Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

Strike looked in the direction indicated. A slender youth with the same coloring 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 neighbor 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 neighbors’ 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.

No, the shock of what she had discovered in the receiving line had not rendered her surroundings blurred. It had instead affected her perception of both sound and time. At one point, she knew that Matthew had urged her to eat, but it did not register with her until after her full plate had been removed by a solicitous waiter, because everything said to her had to permeate the thick walls that had closed in on her in the aftermath of Matthew’s admission of perfidy. Within the invisible cell that separated her entirely from everyone else in the room, adrenaline thundered through her, urging her again and again to stand up and walk out.

If Strike had not arrived today, she might never have known that he wanted her back, and that she might be spared the shame, the anger, the humiliation, the hurt with which she had been racked since that awful night when he had sacked her. Matthew had sought to deny her the thing that might save her, the thing for which she had cried in the small hours of the night when everybody else was asleep: the restoration of her self-respect, of the job that had meant everything to her, of the friendship she had not known was one of the prizes of her life until it was torn away from her. Matthew had lied and kept lying. He had smiled and laughed as she dragged herself through the days before the wedding trying to pretend that she was happy that she had lost a life she had loved. Had she fooled him? Did he believe that she was truly glad her life with Strike was over? If he did, she had married a man who did not know her at all, and if he didn’t…

The puddings were cleared away and Robin had to fake a smile for the concerned waiter who this time asked whether he could bring her something else, as this was the third course that she had left uneaten.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got a loaded gun?” Robin asked him.

Fooled by her serious manner, he smiled, then looked confused.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Never mind.”

“For Christ’s sake, Robin,” Matthew said, and she knew, with a throb of fury and pleasure, that he was panicking, scared of what she would do, scared of what was going to happen next.

Coffee was arriving in sleek silver pots. Robin watched the waiters pouring, saw the little trays of petits fours placed upon the tables. She saw Sarah Shadlock in a tight turquoise sleeveless dress, hurrying across the room to the bathroom ahead of the speeches, watched heavily pregnant Katie following her in her flat shoes, swollen and tired, her enormous belly to the fore, and, again, Robin’s eyes returned to Strike’s back. He was scoffing petits fours and talking to Stephen. She was glad she had put him beside Stephen. She had always thought they would get on.