Lethal White

I have to be fine, she thought, after they had bidden each other goodbye. I’m
not losing everything, all over again.

---

40
Your starting-point is so very widely removed from
his, you see.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
At six o’clock on Wednesday morning, Robin, who had again slept in the
spare room, got up and dressed herself in jeans, T-shirt, sweatshirt and trainers.
Her backpack contained a dark wig that she had bought online and which had
been delivered the previous morning, under the very nose of the skulking
journalist. She crept quietly downstairs, so as not to wake Matthew, with whom
she had not discussed her plan. She knew perfectly well that he would
disapprove.
There was a precarious peace between them, even though dinner on Saturday
night with Tom and Sarah had been an awful affair: in fact, precisely because
dinner had been so dreadful. It had started inauspiciously because the journalist
had indeed followed them up the street. They had succeeded in shaking him off,
largely due to Robin’s counter-surveillance training, which had led them to
dodge unseen out of a crowded Tube compartment just before the doors closed,
leaving Matthew aggravated by what he considered undignified, childish tricks.
But even Matthew could not lay the blame for the rest of the evening at Robin’s
door.
What had begun as light-hearted analysis over dinner of their failure to win
the charity cricket match had turned suddenly nasty and aggressive. Tom had
suddenly lashed out drunkenly at Matthew, telling him he was not half as good
as he thought he was, that his arrogance had grated on the rest of the team, that,
indeed, he was not popular in the office, that he put people’s backs up, rubbed
them the wrong way. Rocked by the sudden attack, Matthew had tried to ask
what he had done wrong at work, but Tom, so drunk that Robin thought he must
have started on the wine long before their arrival, had taken Matthew’s hurt
incredulity as provocation.
“Don’t play the fucking innocent with me!” he had shouted. “I’m not going
to stand for it any more! Belittling me and fucking needling me—”
“Was I?” Matthew asked Robin, shaken, as they walked back towards the
Tube in the darkness.
“No,” said Robin, honestly. “You didn’t say anything nasty to him at all.”

---

She added “tonight” only in her head. It was a relief to be taking a hurt and
bewildered Matthew home, rather than the man she usually lived with, and her
sympathy and support had won her a couple of days’ ceasefire at home. Robin
was not about to jeopardize their truce by telling Matthew what she was
planning this morning to throw the still-lurking journalist off her trail. She
couldn’t afford to be followed to a meeting with a forensic pathologist,
especially as Oliver, according to Vanessa, had needed a great deal of persuasion
to meet Strike and Robin in the first place.
Letting herself out quietly of the French windows into the courtyard behind
the house, Robin used one of the garden chairs to clamber onto the top of the
wall that divided their garden from that of the house directly behind them, of
which the curtains were, mercifully, closed. With a muffled, earthy thud, she slid
off the wall onto the neighbors’ lawn.
The next part of her escape was a little trickier. She had first to drag a heavy
ornamental bench in their neighbor’s garden several feet, until it stood plumb
with the fence, then, balancing on the back of it, she climbed over the top of the
creosoted panel, which swayed precariously as she dropped down into a
flowerbed on the other side, where she staggered and fell. Scrambling up again,
she hurried across the new lawn to the opposite fence, in which there was a door
to the car park on the other side.
To Robin’s relief, the bolt opened easily. As she pulled the garden gate
closed behind her, she thought ruefully of the footprints she had just left across
the dewy lawns. If the neighbors woke early, it would be only too easy to
discover whence had come the intruder who had invaded their gardens, shifted
their garden furniture and squashed their begonias. Chiswell’s killer, if killer
there was, had been far more adept at covering their tracks.
Crouching down behind a parked Skoda in the deserted car park that served
the garage-less street, Robin used the wing mirror to adjust the dark wig she had
taken out of her backpack, then walked off briskly along the street that ran
parallel with Albury Street, until she turned right into Deptford High Street.
Other than a couple of vans making early morning deliveries and the
proprietor of a newsagent raising the metal security roller door from his shop
front, there was hardly anybody around. Glancing over her shoulder, Robin felt a
sudden rush, not of panic, but of elation: nobody was following her. Even so, she
didn’t remove her wig until she was safely on the Tube, giving the young man
who had been eyeing her covertly over his Kindle something of a surprise.
Strike had chosen the Corner Café on Lambeth Road for its proximity to the
forensics laboratory where Oliver Bargate worked. When Robin arrived, she
found Strike standing outside, smoking. His gaze fell to the muddy knees of her

---

jeans.
“Rough landing in a flowerbed,” she explained, as she came within earshot.
“That journalist is still hanging around.”
“Matthew give you a leg up?”
“No, I used garden furniture.”
Strike ground out his cigarette on the wall beside him and followed her into
the café, which smelled pleasantly of frying food. In Strike’s opinion, Robin
looked paler and thinner than usual, but her manner was cheerful as she ordered
coffee and two bacon rolls.
“One,” Strike corrected her. “One,” he repeated regretfully to the man behind
the counter. “Trying to lose weight,” he told Robin, as they took a recently
vacated table. “Better for my leg.”
“Ah,” said Robin. “Right.”
As he took a seat at a recently vacated table and swept crumbs from it with
his sleeve, Strike reflected, not for the first time, that Robin was the only woman
he had ever met who had shown no interest in improving him. He knew that he
could have changed his mind now and ordered five bacon rolls, and she would
simply have grinned and handed them over. This thought made him feel