Lethal White

I was thinking of what brought us together from
the first, what links us so closely to one another…
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Strike had spent many hours of his life trying to guess what he had done to
cause the sullen silence of a woman in his vicinity. The best that could be said
for the prolonged sulk in which Lorelei spent most of Friday evening was that he
knew exactly how he had offended her, and was even prepared to concede that
her displeasure was, to some extent, justified.
Within five minutes of his arrival at her flat in Camden, Izzy had called his
mobile, partly to tell him about a letter that she had received from Geraint Winn,
but mainly, he knew, to talk. She was not the first of his clients to assume that
they had purchased, along with detective services, a mixture of father-confessor
and therapist. Izzy gave every sign that she was settling in to spend her entire
Friday evening talking to Strike, and the flirtatiousness that had been apparent in
the knee touching of their last encounter was even more pronounced by phone.
A tendency to size Strike up as a potential lover was not uncommon in the
sometimes fragile and lonely women he dealt with in his professional life. He
had never slept with a client, in spite of occasional temptation. The agency
meant too much to him, but even had Izzy held attraction for him, he would have
been careful to keep his manner on the antiseptic side of professional, because
she would be forever tainted in his mind by association with Charlotte.
In spite of his genuine desire to cut the call short—Lorelei had cooked, and
was looking particularly lovely in a silky sapphire blue dress that resembled
nightwear—Izzy had displayed the persistent adhesiveness of a teasel. It took
Strike nearly three-quarters of an hour to disentangle himself from his client,
who laughed long and loudly at even his mildest jokes, so that Lorelei could
hardly fail to know that it was a woman who was at the end of the line. Hardly
had he got rid of Izzy and begun to explain to Lorelei that she was a grief-
stricken client, than Barclay had called with an update on Jimmy Knight. The
mere fact that he had taken the second call, considerably briefer though it was,
had, in Lorelei’s eyes, compounded his original offense.
This was the first time he and Lorelei had met since she had retracted her
declaration of love. Her wounded and affronted demeanor over dinner confirmed

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him in the unwilling belief that, far from wanting their no-strings arrangement to
continue, she had clung to the hope that if she stopped pressuring him, he would
be free to reach the realization that he was, in fact, deeply in love with her.
Talking on the phone for the best part of an hour, while dinner slowly shriveled
in the oven, had dashed her hopes of a perfect evening, and the reset of their
relationship.
Had Lorelei only accepted his sincere apology, he might have felt like sex.
However, by half-past two in the morning, at which time she finally burst into
tears of mingled self-recrimination and self-justification, he was too tired and
bad-tempered to accept physical overtures which would, he feared, assume an
importance in her mind that he did not want to give them.
This has to end, he thought, as he rose, hollow-eyed and dark-jawed, at six
o’clock, moving as quietly as possible in the hope that she would not wake
before he made his way out of her flat. Forgoing breakfast, because Lorelei had
replaced the kitchen door with an amusingly retro bead curtain that rattled
loudly, Strike made it all the way to the top of the stairs to the street before
Lorelei emerged from the dark bedroom, sleep tousled, sad and desirable in a
short kimono.
“Weren’t you even going to say goodbye?”