his arm as she walked down the
Lancaster House staircase in her spike-heeled boots. It had been convenient and
pleasurable to have Lorelei in his life these past ten and a half months,
affectionately undemanding, erotically gifted and pretending not to be in love
with him. He could let the relationship continue, tell himself that he was, in that
meaningless phrase, “seeing how things went,” or he could face the fact that he
had merely postponed what must be done, and the longer he let things drift, the
more mess and pain would result.
These reflections were hardly calculated to cheer him up, and as the taxi
drew up outside his sister’s house, with the magnolia tree in the front garden,
and the net curtain twitching excitedly, he felt an irrational resentment towards
his sister, as though all of it was her fault.
Jack opened the front door before Strike could even knock. Given his state
the last time Strike had seen him, Jack looked remarkably well, and the detective
was torn between pleasure at his recovery, and annoyance that he hadn’t been
allowed to take his nephew out, rather than making the long and inconvenient
journey to Bromley.
However, Jack’s delight in Strike’s arrival, his eager questions about
everything Strike remembered about their time together in hospital, because he
himself had been glamorously unconscious, were touching, as was the fact that
Jack insisted upon sitting next to his uncle at dinner, and monopolized his
attention throughout. It was clear that Jack felt that they had become more
closely bonded for each having passed through the tribulation of emergency
surgery. He demanded so many details of Strike’s amputation that Greg put
down his knife and fork and pushed away his plate with a nauseated expression.
Strike had previously formed the impression that Jack, the middle son, was
Greg’s least favorite. He took a slightly malicious pleasure in satisfying Jack’s
curiosity, especially as he knew that Greg, who would usually have shut the
conversation down, was exercising unusual restraint given Jack’s convalescent
state. Unconscious of all undercurrents, Lucy beamed throughout, her eyes

---

barely leaving Strike and Jack. She asked Strike nothing about his private life.
All she seemed to ask was that he would be kind and patient with her son.
Uncle and nephew left the dinner table on excellent terms, Jack choosing a
seat next to Strike on the sofa to watch the Olympics opening ceremony and
chattering nonstop while they waited for the live broadcast to start, expressing
the hope, among other things, that there would be guns, cannons and soldiers.
This innocent remark reminded Strike of Jasper Chiswell and his annoyance,
reported by Robin, that Britain’s military prowess was not to be celebrated on
this largest of national stages. This made Strike wonder whether Jimmy Knight
was sitting in front of a TV somewhere, readying himself to sneer at what he had
castigated as a carnival of capitalism.
Greg handed Strike a bottle of Heineken.
“Here we go!” said Lucy excitedly.
The live broadcast began with a countdown. A few seconds in, a numbered
balloon failed to burst. Let it not be shit, thought Strike, suddenly forgetting
everything else in an upsurge of patriotic paranoia.
But the opening ceremony had been so very much the reverse of shit that
Strike stayed to watch the whole thing, voluntarily missing his last train,
accepting the offer of the sofa bed and breakfasting on Saturday morning with
the family.
“Agency doing well, is it?” Greg asked him over the fry-up Lucy had
cooked.
“Not bad,” said Strike.
He generally avoided discussing his business with Greg, who seemed to have
been wrong-footed by Strike’s success. His brother-in-law had always given the
impression of being irritated by Strike’s distinguished military career. As he
fielded Greg’s questions about the structure of the business, the rights and
responsibilities of his freelance hires, Robin’s special status as salaried partner
and the potential for expansion, Strike detected, not for the first time, Greg’s
barely disguised hope that there might be something Strike had forgotten or
overlooked, too much the soldier to easily navigate the civilian business world.
“What’s the ultimate aim, though?” he asked, while Jack sat patiently at
Strike’s side, clearly hoping to talk more about the military. “I suppose you’ll be
looking to build up the business so that you don’t need to be out on the street?
Direct them all from the office?”
“No,” said Strike. “If I’d wanted a desk job I’d’ve stayed in the army. The
aim is to build up enough reliable employees that we can sustain a steady
workload, and make some decent money. Short term, I want to build up enough

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money in the bank to see us through the lean times.”
“Seems under-ambitious,” said Greg. “With the free advertising you got after
the Ripper case—”
“We’re not talking about that case now,” said Lucy sharply, from beside the
frying pan, and with a glance at his son Greg fell silent, permitting Jack to re-
enter the conversation with a question about assault courses.
Lucy, who had loved every moment of her brother’s visit, glowed with
pleasure as she hugged him goodbye after breakfast.
“Let me know when I can take Jack out,” said Strike, while his nephew
beamed up at him.
“I will, and thanks so much, Stick. I’ll never forget what you—”
“I didn’t do anything,” Strike said, thumping her gently on the back. “He did
it himself. He’s tough, aren’t you, Jack? Thanks for a nice evening, Luce.”
Strike considered that he had got out just in time. Finishing his cigarette
outside the station, with ten minutes to kill before the next train to central
London, he reflected that Greg had reverted over breakfast to that combination
of chirpiness and heartiness with which he usually treated his brother-in-law,
while Lucy’s inquiries after Robin as he put on his coat had shown signs of
becoming a wide-ranging inquiry into his relationships with women in general.
His thoughts had just returned dispiritedly towards Lorelei when his mobile
rang.
“Hello?”
“Is this Cormoran?” said an upper-class female voice he did not immediately
recognize.
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“Izzy Chiswell,” she said, sounding as though she had a head cold.
“Izzy!” repeated Strike, surprised. “Er… how are you?”
“Oh, bearing up. We, ah, got your invoice.”
“Right,” said Strike, wondering whether she was about to dispute the total,
which was large.
“I’d be very happy to give you payment immediately, if you could… I
wonder whether you could possibly come and see me? Today, if that’s
convenient? How are you fixed?”
Strike checked his watch. For the first time in weeks he had nothing to do
except make his way to Lorelei’s later for dinner, and the prospect of collecting a
large check was certainly welcome.
“Yeah, that should be fine,” he said. “Where are you, Izzy?”
She gave him her address in Chelsea.
“I’ll be about an hour.”

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“Perfect,” she said, sounding relieved. “I’ll see you then.”

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38