“Can I help?” Robin offered.
“In that middle drawer. There might be a picture.”
The Jack Russell began barking again as Robin opened a drawer containing an assortment of napkin rings, crocheted doilies, souvenir teaspoons, toothpicks and loose photographs. Robin extracted as many of the latter as she could and brought them back to Lorraine.
“That’s him,” said Lorraine, after sorting through many pictures that mostly featured a very elderly woman whom Robin assumed to be Lorraine’s mother. Lorraine passed the picture straight to Strike.
He would not have recognized Laing if he had passed him in the street. The former boxer was massively swollen, especially around the face. His neck was no longer visible; his skin seemed tight, his features distorted. One arm was around a smiling Lorraine’s shoulders, the other hung loose at his side. He was not smiling. Strike peered closer. The yellow rose tattoo was visible, but partially obscured by angry red skin plaques that mottled the whole expanse of his forearm.
“Is there something wrong with his skin?”
“Psoriatic arthritis,” said Lorraine. “He was bad with it. That’s why he was on the sick benefit. Had to stop work.”
“Yeah?” said Strike. “What had he been working as before?”
“He come down here as a manager for one of the big construction firms,” she said, “but then he got ill and couldn’t work. He’d had his own building company up in Melrose. He was the managing director.”
“Really?” said Strike.
“Yeah, family business,” said Lorraine, searching her stack of photographs. “He inherited it from his dad. There he is again, look.”
They were holding hands in this picture, which looked as though it had been taken in a beer garden. Lorraine beamed and Laing looked blank, his moon face shrinking his dark eyes to slits. He had the characteristic look of a man on medically prescribed steroids. The hair like a fox’s pelt was the same, but otherwise Strike was hard pressed to make out the features of the fit young boxer who had once bitten his face.
“How long were you together?”
“Ten months. I met him right after Mum died. She was ninety-two—she lived here with me. I was helping with Mrs. Williams next door and all; she was eighty-seven. Senile. Her son’s in America. Donnie was good to her. He mowed her lawn and got shopping.”
Bastard knew which side his bread was buttered, thought Strike. Ill, unemployed and broke as Laing had been at the time, a lonely middle-aged woman without dependents who could cook, who had her own house, who had just inherited money from her mother, must have been a godsend. It would have been worth faking a bit of compassion to get his feet under the table. Laing had had charm when he chose to use it.
“He seemed all right when we met,” said Lorraine morosely. “Couldn’t do enough for me then. He wasn’t well himself. Joints swollen and everything. He had to have injections off the doctor… He got a bit moody later, but I thought that was just his health. You don’t expect ill people to be always cheerful, do you? Not everyone’s like Mum. She was a bloody marvel, her health was that bad and she was always smiling and… and…”
“Let me get you a tissue,” said Robin and she leaned slowly towards the crochet-covered box, so as not to disarrange the Jack Russell, which had its head on her lap.
“Did you report the theft of your jewelry?” Strike asked, once Lorraine had received her tissue, which she plied between deep drags on her Superking.
“No,” she said gruffly. “What was the point? They were never going to find it.”
Robin guessed that Lorraine had not wanted to draw official attention to her humiliation, and sympathized.
“Was he ever violent?” Robin asked gently.
Lorraine looked surprised.
“No. Is that why you’re here? Has he hurt someone?”
“We don’t know,” said Strike.
“I don’t think he’d hurt anyone,” she said. “He wasn’t that kind of man. I said that to the police.”
“Sorry,” said Robin, stroking the now-dozing Jack Russell’s head. “I thought you didn’t report the robbery?”
“This was later,” said Lorraine. “Month or so after he’d gone. Somebody broke into Mrs. Williams’s place, knocked her out and robbed the house. The police wanted to know where Donnie was. I said, ‘He’s long gone, moved out.’ Anyway, he wouldn’t do that, I told them. He’d been good to her. He wouldn’t punch an old lady.”
They had once held hands in a beer garden. He had mowed the old lady’s lawn. She refused to believe Laing had been all bad.
“I assume your neighbor couldn’t give the police a description?” Strike asked.
Lorraine shook her head.
“She never came back, after. Died in a home. Got a family in Northfield now,” said Lorraine. “Three little kids. You should hear the noise—and they’ve got the bloody cheek to complain about the dog!”
They had hit a complete dead end. Lorraine had no idea where Laing had gone next. She could not remember him mentioning any place to which he was connected other than Melrose and she had never met any of his friends. Once she had realized that he was never coming back, she had deleted his mobile number from her phone. She agreed to let them take the two photographs of Laing, but other than that, had no more help to offer.
The Jack Russell protested loudly at Robin withdrawing her warm lap and showed every sign of wishing to take his displeasure out on Strike as the detective rose from his chair.
“Stop it, Tigger,” said Lorraine crossly, holding the struggling dog on the sofa with difficulty.
“We’ll see ourselves out,” Robin shouted over the dog’s frenzied barking. “Thanks so much for all your help!”
They left her there in her cluttered, smoky sitting room, bandaged ankle raised, probably a little sadder and more uncomfortable for their visit. The sound of the hysterical dog followed them all the way up the garden path.
“I feel like we could at least have made her a cup of tea or something,” said Robin guiltily as they got back into the Land Rover.
“She doesn’t know what a lucky escape she’s had,” said Strike bracingly. “Think about the poor old dear in there,” he pointed at Northfield, “beaten to shit for a couple of extra quid.”
“You think that was Laing?”
“Of course it was bloody Laing,” said Strike as Robin turned on the engine. “He’d cased the joint while he was supposedly helping her out, hadn’t he? And you notice that, for all he was supposed to be so ill with his arthritis, he was still capable of mowing lawns and half killing old women.”
Hungry and tired, her head aching from the stale cigarette smoke, Robin nodded and said that she supposed so. It had been a depressing interview and the prospect of a further two and a half hours’ drive to get back home was not appealing.
“D’you mind if we get going?” said Strike, checking his watch. “I told Elin I’ll be over tonight.”
“No problem,” said Robin.
Yet for some reason—perhaps due to her headache, perhaps because of the lonely woman sitting in Summerfield among the memories of loved ones who had left her—Robin could easily have wept all over again.
29
I Just Like to Be Bad
Sometimes he found it hard to be with the people who thought themselves his friends: the men with whom he associated when he needed money. Theft was their main occupation, tomming of a Saturday night their recreation; he was popular among them, a mate, so they thought, a fellow, an equal. An equal!
The day the police had found her, all he had wanted was to be alone to savor the coverage. The stories in the paper made good reading. He felt proud: this was the first time he’d been able to kill in private, to take his time, to organize things as he’d wanted. He intended to do the same with The Secretary; to have time to enjoy her alive before he killed her.
His one frustration was there was no mention of the letters that were supposed to point the police to Strike, to
make them interrogate and badger the fucker, drag his name through the mud in the papers, make the dumb public think he’d had something to do with it.
However, there were columns and columns of coverage, photographs of the flat where he’d done her, interviews with the pretty-boy police officer. He saved the stories: they were souvenirs, just like the bits of her he had taken for his private collection.
Of course, his pride and enjoyment had to be hidden from It, because It required very careful handling at the moment. It wasn’t happy, not happy at all. Life wasn’t panning out the way It had expected and he had to pretend to give a flying fuck, to be concerned, be a nice guy, because It was useful to him: It brought in money and It might have to give him alibis. You never knew whether they might be needed. He’d had a close call once before.
That had been the second time he had killed, in Milton Keynes. You didn’t shit on your own doorstep: that had always been one of his guiding principles. He had never been to Milton Keynes before or since and had no connection with the place. He had stolen a car, away from the boys, a solo job. He had had fake plates ready for a while. Then he had simply driven, wondering whether he would get lucky. There had been a couple of failed attempts since his first murder: trying to chat up girls in pubs, in clubs, trying to isolate them, was not working as well as it had in the past. He didn’t look as good as he once had, he knew that, but he didn’t want to establish a pattern of doing prostitutes. The police started to put two and two together if you went for the same type every time. Once he had managed to track a tipsy girl down an alleyway, but before he’d even drawn his knife out a pack of giggling kids had burst into view and he had taken off. After that he had given up on trying to pick up a girl in the usual way. It would have to be force.
He had driven for hours in increasing frustration; not a whiff of a victim in Milton Keynes. At ten to midnight he was on the verge of caving and sniffing out a hooker when he’d spotted her. She was arguing with her boyfriend on a roundabout in the middle of the road, a short-haired brunette in jeans. As he passed he kept an eye on the couple in his rearview mirror. He watched her storm away, as good as intoxicated by her own anger and tears. The infuriated man she had left behind shouted after her, then, with a gesture of disgust, stumbled off in the opposite direction.
He did a U-turn and drove back up the road towards her. She was sobbing as she walked, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.
He had wound down the window.
“You all right, love?”
“Piss off!”
She sealed her fate by plunging angrily into bushes beside the road to get away from his crawling car. Another hundred yards would have taken her to a well-lit stretch of road.
All he had to do was turn off the road and park. He pulled on the balaclava before getting out of the car, the knife ready in his hand, and walked calmly back to the place where she had disappeared. He could hear her trying to fight her way back out of the dense patch of trees and shrubs, placed there by town planners to soften the contours of the wide gray dual carriageway. There was no streetlamp here. He was invisible to passing drivers as he skirted the dark foliage. As she beat her way back onto the pavement, he was standing ready to force her back in at knifepoint.
He had spent an hour in the bushes before leaving the body. He ripped her earrings from her lobes and then wielded his knife with abandon, hacking off bits of her. A gap in the traffic and he scurried, panting, back to the stolen car in the darkness, balaclava still in place.
He drove away, every particle of him elated and sated, his pockets seeping. Only then did the mist lift.
Last time, he had used a car from work, which he had subsequently cleaned thoroughly in full view of his workmates. He doubted anyone would be able to get the blood out of these cloth seats and his DNA would be on everything. What was he going to do? That was the closest he had ever come to panicking.
He drove miles north before abandoning the car in a lonely field far from the main road, not overlooked by any buildings. Here, shivering in the cold, he took off the fake plates, soaked one of his socks in the petrol tank, then chucked it into the bloody front seat and lit it. It took a long time for the car to properly catch; he had to reapproach it several times to help it along until finally, at three in the morning while he watched, shivering, from the cover of trees, it exploded. Then he ran.
It was winter, which meant at least that the balaclava did not look out of place. He buried the fake plates in a wood and hurried on, head bowed, hands in his pockets on his treasured souvenirs. He had considered burying them too, but he could not bring himself to do it. He had covered the bloodstains on his trousers with mud, kept his balaclava on at the station, acting drunk in a corner of the train carriage to keep people away from him, muttering to himself, projecting that aura of menace and madness that acted like a cordon when he wished to be left alone.
By the time he reached home they had found her body. He watched it on the TV that night, eating off a tray in his lap. They found the burnt-out car, but not the plates and—this really was proof of his own inimitable luck, the strange protective blessing the cosmos gave him—the boyfriend with whom she had argued was arrested, charged and, though the evidence against him was transparently weak, convicted! The thought of that dickhead serving his time still made him laugh sometimes…
Nevertheless, those long hours of driving through the darkness when he had known an encounter with the police might be fatal, when he had feared a request to turn out his pockets or a shrewd-eyed passenger noticing dried blood on him had taught him a powerful lesson. Plan every detail. Leave nothing to chance.
That was why he needed to nip out for some Vicks VapoRub. The number-one priority right now was to make sure that It’s stupid new scheme did not interfere with his own.
30
I am gripped, by what I cannot tell…
Blue Öyster Cult, “Lips in the Hills”
Strike was inured to the shifts between frenetic activity and enforced passivity demanded by investigations. Nevertheless, the weekend following their round-trip to Barrow, Market Harborough and Corby found him in a strange state of tension.
The gradual re-immersion in civilian life that had taken place over the past couple of years had brought with it pressures from which he had been protected while in the military. His half-sister Lucy, the only sibling with whom he had shared a childhood, called early on Saturday morning to ask why he had not responded to her invitation to his middle nephew’s birthday party. He explained that he had been away, unable to access mail sent to the office, but she barely listened.
“Jack hero-worships you, you know,” she said. “He really wants you to come.”
“Sorry, Lucy,” said Strike, “can’t make it. I’ll send him a present.”
Had Strike still been in the SIB, Lucy would not have felt entitled to exert emotional blackmail. It had been easy to avoid family obligations then, while he was traveling the world. She had seen him as an inextricable part of the army’s immense and implacable machine. When he steadily refused to yield to her word picture of a desolate eight-year-old nephew looking in vain for Uncle Cormoran at the garden gate, she desisted, asking instead how the hunt for the man who had sent the leg was progressing. Her tone implied that there was something disreputable about being sent a leg. Keen to get her off the phone, Strike told her untruthfully that he was leaving everything up to the police.
Fond as he was of his younger sister, he had come to accept that their relationship rested almost entirely on shared and largely traumatic memories. He never confided in Lucy unless forced to do so by external events, for the simple reason that confidences usually elicited alarm or anxiety. Lucy lived in a state of perennial disappointment that he was still, at the age of thirty-seven, holding out against all those things that she believed necessary to make him happy: a job with regular hours, more money, a wife and children.
Glad to have got rid of her, Strike made himself his third mug of tea of the morn
ing and laid back down on the bed with a pile of newspapers. Several of them displayed a photograph of MURDER VICTIM KELSEY PLATT, wearing a navy school uniform, a smile on her plain, pimply face.
Dressed only in boxers, his hairy belly no smaller for the plentiful takeaways and chocolate bars that had filled it in the last fortnight, he munched his way through a packet of Rich Tea biscuits and skimmed several of the stories, but they told him nothing he did not already know, so he turned instead to the anticipatory comment about the next day’s Arsenal–Liverpool match.
His mobile rang while he was reading. He had not realized how tightly wound he was: he reacted so fast that Wardle was taken by surprise.
“Bloody hell, that was quick. What were you doing, sitting on it?”
“What’s going on?”
“We’ve been over to Kelsey’s sister’s place—name’s Hazel, she’s a nurse. We’re looking into all Kelsey’s day-to-day contacts, we’ve gone through her room and we’ve got her laptop. She’d been online, on some message board for people who want to hack bits off themselves, and she was asking about you.”
Strike scratched his dense, curly hair, staring at the ceiling, listening.
“We’ve got personal details for a couple of the people she was interacting with regularly on the boards. I should have pictures by Monday—where will you be?”
“Here, in the office.”
“Her sister’s boyfriend, the ex-fireman, says Kelsey kept asking him about people trapped in buildings and car accidents and all sorts. She really wanted to get rid of that leg.”
“Jesus,” muttered Strike.
After Wardle had hung up, Strike found himself unable to focus on the backroom reshuffles at the Emirates. After a few minutes he abandoned the pretense that he was absorbed in the fate of Arsène Wenger’s management team and resumed his staring at the cracks in the ceiling, absently turning his mobile over and over.