Lethal White Read online

  Yawning again, he checked his watch. Robin must, surely, have finished having pictures taken by now. With a grimace of pain, because the painkillers they had given him at the hospital had long since worn off, Strike got up, unbolted the door and headed back out among the gawping strangers.

  A string quartet had been set up at the end of the empty dining room. They started to play while the wedding group organised themselves into a receiving line that Robin assumed she must have agreed to at some point during the wedding preparations. She had abnegated so much responsibility for the day’s arrangements that she kept receiving little surprises like this. She had forgotten, for instance, that they had agreed to have photographs taken at the hotel rather than the church. If only they had not sped away in the Daimler immediately after the service, she might have had a chance to speak to Strike and to ask him – beg him, if necessary – to take her back. But he had left without talking to her, leaving her wondering whether she had the courage, or the humility, to call him after this and plead for her job.

  The room seemed dark after the brilliance of the sunlit gardens. It was wood-panelled, with brocade curtains and gilt-framed oil paintings. Scent from the flower arrangements lay heavy in the air, and glass and silverware gleamed on snow-white tablecloths. The string quartet, which had sounded loud in the echoing wooden box of a room, was soon drowned out by the sound of guests clambering up the stairs outside, crowding onto the landing, talking and laughing, already full of champagne and beer.

  ‘Here we go, then!’ roared Geoffrey, who seemed to be enjoying the day more than anybody else. ‘Bring ’em on!’

  If Matthew’s mother had been alive, Robin doubted that Geoffrey would have felt able to give his ebullience full expression. The late Mrs Cunliffe had been full of cool side-stares and nudges, constantly checking any signs of unbridled emotion. Mrs Cunliffe’s sister, Sue, was one of the first down the receiving line, bringing a fine frost with her, for she had wanted to sit at the top table and been denied that privilege.

  ‘How are you, Robin?’ she asked, pecking the air near Robin’s ear. Miserable, disappointed and guilty that she was not feeling happy, Robin suddenly sensed how much this woman, her new aunt-in-law, disliked her. ‘Lovely dress,’ said Aunt Sue, but her eyes were already on handsome Matthew.

  ‘I wish your mother—’ she began, then, with a gasp, she buried her face in the handkerchief that she held ready in her hand.

  More friends and relatives shuffled inside, beaming, kissing, shaking hands. Geoffrey kept holding up the line, bestowing bear hugs on everybody who did not actively resist.

  ‘He came, then,’ said Robin’s favourite cousin, Katie. She would have been a bridesmaid had she not been hugely pregnant. Today was her due date. Robin marvelled that she could still walk. Her belly was watermelon-hard as she leaned in for a kiss.

  ‘Who came?’ asked Robin, as Katie sidestepped to hug Matthew.

  ‘Your boss. Strike. Martin was just haranguing him down in the—’

  ‘You’re over there, I think, Katie,’ said Matthew, pointing her towards a table in the middle of the room. ‘You’ll want to get off your feet, must be difficult in the heat, I guess?’

  Robin barely registered the passage of several more guests down the line. She responded to their good wishes at random, her eyes constantly drawn to the doorway through which they were all filing. Had Katie meant that Strike was here at the hotel, after all? Had he followed her from the church? Was he about to appear? Where had he been hiding? She had searched everywhere – on the terrace, in the hallway, in the bar. Hope surged only to fail again. Perhaps Martin, famous for his lack of tact, had driven him away? Then she reminded herself that Strike was not such a feeble creature as that and hope bubbled up once more, and while her inner self performed these peregrinations of expectation and dread, it was impossible to simulate the more conventional wedding day emotions whose absence, she knew, Matthew felt and resented.

  ‘Martin!’ Robin said joyfully, as her younger brother appeared, already three pints to the bad, accompanied by his mates.

  ‘S’pose you already knew?’ said Martin, taking it for granted that she must. He was holding his mobile in his hand. He had slept at a friend’s house the previous evening, so that his bedroom could be given to relatives from Down South.

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘That he caught the Ripper last night.’

  Martin held up the screen to show her the news story. She gasped at the sight of the Ripper’s identity. The knife wound that man had inflicted was throbbing on her forearm.

  ‘Is he still here?’ asked Robin, throwing pretence to the wind. ‘Strike? Did he say he was staying, Mart?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ muttered Matthew.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Martin, registering Matthew’s irritation. ‘Holding up the queue.’

  He slouched off. Robin turned to look at Matthew and saw, as though in thermal image, the guilt glowing through him.

  ‘You knew,’ she said, shaking hands absently with a great aunt who had leaned in, expecting to be kissed.

  ‘Knew what?’ he snapped.

  ‘That Strike had caught—’

  But her attention was now demanded by Matthew’s old university friend and workmate, Tom, and his fiancée, Sarah. She barely heard a word that Tom said, because she was constantly watching the door, where she hoped to see Strike.

  ‘You knew,’ Robin repeated, once Tom and Sarah had walked away. There was another hiatus. Geoffrey had met a cousin from Canada. ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘I heard the tail end of it on the news this morning,’ muttered Matthew. His expression hardened as he looked over Robin’s head towards the doorway. ‘Well, here he is. You’ve got your wish.’

  Robin turned. Strike had just ducked into the room, one eye grey and purple above his heavy stubble, one ear swollen and stitched. He raised a bandaged hand when their eyes met and attempted a rueful smile, which ended in a wince.

  ‘Robin,’ said Matthew. ‘Listen, I need—’

  ‘In a minute,’ she said, with a joyfulness that had been conspicuously absent all day.

  ‘Before you talk to him, I need to tell—’

  ‘Matt, please, can’t it wait?’

  Nobody in the family wanted to detain Strike, whose injury meant that he could not shake hands. He held the bandaged one in front of him and shuffled sideways down the line. Geoffrey glared at him and even Robin’s mother, who had liked him on their only previous encounter, was unable to muster a smile as he greeted her by name. Every guest in the dining room seemed to be watching.

  ‘You didn’t have to be so dramatic,’ Robin said, smiling up into his swollen face when at last he was standing in front of her. He grinned back, painful though it was: the two-hundred-mile journey he had undertaken so recklessly had been worth it, after all, to see her smile at him like that. ‘Bursting into church. You could have just called.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry about knocking over the flowers,’ said Strike, including the sullen Matthew in his apology. ‘I did call, but—’

  ‘I haven’t had my phone on this morning,’ said Robin, aware that she was holding up the queue, but past caring. ‘Go round us,’ she said gaily to Matthew’s boss, a tall redheaded woman.

  ‘No, I called – two days ago, was it?’ said Strike.

  ‘What?’ said Robin, while Matthew had a stilted conversation with Jemima.

  ‘A couple of times,’ said Strike. ‘I left a message.’

  ‘I didn’t get any calls,’ said Robin, ‘or a message.’

  The chattering, chinking, tinkling sounds of a hundred guests and the gentle melody of the string quartet seemed suddenly muffled, as though a thick bubble of shock had pressed in upon her.

  ‘When did – what did you – two days ago?’

  Since arriving at her parents’ house she had been occupied non-stop with tedious wedding chores, yet she had still managed to check her phone frequently and surreptitiously, hoping that Strike had
called or texted. Alone in bed at one that morning she had checked her entire call history in the vain hope that she would find a missed communication, but had found the history deleted. Having barely slept in the last couple of weeks, she had concluded that she had made an exhausted blunder, pressed the wrong button, erased it accidentally . . .

  ‘I don’t want to stay,’ Strike mumbled. ‘I just wanted to say I’m sorry, and ask you to come—’

  ‘You’ve got to stay,’ she said, reaching out and seizing his arm as though he might escape.

  Her heart was thudding so fast that she felt breathless. She knew that she had lost colour as the buzzing room seemed to wobble around her.

  ‘Please stay,’ she said, still holding tight to his arm, ignoring Matthew as he bristled beside her. ‘I need – I want to talk to you. Mum?’ she called.

  Linda stepped out of the receiving line. She seemed to have been waiting for the summons, and she didn’t look happy.

  ‘Please could you add Cormoran to a table?’ said Robin. ‘Maybe put him with Stephen and Jenny?’

  Unsmiling, Linda led Strike away. There were a few last guests waiting to offer their congratulations. Robin could no longer muster smiles and small talk.

  ‘Why didn’t I get Cormoran’s calls?’ she asked Matthew, as an elderly man shuffled away towards the tables, neither welcomed nor greeted.

  ‘I’ve been trying to tell you—’

  ‘Why didn’t I get the calls, Matthew?’

  ‘Robin, can we talk about this later?’

  The truth burst upon her so suddenly that she gasped.

  ‘You deleted my call history,’ she said, her mind leaping rapidly from deduction to deduction. ‘You asked for my passcode number when I came back from the bathroom at the service station.’ The last two guests took one look at the bride and groom’s expressions and hurried past without demanding their greeting. ‘You took my phone away. You said it was about the honeymoon. Did you listen to his message?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Matthew. ‘I deleted it.’

  The silence that seemed to have pressed in on her had become a high-pitched whine. She felt light-headed. Here she stood in the big white lace dress she didn’t like, the dress she had had altered because the wedding had been delayed once, pinned to the spot by ceremonial obligations. On the periphery of her vision, a hundred blurred faces swayed. The guests were hungry and expectant.

  Her eyes found Strike, who was standing with his back to her, waiting beside Linda while an extra place was laid at her elder brother Stephen’s table. Robin imagined striding over to him and saying: ‘Let’s get out of here.’ What would he say if she did?

  Her parents had spent thousands on the day. The packed room was waiting for the bride and groom to take their seats at the top table. Paler than her wedding dress, Robin followed her new husband to their seats as the room burst into applause.

  The finicky waiter seemed determined to prolong Strike’s discomfort. He had no choice but to stand in full view of every table while he waited for his extra place to be laid. Linda, who was almost a foot shorter than the detective, remained at Strike’s elbow while the youth made imperceptible adjustments to the dessert fork and turned the plate so that the design aligned with its neighbours’. The little Strike could see of Linda’s face below the silvery hat looked angry.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ he said at long last, as the waiter stepped out of the way, but as he took hold of the back of his chair, Linda laid a light hand on his sleeve. Her gentle touch might as well have been a shackle, accompanied as it was by an aura of outraged motherhood and offended hospitality. She greatly resembled her daughter. Linda’s fading hair was red-gold, too, the clear grey-blue of her eyes enhanced by her silvery hat.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she asked through clenched teeth, while waiters bustled around them, delivering starters. At least the arrival of food had distracted the other guests. Conversation broke out as people’s attention turned to their long-awaited meal.

  ‘To ask Robin to come back to work with me.’

  ‘You sacked her. It broke her heart.’

  There was much he could have said to that, but he chose not to say it out of respect for what Linda must have suffered when she had seen that eight-inch knife wound.

  ‘Three times she’s been attacked, working for you,’ said Linda, her colour rising. ‘Three times.’

  Strike could, with truth, have told Linda that he accepted liability only for the first of those attacks. The second had happened after Robin disregarded his explicit instructions and the third as a consequence of her not only disobeying him, but endangering a murder investigation and his entire business.

  ‘She hasn’t been sleeping. I’ve heard her at night . . . ’

  Linda’s eyes were over-bright. She let go of him, but whispered, ‘You haven’t got a daughter. You can’t understand what we’ve been through.’

  Before Strike could muster his exhausted faculties, she had marched away to the top table. He caught Robin’s eye over her untouched starter. She pulled an anguished expression, as though afraid that he might walk out. He raised his eyebrows slightly and dropped, at last, into his seat.

  A large shape to his left shifted ominously. Strike turned to see more eyes like Robin’s, set over a pugnacious jaw and surmounted by bristling brows.

  ‘You must be Stephen,’ said Strike.

  Robin’s elder brother grunted, still glaring. They were both large men; packed together, Stephen’s elbow grazed Strike’s as he reached for his pint. The rest of the table was staring at Strike. He raised his right hand in a kind of half-hearted salute, remembered that it was bandaged only when he saw it, and felt that he was drawing even more attention to himself.

  ‘Hi, I’m Jenny, Stephen’s wife,’ said the broad-shouldered brunette on Stephen’s other side. ‘You look as though you could use this.’

  She passed an untouched pint across Stephen’s plate. Strike was so grateful he could have kissed her. In deference to Stephen’s scowl, he confined himself to a heartfelt ‘thanks’ and downed half of it in one go. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jenny mutter something in Stephen’s ear. The latter watched Strike set the pint glass down again, cleared his throat and said gruffly:

  ‘Congratulations in order, I s’pose.’

  ‘Why?’ said Strike blankly.

  Stephen’s expression became a degree less fierce.

  ‘You caught that killer.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Strike, picking up his fork in his left hand and stabbing the salmon starter. Only after he had swallowed it in its entirety and noticed Jenny laughing did he realise he ought to have treated it with more respect. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Very hungry.’

  Stephen was now contemplating him with a glimmer of approval.

  ‘No point in it, is there?’ he said, looking down at his own mousse. ‘Mostly air.’

  ‘Cormoran,’ said Jenny, ‘would you mind just waving at Jonathan? Robin’s other brother – over there.’

  Strike looked in the direction indicated. A slender youth with the same colouring as Robin waved enthusiastically from the next table. Strike gave a brief, sheepish salute.

  ‘Want her back, then, do you?’ Stephen fired at him.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘I do.’

  He half-expected an angry response, but instead Stephen heaved a long sigh.

  ‘S’pose I’ve got to be glad. Never seen her happier than when she was working for you. I took the piss out of her when we were kids for saying she wanted to be a policewoman,’ he added. ‘Wish I hadn’t,’ he said, accepting a fresh pint from the waiter and managing to down an impressive amount before continuing. ‘We were dicks to her, looking back, and then she . . . well, she stands up for herself a bit better these days.’

  Stephen’s gaze wandered to the top table and Strike, who had his back to it, felt justified in stealing a look at Robin, too. She was silent, neither eating nor looking at Matthew.

  ‘Not now, mate,�
�� he heard Stephen say and turned to see his neighbour holding out a long thick arm to form a barrier between Strike and one of Martin’s friends, who was on his feet and already bending low to ask Strike a question. The friend retreated, abashed.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Strike, finishing Jenny’s pint.

  ‘Get used to it,’ said Stephen, demolishing his own mousse in a mouthful. ‘You caught the Shacklewell Ripper. You’re going to be famous, mate.’

  People talked of things passing in a blur after a shock, but it was not like that for Robin. The room around her remained only too visible, every detail distinct: the brilliant squares of light that fell through the curtained windows, the enamel brightness of the azure sky beyond the glass, the damask tablecloths obscured by elbows and disarranged glasses, the gradually flushing cheeks of the scoffing and quaffing guests, Aunt Sue’s patrician profile unsoftened by her neighbours’ chat, Jenny’s silly yellow hat quivering as she joked with Strike. She saw Strike. Her eyes returned so often to his back that she could have sketched with perfect accuracy the creases in his suit jacket, the dense dark curls of the back of his head, the difference in the thickness of his ears due to the knife injury to the left.