Lethal White

Have you the courage and the strength of will for
that, Rebecca?
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Vanessa’s one-bedroomed flat occupied the ground floor of a detached house
a short distance from Wembley Stadium. Before leaving for work that morning,
she had given Robin a spare key to her flat, along with a kindly assurance that
she knew that it would take Robin longer than a couple of days to find a new
place to live, and that she didn’t mind her staying until she managed to do so.
They had sat up late drinking the night before. Vanessa had told Robin the
full story of finding out that her ex-fiancé had cheated on her, a story full of
twists and counter-twists that Vanessa had never told before, which included the
setting up of two fake Facebook pages as bait for both her ex and his lover,
which had resulted, after three months of patient coaxing, in Vanessa receiving
nude pictures from both of them. As impressed as she was shocked, Robin had
laughed as Vanessa reenacted the scene in which she passed her ex the pictures,
hidden inside the Valentine card she had handed across a table for two in their
favorite restaurant.
“You’re too nice, girl,” said Vanessa, steely-eyed over her Pinot Grigio. “At a
bare minimum I’d have kept her bleeding earring and turned it into a pendant.”
Vanessa was now at work. A spare duvet sat neatly folded at the end of the
sofa on which Robin was sitting, with her laptop open in front of her. She had
spent the entire afternoon scanning available rooms in shared properties, which
were all she could possibly afford on the salary that Strike was paying her. The
memory of the bunk bed in Flick’s flat kept recurring as she scanned the adverts
in her price range, some of which featured stark, barrack-like rooms with
multiple beds inside them, others with photographs that looked as though they
ought to feature attached to news stories about reclusive hoarders discovered
dead by neighbors. Last night’s laughter seemed remote now. Robin was
ignoring the painful, hard lump in her throat that refused to dissolve, no matter
how many cups of tea she consumed.
Matthew had tried to contact her twice that day. Neither time had she picked
up and he hadn’t left a message. She would need to contact a lawyer about
divorce soon, and that would cost money she didn’t have, but her first priority
had to be finding herself a place to live and continuing to put in the usual
number of hours on the Chiswell case, because if Strike had cause to feel she
wasn’t pulling her weight she would be endangering the only part of her life that
currently had worth.

---

You bailed out on uni. Now you’re bailing out on us. You even bailed on your
therapist. You’re a fucking flake.
The photographs of grim rooms in unknown flats kept dissolving before her
eyes as she pictured Matthew and Sarah in the heavy mahogany bed that her
father-in-law had bought, and when this happened Robin’s insides seemed to
turn to liquid lead and her self-control threatened to melt away and she wanted to
phone Matthew back and scream at him, but she didn’t, because she refused to
be what he wanted to make her, the irrational, incontinent, uncontrolled woman,
the fucking flake.
And anyway, she had news for Strike, news she was keen to impart once he
had finished his interview with Billy. Raphael Chiswell had answered his mobile
at eleven o’clock that morning and, after some initial coldness, had agreed to
talk to her, but only at a place of his choosing. An hour later, she had received a
call from Tegan Butcher, who had not required much persuasion to agree to an
interview. Indeed, she seemed disappointed to be talking to the famous Strike’s