Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘Fuck, if I’m in the papers my mum’ll go apeshit,’ said the girl excitedly, and she fell into step on Jimmy’s other side, taking any opportunity to nudge or slap him as he teased her about being scared of what her parents would say. She was, Strike judged, at least fifteen years younger than he was.

‘Enjoying yourself, Jimmy?’

The mask restricted Strike’s peripheral vision, so that it was only when the uncombed, tomato-red hair appeared immediately in front of him that Strike realised Flick had joined the march. Her sudden appearance had taken Jimmy by surprise, too.

‘There you are!’ he said, with a feeble show of pleasure.

Flick glared at the girl called Libby, who sped up, intimidated. Jimmy tried to put his arm around Flick, but she shrugged it off.

‘Oi,’ he said, feigning innocent indignation. ‘What’s up?’

‘Three fucking guesses,’ snarled Flick.

Strike could tell that Jimmy was debating which tack to take with her. His thuggishly handsome face showed irritation but also, Strike thought, a certain wariness. For a second time, he tried to put his arm around her. This time, she slapped it away.

‘Oi,’ he said again, this time aggressively. ‘The fuck was that for?’

‘I’m off doing your dirty work and you’re fucking around with her? What kind of fucking idiot do you think I am, Jimmy?’

‘Missiles OUT!’ bellowed a steward with a megaphone, and the crowd took up the chant once more. The cries made by the Mohican-ed woman beside Strike were as shrill and raucous as a peacock’s. The one bonus of the renewed shouting was that it left Strike at liberty to grunt with pain every time he set his prosthetic foot on the road, which was a kind of release and made the plastic mask reverberate in a ticklish fashion against his sweating face. Squinting through the eyeholes he watched Jimmy and Flick argue, but he couldn’t hear a word over the din of the crowd. Only when the chant subsided at last could he make out a little of what they were saying to each other.

‘I’m fucking sick of this,’ Jimmy was saying. ‘ I’m not the one who picks up students in bars when—’

‘You’d ditched me!’ said Flick, in a kind of whispered scream. ‘You’d fucking ditched me! You told me you didn’t want anything exclusive—’

‘Heat of the moment, wasn’t it?’ said Jimmy roughly. ‘I was stressed. Billy was doing my fucking head in. I didn’t expect you to go straight to a bar and pick up some fucking—’

‘You told me you were sick of—’

‘Fuck’s sake, I lost my temper and said a bunch of shit I didn’t mean. If I went and shagged another woman every time you give me grief—’

‘Yeah, well I sometimes think the only reason you even keep me around is Chis—’

‘ Keep your fucking vo ice down! ’

‘—and today, you think it was fun at that creep’s house—’

‘I said I was grateful, fuck’s sake, we discussed this, didn’t we? I had to get those leaflets printed or I’d’ve come with you—’

‘ And I do that cleaning,’ she said, with a sudden sob, ‘and it’s disgusting and then today you send me – it was horrible, Jimmy, he should be in hospital, he’s in a right state—’

Jimmy glanced around. Coming briefly within Jimmy’s eye-line, Strike attempted to walk naturally, though every time he asked his stump to bear his full weight, he felt as though he was pressing it down on a thousand fire ants.

‘We’ll get him to hospital after,’ said Jimmy. ‘We will, but he’ll screw it all up if we let him loose now, you know what he’s like . . . once Winn’s got those photos . . . hey,’ said Jimmy gently, putting his arm around her for a third time. ‘Listen. I’m so fucking grateful to you.’

‘Yeah,’ choked Flick, wiping her nose on the back of her hand, ‘because of the money. Because you wouldn’t even know what Chiswell had done if—’

Jimmy pulled her roughly towards him and kissed her. For a second she resisted, then opened her mouth. The kiss went on and on as they walked. Strike could see their tongues working in each other’s mouths. They staggered slightly as they walked, locked together, while other CORE members grinned, and the girl whom Jimmy had lifted into the air looked crestfallen.

‘Jimmy,’ murmured Flick at last, when the kiss had ended, but his arm was still around her. She was doe-eyed with lust now, and soft-spoken. ‘I think you should come and talk to him, seriously. He keeps talking about that bloody detective.’

‘What?’ said Jimmy, though Strike could tell he’d heard.

‘Strike. That bastard soldier with the one leg. Billy’s fixated on him. Thinks he’s going to rescue him.’

The end point of the march came into sight at last: Bow Quarter in Fairfield Road, where the square brick tower of an old match factory, proposed site of some of the planned missiles, punctured the skyline.

‘“Rescue him”?’ repeated Jimmy scornfully. ‘Fuck’s sake. It’s not like he’s being fucking tortured.’

The marchers were breaking ranks now, dissolving back into a formless crowd that milled around a dark green pond in front of the proposed missile site. Strike would have given much to sit down on a bench or lean up against a tree, as many of the protestors were doing, so as to take the weight off his stump. Both the end, where skin that was never meant to bear his weight was irritated and inflamed, and the tendons in his knee were begging for ice and rest. Instead, he limped on after Jimmy and Flick as they walked around the edge of the crowd, away from their CORE colleagues.

‘He wanted to see you and I told him you were busy,’ he heard Flick say, ‘and he cried. It was horrible, Jimmy.’

Pretending to be watching the young black man with a microphone, who was ascending a stage at the front of the crowd, Strike edged closer to Jimmy and Flick.

‘I’ll look after Billy when I get the money,’ Jimmy was telling Flick. He seemed guilty and conflicted now. ‘Obviously I’ll look after him . . . and you. I won’t forget what you’ve done.’

She liked hearing that. Out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw her grubby face flush with excitement. Jimmy took a pack of tobacco and some Rizlas from his jeans pocket and began to roll himself another cigarette.

‘Still talking about that fucking detective, is he?’

‘Yeah.’

Jimmy lit up and smoked in silence for a while, his eyes roving abstractedly over the crowd.

‘Tell you what,’ he said suddenly, ‘I’ll go see him now. Calm him down a bit. We just need him to stay put a bit longer. Coming?’

He held out his hand and Flick took it, smiling. They walked away.

Strike let them get a short head start, then stripped off the mask and the old grey hoodie, replaced the former with the sunglasses he had pocketed for this eventuality and set off after them, dumping the mask and hoodie on top of their banners.

The pace Jimmy now set was completely different to the leisurely march. Every few strides, Flick had to jog to keep up, and Strike was soon gritting his teeth as the nerve endings at the inflamed skin at the end of his stump rubbed against the prosthesis, his overworked thigh muscles groaning in protest.

He was perspiring hard, his gait becoming more and more unnatural. Passers-by were starting to stare. He could feel their curiosity and pity as he dragged his prosthetic leg along. He knew he should have been doing his bloody physio exercises, that he ought to have kept to the no chips rule, that in an ideal world he’d have taken the day off today, and rested up, the prosthesis off, an ice pack on his stump. On he limped, refusing to listen to the body pleading with him to stop, the distance between himself, Jimmy and Flick growing ever wider, the compensating movement of his upper body and arms becoming grotesque. He could only pray that neither Jimmy nor Flick would turn and look behind them, because there was no way Strike could remain incognito if they saw him hobbling along like this. They were already disappearing into the neat little brick box that was Bow station, while Strike was panting and swearing on the opposite side of the road.