Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  Worried by these inexplicable features of the case, by the interest the Sun was taking in the minister, and aware that the agency was no closer to securing a ‘bargaining chip’ against either of Chiswell’s blackmailers than on the day that Strike had accepted the minister as a client, he felt he had little choice but to leave no stone unturned. In spite of his tiredness, his aching muscles and his strong suspicion that the protest march would yield nothing useful, he had dragged himself out of bed on Saturday morning, strapped his prosthesis back onto a stump that was already slightly puffy and, unable to think of much he’d like to do less than walk for two hours, set off for Mile End Park.

  Once close enough to the crowd of protestors to make out individuals, Strike pulled from the carrier bag swinging from his hand a plastic Guy Fawkes mask, white with curling eyebrows and moustache and now mainly associated with the hacking organisation Anonymous, and put it on. Balling up the carrier bag, he shoved it into a handy bin, then hobbled on towards the cluster of placards and banners: ‘No missiles on homes!’ ‘No snipers on streets!’ ‘Don’t play games with our lives!’ and several ‘He’s got to go!’ posters featuring the prime minister’s face. Strike’s fake foot always found grass one of the most difficult surfaces to navigate. He was sweating by the time he finally spotted the orange CORE banners, with their logo of broken Olympic rings.

  There were about a dozen of them. Lurking behind a group of chattering youths, Strike readjusted the slipping plastic mask, which had not been constructed for a man whose nose had been broken, and spotted Jimmy Knight, who was talking to two young women, both of whom had just thrown back their heads, laughing delightedly at something Knight had said. Clamping the mask to his face to make sure the slits aligned with his eyes, Strike scanned the rest of the CORE members and concluded that the absence of tomato-red hair was not because Flick had dyed it another colour, but because she wasn’t there.

  Stewards now started herding the crowd into something resembling a line. Strike moved into the mass of protestors, a silent, lumbering figure, acting a little obtusely so that the youthful organisers, intimidated by his size, treated him like a rock around which the current must be channelled as he took up a position right behind CORE. A skinny boy who was also wearing an Anonymous mask gave Strike a double thumbs up as he was shunted towards the rear of the line. Strike returned it.

  Now smoking a roll-up, Jimmy continued to joke with the two young girls beside him, who were vying for his attention. The darker of the two, who was 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 realised 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 Mohican-ed 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 grey 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. Passers-by 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 kerb, 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

  … ailing and languishing in the gloom of such a marriage . . .

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  In retrospect, Robin knew that her anniversary weekend had been doomed before it had even begun, down in the House of Commons crypt where she had turned down Strike’s request to tail Jimmy.

  Trying to throw off her sense of guilt, she had confided Strike’s request to Matthew when he picked her up after work. Already tense due to the demands of navigating the Friday night traffic in the Land Rover, which he disliked, Matthew went on the offensive, demanding to know why she felt bad after all the slave labour Strike had had out of her over the past two years and proceeding to badmouth Strike so viciously that Robin had felt compelled to defend him. They were still arguing about her job an hour later, when Matthew suddenly noticed that there was neither wedding nor engagement ring on Robin’s gesticulating left hand. She never wore these when playing the unmarried Venetia Hall, and had entirely forgotten that she would not be able to retrieve them from Albury Street before leaving for the hotel.

  ‘It’s our bloody anniversary and you can’t even remember to put your rings back on?’ Matthew had shouted.

  They drew up outside the soft golden brick hotel an hour and a half later. A beaming man in uniform opened the door for Robin. Her ‘thank you’ was almost inaudible due to the hard, angry lump in her throat.

  They barely spoke over their Michelin-starred dinner. Robin, who might as well have been eating polystyrene and dust, looked around at the surrounding tables. She and Matthew were by far the youngest couple there, and she wondered whether any of these husbands and wives had been through this kind of trough in their marriages, and survived it.

  They slept back to back that night.

  Robin woke on Saturday in the awareness that every moment in the hotel, every step through the beautifully cultivated grounds, with the lavender walk, the Japanese garden, the orchard and organic vegetable beds, was costing them a small fortune. Perhaps Matthew was thinking the same, because he became conciliatory over breakfast. Nevertheless, their conversation felt perilous, straying regularly into dangerous territory from which they retreated precipitately. A tension headache began pounding behind Robin’s temple, but she did not want to ask hotel staff for painkillers, because any sign of dissatisfaction might lead to another argument. Robin wondered what it would be like to have a wedding day and honeymoon about which it was safe to reminisce. They eventually settled on talking about Matthew’s job as they strolled the grounds.

  There was to be a charity cricket match between
his firm and another the following Saturday. Matthew, who was as good at cricket as he had been at rugby, was greatly looking forward to the game. Robin listened to his boasts about his own prowess and jokes about Tom’s inadequate bowling, laughed at the appropriate moments and made sounds of agreement, and all the time a chilled and miserable part of her was wondering what was happening right now in Bow, whether Strike had gone on the march, whether he was getting anything useful on Jimmy and wondering how she, Robin, had ended up with the pompous, self-involved man beside her, who reminded her of a handsome boy she had once loved.

  For the first time ever, Robin had sex with Matthew that night purely because she could not face the row that would ensue if she refused. It was their anniversary, so they had to have sex, like a notary’s stamp on the weekend, and about as pleasurable. Tears stung her eyes as Matthew climaxed, and that cold, unhappy self buried deep in her compliant body wondered why he could not feel her unhappiness even though she was trying so hard to dissemble, and how he could possibly imagine that the marriage was a success.