Strike put down his coffee.
‘Those are very interesting pieces of information,’ he said slowly.
‘I thought you’d like them,’ said Robin, with a demure smile.
‘Shines an interesting side-light on Manny’s assurance that he didn’t push his boss down the stairs.’
‘They really didn’t like you being there,’ said Robin, ‘but that might have been my fault. I said you were a private detective, but Nenita – her English isn’t as good as Manny’s – didn’t understand, so I said you were a kind of policeman.’
‘Leading them to assume that Chard had invited me over to complain about Manny’s violence towards him.’
‘Did Chard mention it?’
‘Not a word,’ said Strike. ‘Much more concerned about Waldegrave’s alleged treachery.’
After visits to the bathroom they returned to the cold, where they had to screw up their eyes against oncoming snow as they traversed the car park. A light frosting had already settled over the top of the Toyota.
‘You’re going to make it to King’s Cross, right?’ said Strike, checking his watch.
‘Unless we hit trouble on the motorway,’ said Robin, surreptitiously touching the wood trim on the door’s interior.
They had just reached the M4, where there were weather warnings on every sign and where the speed limit had been reduced to sixty, when Strike’s mobile rang.
‘Ilsa? What’s going on?’
‘Hi, Corm. Well, it could be worse. They haven’t arrested her, but that was some intense questioning.’
Strike turned the mobile onto speakerphone for Robin’s benefit and together they listened, similar frowns of concentration on their faces as the car moved through a vortex of swirling snow, rushing the windscreen.
‘They definitely think it’s her,’ said Ilsa.
‘Based on what?’
‘Opportunity,’ said Ilsa, ‘and her manner. She really doesn’t help herself. Very grumpy at being questioned and kept talking about you, which put their backs up. She said you’ll find out who really did it.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Strike, exasperated. ‘And what was in the lock-up?’
‘Oh yeah, that. It was a burned, bloodstained rag in among a pile of junk.’
‘Big effing deal,’ said Strike. ‘Could’ve been there years.’
‘Forensics will find out, but I agree, it’s not much to go on seeing as they haven’t even found the guts yet.’
‘You know about the guts?’
‘Everyone knows about the guts now, Corm. It’s been on the news.’
Strike and Robin exchanged fleeting looks.
‘When?’
‘Lunchtime. I think the police knew it was about to break and brought her in to see if they could squeeze anything out of her before it all became common knowledge.’
‘It’s one of their lot who’s leaked it,’ said Strike angrily.
‘That’s a big accusation.’
‘I had it from the journalist who was paying the copper to talk.’
‘Know some interesting people, don’t you?’
‘Comes with the territory. Thanks for letting me know, Ilsa.’
‘No problem. Try and keep her out of jail, Corm. I quite like her.’
‘Who is that?’ Robin asked as Ilsa hung up.
‘Old school friend from Cornwall; lawyer. She married one of my London mates,’ said Strike. ‘I put Leonora onto her because – shit.’
They had rounded a bend to find a huge tailback ahead of them. Robin applied the brake and they drew up behind a Peugeot.
‘Shit,’ repeated Strike, with a glance at Robin’s set profile.
‘Another accident,’ said Robin. ‘I can see flashing lights.’
Her imagination showed her Matthew’s face if she had to telephone him and say that she was not coming, that she had missed the sleeper. His mother’s funeral… who misses a funeral? She should have been there already, at Matt’s father’s house, helping with arrangements, taking some of the strain. Her weekend bag ought already to have been sitting in her old bedroom at home, her funeral clothes pressed and hanging in her old wardrobe, everything ready for the short walk to the church the following morning. They were burying Mrs Cunliffe, her future mother-in-law, but she had chosen to drive off into the snow with Strike, and now they were gridlocked, two hundred miles from the church where Matthew’s mother would be laid to rest.
He’ll never forgive me. He’ll never forgive me if I miss the funeral because I did this…
Why did she have to have been presented with such a choice, today of all days? Why did the weather have to be so bad? Robin’s stomach churned with anxiety and the traffic did not move.
Strike said nothing, but turned on the radio. The sound of Take That filled the car, singing about there being progress now, where once there was none. The music grated on Robin’s nerves, but she said nothing.
The line of traffic moved forward a few feet.
Oh, please God, let me get to King’s Cross on time, prayed Robin inside her head.
For three quarters of an hour they crawled through the snow, the afternoon light fading fast around them. What had seemed a vast ocean of time until the departure of the night train was starting to feel to Robin like a rapidly draining pool in which she might shortly be sitting alone, marooned.
Now they could see the crash ahead of them; the police, the lights, a mangled Polo.
‘You’ll make it,’ said Strike, speaking for the first time since he had turned on the radio as they waited their turn to be waved forwards by the traffic cop. ‘It’ll be tight, but you’ll make it.’
Robin did not answer. She knew it was all her fault, not his: he had offered her the day off. It was she who had been insistent on coming with him to Devon, she who had lied to Matthew about the availability of train seats today. She ought to have stood all the way from London to Harrogate rather than miss Mrs Cunliffe’s funeral. Strike had been with Charlotte sixteen years, on and off, and the job had broken them. She did not want to lose Matthew. Why had she done this; why had she offered to drive Strike?
The traffic was dense and slow. By five o’clock they were travelling in thick rush-hour traffic outside Reading and crawled to a halt again. Strike turned up the news when it came on the radio. Robin tried to care what they would say about Quine’s murder, but her heart was in Yorkshire now, as though it had leapfrogged the traffic and all the implacable, snowy miles between her and home.
‘Police have confirmed today that murdered author Owen Quine, whose body was discovered six days ago in a house in Barons Court, London, was murdered in the same way as the hero of his last, unpublished book. No arrest has yet been made in the case.
‘Detective Inspector Richard Anstis, who is in charge of the investigation, spoke to reporters earlier this afternoon.’
Anstis, Strike noted, sounded stilted and tense. This was not the way he would have chosen to release the information.
‘We’re interested in hearing from everyone who had access to the manuscript of Mr Quine’s last novel—’
‘Can you tell us exactly how Mr Quine was killed, Detective Inspector?’ asked an eager male voice.
‘We’re waiting for a full forensic report,’ said Anstis, and he was cut across by a female reporter.
‘Can you confirm that parts of Mr Quine’s body were removed by the killer?’
‘Part of Mr Quine’s intestines were taken away from the scene,’ said Anstis. ‘We’re pursuing several leads, but we would appeal to the public for any information. This was an appalling crime and we believe the perpetrator to be extremely dangerous.’
‘Not again,’ said Robin desperately and Strike looked up to see a wall of red lights ahead. ‘Not another accident…’
Strike slapped off the radio, unwound his window and stuck his head out into the whirling snow.
‘No,’ he shouted to her. ‘Someone stuck at the side of the road… in a drift… we’ll be moving ag
ain in a minute,’ he reassured her.
But it took another forty minutes for them to clear the obstruction. All three lanes were packed and they resumed their journey at little more than a crawl.
‘I’m not going to make it,’ said Robin, her mouth dry, as they finally reached the edge of London. It was twenty past ten.
‘You are,’ said Strike. ‘Turn that bloody thing off,’ he said, thumping the sat nav into silence, ‘and don’t take that exit—’
‘But I’ve got to drop you—’
‘Forget me, you don’t need to drop me – next left—’
‘I can’t go down there, it’s one way!’
‘Left!’ he bellowed, tugging the wheel.
‘Don’t do that, it’s danger—’
‘D’you want to miss this bloody funeral? Put your foot down! First right—’
‘Where are we?’
‘I know what I’m doing,’ said Strike, squinting through the snow. ‘Straight on… my mate Nick’s dad’s a cabbie, he taught me some stuff – right again – ignore the bloody No Entry sign, who’s coming out of there on a night like this? Straight on and left at the lights!’
‘I can’t just leave you at King’s Cross!’ she said, obeying his instructions blindly. ‘You can’t drive it, what are you going to do with it?’
‘Sod the car, I’ll think of something – up here, take the second right—’
At five to eleven the towers of St Pancras appeared to Robin like a vision of heaven through the snow.
‘Pull over, get out and run,’ said Strike. ‘Call me if you make it. I’ll be here if you don’t.’
‘Thank you.’
And she had gone, sprinting over the snow with her weekend bag dangling from her hand. Strike watched her vanish into the darkness, imagined her skidding a little on the slippery floor of the station, not falling, looking wildly around for the platform… She had left the car, on his instructions, at the kerb on a double line. If she made the train he was stranded in a hire car he couldn’t drive and which would certainly be towed.
The golden hands on the St Pancras clock moved inexorably towards eleven o’clock. Strike saw the train doors slamming shut in his mind’s eye, Robin sprinting up the platform, red-gold hair flying…
One minute past. He fixed his eyes on the station entrance and waited.
She did not reappear. Still he waited. Five minutes past. Six minutes past.
His mobile rang.
‘Did you make it?’
‘By the skin of my teeth… it was just about to leave… Cormoran, thank you, thank you so much…’
‘No problem,’ he said, looking around at the dark icy ground, the deepening snow. ‘Have a good journey. I’d better sort myself out. Good luck for tomorrow.’
‘Thank you!’ she called as he hung up.
He had owed her, Strike thought, reaching for his crutches, but that did not make the prospect of a journey across snowy London on one leg, or a hefty fine for abandoning a hire car in the middle of town, much more appealing.
31
Danger, the spur of all great minds.
George Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois
Daniel Chard would not have liked the tiny rented attic flat in Denmark Street, Strike thought, unless he could have found primitive charm in the lines of the old toaster or desk lamp, but there was much to say for it if you happened to be a man with one leg. His knee was still not ready to accept a prosthesis on Saturday morning, but surfaces were within grabbing reach; distances could be covered in short hops; there was food in the fridge, hot water and cigarettes. Strike felt a genuine fondness for the place today, with the window steamy with condensation and blurry snow visible on the sill beyond.
After breakfast he lay on his bed, smoking, a mug of dark brown tea beside him on the box that served as a bedside table, glowering not with bad temper but concentration.
Six days and nothing.
No sign of the intestines that had vanished from Quine’s body, nor of any forensic evidence that would have pegged the potential killer (for he knew that a rogue hair or print would surely have prevented yesterday’s fruitless interrogation of Leonora). No appeals for further sightings of the concealed figure who had entered the building shortly before Quine had died (did the police think it a figment of the thick-lensed neighbour’s imagination?). No murder weapon, no incriminating footage of unexpected visitors to Talgarth Road, no suspicious ramblers noticing freshly turned earth, no mound of rotting guts revealed, wrapped in a black burqa, no sign of Quine’s holdall containing his notes for Bombyx Mori. Nothing.
Six days. He had caught killers in six hours, though admittedly those had been slapdash crimes of rage and desperation, where fountains of clues had gushed with the blood and the panicking or incompetent culprits had splattered everyone in their vicinity with their lies.
Quine’s killing was different, stranger and more sinister.
As Strike raised his mug to his lips he saw the body again as clearly as though he had viewed the photograph on his mobile. It was a theatre piece, a stage set.
In spite of his strictures to Robin, Strike could not help asking himself: why had it been done? Revenge? Madness? Concealment (of what?)? Forensic evidence obliterated by the hydrochloric acid, time of death obscured, entrance and departure of the crime scene achieved without detection. Planned meticulously. Every detail thought out. Six days and not a single lead… Strike did not believe Anstis’s claim to have several. Of course, his old friend was no longer sharing information, not after the tense warnings to Strike to butt out, to keep away.
Strike brushed ash absently off the front of his old sweater and lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of his old one.
We believe the perpetrator to be extremely dangerous, Anstis had said to the reporters, a statement, in Strike’s view, that was both painfully obvious and strangely misleading.
And a memory came to him: the memory of the great adventure of Dave Polworth’s eighteenth birthday.
Polworth was Strike’s very oldest friend; they had known each other since nursery. Through childhood and adolescence Strike had moved away from Cornwall regularly and then returned, the friendship picking up again wherever Strike’s mother and her whims had last interrupted it.
Dave had an uncle who had left for Australia in his teens and was now a multi-millionaire. He had invited his nephew to come and stay for his eighteenth birthday, and to bring a mate.
Across the world the two teenagers had flown; it had been the best adventure of their young lives. They had stayed in Uncle Kevin’s massive beachside house, all glass and shining wood, with a bar in the sitting room; diamond sea spray in a blinding sun and enormous pink prawns on a barbecue skewer; the accents, the beer, more beer, the sort of butterscotch-limbed blondes you never saw in Cornwall and then, on Dave’s actual birthday, the shark.
‘They’re only dangerous if they’re provoked,’ said Uncle Kevin, who liked his scuba diving. ‘No touching, lads, all right? No arsing around.’
But for Dave Polworth, who loved the sea, who surfed, fished and sailed at home, arsing around was a way of life.
A killer born, with its flat dead eyes and its ranks of stiletto teeth, but Strike had witnessed the blacktip’s lazy indifference as they swam over it, awed by its sleek beauty. It would have been content to glide away through the azure gloom, he knew that, but Dave was determined to touch.
He had the scar still: the shark had torn away a tidy chunk of his forearm and he had only partial feeling in his right thumb. It had not affected his ability to do his job: Dave was a civil engineer in Bristol now, and they called him ‘Chum’ in the Victory Inn where he and Strike still met to drink Doom Bar on their visits home. Stubborn, reckless, a thrillseeker to his core, Polworth still scuba-dived in his free time, though he left the basking sharks of the Atlantic well alone.
There was a fine crack on the ceiling over Strike’s bed. He did not think he had ever noticed it before. His eyes followed
it as he remembered the shadow on a seabed and a sudden cloud of black blood; the thrashing of Dave’s body in a silent scream.
The killer of Owen Quine was like that blacktip, he thought. There were no frenzied, indiscriminate predators among the suspects in this case. None of them had a known history of violence. There was not, as so often when bodies turned up, a trail of past misdemeanours leading to the door of a suspect, no bloodstained past dragging behind any of them like a bag of offal for hungry hounds. This killer was a rarer, stranger beast: the one who concealed their true nature until sufficiently disturbed. Owen Quine, like Dave Polworth, had recklessly taunted a murderer-in-waiting and unleashed horror upon himself.
Strike had heard the glib assertion many times, that everyone had it in them to kill, but he knew this to be a lie. There were undoubtedly those to whom killing was easy and pleasurable: he had met a few such. Millions had been successfully trained to end others’ lives; he, Strike, was one of them. Humans killed opportunistically, for advantage and in defence, discovering in themselves the capacity for bloodshed when no alternative seemed possible; but there were also people who had drawn up short, even under the most intense pressure, unable to press their advantage, to seize the opportunity, to break the final and greatest taboo.
Strike did not underestimate what it had taken to bind, batter and slice open Owen Quine. The person who had done it had achieved their goal without detection, successfully disposed of the evidence and appeared not to be exhibiting sufficient distress or guilt to alert anyone. All of this argued a dangerous personality, a highly dangerous personality – if disturbed. While they believed themselves to be undetected and unsuspected, there was no danger to anybody around them. But if touched again… touched, perhaps, in the place where Owen Quine had managed to touch them…
‘Fuck,’ murmured Strike, dropping his cigarette hastily into the ashtray beside him; it had burned down to his fingers without him noticing.