Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

“Robin!” said Matthew, as the teenager blushed.

“That way,” said the youth hoarsely, pointing.

Robin marched on. Matthew, she knew, had the key. He had stayed at the hotel with his best man the previous evening, though not in the bridal suite.

When Matthew opened the door, she strode inside, registering the rose petals on the bed, the champagne standing in its cooler, the large envelope inscribed to Mr. and Mrs. Cunliffe. With relief, she saw the holdall that she had intended to take as hand luggage to their mystery honeymoon. Unzipping it, she thrust her uninjured arm inside and found the brace that she had removed for the photographs. When she had pulled it back over her aching forearm, with its barely healed wound, she wrenched the new wedding ring off her finger and slammed it down on the bedside table beside the champagne bucket.

“What are you doing?” said Matthew, sounding both scared and aggressive. “What—you want to call it off? You don’t want to be married?”

Robin stared at him. She had expected to feel release once they were alone and she could speak freely, but the enormity of what he had done mocked her attempts to express it. She read his fear of her silence in his darting eyes, his squared shoulders. Whether he was aware of it or not, he had placed himself precisely between her and the door.

“All right,” he said loudly, “I know I should’ve—”

“You knew what that job meant to me. You knew.”

“I didn’t want you to go back, all right?” Matthew shouted. “You got attacked and stabbed, Robin!”

“That was my own fault!”

“He fucking sacked you!”

“Because I did something he’d told me not to do—”

“I knew you’d fucking defend him!” Matthew bellowed, all control gone. “I knew if you spoke to him you’d go scurrying back like some fucking lapdog!”

“You don’t get to make those decisions for me!” she yelled. “Nobody’s got the right to intercept my fucking calls and delete my messages, Matthew!”

Restraint and pretense were gone. They heard each other only by accident, in brief pauses for breath, each of them howling their resentment and pain across the room like flaming spears that burned into dust before touching their target. Robin gesticulated wildly, then screeched with pain as her arm protested sharply, and Matthew pointed with self-righteous rage at the scar she would carry forever because of her reckless stupidity in working with Strike. Nothing was achieved, nothing was excused, nothing was apologized for: the arguments that had defaced their last twelve months had all led to this conflagration, the border skirmishes that presage war. Beyond the window, afternoon dissolved rapidly into evening. Robin’s head throbbed, her stomach churned, her sense of being stifled threatened to overcome her.

“You hated me working those hours—you didn’t give a damn that I was happy in my job for the first time in my life, so you lied! You knew what it meant to me, and you lied! How could you delete my call history, how could you delete my voicemail—?”

She sat down suddenly in a deep, fringed chair, her head in her hands, dizzy with the force of her anger and shock on an empty stomach.

Somewhere, distantly in the carpeted hush of the hotel corridors, a door closed, a woman giggled.

“Robin,” said Matthew hoarsely.

She heard him approaching her, but she put out a hand, holding him away.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Robin, I shouldn’t have done it, I know that. I didn’t want you hurt again.”

She barely heard him. Her anger was not only for Matthew, but also for Strike. He should have called back. He should have tried and kept trying. If he had, I might not be here now.

The thought scared her.

If I’d known Strike wanted me back, would I have married Matthew?

She heard the rustle of Matthew’s jacket and guessed that he was checking his watch. Perhaps the guests waiting downstairs would think that they had disappeared to consummate the marriage. She could imagine Geoffrey making ribald jokes in their absence. The band must have been in place for an hour. Again she remembered how much this was all costing her parents. Again, she remembered that they had lost deposits on the wedding that had been postponed.

“All right,” she said, in a colorless voice. “Let’s go back down and dance.”

She stood up, automatically smoothing her skirt. Matthew looked suspicious.

“You’re sure?”

“We’ve got to get through today,” she said. “People have come a long way. Mum and Dad have paid a lot of money.”

Hoisting her skirt up again, she set off for the suite door.

“Robin!”

She turned back, expecting him to say “I love you,” expecting him to smile, to beg, to urge a truer reconciliation.

“You’d better wear this,” he said, holding out the wedding ring she had removed, his expression as cold as hers.