Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  During the cursory interview that had led to today’s trial, the shop owner had asked very few questions, instead speaking at length about the husband of thirty years who had just left her to live in Thailand, the neighbour who was suing her over a boundary dispute and the stream of unsatisfactory and ungrateful employees who had walked out on Triquetra to take other jobs. Her undisguised desire to extract the maximum amount of work for the minimum amount of pay, coupled with her outpourings of self-pity, made Robin wonder why anybody had ever wanted to work for her in the first place.

  ‘You’re punctual,’ she observed, when within earshot. ‘Good. Where’s the other one?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Robin.

  ‘I don’t need this,’ said the owner, with a slight note of hysteria. ‘Not on the day I’ve got to meet Brian’s lawyer!’

  She unlocked the door and showed Robin into the shop, which was the size of a large kiosk, and as she raised her arms to start pulling up blinds, the smell of body odour and patchouli mingled with the dusty, incense-scented air. Daylight fell into the shop like a solid thing, rendering everything there more insubstantial and shabby by comparison. Dull silver necklaces and earrings hung in racks on the dark purple walls, many of them featuring pentagrams, peace symbols and marijuana leaves, while glass hookahs mingled with tarot cards, black candles, essential oils and ceremonial daggers on black shelves behind the counter.

  ‘We’ve got millions of extra tourists coming through Camden right now,’ said the owner, bustling around the back of the counter, ‘and if she doesn’t turn – there you are,’ she said, as Flick, who looked sulky, sloped inside. Flick was wearing a yellow and green Hezbollah T-shirt and ripped jeans, and carrying a large leather messenger bag.

  ‘Tube was late,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I managed to get here all right, and so did Bibi!’

  ‘Bobbi,’ Robin corrected her, deliberately broadening her Yorkshire accent.

  She didn’t want to pretend to be a Londoner this time. It was best not to have to talk about schools and locales that Flick might know.

  ‘—well, I need you two to be on top of things all – the – time,’ said the owner, beating out the last three words with one hand against the other. ‘All right, Bibi—’

  ‘—Bobbi—’

  ‘—yes, come here and see how the till works.’

  Robin had no difficulty grasping how the till worked, because she had had a Saturday job in her teens at a clothes shop in Harrogate. It was just as well that she did not need longer instruction, because a steady stream of shoppers began to arrive about ten minutes after they opened. To Robin’s slight surprise, because there was nothing in the shop that she would have cared to buy, many visitors to Camden seemed to feel that their trip would be incomplete without a pair of pewter earrings, or a pentagram-embossed candle, or one of the small hessian bags that lay in a basket beside the till, each of which purported to contain a magic charm.

  ‘All right, I need to be off,’ the owner announced at eleven, while Flick was serving a tall German woman who was dithering between two packs of tarot cards. ‘Don’t forget: one of you needs to be focused on stock all the time, in case of pilfering. My friend Eddie will be keeping an eye out,’ she said, pointing at the stall selling old LPs just outside. ‘Twenty minutes each for lunch, taken separately. Don’t forget,’ she repeated ominously, ‘Eddie’s watching.’

  She left in a whirl of velvet and body odour. The German customer departed with her tarot cards and Flick slammed the till drawer shut, the noise echoing in the temporarily empty shop.

  ‘Old Steady Eddie,’ she said venomously. ‘He doesn’t give a shit. He could rob her blind and he wouldn’t care. Cow,’ added Flick for good measure.

  Robin laughed and Flick seemed gratified.

  ‘What’s tha name?’ asked Robin, in broad Yorkshire. ‘She never said.’

  ‘Flick,’ said Flick. ‘You’re Bobbi, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Robin.

  Flick took out her mobile from her messenger bag, which she had stowed beneath the counter, checked it, appeared not to see what she had hoped to see, then stuffed it out of sight again.

  ‘You must’ve been hard up for work, were you?’ she asked Robin.

  ‘Had to take what I could,’ Robin said. ‘I were sacked.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Fookin’ Amazon,’ said Robin.

  ‘Those tax-dodging bastards,’ said Flick, slightly more interested. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Didn’t make my daily rate.’

  Robin had lifted her story directly from a recent news report about working conditions in one of the retail company’s warehouses: the relentless pressure to make targets, packing and scanning thousands of products a day under unforgiving pressure from supervisors. Flick’s expression wavered between sympathy and anger as Robin talked.

  ‘That’s outrageous!’ she said, when Robin had finished.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Robin, ‘and no union or nothing, obviously. Me dad were a big trade union man back in Yorkshire.’

  ‘Bet he was furious.’

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Robin, unblushingly. ‘Lungs. Ex-miner.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Flick. ‘Sorry.’

  She was looking upon Robin with respect and interest now.

  ‘See, you’ll have been a worker, not an employee. That’s how the bastards get away with it.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Fewer statutory rights,’ said Flick. ‘You might have a case against them if they deducted from your wages, though.’

  ‘Dunno if I could prove that,’ said Robin. ‘How come you know all this?’

  ‘I’m pretty active in the labour movement,’ said Flick, with a shrug. She hesitated, ‘And my mother’s an employment lawyer.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Robin, allowing herself to sound politely surprised.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Flick, picking her nails, ‘but we don’t get on. I don’t see any of my family, actually. They don’t like my partner. Or my politics.’

  She smoothed out the Hezbollah T-shirt and showed Robin.

  ‘What, are they Tories?’ asked Robin.

  ‘Might as well be,’ said Flick. ‘They loved bloody Blair.’

  Robin felt her phone vibrate in the pocket of her second-hand dress.

  ‘Is there a bog anywhere here?’

  ‘Through here,’ said Flick, pointing to a well-hidden purple painted door with more racks of jewellery nailed to it.

  Beyond the purple door Robin found a small cubbyhole with a cracked, dirty window. A safe sat beside a dilapidated kitchen unit with a kettle, a couple of cleaning products and a stiff J-cloth on top. There was no room to sit down and barely room to stand, because a grubby toilet had been plumbed into the corner.

  Robin shut herself inside the chipboard cubicle, put down the toilet lid and sat down to read the lengthy text that Barclay had just sent to both her and Strike.

  Billy’s been found. He was picked up off street 2 weeks ago. Psychotic episode, sectioned, hospital in north London, don’t know which yet. Wouldn’t tell docs his next of kin till yesterday. Social worker contacted Jimmy this morning. Jimmy wants me to go with him to persuade Billy to discharge himself. Scared what Billy’s going to tell the doctors, says he talks too much. Also, Jimmy’s lost bit of paper with Billy’s name on & he’s shitting himself about it. Asked me if I’d seen it. He says it’s handwritten, no other details, I don’t know why so important. Jimmy thinks Flick’s nicked it. Things bad between them again.

  As Robin was reading this for a second time, a response came in from Strike.

  Barclay: find out visiting arrangements at the hospital, I want to see Billy. Robin: try and search Flick’s bag.

  Thanks, Robin texted back, exasperated. I’d never have thought of that on my own.

  She got up, flushed the toilet and returned to the shop, where a gang of black-clad goths were picking over the stock like drooping crows. As she sidle
d past Flick, Robin saw that her messenger bag was sitting on a shelf beneath the counter. When the group had finally left in possession of essential oils and black candles, Flick took out her phone to check it again, before sinking once more into a morose silence.

  Robin’s experience in many temporary offices had taught her that little bonded women more than discovering that they were not alone in their particular man-related miseries. Taking out her own phone, she saw a further text from Strike:

  That’s why I get paid the big money. Brains.

  Amused against her will, Robin suppressed a grin and said:

  ‘He must think I’m fooking stupid.’

  ‘Wassup?’

  ‘Boyfriend. So-called,’ said Robin, ramming her phone back into her pocket. ‘S’posed to be separated from his wife. Guess where he was last night? Mate of mine saw him leaving hers this morning.’ She exhaled loudly and slumped down on the counter.

  ‘Yeah, my boyfriend likes old women and all,’ said Flick, picking at her nails. Robin, who had not forgotten that Jimmy had been married to a woman thirteen years his senior, hoped for more confidences, but before she could ask more, another group of young women entered, chattering in a language that Robin did not recognise, though she thought it sounded Eastern European. They clustered around the basket of supposed charms.

  ‘Dziękuję ci,’ Flick said, as one of them handed over her money, and the girls laughed and complimented her on her accent.

  ‘What did you just say?’ asked Robin, as the party left. ‘Was that Russian?’

  ‘Polish. Learned a bit from my parents’ cleaner.’ Flick hurried on, as though she had given something away, ‘Yeah, I always got on better with the cleaners than I did with my parents, actually, you can’t call yourself a socialist and have a cleaner, can you? Nobody should be allowed to live in a house too big for them, we should have forcible repossessions, redistribution of land and housing to the people who need it.’

  ‘Too right,’ said Robin enthusiastically, and Flick seemed reassured to be forgiven her professional parents by Bobbi Cunliffe, daughter of a dead ex-miner and Yorkshire trade unionist.

  ‘Want a tea?’ she offered.

  ‘Aye, that’d be great,’ said Robin.

  ‘Have you heard of the Real Socialist Party?’ asked Flick, once she had come back into the shop with two mugs.

  ‘No,’ said Robin.

  ‘It’s not your normal political party,’ Flick assured her. ‘We’re more like a proper community-based campaign, like, back to the Jarrow marchers, that kind of thing, the real spirit of Labour movement, not an imperialist Tory-lite shower of shite like fucking “New Labour”. We don’t want to play the same old politics game, we want to change the rules of the game in favour of ordinary working—’

  Billy Bragg’s version of the ‘Internationale’ rang out. As Flick reached into her bag, Robin realised that this was Flick’s ringtone. Reading the caller’s name, Flick became tense.

  ‘You be all right on your own for a bit?’

  ‘Course,’ said Robin.

  Flick slid into the back room. As the door swung shut Robin heard her say:

  ‘What’s going on? Have you seen him?’

  As soon as the door was securely shut, Robin hurried to where Flick had been standing, crouched down and slid her hand under the leather flap of the messenger bag. The interior resembled the depths of a bin. Her fingers groped through sundry bits of crumpled paper, sweet wrappers, a sticky lump of something Robin thought might be chewed gum, various lid-less pens and tubes of make-up, a tin with a picture of Che Guevara on it, a pack of rolling tobacco that had leaked over the rest of the contents, some Rizlas, some spare tampons and a small, twisted ball of fabric that Robin was afraid might be a pair of worn pants. Trying to flatten out, read and then re-crumple each piece of paper was time-consuming. Most seemed to be abandoned drafts of articles. Then, through the door behind her, she heard Flick say loudly:

  ‘Strike? What the hell . . . ’

  Robin froze, listening.

  ‘ . . . paranoid . . . it alone now . . . tell them he’s . . . ’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a woman peering over the counter. Robin jumped up. The portly, grey-haired customer in a tie-dyed T-shirt pointed up at the shelf on the wall, ‘could I see that rather special athame?’

  ‘Which?’ asked Robin, confused.

  ‘The athame. The ceremonial dagger,’ said the elderly woman, pointing.

  Flick’s voice rose and fell in the room behind Robin.

  ‘ . . . it, didn’t you? . . . member you . . . pay me back . . . Chiswell’s money . . . ’

  ‘Mmm,’ said the customer, weighing the knife carefully in her hand, ‘have you anything larger?’

  ‘You had it, not me!’ said Flick loudly, from behind the door.

  ‘Um,’ said Robin, squinting up at the shelf, ‘I think this is all we’ve got. That one might be a bit bigger . . . ’

  She stood on tiptoe to reach the longer knife, as Flick said:

  ‘Fuck off, Jimmy!’

  ‘There you are,’ said Robin, handing over the seven-inch-dagger.

  With a clatter of falling necklaces, the door behind Robin flew open, hitting her in the back.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Flick, seizing her bag and shoving the phone back inside it, breathing hard, her eyes bright.

  ‘Yes, you see, I like the triple moon marking on the smaller one,’ said the elderly witch, pointing at the decoration on the hilt of the first dagger, unfazed by Flick’s dramatic reappearance, ‘but I prefer the longer blade.’

  Flick was in that febrile state between fury and tears that Robin knew was one of the most amenable to indiscretion and confession. Desperate to get rid of her tiresome customer, she said bluntly in Bobbi’s thick Yorkshire:

  ‘Well, that’s all we’ve got.’

  The customer chuntered a little more, weighing the two knives in her hands, and at last took herself off without buying either.

  ‘Y’all right?’ Robin asked Flick at once.

  ‘No,’ said Flick. ‘I need a smoke.’

  She checked her watch.

  ‘Tell her I’m taking lunch if she comes back, all right?’

  Damn, thought Robin, as Flick disappeared, taking her bag and her promising mood with her.

  For over an hour, Robin minded the shop alone, becoming increasingly hungry. Once or twice, Eddie at the record stall peered vaguely into the shop at Robin, but showed no other interest in her activities. In a brief lull between more customers, Robin nipped into the back room to make sure that there wasn’t any food there that she had overlooked. There wasn’t.

  At ten to one, Flick strolled back into the shop with a dark, thuggishly handsome man in a tight blue T-shirt. He subjected Robin to the hard, arrogant stare of a certain brand of womaniser, melding appreciation and disdain to signal that she might be good-looking, but she would have to try a little harder than that to arouse his interest. It was a strategy that Robin had seen work on other young women in offices. It had never worked on her.

  ‘Sorry I was so long,’ Flick told Robin. Her bad mood did not seem entirely dissipated. ‘Ran into Jimmy. Jimmy, this is Bobbi.’

  ‘All right?’ said Jimmy, holding out a hand.

  Robin shook it.

  ‘You go,’ said Flick to Robin. ‘Go and get something to eat.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Robin. ‘Thanks.’

  Jimmy and Flick waited while, under cover of checking her bag for money, Robin crouched down and, hidden by the counter, set her mobile to record before placing it carefully at the back of the dark shelf.

  ‘See tha in a bit, then,’ she said brightly, and strolled away into the market.

  48

  But what do you say to it all, Rebecca?

  Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

  A whining wasp zigzagged from inner to outer rooms of Strike’s office, passing between the two windows that were flung open to admit the fume-laden evening air. Barclay wave
d the insect away with the takeaway menu that had just arrived with a large delivery of Chinese food. Robin peeled lids off the cartons and laid them out on her desk. Over by the kettle, Strike was trying to find a third fork.

  Matthew had been surprisingly accommodating when Robin had called him from Charing Cross Road three-quarters of an hour previously, to say that she needed to meet Strike and Barclay, and was likely to be back late.