Роберт Гэлбрейт - Lethal White

‘They’ll be bringing in the band in half an hour,’ said Matthew. ‘We’re s’posed to—’

But Robin walked off towards the door, taking with her the invisible isolation cell that had kept her cold and tearless through her father’s speech, through Matthew’s nervous utterings, through the tedium of the familiar old anecdotes from the rugby club regurgitated by the best man. She had the vague impression that her mother tried to waylay her as she ploughed through the guests, but paid no attention. She had sat obediently through the meal and the speeches. The universe owed her an interlude of privacy and freedom.

Up the staircase she marched, her skirt held out of the way of her cheap shoes, and off along a plush carpeted corridor, unsure where she was going, with Matthew’s footsteps hurrying behind her.

‘Excuse me,’ she said to a waistcoated teenager who was wheeling a linen basket out of a cupboard, ‘where’s the bridal suite?’

He looked from her to Matthew and smirked, actually smirked.

‘Don’t be a jerk,’ said Robin coldly.

‘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 pretence 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 for ever because of her reckless stupidity in working with Strike. Nothing was achieved, nothing was excused, nothing was apologised 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 marrie d 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 colourless 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.

Strike had not been able to think of a better course of action, given that he intended to stay until he had spoken to Robin again, than continuing to drink. He had removed himself from Stephen and Jenny’s willing protection, feeling that they ought to be free to enjoy the company of friends and family, and fallen back on the methods by which he usually repelled strangers’ curiosity: his own intimidating size and habitually surly expression. For a while he lurked at the end of the bar, nursing a pint on his own, and then repaired to the terrace, where he had stood apart from the other smokers and contemplated the dappled evening, breathing in the sweet meadow smell beneath a coral sky. Even Martin and his friends, now full of drink themselves and smoking in a circle like teenagers, failed to muster sufficient nerve to badger him.

After a while, the guests were skilfully rounded up and ushered en masse back into the wood-panelled room, which had been transformed in their absence into a dance floor. Half the tables had been removed, the others shifted to the sides. A band stood ready behind amplifiers, but the bride and groom remained absent. A man whom Strike understood to be Matthew’s father, sweaty, rotund and red-faced, had already made several jokes about what they might be getting up to when Strike found himself addressed by a woman in a tight turquoise dress whose feathery hair adornment tickled his nose as she closed in for a handshake.

‘It’s Cormoran Strike, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘What an honour! Sarah Shadlock.’

Strike knew all about Sarah Shadlock. She had slept with Matthew at university, while he was in a long-distance relationship with Robin. Once again, Strike indicated his bandage to show why he could not shake her hand.