Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

Yawning again, he checked his watch. Robin must, surely, have finished having pictures taken by now. With a grimace of pain, because the painkillers they had given him at the hospital had long since worn off, Strike got up, unbolted the door and headed back out among the gawping strangers.

A string quartet had been set up at the end of the empty dining room. They started to play while the wedding group organised themselves into a receiving line that Robin assumed she must have agreed to at some point during the wedding preparations. She had abnegated so much responsibility for the day’s arrangements that she kept receiving little surprises like this. She had forgotten, for instance, that they had agreed to have photographs taken at the hotel rather than the church. If only they had not sped away in the Daimler immediately after the service, she might have had a chance to speak to Strike and to ask him – beg him, if necessary – to take her back. But he had left without talking to her, leaving her wondering whether she had the courage, or the humility, to call him after this and plead for her job.

The room seemed dark after the brilliance of the sunlit gardens. It was wood-panelled, with brocade curtains and gilt-framed oil paintings. Scent from the flower arrangements lay heavy in the air, and glass and silverware gleamed on snow-white tablecloths. The string quartet, which had sounded loud in the echoing wooden box of a room, was soon drowned out by the sound of guests clambering up the stairs outside, crowding onto the landing, talking and laughing, already full of champagne and beer.

‘Here we go, then!’ roared Geoffrey, who seemed to be enjoying the day more than anybody else. ‘Bring ’em on!’

If Matthew’s mother had been alive, Robin doubted that Geoffrey would have felt able to give his ebullience full expression. The late Mrs Cunliffe had been full of cool side-stares and nudges, constantly checking any signs of unbridled emotion. Mrs Cunliffe’s sister, Sue, was one of the first down the receiving line, bringing a fine frost with her, for she had wanted to sit at the top table and been denied that privilege.

‘How are you, Robin?’ she asked, pecking the air near Robin’s ear. Miserable, disappointed and guilty that she was not feeling happy, Robin suddenly sensed how much this woman, her new aunt-in-law, disliked her. ‘Lovely dress,’ said Aunt Sue, but her eyes were already on handsome Matthew.

‘I wish your mother—’ she began, then, with a gasp, she buried her face in the handkerchief that she held ready in her hand.

More friends and relatives shuffled inside, beaming, kissing, shaking hands. Geoffrey kept holding up the line, bestowing bear hugs on everybody who did not actively resist.

‘He came, then,’ said Robin’s favourite cousin, Katie. She would have been a bridesmaid had she not been hugely pregnant. Today was her due date. Robin marvelled that she could still walk. Her belly was watermelon-hard as she leaned in for a kiss.

‘Who came?’ asked Robin, as Katie sidestepped to hug Matthew.

‘Your boss. Strike. Martin was just haranguing him down in the—’

‘You’re over there, I think, Katie,’ said Matthew, pointing her towards a table in the middle of the room. ‘You’ll want to get off your feet, must be difficult in the heat, I guess?’

Robin barely registered the passage of several more guests down the line. She responded to their good wishes at random, her eyes constantly drawn to the doorway through which they were all filing. Had Katie meant that Strike was here at the hotel, after all? Had he followed her from the church? Was he about to appear? Where had he been hiding? She had searched everywhere – on the terrace, in the hallway, in the bar. Hope surged only to fail again. Perhaps Martin, famous for his lack of tact, had driven him away? Then she reminded herself that Strike was not such a feeble creature as that and hope bubbled up once more, and while her inner self performed these peregrinations of expectation and dread, it was impossible to simulate the more conventional wedding day emotions whose absence, she knew, Matthew felt and resented.

‘Martin!’ Robin said joyfully, as her younger brother appeared, already three pints to the bad, accompanied by his mates.

‘S’pose you already knew?’ said Martin, taking it for granted that she must. He was holding his mobile in his hand. He had slept at a friend’s house the previous evening, so that his bedroom could be given to relatives from Down South.

‘Knew what?’

‘That he caught the Ripper last night.’

Martin held up the screen to show her the news story. She gasped at the sight of the Ripper’s identity. The knife wound that man had inflicted was throbbing on her forearm.

‘Is he still here?’ asked Robin, throwing pretence to the wind. ‘Strike? Did he say he was staying, Mart?’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ muttered Matthew.

‘Sorry,’ said Martin, registering Matthew’s irritation. ‘Holding up the queue.’

He slouched off. Robin turned to look at Matthew and saw, as though in thermal image, the guilt glowing through him.

‘You knew,’ she said, shaking hands absently with a great aunt who had leaned in, expecting to be kissed.

‘Knew what?’ he snapped.

‘That Strike had caught—’

But her attention was now demanded by Matthew’s old university friend and workmate, Tom, and his fiancée, Sarah. She barely heard a word that Tom said, because she was constantly watching the door, where she hoped to see Strike.

‘You knew,’ Robin repeated, once Tom and Sarah had walked away. There was another hiatus. Geoffrey had met a cousin from Canada. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘I heard the tail end of it on the news this morning,’ muttered Matthew. His expression hardened as he looked over Robin’s head towards the doorway. ‘Well, here he is. You’ve got your wish.’

Robin turned. Strike had just ducked into the room, one eye grey and purple above his heavy stubble, one ear swollen and stitched. He raised a bandaged hand when their eyes met and attempted a rueful smile, which ended in a wince.

‘Robin,’ said Matthew. ‘Listen, I need—’

‘In a minute,’ she said, with a joyfulness that had been conspicuously absent all day.

‘Before you talk to him, I need to tell—’

‘Matt, please, can’t it wait?’

Nobody in the family wanted to detain Strike, whose injury meant that he could not shake hands. He held the bandaged one in front of him and shuffled sideways down the line. Geoffrey glared at him and even Robin’s mother, who had liked him on their only previous encounter, was unable to muster a smile as he greeted her by name. Every guest in the dining room seemed to be watching.

‘You didn’t have to be so dramatic,’ Robin said, smiling up into his swollen face when at last he was standing in front of her. He grinned back, painful though it was: the two-hundred-mile journey he had undertaken so recklessly had been worth it, after all, to see her smile at him like that. ‘Bursting into church. You could have just called.’

‘Yeah, sorry about knocking over the flowers,’ said Strike, including the sullen Matthew in his apology. ‘I did call, but—’

‘I haven’t had my phone on this morning,’ said Robin, aware that she was holding up the queue, but past caring. ‘Go round us,’ she said gaily to Matthew’s boss, a tall redheaded woman.

‘No, I called – two days ago, was it?’ said Strike.

‘What?’ said Robin, while Matthew had a stilted conversation with Jemima.

‘A couple of times,’ said Strike. ‘I left a message.’

‘I didn’t get any calls,’ said Robin, ‘or a message.’

The chattering, chinking, tinkling sounds of a hundred guests and the gentle melody of the string quartet seemed suddenly muffled, as though a thick bubble of shock had pressed in upon her.