“Because she didn’t have one. Only a sister.”
Jason’s lopsided eyes traveled nervously over the objects on the table before returning to Strike.
“I’m pretty sure she said brother.”
“Worked with me in the army, did he?”
“No, not in the army, I don’t think. Later.”
She lied all the time… If it was Tuesday she’d say it was Wednesday.
“Now, I thought she said her boyfriend told her,” said Tempest. “She told us she had a boyfriend called Neil, Jason—remember?”
“Niall,” mumbled Jason.
“Oh, was it? All right, Niall. He picked her up after we had coffee, remember?”
“Hang on,” said Strike, raising a hand, and Tempest paused obediently. “You saw Niall?”
“Yes,” said Tempest. “He picked her up. On his motorbike.”
There was a brief silence.
“A man on a motorbike picked her up from—where did you meet her?” asked Strike, his calm tone belying his suddenly pounding pulse.
“Café Rouge on Tottenham Court Road,” said Tempest.
“That’s not far from our office,” said Robin.
Jason turned an even darker red.
“Oh, Kelsey and Jason knew that, ha ha! You were hoping to see Cormoran pop in, weren’t you, Jason? Ha ha ha,” laughed Tempest merrily as the waiter returned with her starter.
“A man on a motorbike picked her up, Jason?”
Tempest’s mouth was full and, at last, Jason was able to speak.
“Yeah,” he said with a furtive look at Strike. “He was waiting for her along the road.”
“Could you see what he looked like?” asked Strike, correctly anticipating the answer.
“No, he was sort of—sort of tucked around the corner.”
“He kept his helmet on,” said Tempest, washing down a mouthful with wine, the quicker to rejoin the conversation.
“What color was the motorbike, can you remember?” Strike asked.
Tempest rather thought it had been black and Jason was sure it had been red, but they agreed that it had been parked far too far away to recognize the make.
“Can you remember anything else Kelsey said about her boyfriend?” asked Robin.
Both shook their heads.
Their main courses arrived midway through a lengthy explanation by Tempest of the advocacy and support services offered by the website she had developed. Only with her mouth full of chips did Jason finally find the courage to address Strike directly.
“Is it true?” he said suddenly. His face again grew bright red as he said it.
“Is what true?” asked Strike.
“That you—that—”
Chewing vigorously, Tempest leaned towards Strike in her wheelchair, placed her hand on his forearm and swallowed.
“That you did it yourself,” she whispered, with the ghost of a wink.
Her thick thighs had subtly readjusted themselves as she lifted them off the chair, bearing their own weight, instead of hanging behind the mobile torso. Strike had been in Selly Oak Hospital with men left paraplegic and quadriplegic by the injuries they had sustained in war, seen their wasted legs, the compensations they had learned to make in the movement of their upper bodies to accommodate the dead weight below. For the first time, the reality of what Tempest was doing hit him forcibly. She did not need the wheelchair. She was entirely able-bodied.
Strangely, it was Robin’s expression that kept Strike calm and polite, because he found vicarious release in the look of distaste and fury she threw Tempest. He addressed Jason.
“You’ll need to tell me what you’ve been told before I can tell you whether it’s true or not.”
“Well,” said Jason, who had barely touched his Black Angus burger, “Kelsey said you went to the pub with her brother and you got—got drunk and told him the truth. She reckoned you walked off your base in Afghanistan with a gun and you went as far as you could in the dark, then you—shot yourself in the leg, and then you got a doctor to amputate it for you.”
Strike took a large swig of beer.
“And I did this why?”
“What?” said Jason, blinking confusedly.
“Was I trying to get invalided out of the army, or—?”
“Oh, no!” said Jason, looking strangely hurt. “No, you were”—he blushed so hard it seemed unlikely that there was enough blood left in the rest of his body—“like us. You needed it,” he whispered. “You needed to be an amputee.”
Robin suddenly found that she could not look at Strike and pretended to be contemplating a curious painting of a hand holding a single shoe. At least, she thought it showed a hand holding a shoe. It might equally have been a brown plant pot with a pink cactus growing out of it.
“The—brother—who told Kelsey all about me—did he know she wanted to take off her own leg?”
“I don’t think so, no. She said I was the only one she’d ever told.”
“So you think it was just coincidence he mentioned—?”
“People keep it quiet,” said Tempest, shoehorning herself back into the conversation at the first opportunity. “There’s a lot of shame, a lot of shame. I’m not out at work,” she said blithely, waving towards her legs. “I have to say it’s a back injury. If they knew I’m transabled they’d never understand. And don’t get me started on the prejudice from the medical profession, which is absolutely unbelievable. I’ve changed GPs twice; I wasn’t going to put up with being offered bloody psychiatric help again. No, Kelsey told us she’d never been able to tell anyone, poor little love. She had nobody to turn to. Nobody understood. That’s why she reached out to us—and to you, of course,” she told Strike, smiling with a little condescension because, unlike her, he had ignored Kelsey’s appeal. “You’re not alone, mind. Once people have successfully achieved what they’re after they tend to leave the community. We get it—we understand—but it would mean a lot if people hung around just to describe what it feels like to finally be in the body you’re meant to be in.”
Robin was worried that Strike might explode, here in this polite white space where art lovers conversed in soft voices. However, she had reckoned without the self-control that the ex–Special Investigation Branch officer had learned through long years of interrogations. His polite smile to Tempest might have been a little grim, but he merely turned again to Jason and asked:
“So you don’t think it was Kelsey’s brother’s idea for her to contact me?”
“No,” said Jason, “I think that was all her own idea.”
“So what exactly did she want from me?”
“Well, obviously,” interposed Tempest, half-laughing, “she wanted advice on how to do what you’d done!”
“Is that what you think, Jason?” asked Strike and the boy nodded.
“Yeah… she wanted to know how badly she’d have to injure her leg to get it taken off, and I think she had a sort of idea you’d introduce her to the doctor who did yours.”
“That’s the perennial problem,” said Tempest, clearly oblivious to the effect she was having on Strike, “finding reliable surgeons. They’re usually completely unsympathetic. People have died trying to do it themselves. There was a wonderful surgeon in Scotland who performed a couple of amputations on BIID sufferers, but then they stopped him. That was a good ten years ago. People go abroad, but if you can’t pay, if you can’t afford travel… you can see why Kelsey wanted to get her mitts on your contact list!”
Robin let her knife and fork fall with a clatter, feeling on Strike’s behalf all the offense that she assumed him to be experiencing. His contact list! As though his amputation was a rare artefact that Strike had bought on the black market…
Strike questioned both Jason and Tempest for another fifteen minutes before concluding that they knew nothing more of any use. The picture they painted of their one meeting with Kelsey was of an immature and desperate girl whose urge to be amputated was so powerful that she would, by the consent of both of he
r cyberfriends, have done anything to achieve it.
“Yeah,” sighed Tempest, “she was one of those. She’d already had a go when she was younger, with some wire. We’ve had people so desperate they’ve put their legs on train tracks. One guy tried to freeze his leg off in liquid nitrogen. There was a girl in America who deliberately botched a ski jump, but the danger with that is you might not get exactly the degree of disability you’re after—”
“So what degree are you after?” Strike asked her. He had just put up a hand for the bill.
“I want my spinal cord severed,” said Tempest with total composure. “Paraplegic, yeah. Ideally I’ll have it done by a surgeon. In the meantime, I just get on with it,” she said, gesturing again to her wheelchair.
“Using the disabled bathrooms and stairlifts, the works, eh?” asked Strike.
“Cormoran,” said Robin in a warning voice.
She had thought this might happen. He was stressed and sleep-deprived. She supposed she ought to be glad that they had got all the information they needed first.
“It’s a need,” said Tempest composedly. “I’ve known ever since I was a child. I’m in the wrong body. I need to be paralyzed.”
The waiter had arrived; Robin held out her hand for the bill, because Strike hadn’t noticed him.
“Quickly, please,” she said to the waiter, who looked sullen. He was the man Strike had barked at for putting ice in his beer glass.
“Know many disabled people, do you?” Strike was asking Tempest.
“I know a couple,” she said. “Obviously we’ve got a lot in—”
“You’ve got fuck all in common. Fuck all.”
“I knew it,” muttered Robin under her breath, snatching the chip and pin machine out of the waiter’s grip and shoving in her Visa card. Strike stood up, towering over Tempest, who looked suddenly unnerved, while Jason shrank back in his seat, looking as though he wanted to disappear inside his hoodie.
“C’mon, Corm—” said Robin, ripping her card out of the machine.
“Just so you know,” said Strike, addressing both Tempest and Jason as Robin grabbed her coat and tried to pull him away from the table, “I was in a car that blew up around me.” Jason had put his hands over his scarlet face, his eyes full of tears. Tempest merely gaped. “The driver was ripped in two—that’d get you some attention, eh?” he said savagely to Tempest. “Only he was dead, so not so fucking much. The other guy lost half his face—I lost a leg. There was nothing voluntary about—”
“OK,” said Robin, taking Strike’s arm. “We’re off. Thanks very much for meeting us, Jason—”
“Get some help,” said Strike loudly, pointing at Jason as he allowed Robin to pull him away, diners and waiters staring. “Get some fucking help. With your head.”
They were out in the leafy road, nearly a block away from the gallery, before Strike’s breathing began to return to normal.
“OK,” he said, though Robin had not spoken. “You warned me. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” she said mildly. “We got everything we wanted.”
They walked on in silence for a few yards.
“Did you pay? I didn’t notice.”
“Yes. I’ll take it out of petty cash.”
They walked on. Well-dressed men and women passed them, busy, bustling. A bohemian-looking girl with dreadlocks floated past in a long paisley dress, but a five-hundred-pound handbag revealed that her hippy credentials were as fake as Tempest’s disability.
“At least you didn’t punch her,” said Robin. “In her wheelchair. In front of all the art lovers.”
Strike began to laugh. Robin shook her head.
“I knew you’d lose it,” she sighed, but she was smiling.
44
Then Came the Last Days of May
He had thought she was dead. It had not troubled him that he hadn’t seen a news report, because she’d been a hooker. He’d never seen anything in the papers about the first one he’d done either. Prostitutes didn’t fucking count, they were nothing, no one cared. The Secretary was the one who was going to make the big splash, because she was working for that bastard—a clean-living girl with her pretty fiancé, the kind the press went wild for…
He didn’t understand how the whore could still be alive, though. He remembered the feeling of her torso beneath the knife, the popping, puncturing sound of the metal slitting her skin, the grating of steel on bone, the blood gushing. Students had found her, according to the newspaper. Fucking students.
He still he had her fingers, though.
She’d produced a photofit. What a fucking joke! The police were shaven monkeys in uniforms, the lot of them. Did they think this picture would help? It looked nothing like him, nothing at all; it could have been anyone, white or black. He would have laughed out loud if It hadn’t been there, but It wouldn’t like him laughing over a dead hooker and a photofit…
It was pretty bolshy at the moment. He had had to work hard to make up for the fact that he had treated It roughly, had to apologize, play the nice guy. “I was upset,” he had said. “Really upset.” He’d had to cuddle It and buy It fucking flowers and stay home, to make up for being angry, and now It was taking advantage, the way women always did, trying to take more, as much as It could get.
“I don’t like it when you go away.”
I’ll make YOU fucking go away if you keep this up.
He had told her a cock-and-bull story about the chance of a job, but for the first time ever she actually fucking dared question him: Who told you about it? How long will you be gone?
He watched It talking and he imagined drawing back a fist and punching It so hard in It’s ugly fucking face that the bones splintered…
Yet he needed It a little while longer, at least until he did The Secretary.
It still loved him, that was the trump card: he knew he could bring It back into line with the threat of leaving for good. He didn’t want to overplay that one, though. So he pressed on with the flowers, the kisses, the kindness that made the memory of his rage soften and dissolve in It’s stupid, addled memory. He liked to add a little emollient to her drinks, a little extra something to keep her off balance, weeping into his neck, clinging to him.
Patient, kind, but determined.
At last she agreed: a week away, completely away, free to do as he liked.
45
Harvester of eyes, that’s me.
Blue Öyster Cult, “Harvester of Eyes”
Detective Inspector Eric Wardle was far from delighted that Jason and Tempest had lied to his men, but Strike found him less angry than he might have expected when they met for a pint, at Wardle’s invitation, on Monday evening in the Feathers. The explanation for his surprising forbearance was simple: the revelation that Kelsey had been picked up from her rendezvous in Café Rouge by a man on a motorbike fitted perfectly with Wardle’s new pet theory.
“You remember the guy called Devotee who was on their website? Got a fetish for amputees, went quiet after Kelsey was killed?”
“Yeah,” said Strike, who recalled Robin saying that she had had an interaction with him.
“We’ve tracked him down. Guess what’s in his garage?”
Strike assumed, from the fact that no arrest had been made, that they had not found body parts, so he obligingly suggested: “Motorbike?”
“Kawasaki Ninja,” said Wardle. “I know we’re looking for a Honda,” he added, forestalling Strike, “but he crapped himself when we came calling.”
“So do most people when CID turn up on their doorstep. Go on.”
“He’s a sweaty little guy, name of Baxter, a sales rep with no alibi for the weekend of the second and third, or for the twenty-ninth. Divorced, no kids, claims he stayed in for the royal wedding, watching it. Would you have watched the royal wedding without a woman in the house?”
“No,” said Strike, who had only caught footage on the news.
“He claims the bike’s his brother’s and he’s jus
t looking after it, but after a bit of questioning he admitted he’s taken it out a few times. So we know he can ride one, and he could have hired or borrowed the Honda.”
“What did he say about the website?”
“He downplayed that completely, says he’s only pissing around, doesn’t mean anything by it, he’s not turned on by stumps, but when we asked whether we could have a look at his computer he didn’t like it at all. Asked to talk to his lawyer before he gave an answer. That’s where we’ve left it, but we’re going back to see him again tomorrow. Friendly chat.”
“Did he admit to talking to Kelsey online?”
“Hard for him to deny it when we’ve got her laptop and all Tempest’s records. He asked Kelsey about her plans for her leg and offered to meet her and she brushed him off—online, anyway. Bloody hell, we’ve got to look into him,” said Wardle in response to Strike’s skeptical look, “he’s got no alibi, a motorbike, a thing for amputation and he tried to meet her!”
“Yeah, of course,” said Strike. “Any other leads?”
“That’s why I wanted to meet you. We’ve found your Donald Laing. He’s in Wollaston Close, in Elephant and Castle.”
“He is?” said Strike, genuinely taken aback.
Savoring the fact that he had surprised Strike for once, Wardle smirked.
“Yeah, and he’s a sick man. We found him through a JustGiving page. We got on to them and got his address.”
That was the difference between Strike and Wardle, of course: the latter still had badges, authority and the kind of power Strike had relinquished when he left the army.
“Have you seen him?” asked Strike.
“Sent a couple of guys round and he wasn’t in, but the neighbors confirmed it’s his flat. He rents, lives alone and he’s pretty ill, apparently. They said he’s gone home to Scotland for a bit. Friend’s funeral. Supposed to be back soon.”
“Likely bloody story,” muttered Strike into his pint. “If Laing’s got a friend left in Scotland I’ll eat this glass.”
“Have it your own way,” said Wardle, half amused, half impatient. “I thought you’d be pleased we’re chasing up your guys.”