“Yes,” said Strike, “but it’s not what you think. It’s Wardle’s brother.”
Robin’s tired and overwrought brain tried to join dots that refused to connect.
“It’s nothing to do with the case,” said Strike. “He was knocked down on a zebra crossing by a speeding van.”
“God,” said Robin, utterly fazed. She had temporarily forgotten that death came in any manner other than at the hands of a maniac with knives.
“It’s a fucker, all right. He had three kids, and a fourth on the way. I’ve just spoken to Wardle. Bloody terrible thing to happen.”
Robin’s brain seemed to grind back into gear again.
“So is Wardle—?”
“Compassionate leave,” said Strike. “Guess who’s taken over from him?”
“Not Anstis?” Robin asked, suddenly worried.
“Worse than that,” said Strike.
“Not—not Carver?” said Robin, with a sudden presentiment of doom.
Of the policemen whom Strike had managed to offend and upstage during his two most famous detective triumphs, Detective Inspector Roy Carver had been the most comprehensively outclassed and was consequently the most deeply embittered. His failings during the investigation into a famous model’s fall from her penthouse flat had been extensively documented and, indeed, exaggerated in the press. A sweaty man with dandruff and a mottled, purple face like corned beef, he had had an antipathy towards Strike even before the detective had publicly proven that the policeman had failed to spot murder.
“Right in one,” said Strike. “I’ve just had him here for three hours.”
“Oh, God—why?”
“Come off it,” said Strike, “you know why. This is a wet dream for Carver, having an excuse to interrogate me about a series of murders. He stopped just short of asking me for alibis, and he spent a hell of a lot of time on those fake letters to Kelsey.”
Robin groaned.
“Why on earth would they let Carver—? I mean, with his record—”
“Hard though it might be for us to believe, he hasn’t been a dickhead his entire career. His bosses must think he was unlucky with Landry. It’s supposed to be only temporary, while Wardle’s off, but he’s already warned me to stay well away from the investigation. When I asked how inquiries into Brockbank, Laing and Whittaker were going, he as good as told me to fuck off with my ego and my hunches. We’ll be getting no more inside information on the progress of the case, I can promise you that.”
“He’ll have to follow up Wardle’s lines of investigation, though,” said Robin, “won’t he?”
“Given that he’d clearly rather chop off his own knob than let me solve another of his cases, you’d think he’d be careful to follow up all my leads. Trouble is, I can tell he’s rationalized the Landry case as me getting lucky, and I reckon he thinks me coming up with three suspects in this case is pure showboating. I wish to hell,” said Strike, “we’d got an address for Brockbank before Wardle had to leave.”
As Robin had been silent for a whole minute while she listened to Strike, the dressmaker clearly thought it reasonable to check whether she was ready to resume the fitting, and poked her head in through the curtain. Robin, whose expression was suddenly beatific, waved her away impatiently.
“We have got an address for Brockbank,” Robin told Strike in a triumphant voice as the curtains swung closed again.
“What?”
“I didn’t tell you, because I thought Wardle would already have got it, but I thought, just in case—I’ve been ringing round the local nurseries, pretending I was Alyssa, Zahara’s mum. I said I wanted to check they had our new address right. One of them read it out to me off the parent contact sheet. They’re living on Blondin Street in Bow.”
“Jesus Christ, Robin, that’s fucking brilliant!”
When the dressmaker returned to her job at last, she found a considerably more radiant bride than she had left. Robin’s lack of enthusiasm for the process of altering her dress had been diminishing the seamstress’s pleasure in her job. Robin was easily the best-looking client on her books and she had hoped to get a photograph for advertising purposes once the dress was finished.
“That’s wonderful,” said Robin, beaming at the seamstress as she tugged the last seam straight and together they contemplated the vision in the mirror. “That’s absolutely wonderful.”
For the first time, she thought that the dress really didn’t look bad at all.
51
Don’t turn your back, don’t show your profile,
You’ll never know when it’s your turn to go.
Blue Öyster Cult, “Don’t Turn Your Back”
“The public response has been overwhelming. We’re currently following up over twelve hundred leads, some of which look promising,” said Detective Inspector Roy Carver. “We continue to appeal for information on the whereabouts of the red Honda CB750 used to transport part of Kelsey Platt’s body and we remain interested in speaking to anybody who was in Old Street on the night of 5th June, when Heather Smart was killed.”
The headline POLICE FOLLOW NEW LEADS IN HUNT FOR SHACKLEWELL RIPPER was not really justified, in Robin’s view, by anything in the brief report beneath, although she supposed that Carver would not share details of genuine new developments with the press.
Five photographs of the women now believed to have been victims of the Ripper filled most of the page, their identities and their brutal fates stamped across their chests in black typeface.
Martina Rossi, 28, prostitute, stabbed to death, necklace stolen.
Martina was a plump, dark woman wearing a white tank top. Her blurry photograph looked as though it had been a selfie. A small heart-shaped harp charm hung from a chain around her neck.
Sadie Roach, 25, admin assistant, stabbed to death, mutilated, earrings taken.
She had been a pretty girl with a gamine haircut and hoops in her ears. Judging by cropped figures at the edges of her picture, it had been taken at a family gathering.
Kelsey Platt, 16, student, stabbed to death and dismembered.
Here was the familiar chubby, plain face of the girl who had written to Strike, smiling in her school uniform.
Lila Monkton, 18, prostitute, stabbed, fingers cut off, survived.
A blurred picture of a gaunt girl whose bright red hennaed hair was cut into a shaggy bob, her multiple piercings glinting in the camera flash.
Heather Smart, 22, financial services worker, stabbed to death, nose and ears removed.
She was round-faced and innocent-looking, with wavy mouse-brown hair, freckles and a timid smile.
Robin looked up from the Daily Express with a deep sigh. Matthew had been sent to audit a client in High Wycombe, so he had been unable to give Robin a lift today. It had taken her a full hour and twenty minutes to get to Catford from Ealing on trains crammed with tourists and commuters sweating in the London heat. Now she left her seat and headed for the door, swaying with the rest of the commuters as the train slowed and stopped, yet again, at Catford Bridge station.
Her week back at work with Strike had been strange. Strike, who clearly had no intention to comply with the instruction to keep out of Carver’s investigation, was nevertheless taking the investigating officer seriously enough to be cautious.
“If he can make a case that we’ve buggered up the police investigation, we’re finished as a business,” he said. “And we know he’ll try and say I’ve screwed things up, whether I have or not.”
“So why are we carrying on?”
Robin had been playing devil’s advocate, because she would have been deeply unhappy and frustrated had Strike announced that they were abandoning their leads.
“Because Carver thinks my suspects are bullshit, and I think he’s an incompetent tit.”
Robin’s laugh had ended prematurely when Strike had told her he wanted her to return to Catford and stake out Whittaker’s girlfriend.
“Still?” she asked. “Why?”
?
??You know why. I want to see whether Stephanie can give him alibis for any of the key dates.”
“You know what?” said Robin, plucking up her courage. “I’ve been in Catford a lot. If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather do Brockbank. Why don’t I try and get something out of Alyssa?”
“There’s Laing as well, if you want a change,” said Strike.
“He saw me up close when I fell over,” Robin countered at once. “Don’t you think it would be better if you did Laing?”
“I’ve been watching his flat while you’ve been away,” Strike said.
“And?”
“And he mostly stays in, but sometimes he goes to the shops and back.”
“You don’t think it’s him anymore, do you?”
“I haven’t ruled him out,” said Strike. “Why are you so keen to do Brockbank?”
“Well,” said Robin bravely, “I feel like I’ve done a lot of the running on him. I got the Market Harborough address out of Holly and I got Blondin Street out of the nursery—”
“And you’re worried about the kids who’re living with him,” said Strike.
Robin remembered the little black girl with the stiff pigtails who had tripped over, staring at her, in Catford Broadway.
“So what if I am?”
“I’d rather you stuck to Stephanie,” said Strike.
She had been annoyed; so annoyed that she had promptly asked for two weeks off rather more bluntly than she might otherwise have done.
“Two weeks off?” he said, looking up in surprise. He was far more used to her begging to stay at work than asking to leave it.
“It’s for my honeymoon.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right. Yeah. I suppose that’ll be soon, will it?”
“Obviously. The wedding’s on the second.”
“Christ, that’s only—what—three weeks or something?”
She had been annoyed that he had not realized that it was so close.
“Yes,” she had said, getting to her feet and reaching for her jacket. “And would you mind RSVP’ing if you’re coming?”
So she returned to Catford and the busy market stalls, to the smell of incense and raw fish, to pointless hours of standing beneath the crouching stone bears over the stage door of the Broadway Theatre.
Robin had hidden her hair under a straw hat today and was wearing sunglasses, but she still wondered whether she did not see a hint of recognition in the eyes of stallholders as she settled once more to lurk opposite the triple windows of Whittaker and Stephanie’s flat. She had only had a couple of glimpses of the girl since she had resumed her surveillance on her, and on neither occasion had there been the slightest chance of speaking to her. Of Whittaker, there had been no hint at all. Robin settled back against the cool gray stone of the theater wall, prepared for another long day of tedium, and yawned.
By late afternoon she was hot, tired and trying not to resent her mother, who had texted repeatedly throughout the day with questions about the wedding. The last, telling her to ring the florist, who had yet another finicky question for her, arrived just as Robin had decided she needed something to drink. Wondering how Linda would react if she texted back and said she’d decided to have plastic flowers everywhere—on her head, in her bouquet, all over the church—anything to stop having to make decisions—she crossed to the chip shop, which sold chilled fizzy drinks.
She had barely touched the door handle when somebody collided with her, also aiming for the chip-shop door.
“Sorry,” said Robin automatically, and then, “oh my God.”
Stephanie’s face was swollen and purple, one eye almost entirely closed.
The impact had not been hard, but the smaller girl had been bounced off her. Robin reached out to stop her stumbling.
“Jesus—what happened?”
She spoke as though she knew Stephanie. In a sense, she felt she did. Observing the girl’s little routines, becoming familiar with her body language, her clothing and her liking for Coke had fostered a one-sided sense of kinship. Now she found it natural and easy to ask a question hardly any British stranger would ask of another: “Are you all right?”
How she managed it, Robin hardly knew, but two minutes later she was settling Stephanie into a chair in the welcome shade of the Stage Door Café, a few doors along from the chip shop. Stephanie was obviously in pain and ashamed of her appearance, but at the same time she had become too hungry and thirsty to remain upstairs in the flat. Now she had simply bowed to a stronger will, thrown off balance by the older woman’s solicitude, by the offer of a free meal. Robin gabbled nonsensically as she ushered Stephanie down the street, maintaining the fiction that her quixotic offer of sandwiches was due to her guilt at having almost knocked Stephanie over.
Stephanie accepted a cold Fanta and a tuna sandwich with mumbled thanks, but after a few mouthfuls she put her hand to her cheek as though in pain and set the sandwich down.
“Tooth?” asked Robin solicitously.
The girl nodded. A tear trickled out of her unclosed eye.
“Who did this?” Robin said urgently, reaching across the table for Stephanie’s hand.
She was playing a character, growing into the role as she improvised. The straw hat and the long sundress she was wearing had unconsciously suggested a hippyish girl full of altruism who thought that she could save Stephanie. Robin felt a tiny reciprocal squeeze of her fingers even as Stephanie shook her head to indicate that she was not going to give away her attacker.
“Somebody you know?” Robin whispered.
More tears rolled down Stephanie’s face. She withdrew her hand from Robin’s and sipped her Fanta, wincing again as the cold liquid made contact with what Robin thought was probably a cracked tooth.
“Is he your father?” Robin whispered.
It would have been an easy assumption to make. Stephanie could not possibly be older than seventeen. She was so thin that she barely had breasts. Tears had washed away any trace of the kohl that usually outlined her eyes. Her grubby face was infantile, with the suggestion of an overbite, but all was dominated by the purple and gray bruising. Whittaker had pummeled her until the blood vessels in her right eye had burst: the sliver that was visible was scarlet.
“No,” whispered Stephanie. “Boyfriend.”
“Where is he?” Robin asked, reaching again for Stephanie’s hand, now chilly from contact with the cold Fanta.
“Away,” said Stephanie.
“Does he live with you?”
Stephanie nodded and tried to drink more Fanta, keeping the icy liquid away from the damaged side of her face.
“I didn’t wan’ ’im to go,” whispered Stephanie.
As Robin leaned in, the girl’s restraint suddenly dissolved in the face of kindness and sugar.
“I aksed to go wiv ’im and ’e wouldn’t take me. I know ’e’s out tomming, I know ’e is. ’E’s got someone else, I ’eard Banjo saying sumfing. ’E’s got anuvver girl somewhere.”
To Robin’s disbelief, Stephanie’s primary source of pain, far worse than that of her cracked tooth and her bruised and broken face, was the thought that filthy, crack-dealing Whittaker might be somewhere else, sleeping with another woman.
“I on’y wan’ed to go wiv ’im,” Stephanie repeated, and tears slid more thickly down her face, stinging that slit of an eye into a more furious redness.
Robin knew that the kind, slightly dippy girl she had been impersonating would now earnestly beseech Stephanie to leave a man who had beaten her so badly. The trouble was, she was sure that would be the surest way to make Stephanie walk out on her.
“He got angry because you wanted to go with him?” she repeated. “Where has he gone?”
“Says ’e’s wiv the Cult like last—they’re a band,” mumbled Stephanie, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. “’E roadies for ’em—bur it’s just an excuse,” she said, crying harder, “to go places an’ find girls to fuck. I said I’d go an’—cause last time ’e wanted me to—an’
I done the ’ole band for ’im.”
Robin did her very best not to look as though she understood what she had just been told. However, some flicker of anger and revulsion must have contaminated the look of pure kindliness she was trying to project, because Stephanie seemed suddenly to withdraw. She did not want judgment. She met that every day of her life.
“Have you been to a doctor?” Robin asked quietly.
“Wha’? No,” said Stephanie, folding her thin arms around her torso.
“When’s he due back, your boyfriend?”
Stephanie merely shook her head and shrugged. The temporary sympathy Robin had kindled between them seemed to have cooled.
“The Cult,” said Robin, improvising rapidly, her mouth dry, “that isn’t Death Cult, is it?”
“Yeah,” said Stephanie, dimly surprised.
“Which gig? I saw them the other day!”
Don’t ask me where, for God’s sake…
“This was in a pub called the—Green Fiddle, or sumfing. Enfield.”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t the same gig,” said Robin. “When was yours?”
“Need a pee,” mumbled Stephanie, looking around the café.
She shuffled off towards the bathroom. When the door had closed behind her, Robin frantically keyed search terms into her mobile. It took her several attempts to find what she was looking for: Death Cult had played a pub called the Fiddler’s Green in Enfield on Saturday the fourth of June, the day before Heather Smart had been murdered.
The shadows were lengthening outside the café now, which had emptied apart from themselves. Evening was drawing in. The place would surely close soon.
“Cheers for the sandwich an’ ev’rything,” said Stephanie, who had reappeared beside her. “I’m gonna—”
“Have something else. Some chocolate or something,” Robin urged her, even though the waitress mopping table tops looked ready to throw them out.
“Why?” asked Stephanie, showing the first sign of suspicion.
“Because I really want to talk to you about your boyfriend,” said Robin.