“Wait! I mean, if you’ve got time,” she added.
“Couple more minutes,” he said, checking his watch again. “What’s up? You’re haven’t spotted Laing?”
“No,” she said, “but I think—just possibly —we might have a lead on Brockbank.”
“You’re kidding!”
“It’s a strip club off Commercial Road; I’ve had a look at it on Google Street View. Looks pretty grotty. I called and asked for Noel Brockbank and a woman said ‘Who?’ and then, ‘Nile, you mean?’ And she put her hand over the mouthpiece and had a bit of discussion with another woman about what the new bouncer was called. He’s obviously only just arrived. So I described him physically and she said, ‘Yeah, that’s Nile.’ Of course,” said Robin self-deprecatingly, “it might not be him at all, it could be a dark man who really is called Nile, but when I described the long jaw, she said immediately—”
“You’ve played your usual blinder,” said Strike, checking his watch. “Gotta go. Text me the details of this strip club, will you?”
“I thought I might—”
“No, I want you to stick to Wollaston Close,” said Strike. “Keep in touch.”
As the glass door closed behind him and he clanged away down the metal stairs, she tried to feel pleased that he had said she’d played a blinder. Nevertheless, she had hoped for a chance to do something other than stare pointlessly at the flats of Wollaston Close for hours. She was starting to suspect that Laing was not there and, worse still, that Strike knew it.
The visit to the lawyers was brief but productive. The solicitor was delighted with the copious evidence that Strike had laid in front of him, which vividly documented Mad Dad’s constant violations of the custody agreements.
“Oh, excellent,” he beamed over an enlarged picture of the youngest son cowering tearfully behind his nanny as his father snarled and pointed, almost nose to nose with the defiant woman. “Excellent, excellent…”
And then, catching sight of his client’s expression, he had hurried to conceal his glee at this vision of her child’s distress and offered tea.
An hour later Strike, still in his suit but with his tie now stuffed in his pocket, was following Stephanie into Catford shopping center. This meant passing under a gigantic fiberglass sculpture of a grinning black cat, which sat on top of the girder that spanned the alley leading into the mall. Two stories high from its dangling paw to the tip of its jaunty tail, which pointed skywards, it seemed poised to pounce upon or scoop up shoppers as they passed beneath.
Strike had decided to follow Stephanie on a whim, never having tracked her before, and intended to return to keep watch over the flat once he had satisfied himself as to where she was going and whom she might be meeting. She walked, as she almost always did, with her arms wrapped tightly around her torso, as though holding herself together, wearing the familiar gray hoodie on top of a black miniskirt and leggings. The slenderness of her twig-like legs was emphasized by her clumpy trainers. She visited a pharmacy and Strike watched through the window as she sat huddled in a chair waiting for a prescription, making eye contact with nobody, staring at her feet. Once she had collected her white paper bag she left the way she had come, passing back beneath the giant cat with its dangling paw, apparently returning to the flat. However, she walked straight past the chippy in Catford Broadway and shortly afterwards took a right at the Afro Caribbean Food Centre and disappeared into a small pub called the Catford Ram, which was built into the rear of the shopping center. The pub, which appeared to have only one window, had a wood-clad exterior that would have given it the look of a large Victorian kiosk had it not been plastered with signs advertising fast food, Sky Sports and a Wi-Fi connection.
The entire area was paved for pedestrians, but a battered gray transit van had been parked a short distance from the pub entrance, giving Strike useful cover as he lurked, debating his options. No purpose would be served at this juncture by coming face to face with Whittaker and the pub looked too small to avoid being seen by his ex-stepfather, if that was whom Stephanie was meeting. All he really wanted was a chance to measure Whittaker’s current appearance against that of the figure in the beanie hat and, perhaps, the man in the camouflage jacket who had been watching the Court.
Strike leaned up against the van and lit a cigarette. He had just resolved to find a vantage point that was a little further away, so that he might observe whom Stephanie left the pub with, when the rear doors of the van behind which he was lurking suddenly opened.
Strike took several hasty steps backwards as four men clambered out of the back, along with a smoky haze that gave out a powerful, acrid smell of burned plastic that the ex-SIB man recognized immediately as crack.
All four were unkempt, their jeans and T-shirts filthy, their age hard to gauge because each of them was sunken-faced and prematurely wrinkled. The mouths of two of them had collapsed inwards onto gums that had lost teeth. Momentarily taken aback to find the clean-suited stranger at such close quarters, they seemed to understand from his startled expression that he had not known what was happening inside and slammed the van doors.
Three of them swaggered off towards the pub, but the fourth man did not leave. He was staring at Strike, and Strike was staring right back at him. It was Whittaker.
He was bigger than Strike remembered. Although he had known that Whittaker was almost as tall as he was, he had forgotten the scale of him, the breadth of his shoulders, the heft of the bones beneath his heavily tattooed skin. His thin T-shirt, emblazoned with the logo of the band Slayer, which was both militaristic and occult, blew back against him as they stood facing each other, revealing the outline of ribs.
His yellow face looked freeze-dried like an old apple, the flesh wasted, the skin shrunken against the bone, with cavities beneath the high cheekbones. His matted hair was thinning at the temples: it hung in rats’ tails around his stretched earlobes, each of which was adorned with a silver flesh tunnel. There they stood, Strike in his Italian suit, abnormally well groomed, and Whittaker, stinking of crack fumes, his heretic priest’s golden eyes now set beneath wrinkled, sagging lids.
Strike could not have said how long they stared at each other, but a stream of perfectly coherent thoughts passed through his mind while they did…
If Whittaker were the killer, he might be panicked but not too surprised to see Strike. If he were not the killer, his shock at finding Strike right outside his van ought to be extreme. Yet Whittaker had never behaved like other people. He always liked to appear unshockable and omniscient.
Then Whittaker reacted and Strike felt at once that it would have been unreasonable to expect him to do anything other than what he did. Whittaker grinned, revealing blackened teeth, and instantly the hatred of twenty years ago rose in Strike, and he yearned to put his fist through Whittaker’s face.
“Looky look,” said Whittaker quietly. “It’s Sergeant Sherlock facking Holmes.”
He turned his head and Strike saw scalp shining through the thinning roots and took some petty pleasure in the fact that Whittaker was going bald. He was a vain fucker. He wouldn’t like that.
“Banjo!” shouted Whittaker at the last of his three companions, who had only just reached the pub. “Bring ’er out ’ere!”
His smile remained insolent, although the mad eyes flickered from the van to Strike and back to the pub. His filthy fingers were flexing. For all his assumed insouciance, he was edgy. Why didn’t he ask why Strike was there? Or did he already know?
The friend called Banjo reappeared, dragging Stephanie out of the pub by her thin wrist. In her free hand she was still clutching the pharmacist’s white paper bag. It looked glaringly pristine against her and Banjo’s cheap and dirty clothes. A gold necklace bounced around her neck.
“Why’re you—? What—?” she whimpered, uncomprehending.
Banjo deposited her beside Whittaker.
“Go get us a pint,” Whittaker instructed Banjo, who shuffled obediently away. Whittaker slid a hand
around the back of Stephanie’s thin neck and she looked up at him with the slavish adoration of a girl who, like Leda before her, saw in Whittaker wonderful things that were totally invisible to Strike. Then Whittaker’s fingers gripped her neck until the skin around them went white and began to shake her, not so vigorously as to attract the attention of a passer-by, but with sufficient force to change her expression instantly to one of abject fear.
“Know anything about this?”
“’Bout w-what?” she stammered. The pills were rattling in her white paper bag.
“’Im!” said Whittaker quietly. “’Im that you’re so interested in, you filthy little bitch—”
“Get off her,” said Strike, speaking for the first time.
“Do I take orders?” Whittaker asked Strike quietly, his grin wide, his eyes manic.
With sudden, shocking strength, he seized Stephanie around the neck with both hands and lifted her bodily into the air, so that she dropped the white bag on the pavement to try to fight free, her feet scrabbling, her face growing purple.
No thought, no reflection. Strike punched Whittaker hard in the gut and he fell backwards, taking Stephanie with him; before Strike could do anything to prevent it, he heard the smack of her head on the concrete. Temporarily winded, Whittaker tried to get to his feet, a stream of whispered filth pouring from between his black teeth, while out of the corner of his eye Strike saw Whittaker’s three friends, Banjo at the fore, pushing their way out of the pub: they had seen everything through its one dingy window. One of them was holding a short, rusty blade.
“Do it!” Strike taunted them, standing his ground and opening his arms wide. “Bring the cops round your mobile crack den!”
The winded Whittaker made a gesture from the ground that had the effect of holding his friends at bay, which was the most common sense Strike had ever known him show. Faces were peering out of the pub window.
“You fucking mother… you motherfucker…” Whittaker wheezed.
“Yeah, let’s talk about mothers,” Strike said, jerking Stephanie to her feet. The blood was pounding in his ears. He itched to punch Whittaker until the yellow face was pulp. “He killed mine,” he told the girl, looking into her hollow eyes. Her arms were so thin that his hands almost met around them. “Did you hear that? He’s already killed one woman. Maybe more.”
Whittaker tried to grab Strike around his knees and bring him down; Strike kicked him off, still holding Stephanie. Whittaker’s red handprints stood out on her white neck, as did the imprint of the chain, from which hung the outline of a twisted heart.
“Come with me, now,” Strike told her. “He’s a fucking killer. There are women’s refuges. Get away from him.”
Her eyes were like boreholes into a darkness he had never known. He might have been offering her a unicorn: his proposal was madness, outside the realm of the possible, and incredibly, though Whittaker had squeezed her throat until she could not speak, she wrenched away from Strike as if he were a kidnapper, stumbled over to Whittaker and crouched protectively over him, the twisted heart swinging.
Whittaker allowed Stephanie to help him to his feet and turned to face Strike, rubbing his stomach where the punch had landed and then, in his manic way, he began cackling like an old woman. Whittaker had won: they both knew it. Stephanie was clinging to him as though he had saved her. He pushed his filthy fingers deep into the hair at the back of her head and pulled her hard towards him, kissing her, his tongue down her throat, but with his free hand he gestured to his still-watching friends to get back in the van. Banjo climbed into the driver’s seat.
“See ya, mummy’s boy,” Whittaker whispered to Strike, pushing Stephanie in front of him into the back of the van. Before the doors shut on the obscenities and jeers of his male companions, Whittaker looked directly into Strike’s eyes and made the familiar throat-slashing gesture in midair, grinning. The van moved away.
Strike became suddenly aware that a number of people were standing around him, staring, all gazing at him with the vacant yet startled expressions of an audience when the lights go up unexpectedly. Faces were still pressed up against the pub window. There was nothing left for him to do except memorize the registration number of the battered old van before it turned the corner. As he departed the scene, furious, the onlookers scattered, clearing his way.
42
I’m living for giving the devil his due.
Blue Öyster Cult, “Burnin’ for You”
Fuck-ups happen, Strike told himself. His military career had not been entirely devoid of mishap. You could train as hard as you liked, check every piece of equipment, plan for every contingency and still some random mischance would screw you. Once, in Bosnia, a faulty mobile phone had unexpectedly dumped all its power, triggering a train of mishaps that culminated in a friend of Strike’s barely escaping with his life after driving up the wrong street in Mostar.
None of this altered the fact that if a subordinate in the SIB had been running surveillance and leaned up against the back of a carelessly parked van without first checking that it was empty, Strike would have had a lot to say about it, and loudly. He had not meant to confront Whittaker, or so he told himself, but a period of sober reflection forced him to admit that his actions told a different story. Frustrated by the long hours watching Whittaker’s flat, he had taken few pains to hide himself from the pub windows, and while he could not have known that Whittaker was inside the van, there was a savage retrospective pleasure in knowing that, at last, he had punched the fucker.
God, he had wanted to hurt him. The gloating laugh, the rat’s-tail hair, the Slayer T-shirt, the acrid smell, the clutching fingers around the thin white neck, the taunting talk of mothers: the feelings that had erupted in Strike at the unexpected sight of Whittaker had been those of his eighteen-year-old self, eager to fight, careless of consequences.
Setting aside the pleasure it had been to hurt Whittaker, the encounter had not produced much meaningful information. Try though he might to effect a retrospective comparison, he could neither identify nor rule out Whittaker as the large figure in the beanie hat on looks alone. While the dark silhouette that Strike had chased through Soho had not had Whittaker’s matted locks, long hair can be tied back or tucked into a hat; it had looked burlier than Whittaker, but padded jackets easily add substance. Nor had Whittaker’s reaction on finding Strike outside his van given the detective real clues. The more he thought about it, the less he could decide whether he had read triumph in Whittaker’s gloating expression, or whether the last gesture, the dirty fingers slashing through the air, had been his usual play-acting, a toothless threat, the infantile retaliation of a man determined at all costs to be the worst, the scariest.
In brief, their encounter had revealed that Whittaker remained narcissistic and violent, and given Strike two small pieces of additional information. The first was that Stephanie had aggravated Whittaker by showing curiosity about Strike, and while Strike assumed that this was merely because he had once been Whittaker’s stepson, he did not entirely rule out the possibility that it had been triggered by Whittaker mentioning a desire for retribution, or letting slip that he was seeking it. Secondly, Whittaker had managed to make himself some male friends. While he had always had a, to Strike, incomprehensible attraction for certain women, Whittaker had been almost universally disliked and despised by men in the days that Strike had known him. His own gender had tended to deplore his histrionics, the Satanic bullshit, his craving to be first in all company and, of course, to resent his strange magnetic pull over females. Now, though, Whittaker seemed to have found a crew of sorts, men who shared drugs with him and allowed him to boss them around.
Strike concluded that the one thing he could profitably do in the short term was tell Wardle what had happened and give him the registration number of the van. He did this in the hope that the police would think it worth their while to check for drugs and any other incriminating evidence within the vehicle or, even better, inside that flat over the
chippy.
Wardle listened to Strike’s insistence that he had smelled crack fumes without any form of enthusiasm. Strike was forced to admit, when their call had concluded, that if he were in Wardle’s position he would not have considered his own evidence grounds for a search warrant. The policeman clearly thought that Strike had it in for his ex-stepfather, and no amount of pointing out the Blue Öyster Cult connection between himself and Whittaker seemed likely to change Wardle’s mind.
When Robin phoned that night with her usual progress report, Strike found relief and solace in telling her what had happened. Although she had news of her own, she was instantly distracted by the announcement that he had come face to face with Whittaker, and listened to the whole story in eager silence.
“Well, I’m glad you hit him,” she said when Strike had finished castigating himself for allowing the altercation to happen.
“You are?” said Strike, taken aback.
“Of course I am. He was strangling the girl!”
The moment the words left Robin’s mouth she wished she had not said them. She did not want to give Strike any further reason for remembering the thing that she wished she had never told him.
“As knights errant go, I was on the crap side. She fell over with him and cracked her head on the pavement. What I don’t get,” he added, after a short pause for reflection, “is her. That was her chance. She could’ve left: I’d’ve got her to a refuge, I’d’ve seen her right. Why the fuck did she go back to him? Why do women do that?”
In the fractional hesitation before Robin replied, Strike realized that a certain personal interpretation could be put on these words.
“I suppose,” began Robin, and simultaneously Strike said, “I didn’t mean—”
Both stopped.
“Sorry, go on,” said Strike.