Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

Having, as she told herself, talked sense into that part of her that kept yearning for Strike, she reached a hard decision on the eighth evening of her honeymoon. She wanted to go home early and announce their separation to their families. She must tell Matthew that it had nothing to do with anybody else, but after agonizing and serious reflection, she did not believe they were well suited enough to continue in the marriage.

She could still remember her feeling of mingled panic and dread as she had pushed open the cabin door, braced for a fight that had never materialized. Matthew had been sitting slumped on the sofa and when he saw her, he mumbled, “Mum?”

His face, arms and legs had been shining with sweat. As she moved towards him, she saw an ugly black tracing of veins up the inside of his left arm, as though somebody had filled them with ink.

“Matt?”

Hearing her, he had realized that she was not his dead mother.

“Don’t… feel well, Rob…”

She had dashed for the phone, called the hotel, asked for a doctor. By the time he arrived, Matthew was drifting in and out of delirium. They had found the scratch on the back of his hand and, worried, concluded that he might have cellulitis, which Robin could tell, from the faces of the worried doctor and nurse, was serious. Matthew kept seeing figures moving in the shadowy corners of the cabin, people who weren’t there.

“Who’s that?” he kept asking Robin. “Who’s that over there?”

“There’s nobody else here, Matt.”

Now she was holding his hand while the nurse and doctor discussed hospitalization.

“Don’t leave me, Rob.”

“I’m not going to leave you.”

She had meant that she was going nowhere just now, not that she would stay forever, but Matthew had begun to cry.

“Oh, thank God. I thought you were going to walk… I love you, Rob. I know I fucked up, but I love you…”

The doctor gave Matthew oral antibiotics and went to make telephone calls. Delirious, Matthew clung to his wife, thanking her. Sometimes he drifted into a state where, again, he thought he saw shadows moving in the empty corners of the room, and twice more he muttered about his dead mother. Alone in the velvety blackness of the tropical night, Robin listened to winged insects colliding with the screens at the windows, alternately comforting and watching over the man she had loved since she was seventeen.

It hadn’t been cellulitis. The infection had responded, over the next twenty-four hours, to antibiotics. As he recovered from the sudden, violent illness, Matthew watched her constantly, weak and vulnerable as she had never seen him, afraid, she knew, that her promise to stay had been temporary.

“We can’t throw it all away, can we?” he had asked her hoarsely from the bed where the doctor had insisted he stay. “All these years?”

She had let him talk about the good times, the shared times, and she had reminded herself about the giggling girl who had called Strike “Cormy.” She envisioned going home and asking for an annulment, because the marriage had still not been consummated. She remembered the money her parents had spent on the wedding day she had hated.

Bees buzzed in the churchyard roses around her as Robin wondered, for the thousandth time, where she would be right now if Matthew hadn’t scratched himself on coral. Most of her now-terminated therapy sessions had been full of her need to talk about the doubts that had plagued her ever since she had agreed to remain married.

In the months that had followed, and especially when she and Matthew were getting on reasonably well, it seemed to her that it had been right to give the marriage a fair trial, but she never forgot to think of it in terms of a trial, and this in itself sometimes led her, sleepless at night, to castigate herself for the pusillanimous failure to pull herself free once Matthew had recovered.

She had never explained to Strike what had happened, why she had agreed to try and keep the marriage afloat. Perhaps that was why their friendship had grown so cold and distant. When she had returned from her honeymoon, it was to find Strike changed towards her—and perhaps, she acknowledged, she had changed towards him, too, because of what she had heard on the line when she had called, in desperation, from the Maldives bar.

“Sticking with it, then, are you?” he had said roughly, after a glance at her ring finger.

His tone had nettled her, as had the fact that he had never asked why she was trying, never asked about her home life from that point onwards, never so much as hinted that he remembered the hug on the stairs.

Whether because Strike had arranged matters that way or not, they had not worked a case together since that of the Shacklewell Ripper. Imitating her senior partner, Robin had retreated into a cool professionalism.