Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

It was Sunday evening and in less than two hours England would be playing Italy at the quarter-finals of the European Football Championships in Kiev. One of the few personal indulgences Strike had allowed himself was a subscription to Sky so that he could watch football. The small portable TV that was all his flat upstairs could comfortably accommodate might not be the ideal medium on which to watch such an important game, but he could not justify a night in a pub given that he had an early start on Monday, covering Dodgy Doc again, a prospect that gave him little pleasure.

He checked his watch. He had time to get a Chinese takeaway before the match, but he still needed to call both Barclay and Robin with instructions for the next few days. As he was on the point of picking up the phone, a musical alert told him that he had received an email.

The subject line read: ‘Missing Kids in Oxfordshire’. Strike laid his mobile and keys back on the desk and clicked it open.

Strike –

This is best I can do on a quick search. Obviously without exact time frame it’s difficult. 2 missing child cases in Oxfordshire/Wiltshire from the early/mid 90s unresolved as far as I can tell. Suki Lewis, 12, went missing from care October 1992. Also Immamu Ibrahim, 5-year-old, disappeared 1996. Father disappeared at the same time, is believed to be in Algeria. Without further information, not much to be done.

Best, E

12

The atmosphere we breathe is heavy with storms.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

The sunset cast a ruddy glow across the duvet behind Robin as she sat at the dressing table in her and Matthew’s spacious new bedroom. Next-door’s barbecue was now smoking the air that had earlier been fragrant with honeysuckle. She had just left Matthew downstairs, lying on the sofa watching the warm-up to the England–Italy game, a cold bottle of Peroni in his hand.

Opening the dressing table drawer, she took out a pair of coloured contact lenses she had concealed there. After trial and error the previous day, she had decided the hazel ones appeared most natural with her strawberry-blonde hair. Gingerly, she extracted first one, then the other, placing them over her watering blue-grey irises. It was essential that she get used to wearing them. Ideally she would have had them in all weekend, but Matthew’s reaction when he had seen her in them had dissuaded her.

‘Your eyes!’ he had said, after staring at her, perplexed, for a few seconds. ‘Bloody hell, that looks horrible, take them out!’

As Saturday had already been ruined by one of their tense disagreements about her job, she had chosen not to wear the lenses all weekend, because they would serve as a constant reminder to Matthew about what she was up to the following week. He seemed to think that working undercover in the House of Commons was tantamount to treason, and her refusal to tell him who either her client or her targets were had further aggravated him.

Robin kept telling herself that Matthew was worried about her safety and that he could hardly be blamed for it. It had become a mental exercise she performed like a penance: you can’t blame him for being concerned, you nearly got killed last year, he wants you to be safe. However, the fact that she had gone for a drink with Strike on Friday seemed to be worrying Matthew far more than any potential killer.

‘Don’t you think you’re being bloody hypocritical?’ he said.

Whenever he was angry, the skin around his nose and upper lip became taut. Robin had noticed it years ago, but lately it gave her a sensation close to revulsion. She had never mentioned this to her therapist. It had felt too nasty, too visceral.

‘How am I hypocritical?’

‘Going for cosy little drinks with him—’

‘Matt, I work with—’

‘—then complaining when I have lunch with Sarah.’

‘Have lunch with her!’ said Robin, her pulse quickening in anger. ‘Do it! As a matter of fact, I met her in the Red Lion, out with some men from work. Do you want to call Tom and tell him his fiancée’s drinking with colleagues? Or am I the only one who’s not allowed to do it?’

The skin around his nose and mouth looked like a muzzle as it tightened, Robin thought: a pale muzzle on a snarling dog.

‘Would you have told me you’d gone for a drink with him if Sarah hadn’t seen you?’

‘Yes,’ said Robin, her temper snapping, ‘and I’d’ve known you’d be a dick about it, too.’

The tense aftermath of this argument, by no means their most serious of the last month, had lingered all through Sunday. Only in the last couple of hours, with the prospect of the England game to cheer him, had Matthew become amiable again. Robin had even volunteered to fetch him a Peroni from the kitchen and kissed him on the forehead before leaving him, with a sense of liberation, for her coloured contact lenses and her preparations for the following day.

Her eyes felt gradually less uncomfortable with repeated blinking. Robin moved across to the bed, where her laptop lay. Pulling it towards her, she saw that an email from Strike had just arrived.

Robin,

Bit of research on the Winns attached. I’ll call you shortly for quick brief before tomorrow.

CS

Robin was annoyed. Strike was supposed to be ‘plugging gaps’ and working nights. Did he think she had done no research of her own over the weekend? Nevertheless, she clicked on the first of several attachments, a document summarising the fruits of Strike’s online labour.

Geraint Winn

Geraint Ifon Winn, d.o.b. 15th July 1950. Born Cardiff. Father a miner. Grammar school educated, met Della at University of Cardiff. Was ‘property consultant’ prior to acting as her election agent and running her Parliamentary office post-election. No details of former career available online. No company ever registered in his name. Lives with Della, Southwark Park Road, Bermondsey.

Strike had managed to dig up a couple of poor-quality pictures of Geraint with his well-known wife, both of which Robin had already found and saved to her laptop. She knew how hard Strike had had to work to find an image of Geraint, because it had taken her a long time the previous night, while Matthew slept, to find them. Press photographers did not seem to feel he added much to pictures. A thin, balding man who wore heavy-framed glasses, he had a lipless mouth, a weak chin and a pronounced overbite, which taken together put Robin in mind of an overweight gecko.

Strike had also attached information on the Minister for Sport.

Della Winn

D.o.b. 8th August 1947. Née Jones. Born and raised Vale of Glamorgan, Wales. Both parents teachers. Blind from birth due to bilateral microphthalmia. Attended St Enodoch Royal School for the Blind from age 5 – 18. Won multiple swimming awards as teenager. (See attached articles for further details, also of The Playing Field charity).

Even though Robin had read as much as she could about Della over the weekend, she ploughed diligently through both articles. They told her little that she did not already know. Della had worked for a prominent human rights charity before successfully standing for election in the Welsh constituency in which she had been born. She was a long-time advocate for the benefit of sports in deprived areas, a champion of disabled athletes and a supporter for projects that used sport to rehabilitate injured veterans. The founding of her charity, the Level Playing Field, to support young athletes and sportspeople facing challenges, whether of poverty or physical impairment, had received a fair amount of press coverage. Many high-profile sportspeople had given their time to fundraisers.