“Hang on,” said Wardle, getting up. “Need a slash.”
And yet, why not a church? Strike thought as he went to the bar for a couple of fresh pints. The pub was filling up around him. He took a menu back to the table as well as the beers, but could not concentrate on it. Young girls in the choir… he wouldn’t be the first…
“Needed that,” said Wardle, rejoining Strike. “I might go out for a fag, join you back—”
“Finish about Brockbank first,” said Strike, pushing the fresh pint across the table.
“To tell you the truth, we found him by accident,” said Wardle, sitting back down and accepting the pint. “One of our guys has been tailing the mother of a local drug lord. We don’t think Mum’s as innocent as she’s claiming to be, so our guy follows her to church and there’s Brockbank standing on the door handing out hymnbooks. He got talking to the copper without knowing who he was, and our guy didn’t have a clue Brockbank was wanted in connection with anything.
“Four weeks later our guy hears me talking about looking for a Noel Brockbank on the Kelsey Platt case and tells me he met a bloke with the same name a month ago in Brixton. See?” said Wardle, with a ghost of his usual smirk. “I do pay attention to your tip-offs, Strike. Be silly not to, after the Landry case.”
You pay attention when you’ve got nothing out of Digger Malley and Devotee, thought Strike, but he made impressed and grateful noises before returning to the main point.
“Did you say Brockbank’s stopped attending church?”
“Yeah,” sighed Wardle. “I went down there yesterday, had a word with the vicar. Young guy, enthusiastic, inner-city church—you know the sort,” said Wardle—inaccurately, because Strike’s contact with the clergy had been mostly limited to military chaplains. “He had a lot of time for Brockbank. Said he’d had a rough deal in life.”
“Brain damage, invalided out of the army, lost his family, all that crap?” asked Strike.
“That was the gist,” said Wardle. “Said he misses his son.”
“Uh huh,” said Strike darkly. “Did he know where Brockbank was living?”
“No, but apparently his girlfriend—”
“Alyssa?”
Frowning slightly, Wardle reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulled out a notebook and consulted it.
“Yeah, it is, as it goes,” he said. “Alyssa Vincent. How did you know that?”
“They’ve both just been sacked from a strip club. I’ll explain in a bit,” said Strike hurriedly, as Wardle showed signs of becoming sidetracked. “Go on about Alyssa.”
“Well, she’s managed to get a council house in east London near her mother. Brockbank told the vicar he was going to move in with her and the kids.”
“Kids?” said Strike, his thoughts flying to Robin.
“Two little girls, apparently.”
“Do we know where this house is?” asked Strike.
“Not yet. The vicar was sorry to see him go,” said Wardle, glancing restlessly towards the pavement, where a couple of men were smoking. “I did get out of him that Brockbank was in church on Sunday the third of April, which was the weekend Kelsey died.”
In view of Wardle’s increasing restlessness, Strike passed no comment except to suggest that they both adjourn to the pavement for a cigarette.
They lit up and smoked side by side for a couple of minutes. Workers walked past in both directions, weary from late hours at the office. Evening was drawing in. Directly above them, between the indigo of approaching night and the neon coral of the setting sun, was a narrow stretch of no-colored sky, of vapid and empty air.
“Christ, I’ve missed this,” said Wardle, dragging on the cigarette as though it was mother’s milk before picking up the thread of their conversation once more. “Yeah, so Brockbank was in church that weekend, making himself useful. Very good with the kids, apparently.”
“I’ll bet he is,” muttered Strike.
“Take some nerve, though, wouldn’t it?” said Wardle, blowing smoke towards the opposite side of the road, his eyes on Epstein’s sculpture Day, which adorned the old London Transport offices. A boy stood before a throned man, his body contorted so that he both managed to embrace the king behind him and display his own penis to onlookers. “To kill and dismember a girl, then turn up in church as though nothing had happened?”
“Are you Catholic?” Strike asked.
Wardle looked startled.
“I am, as it goes,” he said suspiciously. “Why?”
Strike shook his head, smiling slightly.
“I know a psycho wouldn’t care,” said Wardle with a trace of defensiveness. “I’m just saying… anyway, we’ve got people trying to find out where he’s living now. If it’s a council house, and assuming Alyssa Vincent’s her real name, it shouldn’t be too difficult.”
“Great,” said Strike. The police had resources that he and Robin could not match; perhaps now, at last, some definitive information would be forthcoming. “What about Laing?”
“Ah,” said Wardle, grinding out his first cigarette and immediately lighting another, “we’ve got more on him. He’s been living alone in Wollaston Close for eighteen months now. Survives on disability benefits. He had a chest infection over the weekend of the second and third and his friend Dickie came in to help him out. He couldn’t get to the shops.”
“That’s bloody convenient,” said Strike.
“Or genuine,” said Wardle. “We checked with Dickie and he confirmed everything Laing told us.”
“Was Laing surprised the police were asking about his movements?”
“Seemed pretty taken aback at first.”
“Did he let you in the flat?”
“Didn’t arise. We met him crossing the car park on his sticks and we ended up talking to him in a local café.”
“That Ecuadorian place in a tunnel?”
Wardle subjected Strike to a hard stare that the detective returned with equanimity.
“You’ve been staking him out as well, have you? Don’t mess this up for us, Strike. We’re on it.”
Strike might have responded that it had taken press scrutiny and the failure to make anything of his preferred leads to make Wardle commit serious resources to the tracking of Strike’s three suspects. He chose to hold his silence.
“Laing’s not stupid,” Wardle continued. “We hadn’t been questioning him long when he twigged what it was about. He knew you must’ve given us his name. He’d seen in the papers you got sent a leg.”
“What was his view on the matter?”
“There might’ve been an undertone of ‘couldn’t’ve happened to a nicer bloke,’” said Wardle with a slight grin, “but on balance, about what you’d expect. Bit of curiosity, bit of defensiveness.”
“Did he look ill?”
“Yeah,” said Wardle. “He didn’t know we were coming, and we met him shambling along on his sticks. He doesn’t look good close up. Bloodshot eyes. His skin’s kind of cracked. Bit of a mess.”
Strike said nothing. His mistrust of Laing’s illness lingered. In spite of the clear photographic evidence of steroid use, skin plaques and lesions that Strike had seen with his own eyes, he found himself stubbornly resistant to the idea that Laing was genuinely ill.
“What was he doing when the other women were killed?”
“Says he was home alone,” said Wardle. “Nothing to prove or disprove it.”
“Hmn,” said Strike.
They turned back into the pub. A couple had taken their table so they found another beside the floor-to-ceiling window onto the street.
“What about Whittaker?”
“Yeah, we caught up with him last night. He’s roadying for a band.”
“Are you sure about that?” said Strike suspiciously, remembering Shanker’s assertion that Whittaker claimed to be doing so, but was in fact living off Stephanie.
“Yeah, I’m sure. We called in on the druggie girlfriend—”
“Get inside the flat?”
r />
“She talked to us at the door, unsurprisingly,” said Wardle. “The place stinks. Anyway, she told us he was off with the boys, gave us the address of the concert and there he was. Old transit van parked outside and an even older band. Ever heard of Death Cult?”
“No,” said Strike.
“Don’t bother, they’re shit,” said Wardle. “I had to sit through half an hour of the stuff before I could get near Whittaker. Basement of a pub in Wandsworth. I had tinnitus all the next day.
“Whittaker seemed to be half expecting us,” said Wardle. “Apparently he found you outside his van a few weeks ago.”
“I told you about that,” said Strike. “Crack fumes—”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Wardle. “Look, I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, but he reckons Stephanie can give him an alibi for the whole day of the royal wedding, so that would rule out the attack on the hooker in Shacklewell, and he claims he was off with Death Cult when both Kelsey and Heather were killed.”
“All three killings covered, eh?” said Strike. “That’s neat. Do Death Cult agree he was with them?”
“They were pretty vague about it, to be honest,” said Wardle. “The lead singer’s got a hearing aid. I don’t know whether he caught everything I asked him. Don’t worry, I’ve got guys checking all their witness statements,” he added in the face of Strike’s frown. “We’ll find out whether he was really there or not.”
Wardle yawned and stretched.
“I’ve got to get back to the office,” he said. “This could be an all-nighter. We’ve got a load of information coming in now the papers are on to it.”
Strike was extremely hungry now, but the pub was noisy and he felt he would rather eat somewhere he could think. He and Wardle headed up the road together, both lighting fresh cigarettes as they walked.
“The psychologist raised something,” said Wardle as the curtain of darkness unrolled across the sky above them. “If we’re right, and we’re dealing with a serial killer, he’s usually an opportunist. He’s got a bloody good m.o.—he must be a planner to a degree, or he couldn’t have got away with it so often—but there was a change in the pattern with Kelsey. He knew exactly where she was staying. The letters and the fact that he knew there wouldn’t be anyone there: it was totally premeditated.
“Trouble is, we’ve had a bloody good look, but we can’t find any evidence that any of your guys have ever been in proximity with her. We virtually took her laptop apart, and there was nothing there. The only people she ever talked to about her leg were those oddballs Jason and Tempest. She had hardly any friends, and the ones she did have were all girls. There was nothing suspicious on her phone. As far as we know, none of your guys has ever lived or worked in Finchley or Shepherd’s Bush, let alone gone anywhere near her school or college. They’ve got no known connection with any of her associates. How the hell could any of them get close enough to manipulate her without her family noticing?”
“We know she was duplicitous,” said Strike. “Don’t forget the pretend boyfriend who turned out to be pretty real when he picked her up from Café Rouge.”
“Yeah,” sighed Wardle. “We’ve still got no leads on that bloody bike. We’ve put out a description in the press, but nothing.
“How’s your partner?” he added, pausing outside the glass doors of his place of work, but apparently determined to smoke the cigarette down to the last millimeter. “Not too shaken up?”
“She’s fine,” said Strike. “She’s back in Yorkshire for a wedding dress fitting. I made her take the time off: she’s been working through the weekend a lot lately.”
Robin had left without complaint. What was there to stay for, with the press staking out Denmark Street, one lousy paying job and the police now covering Brockbank, Laing and Whittaker more efficiently than the agency ever could?
“Good luck,” said Strike as he and Wardle parted. The policeman raised a hand in acknowledgment and farewell, and disappeared into the large building behind the slowly revolving prism glittering with the words New Scotland Yard.
Strike strolled back towards the Tube, craving a kebab and inwardly deliberating the problem that Wardle had just put to him. How could any of his suspects have got close enough to Kelsey Platt to know her movements or gain her trust?
He thought about Laing, living alone in his grim Wollaston Close flat, claiming his disability benefit, overweight and infirm, looking far older than his real age of thirty-four. He had been a funny man, once. Did he still have it in him to charm a young girl to the point that she would have ridden on motorbikes with him or taken him trustingly to a flat in Shepherd’s Bush, about which her family knew nothing?
What about Whittaker, stinking of crack, with his blackened teeth and his thinning, matted hair? True, Whittaker had once had mesmeric charm, and emaciated, drug-addicted Stephanie seemed to find him appealing, but Kelsey’s only known passion had been for a clean-cut blond boy just a few years older than herself.
Then there was Brockbank. To Strike, the massive, swarthy ex-flanker was downright repulsive, as unlike pretty Niall as it was possible to be. Brockbank had been living and working miles from Kelsey’s home and work, and while both had attended churches, their places of worship were on opposite banks of the Thames. The police would surely have unearthed any contact between the two congregations by now.
Did the absence of any known connection between Kelsey and Strike’s three suspects rule each of them out as the killer? While logic seemed to urge the answer yes, something stubborn inside Strike continued to whisper no.
50
I’m out of my place, I’m out of my mind…
Blue Öyster Cult, “Celestial the Queen”
Robin’s trip home was tinged throughout with the strangest sense of unreality. She felt out of step with everybody, even her mother, who was preoccupied with the wedding arrangements and, while sympathetic to Robin’s constant checking of her phone for any development on the Shacklewell Ripper, a little harassed.
Back in the familiar kitchen where Rowntree snoozed at her feet, the seating plan for the reception spread out on the scrubbed wooden table between them, Robin began to appreciate how fully she had abnegated responsibility for her wedding. Linda was constantly firing questions at her about favors, speeches, the bridesmaids’ shoes, her headdress, when it would be convenient to speak to the vicar, where she and Matt wanted the presents sent, whether Matthew’s Auntie Sue ought to be on the top table or not. Robin had imagined that being at home would be restful. Instead she was required to deal, on the one hand, with a tidal wave of trivial queries from her mother; on the other, a series of questions from her brother Martin, who pored over accounts of the discovery of Heather Smart’s body until Robin lost her temper with what she saw as his ghoulishness, whereupon an overwrought Linda banned all mention of the killer from their house.
Matthew, meanwhile, was angry, though trying not to show it, that Robin had not yet asked Strike for two weeks off for the honeymoon.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said Robin at dinner. “We’ve got hardly any work on and Cormoran says the police have taken over all our leads.”
“He still hasn’t confirmed,” said Linda, who had been beadily watching how little Robin was eating.
“Who hasn’t?” asked Robin.
“Strike. No RSVP.”
“I’ll remind him,” said Robin, taking a large slug of wine.
She had not told any of them, not even Matthew, that she kept having nightmares that woke her gasping in the darkness, back in the bed where she had slept in the months following her rape. A massive man kept coming for her in these dreams. Sometimes he burst into the office where she worked with Strike. More frequently he loomed out of the darkness in the backstreets of London, knives shining. That morning he had been on the point of gouging out her eyes when she woke, gasping, to the sound of Matthew drowsily asking her what she had said.
“Nothing,” she had said, pushing sweaty hair off h
er forehead. “Nothing.”
Matthew had to return to work on Monday. He seemed pleased to leave her behind in Masham, helping Linda with preparations for the wedding. Mother and daughter met the vicar at St. Mary the Virgin for a final discussion about the form of the service on Monday afternoon.
Robin tried hard to concentrate on the minister’s cheerful suggestions, his ecclesiastical pep talk, but all the time he was talking her eyes kept drifting to the large stone crab that appeared to be clinging to the church wall on the right of the aisle.
This crab had fascinated her in her childhood. She had not been able to understand why there was a big carved crab crawling up the stones of their church, and her curiosity on the point had ended up infecting Linda, who had gone to the local library, looked up the records and triumphantly informed her daughter that the crab had been the emblem of the ancient Scrope family, whose memorial sat above it.
Nine-year-old Robin had been disappointed by the answer. In a way, an explanation had never been the point. She had simply liked being the only one who wanted to find out the truth.
She was standing in the dressmaker’s box-like changing room, with its gilt-framed mirror and its new-carpet smell, when Strike called next day. Robin knew that it was Strike because of the unique ringtone that she had attached to his calls. She lunged for her handbag, causing the dressmaker to emit a little cry of annoyance and surprise as the folds of chiffon that she was dexterously repinning were torn from her hands.
“Hello?” said Robin.
“Hi,” said Strike.
The single syllable told her that something bad had happened.
“Oh God, has someone else been killed?” Robin blurted out, forgetting the dressmaker crouching at the hem of her wedding dress. The woman stared at her in the mirror, her mouth full of pins.
“Sorry, could you give me a moment? Not you!” she added to Strike, in case he hung up.
“Sorry,” she repeated as the curtain closed behind the dressmaker and she sank down onto the stool in the corner in her wedding dress, “I was with someone. Has someone else died?”