Lethal White

Thank God, thought Robin.
Kinvara crossed her legs and folded her arms across her large chest. Her foot
bounced up and down. She shot Raphael a hard, almost spiteful look.
“Aren’t you going to say hello, Raphael?”
“Hello,” he said.
“Jasper told me to meet him here, but if you’d rather I waited in the corridor
I can,” Kinvara said in her high, tight voice.
“Of course not,” muttered Raphael, frowning determinedly at his monitor.

---

“Well, I wouldn’t want to interrupt anything,” said Kinvara, turning from
Raphael to Robin. The story of the blonde in the art gallery bathroom swam back
into Robin’s mind. For a second time she pretended to be searching for
something in a drawer and it was with relief that she heard the sounds of
Chiswell and Izzy coming along the corridor.
“… and by ten o’clock, no later, or I won’t have time to read the whole
bloody thing. And tell Haines he’ll have to talk to the BBC, I haven’t got time
for a bunch of idiots talking about inclu—Kinvara.”
Chiswell stopped dead in the office door and said, without any trace of
affection, “I told you to meet me at DCMS, not here.”
“And it’s lovely to see you, too, Jasper, after three days apart,” said Kinvara,
getting to her feet and smoothing her crumpled dress.
“Hi, Kinvara,” said Izzy.
“I forgot you said DCMS,” Kinvara told Chiswell, ignoring her stepdaughter.
“I’ve been trying to call you all morning—”
“I told you,” growled Chiswell, “I’d be in meetings till one, and if it’s about
those bloody stud fees again—”
“No, it isn’t about the stud fees, Jasper, actually, and I’d have preferred to
tell you in private, but if you want me to say it in front of your children, I will!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Chiswell blustered. “Come away, then, come on,
we’ll find a private room—”
“There was a man last night,” said Kinvara, “who—don’t look at me like
that, Isabella!”
Izzy’s expression was indeed conveying naked skepticism. She raised her
eyebrows and walked into the room, acting as though Kinvara had become
invisible to her.
“I said you can tell me in a private room!” snarled Chiswell, but Kinvara
refused to be deflected.
“I saw a man in the woods by the house last night, Jasper!” she said, in a
loud, high-pitched voice that Robin knew would be echoing all the way along
the narrow corridor. “I’m not imagining things—there was a man with a spade in
the woods, I saw him, and he ran when the dogs chased him! You keep telling
me not to make a fuss, but I’m alone in that house at night and if you’re not
going to do anything about this, Jasper, I’m going to call the police!”

---

22
… don’t you feel called upon to undertake it, for
the sake of the good cause?
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Strike was in a thoroughly bad temper.
Why the fuck, he asked himself, as he limped towards Mile End Park the
following morning, was he, the senior partner and founder of the firm, having to
stake out a protest march on a hot Saturday morning, when he had three
employees and a knackered leg? Because, he answered himself, he didn’t have a
baby who needed watching, or a wife who’d booked plane tickets or broken her
wrist, or a fucking anniversary weekend planned. He wasn’t married, so it was
his downtime that had to be sacrificed, his weekend that became just two more
working days.
Everything that Robin feared Strike to be thinking about her, he was, in fact,
thinking: of her house on cobbled Albury Street versus his drafty two rooms in a
converted attic, of the rights and status conferred by the little gold ring on her
finger, set against Lorelei’s disappointment when he had explained that lunch
and possibly dinner would now be impossible, of Robin’s promises of equal
responsibility when he had taken her on as a partner, contrasted with the reality
of her rushing home to her husband.
Yes, Robin had worked many hours of unpaid overtime in her two years at
the agency. Yes, he knew that she had gone way beyond the call of duty for him.
Yes, he was, in theory, fucking grateful to her. The fact remained that today,
while he was limping along the street towards hours of probably fruitless
surveillance, she and her arsehole of a husband were speeding off to a country
hotel weekend, a thought that made his sore leg and back no easier to bear.
Unshaven, clad in an old pair of jeans, a frayed, washed-out hoodie and
ancient trainers, with a carrier bag swinging from his hand, Strike entered the
park. He could see the massing protestors in the distance. The risk of Jimmy
recognizing him had almost decided Strike to let the march go unwatched, but
the most recent text from Robin (which he had, out of sheer bad temper, left
unanswered) had changed his mind.
Kinvara Chiswell came into the office. She claims she saw a man with a
spade in the woods near their house last night. From what she said, Chiswell’s

---

been telling her not to call the police about these intruders, but she says she’s
going to do it unless he does something about them. Kinvara didn’t know
Chiswell’s called us in, btw, she thought I really was Venetia Hall. Also,
there’s a chance the charity commission’s investigating the Level Playing
Field. I’m trying to get more details.
This communication had served only to aggravate Strike. Nothing short of a
concrete piece of evidence against Geraint Winn would have satisfied him right
now, with the Sun on Chiswell’s case and their client so tetchy and stressed.
According to Barclay, Jimmy Knight owned a ten-year-old Suzuki Alto, but
it had failed its MOT and was currently off the road. Barclay could not
absolutely guarantee that Jimmy wasn’t sneaking out under cover of darkness to
trespass in Chiswell’s gardens and woods seventy miles away, but Strike thought
it unlikely.
On the other hand, he thought it just possible that Jimmy might have sent a
proxy to intimidate Chiswell’s wife. He probably still had friends or
acquaintances in the area where he grew up. An even more disturbing idea was
that Billy had escaped from the prison, real or imaginary, in which he had told
Strike he was being held, and decided to dig for proof that the child lay in a pink
blanket by his father’s old cottage or, gripped by who knew what paranoid
fantasy, to slash one of Kinvara’s horses.
Worried by these inexplicable features of the case, by the interest the Sun
was taking in the minister, and aware that the agency was no closer to securing a
“bargaining chip” against either of Chiswell’s blackmailers than on the day that
Strike had accepted the minister as a client, he felt he had little choice but to
leave no stone unturned. In spite of his tiredness, his aching muscles and his
strong suspicion that the protest march would yield nothing useful, he had
dragged himself out of bed on Saturday morning, strapped his prosthesis back
onto a stump that was already slightly puffy and, unable to think of much he’d
like to do less than walk for two hours, set off for Mile End Park.
Once close enough to the crowd of protestors to make out individuals, Strike
pulled from the carrier bag swinging from his hand a plastic Guy Fawkes mask,
white with curling eyebrows and mustache and now mainly associated with the
hacking organization Anonymous, and put it on. Balling up the carrier bag, he
shoved it into a handy bin, then hobbled on towards the cluster of placards and
banners: “No missiles on homes!” “No snipers on streets!” “Don’t play games
with our lives!” and several “He’s got to go!” posters featuring the prime
minister’s face. Strike’s fake foot always found grass one of the most difficult
surfaces to navigate. He was sweating by the time he finally spotted the orange

---

CORE banners, with their logo of broken Olympic rings.
There were about a dozen of them. Lurking behind a group of chattering
youths, Strike readjusted the slipping plastic mask, which had not been
constructed for a man whose nose had been broken, and spotted Jimmy Knight,
who was talking to two young women, both of whom had just thrown back their
heads, laughing delightedly at something Knight had just said. Clamping the
mask to his face to make sure the slits aligned with his eyes, Strike scanned the
rest of the CORE members and concluded that the absence of tomato-red hair
was not because Flick had dyed it another color, but because she wasn’t there.
Stewards now started herding the crowd into something resembling a line.
Strike moved into the mass of protestors, a silent, lumbering figure, acting a little
obtusely so that the youthful organizers, intimidated by his size, treated him like
a rock around which the current must be channeled as he took up a position right
behind CORE. A skinny boy who was also wearing an Anonymous mask gave
Strike a double thumbs up as he was shunted towards the rear of the line. Strike
returned it.
Now smoking a roll-up, Jimmy continued to joke with the two young girls
beside him, who were vying for his attention. The darker of the two, who was