Роберт Гэлбрейт: Lethal White

Praise for Robert Galbraith

‘Unputdownable . . . this almost preposterously compulsive page-turner is irresistible’

Sunday Times

‘A gimlet eye for detail and beautifully crafted plot make it a delight from start to finish’

Daily Mail

‘A superb and polished thriller’

Sunday Mirror

‘A damn good read . . . it’s a book to gulp down’

Daily Telegraph

‘A properly addictive whodunnit’

Financial Times

‘Criminally good stuff’

Sun

‘A confident hold on a deliriously clever plot’

Guardian

‘Enthralling’

Time

Also by Robert Galbraith

The Cuckoo’s Calling

The Silkworm

Career of Evil

SPHERE

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Sphere

Copyright © J.K. Rowling 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those

clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without

the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published

and without a similar condition including this condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7515-7284-1

Sphere

An imprint of

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

www.hachette.co.uk

www.littlebrown.co.uk

Contents

Praise for Robert Galbraith

Also by Robert Galbraith

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

ONE YEAR LATER

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

PART TWO

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

ONE MONTH LATER

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

To Di and Roger,

and in memory

of the lovely white Spike

Prologue

Happiness, dear Rebecca, means first and foremost the calm, joyous sense of innocence.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

If only the swans would swim side by side on the dark green lake, this picture might turn out to be the crowning achievement of the wedding photographer’s career.

He was loath to change the couple’s position, because the soft light beneath the canopy of trees was turning the bride, with her loose red-gold curls, into a pre-Raphaelite angel and emphasising the chiselled cheekbones of her husband. He couldn’t remember when he had last been commissioned to photograph so handsome a couple. There was no need for tactful tricks with the new Mr and Mrs Matthew Cunliffe, no need to angle the lady so that rolls of back fat were hidden (she was, if anything, fractionally too slender, but that would photograph well), no need to suggest the groom ‘try one with your mouth closed’, because Mr Cunliffe’s teeth were straight and white. The only thing that needed concealing, and it could be retouched out of the final pictures, was the ugly scar running down the bride’s forearm: purple and livid, with the puncture marks of stitches still visible.

She had been wearing a rubber and stockinette brace when the photographer arrived at her parents’ house that morning. It had given him quite a start when she had removed it for the photographs. He had even wondered whether she had made a botched attempt to kill herself before the wedding, because he had seen it all. You did, after twenty years in the game.

‘I was assaulted,’ Mrs Cunliffe – or Robin Ellacott, as she had been two hours ago – had said. The photographer was a squeamish man. He had fought off the mental image of steel slicing into that soft, pale flesh. Thankfully, the ugly mark was now hidden in the shadow cast by Mrs Cunliffe’s bouquet of creamy roses.

The swans, the damned swans. If both would clear out of the background it wouldn’t matter, but one of them was repeatedly diving, its fluffy pyramid of a backside jutting out of the middle of the lake like a feathered iceberg, its contortions ruffling the surface of the water so that its digital removal would be far more complicated than young Mr Cunliffe, who had already suggested this remedy, realised. The swan’s mate, meanwhile, continued to lurk over by the bank: graceful, serene and determinedly out of shot.

‘Have you got it?’ asked the bride, her impatience palpable.

‘You look gorgeous, flower,’ said the groom’s father, Geoffrey, from behind the photographer. He sounded tipsy already. The couple’s parents, best man and bridesmaids were all watching from the shade of nearby trees. The smallest bridesmaid, a toddler, had had to be restrained from throwing pebbles into the lake, and was now whining to her mother, who talked to her in a constant, irritating whisper.

‘Have you got it?’ Robin asked again, ignoring her father-in-law.

‘Almost,’ lied the photographer. ‘Turn in to him a little bit more, please, Robin. That’s it. Nice big smiles. Big smiles, now!’

There was a tension about the couple that could not be wholly attributed to the difficulty of getting the shot. The photographer didn’t care. He wasn’t a marriage counsellor. He had known couples to start screaming at each other while he read his light meter. One bride had stormed out of her own reception. He still kept, for the amusement of friends, the blurred shot from 1998 that showed a groom head-butting his best man.

Good-looking as they were, he didn’t fancy the Cunliffes’ chances. That long scar down the bride’s arm had put him off her from the start. He found the whole thing ominous and distasteful.

‘Let’s leave it,’ said the groom suddenly, releasing Robin. ‘We’ve got enough, haven’t we?’

‘Wait, wait, the other one’s coming now!’ said the photographer crossly.

The moment Matthew had released Robin, the swan by the far shore had begun to paddle its way across the dark green water towards its mate.

‘You’d think the buggers were doing it on purpose, eh, Linda?’ said Geoffrey with a fat chuckle to the bride’s mother. ‘Bloody things.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Robin, pulling her long skirt up clear of her shoes, the heels of which were a little too low. ‘I’m sure we’ve got something.’

She strode out of the copse of trees into the blazing sunlight and off across the lawn towards the seventeenth-century castle, where most of the wedding guests were already milling, drinking champagne as they admired the view of the hotel grounds.

‘I think her arm’s hurting her,’ the bride’s mother told the groom’s father.

Bollocks it is , thought the photographer with a certain cold pleasure. They rowed in the car.