“If you think I should call Wardle and pass this over to him—” said Robin, her resentment palpable.
“No,” said Strike, and the haste with which he answered gave Robin some small satisfaction. “Until we’ve heard what he’s… we won’t waste Wardle’s time. We’ll let him know once we’ve heard what this Jason’s got. When did you say he’s coming to London?”
“He’s trying to get time off; I don’t know yet.”
“One of us could go up to Leeds and meet him.”
“He wants to come down. He’s trying to keep all this away from anyone who knows him.”
“OK,” said Strike gruffly, rubbing his bloodshot eyes and trying to formulate a plan that would keep Robin simultaneously busy and out of harm’s way. “You keep the pressure on him, then, and start ringing round those numbers, see whether you can get a lead on Brockbank.”
“I’ve already started doing that,” she said and he heard the latent rebelliousness, the imminent insistence that she wanted to be back on the street.
“And,” said Strike, thinking fast, “I want you to stake out Wollaston Close.”
“Looking for Laing?”
“Exactly. Keep a low profile, don’t stay there after dark and if you see the beanie bloke you get out of there or set off your bloody rape alarm. Preferably both.”
Even Strike’s surliness could not douse Robin’s delight that she was back on board, a fully equal partner in the business.
She could not know that Strike believed and hoped that he was sending her up a dead end. By day and by night he had watched the entrances to the small block of flats, shifting position regularly, using night-vision goggles to scan the balconies and windows. Nothing he had seen indicated that Laing was lurking within: no broad shadow moving behind a curtain, no hint of a low-growing hairline or dark ferret-like eyes, no massive figure swaying along on crutches or (because Strike took nothing for granted when it came to Donald Laing) swaggering along like the ex-boxer he was. Every man who had passed in and out of the building had been scrutinized by Strike for a hint of resemblance to Laing’s JustGiving photograph or to the faceless figure in the beanie hat, and none of them had come close to a match.
“Yeah,” he said, “you get onto Laing and—give me half those Brockbank numbers—we’ll divide them up. I’ll stick with Whittaker. Make sure you check in regularly, OK?”
He heaved himself out of the sofa.
“Of course,” said Robin, elated. “Oh, and—Cormoran—”
He was already on the way to the inner office, but turned.
“—what are these?”
She was holding up the Accutane pills that he had found in Kelsey’s drawer and which he had left in Robin’s in-tray after looking them up online.
“Oh, them,” he said. “They’re nothing.”
Some of her cheeriness seemed to evaporate. A faint guilt stirred. He knew he was being a grumpy bastard. She didn’t deserve it. He tried to pull himself together.
“Acne medication,” he said. “They were Kelsey’s.”
“Of course—you went to the house—you saw her sister! What happened? What did she say?”
Strike did not feel equal to telling her all about Hazel Furley now. The interview felt a long time ago, he was exhausted and still felt unreasonably antagonistic.
“Nothing new,” he said. “Nothing important.”
“So why did you take these pills?”
“I thought they might be birth control… maybe she was up to something her sister didn’t know about.”
“Oh,” said Robin. “So they really are nothing.”
She tossed them into the bin.
Ego made Strike go on: ego, pure and simple. She had found a good lead and he had nothing except a vague idea about the Accutane.
“And I found a ticket,” he said.
“A what?”
“Like a coat check ticket.”
Robin waited expectantly.
“Number eighteen,” said Strike.
Robin waited for a further explanation, but none came. Strike yawned and conceded defeat.
“I’ll see you later. Keep me posted on what you’re up to and where you are.”
He let himself into his office, closed the door, sat down at his desk and slumped backwards in his chair. He had done all he could to stop her getting back on the street. Now, he wanted nothing more than to hear her leave.
40
… love is like a gun
And in the hands of someone like you
I think it’d kill.
Blue Öyster Cult, “Searchin’ for Celine”
Robin was a decade younger than Strike. She had arrived in his office as a temporary secretary, unsought and unwelcome, at the lowest point of his professional life. He had only meant to keep her on for a week, and that because he had almost knocked her to her death down the metal stairs when she arrived, and he felt he owed her. Somehow she had persuaded him to let her stay, firstly for an extra week, then for a month and, finally, forever. She had helped him claw his way out of near insolvency, worked to make his business successful, learned on the job and now asked nothing more than to be allowed to stand beside him while that business crumbled again, and to fight for its survival.
Everyone liked Robin. He liked Robin. How could he fail to like her, after everything they had been through together? However, from the very first he had told himself: this far and no further. A distance must be maintained. Barriers must remain in place.
She had entered his life on the very day that he had split from Charlotte for good, after sixteen years of an on-off relationship that he still could not say had been more pleasurable than painful. Robin’s helpfulness, her solicitousness, her fascination with what he did, her admiration for him personally (if he was going to be honest with himself, he should do it thoroughly) had been balm to those wounds that Charlotte had inflicted, those internal injuries that had long outlasted her parting gifts of a black eye and lacerations.
The sapphire on Robin’s third finger had been a bonus, then: a safeguard and a full stop. In preventing the possibility of anything more, it set him free to… what? Rely on her? Befriend her? Allow barriers to become imperceptibly eroded, so that as he looked back it occurred to him that they had each shared personal information that hardly anybody else knew. Robin was one of only three people (he suspected) who knew about that putative baby that Charlotte claimed to have lost, but which might never have existed, or was aborted. He was one of a mere handful who knew that Matthew had been unfaithful. For all his determination to keep her at arm’s length, they had literally leaned on each other. He could remember exactly what it felt like to have his arm around her waist as they had meandered towards Hazlitt’s Hotel. She was tall enough to hold easily. He did not like having to stoop. He had never fancied very small women.
Matthew would not like this, she had said.
He would have liked it even less had he known how much Strike had liked it.
She was nowhere near as beautiful as Charlotte. Charlotte had had the kind of beauty that made men forget themselves midsentence, that stunned them into silence. Robin, as he could hardly fail to notice when she bent over to turn off her PC at the wall, was a very sexy girl, but men were not struck dumb in her presence. Indeed, remembering Wardle, she seemed to make them more loquacious.
Yet he liked her face. He liked her voice. He liked being around her.
It wasn’t that he wanted to be with her—that would be insanity. They could not run the business together and have an affair. In any case, she wasn’t the kind of girl you had an affair with. He had only ever known her engaged or else bereft at the demise of her engagement and therefore saw her as the kind of woman who was destined for marriage.
Almost angrily, he added together those things he knew and had observed that marked her as profoundly different from him, as embodying a safer, more cloistered, more conventional world. She had had the same pompous boyfriend since sixth form (although he underst
ood that a little better now), a nice middle-class family back in Yorkshire, parents married for decades and apparently happy, a Labrador and a Land Rover and a pony, Strike reminded himself. A bloody pony!
Then other memories intruded and a different Robin peeled away from this picture of a safe and ordered past: and there in front of him stood a woman who would not have been out of place in the SIB. This was the Robin who had taken advanced driving courses, who had concussed herself in the pursuit of a killer, who had calmly wrapped her coat like a tourniquet around his bleeding arm after he was stabbed and taken him to hospital. The Robin who had improvised so successfully in interrogating suspects that she had winkled out information that the police had not managed to get, who had invented and successfully embodied Venetia Hall, who had persuaded a terrified young man who wanted his leg amputated to confide in her, who had given Strike a hundred other examples of initiative, resourcefulness and courage that might have turned her into a plainclothes police officer by now, had she not once walked into a dark stairwell where a bastard in a mask stood waiting.
And that woman was going to marry Matthew! Matthew, who had been banking on her working in human resources, with a nice salary to complement his own, who sulked and bitched about her long, unpredictable hours and her lousy paycheck… couldn’t she see what a stupid bloody thing she was doing? Why the fuck had she put that ring back on? Hadn’t she tasted freedom on that drive up to Barrow, which Strike looked back on with a fondness that discomposed him?
She’s making a fucking huge mistake, that’s all.
That was all. It wasn’t personal. Whether she was engaged, married or single, nothing could or ever would come of the weakness he was forced to acknowledge that he had developed. He would reestablish the professional distance that had somehow ebbed away with her drunken confessions and the camaraderie of their trip up north, and temporarily shelve his half-acknowledged plan to end the relationship with Elin. It felt safer just now to have another woman within reach, and a beautiful one at that, whose enthusiasm and expertise in bed ought surely to compensate for an undeniable incompatibility outside it.
He fell to wondering how long Robin would continue working for him after she became Mrs. Cunliffe. Matthew would surely use every ounce of his husbandly influence to pry her away from a profession as dangerous as it was poorly paid. Well, that was her lookout: her bed, and she could lie in it.
Except that once you had broken up, it was much easier to do so again. He ought to know. How many times had he and Charlotte split? How many times had their relationship fallen to pieces, and how many times had they tried to reassemble the wreckage? There had been more cracks than substance by the end: they had lived in a spider’s web of fault lines, held together by hope, pain and delusion.
Robin and Matthew had just two months to go before the wedding.
There was still time.
41
See there a scarecrow who waves through the mist.
Blue Öyster Cult, “Out of the Darkness”
It happened quite naturally that Strike saw Robin very little over the following week. They were staking out different locations and exchanged information almost exclusively over their mobiles.
As Strike had expected, neither Wollaston Close nor its environs had revealed any trace of the ex-King’s Own Royal Borderer, but he had been no more successful in spotting his man in Catford. The emaciated Stephanie entered and left the flat over the chip shop a few more times. Although he could not be there around the clock, Strike was soon pretty sure that he had seen her entire wardrobe: a few pieces of dirty jersey and one tatty hoodie. If, as Shanker had confidently asserted, she was a prostitute, she was working infrequently. While he took care never to let her see him, Strike doubted that her hollow eyes would retain much of an impression even if he had moved into plain view. They had become shuttered, full of inner darkness, no longer taking in the outside world.
Strike had tried to ascertain whether Whittaker was almost permanently inside or almost constantly absent from the flat in Catford Broadway, but there was no landline registered for the address and the property was listed online as owned by a Mr. Dareshak, who was either renting it or unable to get rid of his squatters.
The detective was standing smoking beside the stage door one evening, watching the lit windows and wondering whether he was imagining movement behind them, when his mobile buzzed and he saw Wardle’s name.
“Strike here. What’s up?”
“Bit of a development, I think,” said the policeman. “Looks like our friend’s struck again.”
Strike moved the mobile to his other ear, away from the passing pedestrians.
“Go on.”
“Someone stabbed a hooker down in Shacklewell and cut off two of her fingers as a souvenir. Deliberately cut ’em off—pinned her arm down and hacked at them.”
“Jesus. When was this?”
“Ten days ago—twenty-ninth of April. She’s only just come out of an induced coma.”
“She survived?” said Strike, now taking his eyes entirely off the windows behind which Whittaker might or might not have been lurking, his attention all Wardle’s.
“By a fucking miracle,” said Wardle. “He stabbed her in the abdomen, punctured her lung, then hacked off her fingers. Miracle he missed major organs. We’re pretty sure he thought she was dead. She’d taken him down a gap between two buildings for a blow job, but they were disturbed: two students walking down Shacklewell Lane heard her scream and went down the alley to see what was going on. If they’d been five minutes later she’d’ve been a goner. It took two blood transfusions to keep her alive.”
“And?” said Strike. “What’s she saying?”
“Well, she’s drugged up to the eyeballs and can’t remember the actual attack. She thinks he was a big, beefy white guy wearing a hat. Dark jacket. Upturned collar. Couldn’t see much of his face, but she thinks he was a northerner.”
“She does?” said Strike, his heart pounding faster than ever.
“That’s what she said. She’s groggy, though. Oh, and he stopped her getting run over, that’s the last thing she can remember. Pulled her back off the road when a van was coming.”
“What a gent,” said Strike, exhaling smoke at the starry sky.
“Yeah,” said Wardle. “Well, he wanted his body parts pristine, didn’t he?”
“Any chance of a photofit?”
“We’re going to get the artist in to see her tomorrow, but I haven’t got high hopes.”
Strike stood in the darkness, thinking hard. He could tell that Wardle had been shaken by the new attack.
“Any news on any of my guys?” he asked.
“Not yet,” said Wardle tersely. Frustrated, Strike chose not to push it. He needed this open line into the investigation.
“What about your Devotee lead?” Strike asked, turning back to look at the windows of Whittaker’s flat, where nothing seemed to have changed. “How’s that coming along?”
“I’m trying to get the cybercrime lot after him, but I’m being told they’ve got bigger fish to fry just now,” said Wardle, not without bitterness. “Their view is he’s just a common or garden pervert.”
Strike remembered that this had also been Robin’s opinion. There seemed little else to say. He said good-bye to Wardle, then sank back into his niche in the cold wall, smoking and watching Whittaker’s curtained windows as before.
Strike and Robin met in the office by chance the following morning. Strike, who had just left his flat with a cardboard file of pictures of Mad Dad under his arm, had intended to head straight out without entering the office, but the sight of Robin’s blurred form through the frosted glass changed his mind.
“Morning.”
“Hi,” said Robin.
She was pleased to see him and even more pleased to see that he was smiling. Their recent communication had been full of an odd constraint. Strike was wearing his best suit, which made him look thinner.
“Why are yo
u so smart?” she asked.
“Emergency lawyer’s appointment: Mad Dad’s wife wants me to show them everything I’ve got, all the pictures of him lurking outside the school and jumping out at the kids. She called me late last night; he’d just turned up at the house pissed and threatening: she’s going to throw the book at him, try and get an injunction out.”
“Does this mean we’re stopping surveillance on him?”
“I doubt it. Mad Dad won’t go quietly,” said Strike, checking his watch. “Anyway, forget that—I’ve got ten minutes and I’ve got news.”
He told her about the attempted murder of the prostitute in Shacklewell. When he had finished, Robin looked sober and thoughtful.
“He took fingers?”
“Yeah.”
“You said—when we were in the Feathers—you said you didn’t see how Kelsey could have been his first murder. You said you were sure he’d worked up to—what he did to her.”
Strike nodded.
“Do you know whether the police have looked for any other killings where a bit of the woman was cut off?”
“Bound to have,” said Strike, hoping he was right and making a mental note to ask Wardle. “Anyway,” he said, “after this one, they will.”
“And she doesn’t think she’d recognize him again?”
“Like I said, he’d obscured his face. Big white guy, black jacket.”
“Did they get any DNA evidence from her?” asked Robin.
Simultaneously, both of them thought of what Robin herself had been subjected to in hospital after her attack. Strike, who had investigated rapes, knew the form. Robin had a sudden miserable memory of having to pee into a sample bottle, one eye completely closed from where he had punched her, aching all over, her throat swollen from the strangulation, then having to lie down on the examination couch, and the female doctor’s gentleness as she parted Robin’s knees…
“No,” said Strike. “He didn’t—no penetration. Anyway, I’d better get going. You can forget about tailing Mad Dad today: he’ll know he’s blotted his copybook, I doubt he’ll show up at school. If you can keep an eye on Wollaston—”