“That was going to be my next question,” said Wardle. “Did you get a second letter?”
Strike looked towards Robin, who shook her head.
“OK,” said Wardle, “for the record: when did the original letter from—” He checked the photocopy. “Kelsey, she’s signed herself—come in?”
Robin answered.
“I’ve got the envelope back in the nut—” The ghost of a smile passed over Strike’s face. “—in the drawer where we keep unsolicited letters. We can check the postcode, but as far as I can remember it was early this year. Maybe February.”
“OK, excellent,” said Wardle, “we’ll be sending someone over to retrieve that envelope.” He smiled at Robin, who was looking anxious. “Calm down: I believe you. Some total nutter’s trying to frame Strike. None of it hangs together. Why would he stab a woman, dismember her and then mail her leg to his own office? Why would he leave letters from himself in the flat?”
Robin tried to smile back.
“She was stabbed?” interposed Strike.
“They’re working on what actually killed her,” said Wardle, “but there are two deep wounds to the torso they’re pretty sure would have done it before he started cutting her up.”
Beneath the table top, Robin made fists, her nails digging deep into her palms.
“Now,” said Wardle, and Detective Sergeant Ekwensi clicked out the nib of her pen and prepared to write, “does the name Oxana Voloshina mean anything to either of you?”
“No,” said Strike and Robin shook her head.
“It looks like that was the victim’s real name,” Wardle explained. “That’s how she signed her tenancy agreement and the landlady says she provided ID. She was claiming to be a student.”
“Claiming?” said Robin.
“We’re looking into who she really was,” said Wardle.
Of course, thought Robin, he’s expecting her to be a prostitute.
“Her English was good, judging by her letter,” commented Strike. “That’s if she genuinely wrote it.”
Robin looked at him, confused.
“If someone’s faking letters from me, why couldn’t they have faked the letter from her?” Strike asked her.
“To try and get you to genuinely communicate with her, you mean?”
“Yeah—lure me to a rendezvous or lay some kind of paper trail between us that would look incriminating once she was dead.”
“Van, go see if the photos of the body are viewable,” said Wardle.
Detective Sergeant Ekwensi left the room. Her posture was that of a model. Robin’s insides began to crawl with panic. As though Wardle had sensed it, he turned to her and said:
“I don’t think you’ll need to look at them if Strike—”
“She should look,” said Strike.
Wardle looked taken aback and Robin, though she tried not to show it, found herself wondering whether Strike was trying to scare her into compliance with his nothing-after-dark rule.
“Yes,” she said, with a decent show of calm. “I think I should.”
“They’re—not nice,” said Wardle, with uncharacteristic understatement.
“The leg was sent to Robin,” Strike reminded him. “There’s as much chance that she’s seen this woman previously as I have. She’s my partner. We work the same jobs.”
Robin glanced sideways at Strike. He had never before described her as his partner to somebody else, or not within Robin’s hearing. He was not looking at her. Robin switched her attention back to Wardle. Apprehensive though she was, after hearing Strike put her on equal professional footing with himself she knew that, whatever she was about to see, she would not let herself, or him, down. When Detective Sergeant Ekwensi returned holding a sheaf of photographs in her hand Robin swallowed hard and straightened her back.
Strike took them first and his reaction was not reassuring.
“Holy fucking shit.”
“The head’s best preserved,” said Wardle quietly, “because he put it in the freezer.”
Just as she would have withdrawn her hand instinctively from something red hot, Robin now had to fight a powerful urge to turn away, to close her eyes, to flip the photograph over. Instead she took it from Strike and looked down; her intestines became liquid.
The severed head sat on what remained of its neck, staring blindly into the camera, its eyes so frosted their color was invisible. The mouth gaped darkly. Her brown hair was stiff, flecked with ice. The cheeks were full and chubby, the chin and forehead covered in acne. She looked younger than twenty-four.
“Do you recognize her?”
Wardle’s voice sounded startlingly close to Robin. She had felt as though she had traveled a long distance as she stared at the severed head.
“No,” said Robin.
She put the picture down and took the next from Strike. A left leg and two arms had been rammed into the fridge, where they had begun to decompose. Having steeled herself for the head she had not thought anything else could be as bad and she was ashamed of the small bleat of distress that escaped her.
“Yeah, it’s bad,” said Detective Sergeant Ekwensi quietly. Robin met her eyes with gratitude.
“There’s a tattoo on the wrist of the left arm,” Wardle pointed out, handing them a third picture in which the relevant arm lay outstretched on a table. Now feeling definitely nauseated, Robin looked and made out “1D” in black ink.
“You don’t need to see the torso,” said Wardle, shuffling the photographs and handing them back to Detective Sergeant Ekwensi.
“Where was it?” asked Strike.
“In the bath,” said Wardle. “That’s where he killed her, the bathroom. It looked like an abattoir in there.” He hesitated. “The leg wasn’t the only thing he cut off her.”
Robin was glad that Strike did not ask what else had gone. She did not think she could stand to hear.
“Who found her?” asked Strike.
“The landlady,” said Wardle. “She’s elderly and she collapsed right after we got there. Looks like a heart attack. They took her to Hammersmith Hospital.”
“What made her go round?”
“Smell,” said Wardle. “Downstairs had rung her. She decided to pop in early before doing her shopping, try and catch this Oxana at home. When she didn’t answer the landlady let herself in.”
“Downstairs hadn’t heard anything—screams—anything?”
“It’s a converted house full of students. Less than bloody useless,” said Wardle. “Loud music, mates coming and going all hours, they gaped like sheep when we asked them if they’d heard anything from upstairs. The girl who’d rung the landlady had total hysterics. She said she’d never forgive herself for not phoning up when she first smelled something bad.”
“Yeah, that would’ve changed everything,” said Strike. “You could’ve stuck her head back on and she’d have been fine.”
Wardle laughed. Even Detective Sergeant Ekwensi smiled.
Robin stood up abruptly. Last night’s wine and this morning’s croissant were churning horribly in her guts. Excusing herself in a small voice, she moved briskly towards the door.
22
I don’t give up but I ain’t a stalker,
I guess I’m just an easy talker.
Blue Öyster Cult, “I Just Like to Be Bad”
“Thank you, I get the concept of gallows humor,” said Robin an hour later, part exasperated, part amused. “Can we move on?”
Strike regretted his witticism in the meeting room, because Robin had returned from a twenty-minute bathroom trip looking white and slightly clammy, a whiff of peppermint revealing that she had cleaned her teeth again. Instead of taking a taxi he had suggested they take a short walk in the fresh air along Broadway to the Feathers, the closest pub, where he ordered them a pot of tea. Personally, he was ready for a beer, but Robin had not been trained up to consider alcohol and bloodshed natural fellows and he felt a pint might reinforce her impression of his callousness.
The
Feathers was quiet at half past eleven on a Wednesday morning. They took a table at the back of the large pub, away from a couple of plainclothes officers who were talking in soft voices near the window.
“I told Wardle about our friend in the beanie while you were in the bathroom,” Strike told Robin. “He says he’s going to put a plainclothes man around Denmark Street to keep an eye out for a few days.”
“D’you think the press are going to come back?” asked Robin, who had not yet had time to worry about this.
“I hope not. Wardle’s going to keep the fake letters under wraps. He says it’s playing into this nutter’s hands to release them. He inclines to the view that the killer’s genuinely trying to frame me.”
“You don’t?”
“No,” said Strike. “He’s not that unhinged. There’s something weirder going on here.”
He fell silent and Robin, respecting his thought process, maintained her own silence.
“Terrorism, that’s what this is,” said Strike slowly, scratching his unshaven chin. “He’s trying to put the wind up us, disrupt our lives as much as possible; and let’s face it, he’s succeeding. We’ve got police crawling over the office and calling us into the Yard, we’ve lost most of our clients, you’re—”
“Don’t worry about me!” said Robin at once, “I don’t want you to worry—”
“For fuck’s sake, Robin,” said Strike on a flash of temper, “both of us saw that guy yesterday. Wardle thinks I should tell you to stay home and I—”
“Please,” she said, her early-morning fears swarming back upon her, “don’t make me stop work—”
“It’s not worth being murdered to escape your home life!”
He regretted saying it immediately, as he saw her wince.
“I’m not using it as an escape,” she muttered. “I love this job. I woke up this morning feeling sick about what I told you last night. I was worried you—might not think I’m tough enough anymore.”
“This hasn’t got anything to do with what you told me last night and nothing to do with being tough. It’s about a psycho who might be following you, who’s already hacked a woman to bits.”
Robin drank her lukewarm tea and said nothing. She was ravenous. However, the thought of eating pub food containing any form of meat made sweat break out over her scalp.
“It can’t have been a first murder, can it?” Strike asked rhetorically, his dark eyes fixed on the hand-painted names of beers over the bar. “Beheading her, cutting off her limbs, taking bits of her away? Wouldn’t you work up to that?”
“You’d think so,” Robin agreed.
“That was done for the pleasure of doing it. He had a one-man orgy in that bathroom.”
Robin was now unsure whether she was experiencing hunger or nausea.
“A sadistic maniac who’s got a grudge against me and has decided to unite his hobbies,” Strike mused aloud.
“Does that fit any of the men you suspect?” Robin asked. “Have any of them killed before, that you know of?”
“Yeah,” said Strike. “Whittaker. He killed my mother.”
But in a very different way, thought Robin. It had been a needle, not knives, that had dispatched Leda Strike. Out of respect for Strike, who was looking grim, she did not voice the thought. Then she remembered something else.
“I suppose you know,” she said cautiously, “that Whittaker kept another woman’s dead body in his flat for a month?”
“Yeah,” said Strike. “I heard.”
The news had filtered through to him while he was out in the Balkans, passed on by his sister Lucy. He had found a picture online of Whittaker walking into court. His ex-stepfather had been almost unrecognizable, crew-cutted and bearded, but still with those staring gold eyes. Whittaker’s story, if Strike remembered correctly, had been that he had been afraid of “another false accusation” of murder, so he had attempted to mummify the dead woman’s body, binding it up in bin bags and hiding it under floorboards. The defense had claimed to an unsympathetic judge that their client’s novel approach to his problem was due to heavy drug use.
“He hadn’t murdered her, though, had he?” Robin asked, trying to remember exactly what Wikipedia had said.
“She’d been dead a month, so I doubt it was an easy post-mortem,” said Strike. The look that Shanker had described as ugly had returned. “Personally, I’d lay odds he killed her. How unlucky does a man get, two of his girlfriends dropping dead at home while he’s sitting there doing nothing?
“He liked death, Whittaker; he liked bodies. He claimed he’d been a gravedigger when he was a teenager. He had a thing about corpses. People took him for a hardcore goth or some ten-a-penny poseur—the necrophiliac lyrics, the Satanic Bible, Aleister Crowley, all that crap—but he was an evil, amoral bastard who told everyone he met he was an evil, amoral bastard and what happened? Women fell over themselves to get at him.
“I need a drink,” said Strike. He got up and headed for the bar.
Robin watched him go, slightly taken aback by his sudden rush of anger. His opinion that Whittaker had murdered twice was unsupported by either the courts or, as far as she knew, police evidence. She had become used to Strike’s insistence on the meticulous collection and documentation of facts, his oft-repeated reminders that hunches and personal antipathies might inform, but must never be allowed to dictate, the direction of an investigation. Of course, when it was a case of Strike’s own mother…
Strike returned with a pint of Nicholson’s Pale Ale and a couple of menus.
“Sorry,” he muttered when he had sat back down and taken a long pull on the pint. “Thinking about stuff I haven’t thought about for a long time. Those bloody lyrics.”
“Yes,” said Robin.
“For fuck’s sake, it can’t be Digger,” said Strike in frustration, running a hand through his dense, curly hair and leaving it entirely unchanged. “He’s a professional gangster! If he’d found out I gave evidence against him and wanted retribution he’d have bloody shot me. He wouldn’t fanny about with severed legs and song lyrics, knowing it’d bring the police down on him. He’s a businessman.”
“Does Wardle still think it’s him?”
“Yeah,” said Strike, “but he should know as well as anyone the procedures on anonymous evidence are watertight. You’d have coppers lying dead all over town if they weren’t.”
He refrained from further criticism of Wardle, though it cost him an effort. The man was being considerate and helpful when he could be causing Strike difficulties. Strike had not forgotten that the last time he had tangled with the Met they had kept him in an interrogation room for five solid hours on what appeared to be the whim of resentful officers.
“What about the two men you knew in the army?” asked Robin, dropping her voice because a group of female office workers were settling themselves at a table nearby. “Brockbank and Laing. Had either of them killed anyone? I mean,” she added, “I know they were soldiers, but outside combat?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me to hear Laing had done someone in,” said Strike, “but he hadn’t, as far as I know, before he went down. He used a knife on his ex-wife, I know that—tied her up and cut her. He spent a decade inside and I doubt they managed to rehabilitate him. He’s been out over four years: plenty of time to commit murder.
“I haven’t told you—I met his ex-mother-in-law in Melrose. She reckons he went to Gateshead when he got out of the nick and we know he might have been in Corby in 2008… but,” said Strike, “she also told me he was ill.”
“What kind of ill?”
“Some form of arthritis. She didn’t know the details. Could an unfit man have done what we saw in those photos?” Strike picked up the menu. “Right. I’m bloody starving and you haven’t eaten anything except crisps for two days.”
When Strike had ordered pollock and chips and Robin a plowman’s, he made another conversational swerve.
“Did the victim look twenty-four to you?”
“I
—I couldn’t tell,” said Robin, trying and failing to block the image of the head with its smooth chubby cheeks, its frosted-white eyes. “No,” she said, after a brief pause. “I thought it—she—looked younger.”
“Me too.”
“I might… bathroom,” said Robin, standing up.
“You OK?”
“I just need a pee—too much tea.”
He watched her go, then finished his pint, following a train of thought he had not yet confided to Robin, or indeed anyone else.
The child’s essay had been shown to him by a female investigator in Germany. Strike could still remember the last line, written in neat girlish handwriting on a sheet of pale pink paper.
The lady changed her name to Anastassia and died her hair and nobody ever found out were she went, she vanished.
“Is that what you’d like to do, Brittany?” the investigator had asked quietly on the tape Strike had watched later. “You’d like to run away and vanish?”
“It’s just a story!” Brittany had insisted, trying for a scornful laugh, her little fingers twisting together, one leg almost wrapped around the other. Her thin blonde hair had hung lank around her pale, freckly face. Her spectacles had been wonky. She had reminded Strike of a yellow budgerigar. “I only made it up!”
DNA testing would find out soon enough who the woman in the fridge had been, and then the police would trawl backwards to see who Oxana Voloshina—if that was her name—really was. Strike could not tell whether he was being paranoid or not in continuing to worry that the body belonged to Brittany Brockbank. Why had the name Kelsey been used on the first letter to him? Why did the head look so young, still smooth with puppy fat?
“I should be on Platinum by now,” said Robin sadly, checking her watch as she sat back down at the table. One of the office workers beside them seemed to be celebrating her birthday: with much raucous laughter from her colleagues she had just unwrapped a red and black basque.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Strike said absently, as his fish and chips and Robin’s plowman’s descended in front of them. He ate silently for a couple of minutes, then set down his knife and fork, pulled out his notebook, looked something up in the notes he had made back in Hardacre’s Edinburgh office and picked up his phone. Robin watched him key in words, wondering what he was doing.