Lethal White

I am not going to let myself be beaten to the
ground by the dread of what may happen.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
The following morning, Robin woke, gasping, her fingers at her own throat,
trying to loosen a non-existent hold. She was already at the bedroom door when
Matthew woke, confused.
“It’s nothing, I’m fine,” she muttered, before he could articulate a question,
groping to find the handle that would let her out of the bedroom.
The surprise was that it hadn’t happened more often since she had heard the
story of the strangled child. Robin knew exactly how it felt to have fingers close
tightly around your neck, to feel your brain flood with darkness, to know that
you were seconds from being blotted out of existence. She had been driven into
therapy by sharp-edged fragments of recollection that were unlike normal
memories and which had the power to drag her suddenly out of her body and
plunge her back into a past where she could smell the strangler’s nicotine-stained
fingers, and feel the stabber’s soft, sweatshirted belly against her back.
She locked the bathroom door and sat down on the floor in the loose T-shirt
she had worn to bed, focusing on her breathing, on the feel of the cool tiles
beneath her bare legs, observing, as she had been taught, the rapid beating of her
heart, the adrenaline jolting through her veins, not fighting her panic, but
watching it. After a while, she consciously noticed the faint smell of the lavender
body wash she had used last night, and heard the distant passing of an airplane.
You’re safe. Just a dream. Just a dream.
Through two closed doors, she heard Matthew’s alarm go off. A few minutes
later, he knocked on the door.
“You all right?”
“Fine,” Robin called back, over the running tap.
She opened the door.
“Everything OK?” he asked, watching her closely.
“Just needed a pee,” said Robin brightly, heading back to the bedroom for
her colored contact lenses.
Before starting work with Strike, Robin had signed on with an agency called

---

Temporary Solutions. The offices to which they had sent her were jumbled in her
memory now, so that only anomalies, eccentrics and oddities remained. She
remembered the alcoholic boss whose dictated letters she had reworded out of
kindness, the desk drawer she had opened to find a complete set of dentures and
a pair of stained underpants, the hopeful young man who had nicknamed her
“Bobbie” and tried, ineptly, to flirt over their back-to-back monitors, the woman
who had plastered the interior of her cubicle workspace with pictures of the actor
Ian McShane and the girl who had broken up with her boyfriend on the
telephone in the middle of the open-plan office, indifferent to the prurient hush
falling over the rest of the room. Robin doubted whether any of the people with
whom she had come into glancing contact remembered her any better than she
remembered them, even the timid romancer who had called her “Bobbie.”
However, from the moment that she arrived at the Palace of Westminster, she
knew that what happened here would live in her memory forever. She felt a
ripple of pleasure simply to leave the tourists behind and pass through the gate
where the policeman stood guard. As she approached the palace, with its
intricate gold moldings starkly shadowed in the early morning sun, the famous
clock tower silhouetted against the sky, her nerves and her excitement mounted.
Strike had told her which side door to use. It led into a long, dimly lit stone
hall, but first she must pass through a metal detector and X-ray machine of the
kind used at airports. As she took off her shoulder bag to be scanned, Robin
noticed a tall, slightly disheveled natural blonde in her thirties waiting a short
distance away, holding a small package wrapped in brown paper. The woman
watched as Robin stood for an automated picture that would appear on a paper
day pass, to be worn on a lanyard around her neck, and when the security man
waved Robin on, stepped forwards.
“Venetia?”
“Yes,” said Robin.
“Izzy,” said the other, smiling and holding out a hand. She was wearing a
loose blouse with a splashy pattern of oversize flowers on it, and wide-legged
trousers. “This is from Papa.” She pressed the package she was holding into
Robin’s hands. “I’m rilly sorry, we’ve got to dash—so glad you got here on time
—”
She set off at a brisk walk, and Robin hastened to follow.
“—I’m in the middle of printing off a bunch of papers to take over to Papa at
DCMS—I’m snowed under just now. Papa being Minister for Culture, with the
Olympics coming, it’s just crazy—”
She led Robin at a near jog through the hall, which had stained-glass
windows at the far end, and off along labyrinthine corridors, talking all the while

---

in a confident, upper-class accent, leaving Robin impressed by her lungpower.
“Yah, I’m leaving at the summer recess—setting up a decorating company
with my friend Jacks—I’ve been here for five years—Papa’s not happy—he
needs somebody rilly good and the only applicant he liked turned us down.”
She talked over her shoulder at Robin, who was hurrying to keep up.
“I don’t s’pose you know any fabulous PAs?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Robin, who had retained no friends from her temping
career.
“Nearly there,” said Izzy, who had led Robin through a bewildering number
of narrow corridors, all carpeted in the same forest green as the leather seats
Robin had seen in the Commons on TV. At last they reached a side-passage off
which led several heavy wooden doors, arched in the gothic style.
“That,” said Izzy in a stage whisper, pointing as they passed the first door on
the right, “is Winn’s. This,” she said, marching to the last door on the left, “is
ours.”
She stood aside to let Robin pass into the room first.
The office was cramped and cluttered. The arched stone windows were hung
with net curtains, beyond which lay the terrace bar, where shadowy figures
moved against the dazzling brightness of the Thames. There were two desks, a
multitude of bookshelves and a sagging green armchair. Green drapes hung at
the overflowing bookshelves that covered one wall, only partially concealing the
untidy stacks of files stacked there. On top of a filing cabinet stood a TV
monitor, showing the currently empty interior of the Commons, its green
benches deserted. A kettle sat beside mismatched mugs on a low shelf and had
stained the wallpaper above it. The desktop printer whirred wheezily in a corner.
Some of the papers it was disgorging had slid onto the threadbare carpet.
“Oh, shit,” said Izzy, dashing over and scooping them up, while Robin closed
the door behind her. As she tapped the fallen papers back into a neat stack on her
desk, Izzy said:
“I’m thrilled Papa’s brought you in. He’s been under so much strain, which
he really doesn’t need with everything we’ve got on now, but you and Strike will
sort it out, won’t you? Winn’s a horrible little man,” said Izzy, reaching for a
leather folder. “Inadequate, you know. How long have you worked with Strike?”
“A couple of years,” said Robin, as she undid the package Izzy had given
her.
“I’ve met him, did he tell you? Yah—I was at school with his ex, Charlie
Campbell. Gorgeous but trouble, Charlie. D’you know her?”
“No,” said Robin. A long-ago near-collision outside Strike’s office had been
her only contact with Charlotte.

---

“I always quite fancied Strike,” said Izzy.
Robin glanced around, surprised, but Izzy was matter-of-factly inserting
papers into the folder.
“Yah, people couldn’t see it, but I could. He was so butch and so… well…
unapologetic.”
“Unapologetic?” Robin repeated.
“Yah. He never took any crap from anyone. Didn’t give a toss that people
thought he wasn’t, you know—”
“Good enough for her?”
As soon as the words escaped her, Robin felt embarrassed. She had felt
suddenly strangely protective of Strike. It was absurd, of course: if anybody
could look after themselves, it was he.
“S’pose so,” said Izzy, still waiting for her papers to print. “It’s been ghastly
for Papa, these past couple of months. And it isn’t as though what he did was
wrong!” she said fiercely. “One minute it’s legal, the next it isn’t. That’s not
Papa’s fault.”
“What wasn’t legal?” asked Robin innocently.
“Sorry,” Izzy replied, pleasantly but firmly. “Papa says, the fewer people
know, the better.”
She peeked through the net curtains at the sky. “I won’t need a jacket, will I?
No… sorry to dash, but Papa needs these and he’s off to meet Olympic sponsors
at ten. Good luck.”
And in a rush of flowered fabric and tousled hair, she was gone, leaving
Robin curious but strangely reassured. If Izzy could take this robust view of her
father’s misdemeanor, it surely could not be anything dreadful—always
assuming, of course, that Chiswell had told his daughter the truth.
Robin ripped the last piece of wrapping from the small parcel Izzy had given
her. It contained, as she had known it would, the half-dozen listening devices
that Strike had given to Jasper Chiswell over the weekend. As a Minister of the
Crown, Chiswell was not required to pass through the security scanner every
morning, as Robin was. She examined the bugs carefully. They had the
appearance of normal plastic power points, and were designed to be fitted over
genuine plug sockets, allowing the latter to function as normal. They would
begin to record only when somebody spoke in their vicinity. She could hear her
own heartbeat in the silence left by Izzy’s departure. The difficulty of her task
was only just beginning to sink in.
She took off her coat, hung it up, then removed from her shoulder bag a large
box of Tampax, which she had brought for the purpose of concealing the
listening devices she wasn’t using. After hiding all but one of the bugs inside it,

---

she placed the box in the bottom drawer of her desk. Next, she searched the
cluttered shelves until she found an empty box file, in which she hid the
remaining device beneath a handful of letters with typos that she took out of a
pile labeled “for shredding.” Thus armed, Robin took a deep breath and left the
room.
Winn’s door had opened since she had arrived. As Robin walked past, she
saw a tall young Asian man wearing thick-lensed glasses and carrying a kettle.
“Hi!” said Robin at once, imitating Izzy’s bold, cheery approach. “I’m
Venetia Hall, we’re neighbors! Who are you?”
“Aamir,” muttered the other, in a working-class London accent. “Mallik.”
“Do you work for Della Winn?” asked Robin.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, she’s so inspirational,” gushed Robin. “One of my heroines, actually.”
Aamir did not reply, but radiated a desire to be left alone. Robin felt like a
terrier trying to harass a racehorse.
“Have you worked here long?”
“Six months.”
“Are you going to the café?”
“No,” said Aamir, as though she had propositioned him, and he turned
sharply away towards the bathroom.
Robin walked on, holding her box file, wondering whether she had imagined
animosity rather than shyness in the young man’s demeanor. It would have been
helpful to make a friend in Winn’s office. Having to pretend to be an Izzy-esque
goddaughter of Jasper Chiswell was hampering her. She couldn’t help but feel
that Robin Ellacott from Yorkshire might have befriended Aamir more easily.
Having set off with fake purpose, she decided to explore for a while before
returning to Izzy’s office.
Chiswell’s and Winn’s offices were in the Palace of Westminster itself,
which, with its vaulted ceilings, libraries, tearooms and air of comfortable
grandeur, might have been an old university college.
A half-covered passageway, watched over by large stone statues of a unicorn
and lion, led to an escalator to Portcullis House. This was a modern crystal
palace, with a folded glass roof, triangular panes held in place by thick black
struts. Beneath was a wide, open-plan area including a café, where MPs and civil
servants mingled. Flanked by full-grown trees, large water features consisting of
long blocks of covered-in shallow pools became dazzling strips of quicksilver in
the June sunshine.
There was a shiver of ambition in the thrumming air, and the sense of being