Lethal White

particularly attractive, was holding a double-sided banner carrying a highly
detailed painting of David Cameron as Hitler overlooking the 1936 Olympic
Stadium. It was quite an impressive piece of art, and Strike had time to admire it
as the procession finally set off at a steady pace, flanked by police and stewards
in high visibility jackets, moving gradually out of the park and onto the long,
straight Roman Road.
The smooth tarmac was slightly easier on Strike’s prosthesis, but his stump
was still throbbing. After a few minutes a chant was got up: “Missiles OUT!
Missiles OUT!”
A couple of press photographers were walking backwards in the road ahead,
taking pictures of the front of the march.
“Hey, Libby,” said Jimmy, to the girl with the hand-painted Hitler banner.
“Wanna get on my shoulders?”
Strike noted her friend’s poorly concealed envy as Jimmy crouched down so
that Libby could straddle his neck and be lifted up above the crowd, her banner
raised high enough for the photographers in front to see.
“Show ’em your tits, we’ll be front page!” Jimmy called up to her.
“Jimmy!” she squealed, in mock outrage. Her friend’s smile was forced. The
cameras clicked, and Strike, grimacing with pain behind the plastic mask, tried
not to limp too obviously.
“Guy with the biggest camera was focused on you the whole time,” said

---

Jimmy, when he finally lowered the girl back to the ground.
“Fuck, if I’m in the papers my mum’ll go apeshit,” said the girl excitedly,
and she fell into step on Jimmy’s other side, taking any opportunity to nudge or
slap him as he teased her about being scared of what her parents would say. She
was, Strike judged, at least fifteen years younger than he was.
“Enjoying yourself, Jimmy?”
The mask restricted Strike’s peripheral vision, so that it was only when the
uncombed, tomato-red hair appeared immediately in front of him that Strike
realized Flick had joined the march. Her sudden appearance had taken Jimmy by
surprise, too.
“There you are!” he said, with a feeble show of pleasure.
Flick glared at the girl called Libby, who sped up, intimidated. Jimmy tried
to put his arm around Flick, but she shrugged it off.
“Oi,” he said, feigning innocent indignation. “What’s up?”
“Three fucking guesses,” snarled Flick.
Strike could tell that Jimmy was debating which tack to take with her. His
thuggishly handsome face showed irritation but also, Strike thought, a certain
wariness. For a second time, he tried to put his arm around her. This time, she
slapped it away.
“Oi,” he said again, this time aggressively. “The fuck was that for?”
“I’m off doing your dirty work and you’re fucking around with her? What
kind of fucking idiot do you think I am, Jimmy?”
“Missiles OUT!” bellowed a steward with a megaphone, and the crowd took
up the chant once more. The cries made by the Mohicaned woman beside Strike
were as shrill and raucous as a peacock’s. The one bonus of the renewed
shouting was that it left Strike at liberty to grunt with pain every time he set his
prosthetic foot on the road, which was a kind of release and made the plastic
mask reverberate in a ticklish fashion against his sweating face. Squinting
through the eyeholes he watched Jimmy and Flick argue, but he couldn’t hear a
word over the din of the crowd. Only when the chant subsided at last could he
make out a little of what they were saying to each other.
“I’m fucking sick of this,” Jimmy was saying. “I’m not the one who picks up
students in bars when—”
“You’d ditched me!” said Flick, in a kind of whispered scream. “You’d
fucking ditched me! You told me you didn’t want anything exclusive—”
“Heat of the moment, wasn’t it?” said Jimmy roughly. “I was stressed. Billy
was doing my fucking head in. I didn’t expect you to go straight to a bar and
pick up some fucking—”
“You told me you were sick of—”

---

“Fuck’s sake, I lost my temper and said a bunch of shit I didn’t mean. If I
went and shagged another woman every time you give me grief—”
“Yeah, well I sometimes think the only reason you even keep me around is
Chis—”
“Keep your fucking voice down!”
“—and today, you think it was fun at that creep’s house—”
“I said I was grateful, fuck’s sake, we discussed this, didn’t we? I had to get
those leaflets printed or I’d’ve come with you—”
“And I do that cleaning,” she said, with a sudden sob, “and it’s disgusting
and then today you send me—it was horrible, Jimmy, he should be in hospital,
he’s in a right state—”
Jimmy glanced around. Coming briefly within Jimmy’s eye-line, Strike
attempted to walk naturally, though every time he asked his stump to bear his
full weight, he felt as though he was pressing it down on a thousand fire ants.
“We’ll get him to hospital after,” said Jimmy. “We will, but he’ll screw it all
up if we let him loose now, you know what he’s like… once Winn’s got those
photos… hey,” said Jimmy gently, putting his arm around her for a third time.
“Listen. I’m so fucking grateful to you.”
“Yeah,” choked Flick, wiping her nose on the back of her hand, “because of
the money. Because you wouldn’t even know what Chiswell had done if—”
Jimmy pulled her roughly towards him and kissed her. For a second she
resisted, then opened her mouth. The kiss went on and on as they walked. Strike
could see their tongues working in each other’s mouths. They staggered slightly
as they walked, locked together, while other CORE members grinned, and the
girl whom Jimmy had lifted into the air looked crestfallen.
“Jimmy,” murmured Flick at last, when the kiss had ended, but his arm was
still around her. She was doe-eyed with lust now, and soft-spoken. “I think you
should come and talk to him, seriously. He keeps talking about that bloody
detective.”
“What?” said Jimmy, though Strike could tell he’d heard.
“Strike. That bastard soldier with the one leg. Billy’s fixated on him. Thinks
he’s going to rescue him.”
The end point of the march came into sight at last: Bow Quarter in Fairfield
Road, where the square brick tower of an old match factory, proposed site of
some of the planned missiles, punctured the skyline.
“‘Rescue him’?” repeated Jimmy scornfully. “Fuck’s sake. It’s not like he’s
being fucking tortured.”
The marchers were breaking ranks now, dissolving back into a formless
crowd that milled around a dark green pond in front of the proposed missile site.

---

Strike would have given much to sit down on a bench or lean up against a tree,
as many of the protestors were doing, so as to take the weight off his stump.
Both the end, where skin that was never meant to bear his weight was irritated
and inflamed, and the tendons in his knee were begging for ice and rest. Instead,
he limped on after Jimmy and Flick as they walked around the edge of the
crowd, away from their CORE colleagues.
“He wanted to see you and I told him you were busy,” he heard Flick say,
“and he cried. It was horrible, Jimmy.”
Pretending to be watching the young black man with a microphone, who was
ascending a stage at the front of the crowd, Strike edged closer to Jimmy and
Flick.
“I’ll look after Billy when I get the money,” Jimmy was telling Flick. He
seemed guilty and conflicted now. “Obviously I’ll look after him… and you. I
won’t forget what you’ve done.”
She liked hearing that. Out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw her grubby
face flush with excitement. Jimmy took a pack of tobacco and some Rizlas from
his jeans pocket and began to roll himself another cigarette.
“Still talking about that fucking detective, is he?”
“Yeah.”
Jimmy lit up and smoked in silence for a while, his eyes roving abstractedly
over the crowd.
“Tell you what,” he said suddenly, “I’ll go see him now. Calm him down a
bit. We just need him to stay put a bit longer. Coming?”
He held out his hand and Flick took it, smiling. They walked away.
Strike let them get a short head start, then stripped off the mask and the old
gray hoodie, replaced the former with the sunglasses he had pocketed for this
eventuality and set off after them, dumping the mask and hoodie on top of their
banners.
The pace Jimmy now set was completely different to the leisurely march.
Every few strides, Flick had to jog to keep up, and Strike was soon gritting his
teeth as the nerve endings at the inflamed skin at the end of his stump rubbed
against the prosthesis, his overworked thigh muscles groaning in protest.
He was perspiring hard, his gait becoming more and more unnatural.
Passersby were starting to stare. He could feel their curiosity and pity as he
dragged his prosthetic leg along. He knew he should have been doing his bloody
physio exercises, that he ought to have kept to the no chips rule, that in an ideal
world he’d have taken the day off today, and rested up, the prosthesis off, an ice
pack on his stump. On he limped, refusing to listen to the body pleading with
him to stop, the distance between himself, Jimmy and Flick growing ever wider,

---

the compensating movement of his upper body and arms becoming grotesque.
He could only pray that neither Jimmy nor Flick would turn and look behind
them, because there was no way Strike could remain incognito if they saw him
hobbling along like this. They were already disappearing into the neat little brick
box that was Bow station, while Strike was panting and swearing on the opposite
side of the road.
As he stepped off the curb, an excruciating pain shot through the back of his
right thigh, as though a knife had sliced through the muscle. The leg buckled and
he fell, his outstretched hand skidding along asphalt, hitting hip, shoulder and
head on the open road. Somewhere in the vicinity a woman yelped in shock.
Onlookers would think he was drunk. It had happened before when he had
fallen. Humiliated, furious, groaning in agony, Strike crawled back onto the
pavement, dragging his right leg out of the way of oncoming traffic. A young
woman approached nervously to see whether he needed help, he barked at her,
then felt guilty.
“Sorry,” he croaked, but she was gone, hurrying away with two friends.
He dragged himself to the railings bordering the pavement and sat there,
back against metal, sweating and bleeding. He doubted whether he would be
able to stand again without assistance. Running his hands over the back of his
stump, he felt an egg-shaped swelling and, with a groan, guessed that he had torn
a hamstring. The pain was so sharp that it was making him feel sick.
He tugged his mobile out of his pocket. The screen was cracked where he
had fallen on it.
“Fuck. It. All,” he muttered, closing his eyes and leaning his head back
against the cold metal.
He sat motionless for several minutes, dismissed as a tramp or a drunk by the
people navigating around him, while he silently assessed his limited options. At
last, with a sense of being utterly cornered, he opened his eyes, wiped his face
with his forearm, and punched in Lorelei’s number.
23