Lethal White

Little girl it was, but after they said it was a little boy.
So a vulnerable, androgynous child might have disappeared off the face of
the earth around the same time, and in the approximate area, that Billy Knight
claimed to have witnessed the strangling of a boy-girl.
In the car, he composed a text to Robin.
If you can make it sound natural, ask Izzy if she remembers anything
about a 12-year-old called Suki Lewis. She ran away 20 years ago from a care
home near their family house.
The dirt on his windscreen shimmered and blurred in the rising sun as he left
London. Driving was no longer the pleasure it had once been. Strike could not
afford a specially adapted vehicle, and even though it was an automatic, the
operation of the BMW’s pedals remained challenging with his prosthesis. In
challenging conditions, he sometimes reverted to operating brake and accelerator
with his left foot.
When he finally joined the M6, Strike hoped to settle in at sixty miles an
hour, but some arsehole in a Vauxhall Corsa decided to tailgate him.
“Fucking overtake,” growled Strike. He was not minded to alter his own
speed, having settled in comfortably without needing to use his false foot more
than was necessary, and for a while he glowered into his rearview mirror until
the Vauxhall driver got the hint and took himself off.
Relaxing to the degree that was ever possible behind the wheel these days,
Strike wound down the window to admit the fine, fresh summer’s day and
allowed his thoughts to return to Billy and the missing Suki Lewis.
She wouldn’t let me dig, he had said in the office, compulsively tapping his
nose and his chest, but she’d let you.

---

Who, Strike wondered, was “she”? Perhaps the new owner of Steda Cottage?
They might well object to Billy asking to dig up flowerbeds in search of bodies.
After feeling around with his left hand inside his provisions bag, extracting
and ripping open a bag of crisps with his teeth, Strike reminded himself for the
umpteenth time that Billy’s whole story might be a chimera. Suki Lewis could be
anywhere. Not every lost child was dead. Perhaps Suki, too, had been stolen
away by an errant parent. Twenty years previously, in the infancy of the internet,
imperfect communication between regional police forces could be exploited by
those wishing to reinvent themselves or others. And even if Suki was no longer
alive, there was nothing to suggest that she had been strangled, let alone that
Billy Knight had witnessed it. Most people would surely conclude that this was a
case of much smoke, but no fire.
Chewing crisps by the handful, Strike reflected that whenever it came to a
question of what “most people” would think, he usually envisaged his half-sister
Lucy, the only one of his seven half-siblings with whom he had shared his
chaotic and peripatetic childhood. To him, Lucy represented the acme of all that
was conventional and unimaginative, even though they had both grown up on
intimate terms with the macabre, the dangerous and the frightening.
Before Lucy had gone to live permanently with their aunt and uncle in
Cornwall, at the age of fourteen, their mother had hauled her and Strike from
squat to commune to rented flat to friend’s floor, rarely remaining in the same
place more than six months, exposing her children to a parade of eccentric,
damaged and addicted human beings along the way. Right hand on the wheel,
left hand now groping around for biscuits, Strike recalled some of the
nightmarish spectacles that he and Lucy had witnessed as children: the psychotic
youth fighting an invisible devil in a basement flat in Shoreditch, the teenager
literally being whipped at a quasi-mystical commune in Norfolk (still, for
Strike’s money, the worst place that Leda had ever taken them) and Shayla, one
of the most fragile of Leda’s friends and a part-time prostitute, sobbing about the
brain damage inflicted on her toddler son by a violent boyfriend.
That unpredictable and sometimes terrifying childhood had left Lucy with a
craving for stability and conformity. Married to a quantity surveyor whom Strike
disliked, with three sons he barely knew, she would probably dismiss Billy’s
story of the strangled boy-girl as the product of a broken mind, sweeping it
swiftly away into the corner with all the other things she could not bear to think
about. Lucy needed to pretend that violence and strangeness had vanished into a
past as dead as their mother; that with Leda gone, life was unshakably secure.
Strike understood. Profoundly different though they were, often though she
exasperated him, he loved Lucy. Nevertheless, he could not help comparing her

---

with Robin as he bowled towards Manchester. Robin had grown up in what
seemed to Strike the very epitome of middle-class stability, but she was
courageous in a way that Lucy was not. Both women had been touched by
violence and sadism. Lucy had reacted by burying herself where she hoped it
would never reach her again; Robin, by facing it almost daily, investigating and
resolving other crimes and traumas, driven to do so by the same impulse to
actively disentangle complications and disinter truths that Strike recognized in
himself.
As the sun climbed higher, still dappling the grubby windscreen, he
experienced a powerful regret that she wasn’t here with him now. She was the
best person he had ever met to run a theory past. She’d unscrew the thermos for
him and pour him tea. We’d have a laugh.
They had slipped back into their old bantering ways a couple of times lately,
since Billy had entered the office with a story troubling enough to break down
the reserve that had, over a year, hardened into a permanent impediment to their
friendship… or whatever it was, thought Strike, and for a moment or two he felt
her again in his arms on the stairs, breathed in the scent of white roses and of the
perfume that hung around the office when Robin was at her desk…
With a kind of mental grimace, he reached for another cigarette, lit up and
forced his mind towards Manchester, and the line of questioning he intended to
take with Dawn Clancy, who, for five years, had been Mrs. Jimmy Knight.
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