Lethal White

… I want to try and play my humble part in the
struggles of life.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Robin emerged from Camden Town station at half past eight on Friday
morning and set off for the jewelry shop where she was to have her day’s trial,
furtively checking her appearance in every window that she passed.
In the months following the trial of the Shacklewell Ripper, she had become
adept at makeup techniques such as altering the shape of her eyebrows or over-
painting her lips in vermillion, which made a significant difference to her
appearance when coupled with wigs and colored contact lenses, but she had
never before worn as much makeup as today. Her eyes, in which she was
wearing dark brown contact lenses, were heavily rimmed with black kohl, her
lips painted pale pink, her nails a metallic gray. Having only one conventional
hole in each earlobe, she had bought a couple of cheap ear cuffs to simulate a
more adventurous approach to piercing. The short black second-hand dress she
had bought at the local Oxfam shop in Deptford still smelled slightly fusty, even
though she had run it through the washing machine the previous day, and she
wore it with thick black tights and a pair of flat black lace-up boots in spite of
the warmth of the morning. Thus attired, she hoped that she resembled the other
goth and emo girls who frequented Camden, an area of London that Robin had
rarely visited and which she associated mainly with Lorelei and her vintage
clothes store.
She had named her new alter ego Bobbi Cunliffe. When undercover, it was
best to assume names with a personal association, to which you responded
instinctively. Bobbi sounded like Robin, and indeed people had sometimes tried
to abbreviate her name that way, most notably her long-ago flirt in a temporary
office, and her brother, Martin, when he wished to annoy her. Cunliffe was
Matthew’s surname.
To her relief, he had left for work early that day, because he was auditing an
office out in Barnet, leaving Robin free to complete her physical transformation
without undermining remarks and displeasure that she was, again, going
undercover. Indeed, she thought she might derive a certain pleasure from using
her married name—the first time she had ever offered it as her own—while

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embodying a girl whom Matthew would instinctively dislike. The older he got,
the more Matthew was aggravated by and contemptuous of people who did not
dress, think or live as he did.
The Wiccan’s jewelry shop, Triquetra, was tucked away in Camden Market.
Arriving outside at a quarter to nine, Robin found the stallholders of Camden
Lock Place already busy, but the store locked up and empty. After a five-minute
wait, her employer arrived, puffing slightly. A large woman whom Robin
guessed to be in her late fifties, she had straggly dyed black hair that showed half
an inch of silver root, had the same savage approach to eyeliner as Bobbi
Cunliffe and wore a long green velvet dress.
During the cursory interview that had led to today’s trial, the shop owner had
asked very few questions, instead speaking at length about the husband of thirty
years who had just left her to live in Thailand, the neighbor who was suing her
over a boundary dispute and the stream of unsatisfactory and ungrateful
employees who had walked out on Triquetra to take other jobs. Her undisguised
desire to extract the maximum amount of work for the minimum amount of pay,
coupled with her outpourings of self-pity, made Robin wonder why anybody had
ever wanted to work for her in the first place.
“You’re punctual,” she observed, when within earshot. “Good. Where’s the
other one?”
“I don’t know,” said Robin.
“I don’t need this,” said the owner, with a slight note of hysteria. “Not on the
day I’ve got to meet Brian’s lawyer!”
She unlocked the door and showed Robin into the shop, which was the size
of a large kiosk, and as she raised her arms to start pulling up blinds, the smell of
body odor and patchouli mingled with the dusty, incense-scented air. Daylight
fell into the shop like a solid thing, rendering everything there more insubstantial
and shabby by comparison. Dull silver necklaces and earrings hung in racks on
the dark purple walls, many of them featuring pentagrams, peace symbols and
marijuana leaves, while glass hookahs mingled with tarot cards, black candles,
essential oils and ceremonial daggers on black shelves behind the counter.
“We’ve got millions of extra tourists coming through Camden right now,”
said the owner, bustling around the back of the counter, “and if she doesn’t turn
—there you are,” she said, as Flick, who looked sulky, sloped inside. Flick was
wearing a yellow and green Hezbollah T-shirt and ripped jeans, and carrying a
large leather messenger bag.
“Tube was late,” she said.
“Well, I managed to get here all right, and so did Bibi!”
“Bobbi,” Robin corrected her, deliberately broadening her Yorkshire accent.

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She didn’t want to pretend to be a Londoner this time. It was best not to have
to talk about schools and locales that Flick might know.
“—well, I need you two to be on top of things all—the—time,” said the
owner, beating out the last three words with one hand against the other. “All
right, Bibi—”
“—Bobbi—”
“—yes, come here and see how the till works.”
Robin had no difficulty grasping how the till worked, because she had had a
Saturday job in her teens at a clothes shop in Harrogate. It was just as well that
she did not need longer instruction, because a steady stream of shoppers began to
arrive about ten minutes after they opened. To Robin’s slight surprise, because
there was nothing in the shop that she would have cared to buy, many visitors to
Camden seemed to feel that their trip would be incomplete without a pair of
pewter earrings, or a pentagram-embossed candle, or one of the small hessian
bags that lay in a basket beside the till, each of which purported to contain a
magic charm.
“All right, I need to be off,” the owner announced at eleven, while Flick was
serving a tall German woman who was dithering between two packs of tarot
cards. “Don’t forget: one of you needs to be focused on stock all the time, in case
of pilfering. My friend Eddie will be keeping an eye out,” she said, pointing at
the stall selling old LPs just outside. “Twenty minutes each for lunch, taken
separately. Don’t forget,” she repeated ominously, “Eddie’s watching.”
She left in a whirl of velvet and body odor. The German customer departed
with her tarot cards and Flick slammed the till drawer shut, the noise echoing in
the temporarily empty shop.
“Old Steady Eddie,” she said venomously. “He doesn’t give a shit. He could
rob her blind and he wouldn’t care. Cow,” added Flick for good measure.
Robin laughed and Flick seemed gratified.
“What’s tha name?” asked Robin, in broad Yorkshire. “She never said.”
“Flick,” said Flick. “You’re Bobbi, yeah?”
“Yeah,” said Robin.
Flick took out her mobile from her messenger bag, which she had stowed
beneath the counter, checked it, appeared not to see what she had hoped to see,
then stuffed it out of sight again.
“You must’ve been hard up for work, were you?” she asked Robin.
“Had to take what I could,” Robin said. “I were sacked.”
“Yeah?”
“Fookin’ Amazon,” said Robin.
“Those tax-dodging bastards,” said Flick, slightly more interested. “What

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happened?”
“Didn’t make my daily rate.”
Robin had lifted her story directly from a recent news report about working
conditions in one of the retail company’s warehouses: the relentless pressure to
make targets, packing and scanning thousands of products a day under
unforgiving pressure from supervisors. Flick’s expression wavered between
sympathy and anger as Robin talked.
“That’s outrageous!” she said, when Robin had finished.
“Yeah,” said Robin, “and no union or nothing, obviously. Me dad were a big
trade union man back in Yorkshire.”
“Bet he was furious.”
“He’s dead,” said Robin, unblushingly. “Lungs. Ex-miner.”
“Oh, shit,” said Flick. “Sorry.”
She was looking upon Robin with respect and interest now.
“See, you’ll have been a worker, not an employee. That’s how the bastards
get away with it.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Fewer statutory rights,” said Flick. “You might have a case against them if
they deducted from your wages, though.”
“Dunno if I could prove that,” said Robin. “How come you know all this?”
“I’m pretty active in the labor movement,” said Flick, with a shrug. She
hesitated, “And my mother’s an employment lawyer.”
“Yeah?” said Robin, allowing herself to sound politely surprised.
“Yeah,” said Flick, picking her nails, “but we don’t get on. I don’t see any of
my family, actually. They don’t like my partner. Or my politics.”
She smoothed out the Hezbollah T-shirt and showed Robin.
“What, are they Tories?” asked Robin.
“Might as well be,” said Flick. “They loved bloody Blair.”
Robin felt her phone vibrate in the pocket of her second-hand dress.
“Is there a bog anywhere here?”
“Through here,” said Flick, pointing to a well-hidden purple painted door
with more racks of jewelry nailed to it.
Beyond the purple door Robin found a small cubbyhole with a cracked, dirty
window. A safe sat beside a dilapidated kitchen unit with a kettle, a couple of
cleaning products and a stiff J-cloth on top. There was no room to sit down and
barely room to stand, because a grubby toilet had been plumbed into the corner.
Robin shut herself inside the chipboard cubicle, put down the toilet lid and
sat down to read the lengthy text that Barclay had just sent to both her and
Strike.

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Billy’s been found. He was picked up off street 2 weeks ago. Psychotic
episode, sectioned, hospital in north London, don’t know which yet. Wouldn’t
tell docs his next of kin till yesterday. Social worker contacted Jimmy this
morning. Jimmy wants me to go with him to persuade Billy to discharge
himself. Scared what Billy’s going to tell the doctors, says he talks too much.
Also, Jimmy’s lost bit of paper with Billy’s name on & he’s shitting himself
about it. Asked me if I’d seen it. He says it’s handwritten, no other details, I
don’t know why so important. Jimmy thinks Flick’s nicked it. Things bad
between them again.
As Robin was reading this for a second time, a response came in from Strike.
Barclay: find out visiting arrangements at the hospital, I want to see Billy.
Robin: try and search Flick’s bag.
Thanks, Robin texted back, exasperated. I’d never have thought of that on
my own.
She got up, flushed the toilet and returned to the shop, where a gang of
black-clad goths were picking over the stock like drooping crows. As she sidled
past Flick, Robin saw that her messenger bag was sitting on a shelf beneath the
counter. When the group had finally left in possession of essential oils and black
candles, Flick took out her phone to check it again, before sinking once more
into a morose silence.
Robin’s experience in many temporary offices had taught her that little
bonded women more than discovering that they were not alone in their particular
man-related miseries. Taking out her own phone, she saw a further text from
Strike:
That’s why I get paid the big money. Brains.
Amused against her will, Robin suppressed a grin and said:
“He must think I’m fooking stupid.”
“Wassup?”
“Boyfriend. So-called,” said Robin, ramming her phone back into her pocket.
“S’posed to be separated from his wife. Guess where he was last night? Mate of
mine saw him leaving hers this morning.” She exhaled loudly and slumped down
on the counter.
“Yeah, my boyfriend likes old women and all,” said Flick, picking at her
nails. Robin, who had not forgotten that Jimmy had been married to a woman
thirteen years his senior, hoped for more confidences, but before she could ask
more, another group of young women entered, chattering in a language that

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Robin did not recognize, though she thought it sounded Eastern European. They
clustered around the basket of supposed charms.
“Dziękuję ci,” Flick said, as one of them handed over her money, and the
girls laughed and complimented her on her accent.
“What did you just say?” asked Robin, as the party left. “Was that Russian?”
“Polish. Learned a bit from my parents’ cleaner.” Flick hurried on, as though
she had given something away, “Yeah, I always got on better with the cleaners
than I did with my parents, actually, you can’t call yourself a socialist and have a
cleaner, can you? Nobody should be allowed to live in a house too big for them,
we should have forcible repossessions, redistribution of land and housing to the
people who need it.”
“Too right,” said Robin enthusiastically, and Flick seemed reassured to be
forgiven her professional parents by Bobbi Cunliffe, daughter of a dead ex-miner
and Yorkshire trade unionist.
“Want a tea?” she offered.
“Aye, that’d be great,” said Robin.
“Have you heard of the Real Socialist Party?” asked Flick, once she had
come back into the shop with two mugs.
“No,” said Robin.
“It’s not your normal political party,” Flick assured her. “We’re more like a
proper community-based campaign, like, back to the Jarrow marchers, that kind
of thing, the real spirit of Labor movement, not an imperialist Tory-lite shower
of shite like fucking ‘New Labor.’ We don’t want to play the same old politics
game, we want to change the rules of the game in favor of ordinary working—”
Billy Bragg’s version of the “Internationale” rang out. As Flick reached into
her bag, Robin realized that this was Flick’s ringtone. Reading the caller’s name,
Flick became tense.
“You be all right on your own for a bit?”
“Course,” said Robin.
Flick slid into the back room. As the door swung shut Robin heard her say:
“What’s going on? Have you seen him?”
As soon as the door was securely shut, Robin hurried to where Flick had
been standing, crouched down and slid her hand under the leather flap of the
messenger bag. The interior resembled the depths of a bin. Her fingers groped
through sundry bits of crumpled paper, sweet wrappers, a sticky lump of
something Robin thought might be chewed gum, various lid-less pens and tubes
of makeup, a tin with a picture of Che Guevara on it, a pack of rolling tobacco
that had leaked over the rest of the contents, some Rizlas, some spare tampons
and a small, twisted ball of fabric that Robin was afraid might be a pair of worn

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pants. Trying to flatten out, read and then re-crumple each piece of paper was
time-consuming. Most seemed to be abandoned drafts of articles. Then, through
the door behind her, she heard Flick say loudly:
“Strike? What the hell…”
Robin froze, listening.
“… paranoid… it alone now… tell them he’s…”
“Excuse me,” said a woman peering over the counter. Robin jumped up. The
portly, gray-haired customer in a tie-dyed T-shirt pointed up at the shelf on the
wall, “could I see that rather special athame?”
“Which?” asked Robin, confused.
“The athame. The ceremonial dagger,” said the elderly woman, pointing.
Flick’s voice rose and fell in the room behind Robin.
“… it, didn’t you?… member you… pay me back… Chiswell’s money…”
“Mmm,” said the customer, weighing the knife carefully in her hand, “have
you anything larger?”
“You had it, not me!” said Flick loudly, from behind the door.
“Um,” said Robin, squinting up at the shelf, “I think this is all we’ve got.
That one might be a bit bigger…”
She stood on tiptoe to reach the longer knife, as Flick said:
“Fuck off, Jimmy!”
“There you are,” said Robin, handing over the seven-inch dagger.
With a clatter of falling necklaces, the door behind Robin flew open, hitting
her in the back.
“Sorry,” said Flick, seizing her bag and shoving the phone back inside it,
breathing hard, her eyes bright.
“Yes, you see, I like the triple moon marking on the smaller one,” said the
elderly witch, pointing at the decoration on the hilt of the first dagger, unfazed
by Flick’s dramatic reappearance, “but I prefer the longer blade.”
Flick was in that febrile state between fury and tears that Robin knew was
one of the most amenable to indiscretion and confession. Desperate to get rid of
her tiresome customer, she said bluntly in Bobbi’s thick Yorkshire:
“Well, that’s all we’ve got.”
The customer chuntered a little more, weighing the two knives in her hands,
and at last took herself off without buying either.
“Y’all right?” Robin asked Flick at once.
“No,” said Flick. “I need a smoke.”
She checked her watch.
“Tell her I’m taking lunch if she comes back, all right?”
Damn, thought Robin, as Flick disappeared, taking her bag and her

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promising mood with her.
For over an hour, Robin minded the shop alone, becoming increasingly
hungry. Once or twice, Eddie at the record stall peered vaguely into the shop at
Robin, but showed no other interest in her activities. In a brief lull between more
customers, Robin nipped into the back room to make sure that there wasn’t any
food there that she had overlooked. There wasn’t.
At ten to one, Flick strolled back into the shop with a dark, thuggishly
handsome man in a tight blue T-shirt. He subjected Robin to the hard, arrogant
stare of a certain brand of womanizer, melding appreciation and disdain to signal
that she might be good-looking, but she would have to try a little harder than that
to arouse his interest. It was a strategy that Robin had seen work on other young
women in offices. It had never worked on her.
“Sorry I was so long,” Flick told Robin. Her bad mood did not seem entirely
dissipated. “Ran into Jimmy. Jimmy, this is Bobbi.”
“All right?” said Jimmy, holding out a hand.
Robin shook it.
“You go,” said Flick to Robin. “Go and get something to eat.”
“Oh, right,” said Robin. “Thanks.”
Jimmy and Flick waited while, under cover of checking her bag for money,
Robin crouched down and, hidden by the counter, set her mobile to record before
placing it carefully at the back of the dark shelf.
“See tha in a bit, then,” she said brightly, and strolled away into the market.

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48