Strike froze, listening, panicking. He had not returned Charlotte’s call. He tried to make out her tone and inflection; it would be like her to come in person and overwhelm his temp with charm, to make of his ally a friend, to saturate his own staff with Charlotte’s version of the truth. The two voices melded in laughter again, and he could not tell whose they were.
“Hi, Stick,” said a cheery voice as he pushed open the glass door.
His sister, Lucy, was sitting on the sagging sofa, with her hands around a mug of coffee, bags from Marks and Spencer and John Lewis heaped all around her.
Strike’s first surge of relief that she was not Charlotte was nevertheless tainted with a lesser dread of what she and Robin had been talking about, and how much each of them now knew about his private life. As he returned Lucy’s hug, he noticed that Robin had, again, closed the inner door on the camp bed and kitbag.
“Robin says you’ve been out detecting.” Lucy seemed in high spirits, as she so often was when she was out alone, unencumbered by Greg and the boys.
“Yeah, we do that sometimes, detectives,” said Strike. “Been shopping?”
“Yes, Sherlock, I have.”
“D’you want to go out for a coffee?”
“I’ve already got one, Stick,” she said, holding up the mug. “You’re not very sharp today. Are you limping a bit?”
“Not that I’ve noticed.”
“Have you seen Mr. Chakrabati recently?”
“Fairly recently,” lied Strike.
“If it’s all right,” said Robin, who was putting on her trench coat, “I’ll take lunch, Mr. Strike. I haven’t had any yet.”
The resolution of moments ago, to treat her with professional froideur, now seemed not only unnecessary but unkind. She had more tact than any woman he had ever met.
“That’s fine, Robin, yeah,” he said.
“Nice to meet you, Lucy,” Robin said, and with a wave she disappeared, closing the glass door behind her.
“I really like her,” said Lucy enthusiastically, as Robin’s footsteps clanged away. “She’s great. You should try and get her to stay on permanently.”
“Yeah, she’s good,” said Strike. “What were you two having such a laugh about?”
“Oh, her fiancé—he sounds a bit like Greg. Robin says you’ve got an important case on. It’s all right. She was very discreet. She says it’s a suspicious suicide. That can’t be very nice.”
She gave him a meaningful look he chose not to understand.
“It’s not the first time. I had a couple of those in the army, too.”
But he doubted that Lucy was listening. She had taken a deep breath. He knew what was coming.
“Stick, have you and Charlotte split up?”
Better get it over with.
“Yeah, we have.”
“Stick!”
“It’s fine, Luce. I’m fine.”
But her good humor had been obliterated in a great gush of fury and disappointment. Strike waited patiently, exhausted and sore, while she raged: she had known all along, known that Charlotte would do it all over again; she had lured him away from Tracey, and from his fantastic army career, rendered him as insecure as possible, persuaded him to move in, only to dump him—
“I ended it, Luce,” he said, “and Tracey and I were over before…” but he might as well have commanded lava to flow backwards: why hadn’t he realized that Charlotte would never change, that she had only returned to him for the drama of the situation, attracted by his injury and his medal? The bitch had played the ministering angel and then got bored; she was dangerous and wicked; measuring her own worth in the havoc she caused, glorying in the pain she inflicted…
“I left her, it was my choice…”
“Where have you been living? When did this happen? That absolute bloody bitch—no, I’m sorry, Stick, I’m not going to pretend anymore—all the years and years of shit she’s put you through—oh God, Stick, why didn’t you marry Tracey?”
“Luce, let’s not do this, please.”
He moved aside some of her John Lewis bags, full, he saw, of small pants and socks for her sons, and sat down heavily on the sofa. He knew he looked grubby and scruffy. Lucy seemed on the verge of tears; her day out in town was ruined.
“I suppose you haven’t told me because you knew I’d do this?” she said at last, gulping.
“It might’ve been a consideration.”
“All right, I’m sorry,” she said furiously, her eyes shining with tears. “But that bitch, Stick. Oh God, tell me you’re never going to go back to her. Please just tell me that.”
“I’m not going back to her.”
“Where are you staying—Nick and Ilsa’s?”
“No. I’ve got a little place in Hammersmith” (the first place that occurred to him, associated, now, with homelessness). “Bedsit.”
“Oh Stick…come and stay with us!”
He had a fleeting vision of the all-blue spare room, and Greg’s forced smile.
“Luce, I’m happy where I am. I just want to get on with work and be on my own for a bit.”
It took him another half-hour to shift her out of his office. She felt guilty that she had lost her temper; apologized, then attempted to justify herself, which triggered another diatribe about Charlotte. When she finally decided to leave, he helped her downstairs with her bags, successfully distracting her from the boxes full of his possessions that still stood on the landing, and finally depositing her into a black cab at the end of Denmark Street.
Her round, mascara-streaked face looked back at him out of the rear window. He forced a grin and a wave before lighting another cigarette, and reflecting that Lucy’s idea of sympathy compared unfavorably with some of the interrogation techniques they had used at Guantanamo.
10
ROBIN HAD FALLEN INTO THE habit of buying Strike a pack of sandwiches with her own, if he happened to be in the office over lunchtime, and reimbursing herself from petty cash.
Today, however, she did not hurry back. She had noticed, though Lucy had seemed oblivious, how unhappy Strike had been to find them in conversation. His expression, when he had entered the office, had been every bit as grim as the first time they had met.
Robin hoped that she had not said anything to Lucy that Strike would not like. Lucy had not exactly pried, but she had asked questions to which it was difficult to know the answer.
“Have you met Charlotte yet?”
Robin guessed that this was the stunning ex-wife or girlfriend whose exit she had witnessed on her first morning. Near-collision hardly constituted a meeting, however, so she answered:
“No, I haven’t.”
“Funny.” Lucy had given a disingenuous little smile. “I’d have thought she’d have wanted to meet you.”
For some reason, Robin had felt prompted to reply:
“I’m only temporary.”
“Still,” said Lucy, who seemed to understand the answer better than Robin did herself.
It was only now, wandering up and down the aisle of crisps without really concentrating on them, that the implications of what Lucy had said slid into place. Robin supposed that Lucy might have meant to flatter her, except that the mere possibility of Strike making any kind of pass was extremely distasteful to her.
(“Matt, honestly, if you saw him…he’s enormous and he’s got a face like some beaten-up boxer. He is not remotely attractive, I’m sure he’s over forty, and…” she had cast around for more aspersions to cast upon Strike’s appearance, “he’s got that sort of pubey hair.”
Matthew had only really become reconciled to her continuing employment with Strike now that Robin had accepted the media consultancy job.)
Robin selected two bags of salt and vinegar crisps at random, and headed towards the cash desk. She had not yet told Strike that she would be leaving in two and a half weeks’ time.
Lucy had moved from the subject of Charlotte only to interrogate Robin on the amount of business coming through t
he shabby little office. Robin had been as vague as she dared, intuiting that if Lucy did not know how bad Strike’s finances were, it was because he did not want her to know. Hoping that he would be pleased for his sister to think that business was good, she mentioned that his latest client was wealthy.
“Divorce case, is it?” asked Lucy.
“No,” said Robin, “it’s a…well, I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement…he’s been asked to reinvestigate a suicide.”
“Oh God, that won’t be fun for Cormoran,” said Lucy, with a strange note in her voice.
Robin looked confused.
“Hasn’t he told you? Mind you, people usually know without telling. Our mother was a famous—groupie, they call it, don’t they?” Lucy’s smile was suddenly forced, and her tone, though she was striving for detachment and unconcern, had become brittle. “It’s all on the internet. Everything is these days, isn’t it? She died of an overdose and they said it was suicide, but Stick always thought her ex-husband did it. Nothing was ever proven. Stick was furious. It was all very sordid and horrible, anyway. Perhaps that’s why the client chose Stick—I take it the suicide was an overdose?”
Robin did not reply, but it did not matter; Lucy went on without pausing for an answer:
“That’s when Stick dropped out of university and joined the military police. The family was very disappointed. He’s really bright, you know; nobody in our family had ever been to Oxford; but he just packed up and left and joined the army. And it seemed to suit him; he did really well there. I think it’s a shame he left, to be honest. He could have stayed, even with, you know, his leg…”
Robin did not betray, by so much as a flicker of her eyelid, that she did not know.
Lucy sipped her tea.
“So whereabouts in Yorkshire are you from?”
The conversation had flowed pleasantly after that, right up until the moment that Strike had walked in on them laughing at Robin’s description of Matthew’s last excursion into DIY.
But Robin, heading back to the office with sandwiches and crisps, felt even sorrier for Strike than she had done before. His marriage—or, if they had not been married, his live-in relationship—had failed; he was sleeping in his office; he had been injured in the war, and now she discovered that his mother had died in dubious and squalid circumstances.
She did not pretend to herself that this compassion was untinged with curiosity. She already knew that she would certainly, at some point in the near future, try and find the online particulars of Leda Strike’s death. At the same time, she felt guilty that she had been given another glimpse of a part of Strike she had not been meant to see, like that patch of virtually furry belly he had accidentally exposed that morning. She knew him to be a proud and self-sufficient man; these were the things she liked and admired about him, even if the way these qualities expressed themselves—the camp bed, the boxed possessions on the landing, the empty Pot Noodle tubs in the bin—aroused the derision of such as Matthew, who assumed that anyone living in uncomfortable circumstances must have been profligate or feckless.
Robin was not sure whether or not she imagined the slightly charged atmosphere in the office when she returned. Strike was sitting in front of her computer monitor, tapping away at the keyboard, and while he thanked her for the sandwiches, he did not (as was usual) turn away from work for ten minutes for a chat about the Landry case.
“I need this for a couple of minutes; will you be OK on the sofa?” he asked her, continuing to type.
Robin wondered whether Lucy had told Strike what they had discussed. She hoped not. Then she felt resentful for feeling guilty; after all, she had done nothing wrong. Her aggravation put a temporary stop on her great desire to know whether he had found Rochelle Onifade.
“Aha,” said Strike.
He had found, on the Italian designer’s website, the magenta fake-fur coat that Rochelle had been wearing that morning. It had become available for purchase only within the last two weeks, and it cost fifteen hundred pounds.
Robin waited for Strike to explain the exclamation, but he did not.
“Did you find her?” she asked, at last, when finally Strike turned from the computer to unwrap the sandwiches.
He told her about their encounter, but all the enthusiasm and gratitude of that morning, when he had called her “genius” over and again, was absent. Robin’s tone, as she gave him the results of her own telephone inquiries, was, therefore, similarly cool.
“I called the Law Society about the conference in Oxford on January the seventh,” she said. “Tony Landry attended. I pretended to be somebody he’d met there, who’d mislaid his card.”
He did not seem particularly interested in the information he had requested, nor did he compliment her on her initiative. The conversation petered out in mutual dissatisfaction.
The confrontation with Lucy had exhausted Strike; he wanted to be alone. He also suspected that Lucy might have told Robin about Leda. His sister deplored the fact that their mother had lived and died in conditions of mild notoriety, yet in certain moods she seemed to be seized with a paradoxical desire to discuss it all, especially with strangers. Perhaps it was a kind of safety valve, because of the tight lid she kept on her past with her suburban friends, or perhaps she was trying to carry the fight into the enemy’s territory, so anxious about what they might already know about her that she tried to forestall prurient interest before it could start. But he had never wanted Robin to know about his mother, or about his leg, or about Charlotte, or any of the other painful subjects which Lucy insisted on probing whenever she came close enough.
In his tiredness, and his bad mood, Strike extended to Robin, unfairly, his blanket irritation at women, who did not seem able just to leave a man in peace. He thought he might take his notes to the Tottenham this afternoon, where he would be able to sit and think without interruptions, and without being badgered for explanations.
Robin felt the atmospheric change keenly. Taking her cue from the silently munching Strike, she brushed herself free of crumbs, then gave him the morning’s messages in a brisk and impersonal tone.
“John Bristow called with a mobile number for Marlene Higson. He’s also got through to Guy Somé, who could meet you at ten o’clock on Thursday morning at his studio in Blunkett Street, if that suits. It’s out in Chiswick, near Strand-on-the-Green.”
“Great. Thanks.”
They said very little else to each other that day. Strike spent the greater part of the afternoon at the pub, returning only at ten to five. The awkwardness between them persisted, and for the first time, he was quite pleased to see Robin leave.
Part Four
Optimumque est, ut volgo dixere, aliena insania frui.
And the best plan is, as the popular saying was, to profit by the folly of others.
Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis
1
STRIKE VISITED ULU EARLY TO shower, and dressed with unusual care, on the morning of his visit to the studio of Guy Somé. He knew, from his perusal of the designer’s website, that Somé advocated the purchase and wear of such items as chaps in degraded leather, ties of metal mesh and black-brimmed headbands that seemed to have been made by cutting the tops out of old bowlers. With a faint feeling of defiance, Strike put on the conventional, comfortable dark blue suit he had worn to Cipriani.
The studio he sought had been a disused nineteenth-century warehouse, which stood on the north bank of the Thames. The glittering river dazzled his eyes as he tried to find the entrance, which was not clearly marked; nothing on the outside proclaimed the use to which the building was being put.
At last he discovered a discreet, unmarked bell, and the door was opened electronically from within. The stark but airy hallway was chilly with air-conditioning. A jingling and clacking noise preceded the entrance into the hall of a girl with tomato-red hair, dressed in head-to-toe black and wearing many silver bangles.
“Oh,” she said, seeing Strike.
“I’ve
got an appointment with Mr. Somé at ten,” he told her. “Cormoran Strike.”
“Oh,” she said again. “OK.”
She disappeared the same way she had come. Strike used the wait to call the mobile telephone number of Rochelle Onifade, as he had been doing ten times a day since he had met her. There was no response.
Another minute passed, and then a small black man was suddenly crossing the floor towards Strike, catlike and silent on rubber soles. He walked with an exaggerated swing of his hips, his upper body quite still except for a little counterbalancing sway of the shoulders, his arms almost rigid.
Guy Somé was nearly a foot shorter than Strike and had perhaps a hundredth of his body fat. The front of the designer’s tight black T-shirt was decorated with hundreds of tiny silver studs which formed an apparently three-dimensional image of Elvis’s face, as though his chest were a Pin Art toy. The eye was further confused by the fact that a well-defined six-pack moved underneath the tight Lycra. Somé’s snug gray jeans bore a faint dark pinstripe, and his trainers seemed to be made out of black suede and patent leather.
His face contrasted strangely with his taut, lean body, for it abounded in exaggerated curves: the eyes exophthalmic so that they appeared fishlike, looking out of the sides of his head. The cheeks were round, shining apples and the full-lipped mouth was a wide oval: his small head was almost perfectly spherical. Somé looked as though he had been carved out of soft ebony by a master hand that had grown bored with its own expertise, and started to veer towards the grotesque.
He held out a hand with a slight crook of the wrist.
“Yeah, I can see a bit of Jonny,” he said, looking up into Strike’s face; his voice was camp and faintly cockney. “Much butcher, though.”
Strike shook hands. There was surprising strength in the fingers. The red-haired girl came jingling back.
“I’ll be busy for an hour, Trudie, no calls,” Somé told her. “Bring us some tea and bicks, darling.”