The Ink Black Heart, page 69
‘Nuthing. I lost it. Burrit wasn’t his.’ After a brief hesitation he added, ‘His girlfriend gave it me.’
‘Oh,’ said Robin. ‘But then – why would he—?’
‘His girlfriend was Edie Ledwell. The girl who did The Ink Black Heart. The one who was murdered.’
‘Oh,’ said Robin again. ‘Poor man!’
‘What?’ said Pez, and then, ‘Oh. Yer, I s’pose.’
Pez drank a lot more of his pint, while Robin’s mind worked fast.
‘Look,’ she said, having taken a swift decision, ‘er – since you’ve mentioned her – I – I didn’t know whether I should tell you this, but it kind of creeped me out.’
‘What did?’
‘Well, I do know what that boy was talking about, back there.’
‘Who, Bram?’
‘Yeah. He just told me Zoe killed that girl. Edie.’
For a moment, Pez simply stared at Robin.
‘Bram said Zoe killed Edie?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin. ‘I mean, obviously I didn’t believe him. It was just an odd thing for a kid to say.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ muttered Pez, removing his arm from around the back of Robin’s chair to run his hands through his curly black hair before draining the rest of his second pint.
‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ said Robin quietly.
‘I just thought I could have one evening without thinking about it, like.’
‘Oh, I – I’m sorry I mentioned it,’ said Robin, now allowing the faintest note of grievance to creep into her voice. It wasn’t Jessica Robins’s fault she’d been taken into that burned-out bedroom by a disturbed child and been burdened with talk of murder. Jessica Robins was taken aback by this sudden change of tone, and starting to think Pez wasn’t the amusing and charming man she’d taken him for.
‘No,’ said Pez quickly, ‘don’t – it’s not your fault. It’s just been horrible. Since it happened. Everyone wants to talk about it all the fucking time and what’s the fucking point? I mean, she’s fucking dead, isn’t she? Talking about it all the fucking time isn’t gonna bring her back… Bram doesn’t like Zoe, that’s all. She babysits him sometimes. He doesn’t like anyone who tries to tell him what to do. You’ve seen her: she couldn’t fucking lift a machete, let alone fucking use one… You ever gonna finish that wine?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, careful to keep just the right amount of reserve in her voice.
‘Sorry,’ said Pez, now looking partly contrite, partly irritable. ‘It’s been – we’ve all been through it, since it happened. I had the police talk to me.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah. They talked to everyone who knew Josh and Edie, like. Even Mariam.’
‘You’re kidding!’
‘Nope. She knew Josh and Edie were meeting in the cemetery that afternoon, see. But she was taking an afternoon class when it happened. Special-needs class. Kids. I were in the studio working on me comic-book idea.’
‘The time-travelling undertaker?’
‘Yeah,’ said Pez, although he didn’t look particularly flattered that Robin had remembered. ‘Anyway, people saw me, like, passing the door, so I was in the clear for murder. But then the pigs wanted to know if I was this troll who was persecuting Edie on Twitter.’
He gave a snort of derision.
‘I shared a fucking building with her for three years – if I wanted to harass her, I’d hardly need to go on the fucking internet. Anyway, I know who that troll was, it’s not hard to fucking work out.’
‘Who was it?’ said Robin, trying to keep her voice casual.
‘Bloke called Wally Cardew,’ said Pez without a second’s pause for thought.
‘Did you tell the police that?’
‘Yeah. Told ’em I knew it was him all along. Anomie – that’s what the troll’s called—’
‘Anomie?’ said Robin. ‘That’s weird. Nils was just—’
‘Yeah, the name was one of the reasons I knew it was Wally. I heard Nils explaining it to him – he’ll have gorrit off the window in the kitchen.’
‘Oh, you know this guy personally?’
‘Yeah, we were both in The Ink Black Heart, like. Voiced characters. I was only in a couple of episodes, because I had to go back and look after me da’ for a bit, and when I got back someone else had taken over, doing a fake fucking Scouse accent.’
From his expression, Robin deduced that Pez hadn’t been happy about this.
‘Wally’s gorra mate who can code – I remember him telling me about the guy trying to get some game made by a developer – and this troll, Anomie, runs an online game based on the cartoon, with a mate. So, yeah – not rocket science, is it?
‘Gonna get another pint,’ said Pez. ‘Sure you don’t want another wine?’
‘No, I’ll finish this first,’ said Robin.
Pez went to the bar, while Robin’s mind raced. Several of the things Pez had just said about himself fitted the tentative profile of Anomie she and Strike had come up with, and yet she’d imagined that if she sat face to face with Anomie she’d feel it, know it instinctively, because the malevolence and sadism they’d displayed during their long persecution of Edie Ledwell would leak from them, however cunningly they might try to conceal it. Pez Pierce might not have been her ideal drinking companion, but she couldn’t imagine him devoting hours of his life to the game, or to a relentless campaign of harassment conducted over Twitter. He was a gifted artist, a success with women, a lover of music: he seemed to Robin to live a mostly satisfying life in the physical world and not to need the dubious pleasures of an anonymous online persona.
When he returned to the table and sat down, Robin said:
‘Why did they replace you on the cartoon? Wouldn’t it have been better to use someone who’s genuinely from Liverpool than someone faking the accent? I hate people imitating my accent,’ she added. ‘There’s a guy at work who thinks it’s really funny to start up with the “ee bah gum” stuff whenever I speak in a meeting.’
‘Fucking Londoners, innit?’ said Pez. He drank from his fresh pint. ‘Edie said they didn’t know when I’d be back from me da’s, so they went on without me. Let’s not talk about that fucking cartoon,’ he added. ‘I told you, I wanna night off.’
‘OK,’ said Robin, taking care to look taken aback and a little offended again.
‘Ah, no – look, I’m sorry,’ said Pez, unbending at once in the face of her coolness. ‘I just – I still can’t get me head round it, like. Wor ’appened.’
‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ said Robin. ‘It’s horrendous.’
Pez slid his arm over the back of her chair again.
‘Did I mention you’re fucking gorgeous?’
Robin let him press his mouth to hers again. This kiss was gentler, not a protracted affair of clashing teeth, tongue and saliva, which seemed only appropriate, mere seconds after discussion of murder. When Pez had released her, Robin said quietly,
‘Maybe it would help you to talk about it.’
‘Offering to be my therapist?’ he asked, looking into her eyes while stroking her shoulder blade.
‘Well, I’m not licensed,’ said Robin, ‘but on the bright side, I offer services you can’t get on the NHS.’
He let out another shout of laughter, and before he could ask exactly what she was thinking of, Robin said seriously,
‘Maybe you should speak to someone. This must have been really traumatic for you, and you’ve got enough stress in your life, haven’t you, with your dad being ill and everything?’
He looked slightly taken aback by that.
‘Why did you and your boyfriend split up?’
‘He cheated,’ said Robin, ‘with a friend of mine. Why’re you asking that?’
‘Because you’re gorgeous and sweet. He must’ve been a right dick.’
Oh, not again, thought Robin, as Pez moved in for yet another kiss. It was the longest so far: at least he wasn’t touching her hair, but as his mouth ground against hers harder than ever and his tongue moved in her mouth, he slid both arms around her, so that he almost pulled her out of her chair.
‘Control yourself,’ she whispered against his mouth, half laughing as she extricated herself with some difficulty. ‘God. People are staring.’
‘Just wanted some of that non-NHS therapy.’
‘You’ve forgotten the talking part,’ said Robin, and mainly to stop him kissing her again she now downed the rest of her glass of wine, while Pez continued to stroke her upper back.
‘That’s the spirit,’ he said, watching her drink.
‘I wasn’t kidding,’ said Robin lightly. ‘You’ve been through something horrible. I can tell you’re upset.’
‘Ar, don’t go thinking I’ve lost me best friend,’ said Pez roughly. ‘I fell out with her long before it happened.’
‘Why?’ asked Robin.
‘You don’t wanna hear about that,’ said Pez. ‘Trust me. You don’t wanna know.’
‘OK,’ said Robin, and once again she allowed a little more coolness into her voice, as well as a trace of hurt. Jessica Robins didn’t like being treated as though she ranked only slightly higher than a pint of lager in terms of distractions. She liked a bit of conversation before being persuaded into bed. After a few seconds’ charged silence, Pez said,
‘All right, bur I warned you. OK, well – one of the other guys voicing one of the characters on the cartoon was hanging round in the computer room at North Grove, waiting for his scene or wharrever. I walked in and I noticed him shut down what he was looking at pretty fast, like, and I was curious, like. Never liked this guy. Public school, rich parents, tryna tell everyone else how much privilege they had. One time Wally dug up a picture of this guy’s prep school. Gorrit off the internet, like. Blew it up an’ stuck it on the wall with Tim’s face pasted over one of these little pricks in their little pink caps, an’ he wrote over it, “Tim learning to despise white cis-het privilege”.’
Robin laughed.
‘Tim didn’t like that,’ said Pez with a certain satisfaction. ‘Norrat all. I’ve met people like him on jobs. Middle-class arseholes who resent you for growing up working class. Like they think you’re showing off. Trying to get an unfair advantage in the oppression stakes or something.’
Robin laughed again.
‘Anyway… d’you know what lolicon is?’
‘No, what is it?’
‘It’s cartoons of little girls. Drawings of them doing stuff. You know – sexy stuff. It’s a Japanese thing, or that’s where it started. It’s all over the net now.’
‘Oh,’ said Robin, her mind now racing. ‘I mean… gross.’
‘Yeah… so that’s what Timmy Superwoke was looking at when I walked in. He didn’t have time to wipe the history, because Edie come in right after me and told him she needed him for the scene, like. I went straight over and checked what he’d been browsing.
‘Anyway, I told Edie what he’d been looking at, once they’d all gone home, like, and we had a row. She didn’t believe me. She fuckin’ hero-worshipped this guy. She always wanted to be liked by clever people. She’d never done A levels or nothing. No higher education. She couldn’t see this Tim guy was a prick. She thought he was clever just because he’s got that kind of accent, like.
‘But she went and asked him about wor I’d said. He said I was lying, and she believed him. Then we had a proper row, because I said if he was kinky for kids, she shouldn’t be bringing him into North Grove to help with children’s classes, like. I know it was only drawings,’ said Pez, ‘but some of it was proper hardcore. She told me I was bitter and all sorts of shit.’
‘Why would she think you were bitter?’ asked Robin, sounding suitably indignant on Pez’s behalf.
‘Because they’d had the big success, I s’spose,’ said Pez darkly. ‘So after tha’, we didn’t talk a lot.’
He drank some more beer, looking sullen, then went on,
‘See, before she met Josh – that’s the guy she did the cartoon with – we had a kind of thing going. Not serious. And we were working on a thing togeth—’
Pez cut himself off.
‘And now I’ve gor her fucking boyfriend coming round tryna make me hand over what’s mine. Well, he can fuck right off,’ said Pez, though Robin thought she detected some unease beneath the anger and bravado. ‘It’s mine and I’m fucking keeping it.’
So you haven’t lost it, thought Robin, but sweet, kind Jessica Robins expressed only sympathy for her date’s justifiable resentment, before offering to buy him a fourth pint.
68
The jealous doubt, the burning pain,
That rack the lover’s heart and brain;
The fear that will not own it fear,
The hope that cannot disappear…
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
The Troubadour, Canto 2
Tired of the confines of the office and his attic flat, Strike had decided to spend the evening at The Tottenham, where he could enjoy a couple of pints while continuing his online investigations. However, The Tottenham had been atypically full for a Thursday night, so he’d headed instead to The Angel, only to find a sign on the bar declaring that the use of mobiles and laptops was forbidden in the establishment.
His craving for beer increasing with each thwarted attempt to get some, he came to rest at last in The Cambridge, a large and noisy pub situated on the edge of Theatreland, where he’d no sooner sat down with his first pint of Doom Bar than Robin had called, asking him to take over as Buffypaws in Drek’s Game. In consequence, he’d had to abandon the lines of investigation he’d planned and had spent the last two hours pretending to be Buffypaws in the company of successive pints, and a burger and chips. Other than one private-channel conversation with Fiendy1, his stint in the game had been uneventful, Anomie absent throughout.
At a quarter to ten, with Strike still in The Cambridge and becoming increasingly bored of the game, his mobile rang.
‘Strike.’
‘Evening,’ said Nutley. ‘Got a bit on Kea Niven.’
Strike had sent their newest subcontractor to King’s Lynn in the hope of finally ruling Kea out of the investigation. The choice of Nutley had been largely dictated by Strike’s desire to keep the man out of his own vicinity.
‘Go on,’ said Strike, picking up a pen and drawing his notebook closer to him.
‘She’s been out for a drink with some friends,’ said Nutley. ‘Local wine bar.’
‘Walking all right, then, is she?’ asked Strike.
‘She’s got a stick with her,’ said Nutley, ‘and her mates have been going up and down to the bar for her.’
He waited to be prompted. This habit was one of many of Nutley’s that Strike found extremely irritating.
‘Is that it?’
‘No,’ said Nutley, sounding amused that Strike could think so. ‘’Bout twenty minutes ago, her mobile rang and she went outside the bar to take the call. I went too. Pretended I wanted a fag.’
Nutley paused to be praised for his initiative. When Strike’s only response was silence, Nutley continued,
‘Yeah, so she was talking to someone on the phone and got kind of hysterical. Wanting to know why they hadn’t called her back sooner and stuff. She was saying she’s got to get a message to Josh and wanted this person to arrange it. She said people on Edit are saying terrible things about her and they aren’t true and it’s all been faked, or something. And,’ said Nutley, with the air of a man about to produce a rabbit out of a hat, ‘she said she thinks Anomie’s behind it. The stuff on Edit.’
‘You sure she wasn’t saying “Reddit”?’ asked Strike, not bothering to keep the exasperation out of his voice.
‘What?’
‘Reddit,’ repeated Strike.
‘Yeah, it might’ve been,’ said Nutley, after considering the point for a few seconds, ‘but like I say, she was kind of hysterical, it was hard to hear exactly what she was going on about. They’re all arty types, though, aren’t they, so I thought Edit might be some kind of—’
‘Did you get the name of the person she was talking to?’
‘Didn’t hear her say a name.’
Of course you fucking didn’t.
‘OK, good job, Nutley,’ said Strike, his tone contradicting his words. ‘Write it up for the file and call me if anything else happens.’
Once Nutley had rung off, Strike turned back to Drek’s Game, very much wishing he too had somebody he could send up and down to the bar in his stead. The surrounding tables were full of people laughing and talking: he was the only solitary drinker, a forty-year-old oddball with his laptop, gaming alone while craving a smoke. He’d just avoided being attacked by a digital vampire, then successfully steered Buffypaws past a stone lion with the help of Robin’s cheat sheet (‘type “You is bad stony mukfluk, bwah”’) when a text arrived from his half-sister Prudence.
He still hadn’t met her, of course. While he’d been laid up with his leg and overwhelmed by work, she’d been preoccupied with her injured daughter.
Hi. Sylvie’s doing much better, so I wondered how you might be fixed for next Thursday for a quick drink?
Deciding he needn’t answer immediately, Strike returned his attention to his laptop screen. Five minutes later, his mobile buzzed with a second text, then rang before he could look at it: it was Robin calling, so he answered immediately.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’ve just left Pez. Has Anomie been in the game?’
‘No,’ said Strike, and Robin groaned. ‘But I’ve had a one-on-one chat with Fiendy1, who knows his football, I must say. Sanest person I’ve met on here so far. You should’ve told me Buffypaws was a Man U supporter, though.’
‘Shit, wasn’t that in the notes? Sorry. It was the first team I could think of.’
‘’S’fine, I got by,’ said Strike. ‘I’d’ve thought it was only polite to make it Arsenal, though. How was Pez?’
‘I’ve just sent you a recording of the interview. I haven’t listened back to it, so I don’t know how much my mobile picked up. The pub was quite noisy.’
‘Having the same problem,’ said Strike, raising his voice over a gaggle of particularly raucous people who’d just arrived at the next table.
‘Oh,’ said Robin. ‘But then – why would he—?’
‘His girlfriend was Edie Ledwell. The girl who did The Ink Black Heart. The one who was murdered.’
‘Oh,’ said Robin again. ‘Poor man!’
‘What?’ said Pez, and then, ‘Oh. Yer, I s’pose.’
Pez drank a lot more of his pint, while Robin’s mind worked fast.
‘Look,’ she said, having taken a swift decision, ‘er – since you’ve mentioned her – I – I didn’t know whether I should tell you this, but it kind of creeped me out.’
‘What did?’
‘Well, I do know what that boy was talking about, back there.’
‘Who, Bram?’
‘Yeah. He just told me Zoe killed that girl. Edie.’
For a moment, Pez simply stared at Robin.
‘Bram said Zoe killed Edie?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin. ‘I mean, obviously I didn’t believe him. It was just an odd thing for a kid to say.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ muttered Pez, removing his arm from around the back of Robin’s chair to run his hands through his curly black hair before draining the rest of his second pint.
‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ said Robin quietly.
‘I just thought I could have one evening without thinking about it, like.’
‘Oh, I – I’m sorry I mentioned it,’ said Robin, now allowing the faintest note of grievance to creep into her voice. It wasn’t Jessica Robins’s fault she’d been taken into that burned-out bedroom by a disturbed child and been burdened with talk of murder. Jessica Robins was taken aback by this sudden change of tone, and starting to think Pez wasn’t the amusing and charming man she’d taken him for.
‘No,’ said Pez quickly, ‘don’t – it’s not your fault. It’s just been horrible. Since it happened. Everyone wants to talk about it all the fucking time and what’s the fucking point? I mean, she’s fucking dead, isn’t she? Talking about it all the fucking time isn’t gonna bring her back… Bram doesn’t like Zoe, that’s all. She babysits him sometimes. He doesn’t like anyone who tries to tell him what to do. You’ve seen her: she couldn’t fucking lift a machete, let alone fucking use one… You ever gonna finish that wine?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, careful to keep just the right amount of reserve in her voice.
‘Sorry,’ said Pez, now looking partly contrite, partly irritable. ‘It’s been – we’ve all been through it, since it happened. I had the police talk to me.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah. They talked to everyone who knew Josh and Edie, like. Even Mariam.’
‘You’re kidding!’
‘Nope. She knew Josh and Edie were meeting in the cemetery that afternoon, see. But she was taking an afternoon class when it happened. Special-needs class. Kids. I were in the studio working on me comic-book idea.’
‘The time-travelling undertaker?’
‘Yeah,’ said Pez, although he didn’t look particularly flattered that Robin had remembered. ‘Anyway, people saw me, like, passing the door, so I was in the clear for murder. But then the pigs wanted to know if I was this troll who was persecuting Edie on Twitter.’
He gave a snort of derision.
‘I shared a fucking building with her for three years – if I wanted to harass her, I’d hardly need to go on the fucking internet. Anyway, I know who that troll was, it’s not hard to fucking work out.’
‘Who was it?’ said Robin, trying to keep her voice casual.
‘Bloke called Wally Cardew,’ said Pez without a second’s pause for thought.
‘Did you tell the police that?’
‘Yeah. Told ’em I knew it was him all along. Anomie – that’s what the troll’s called—’
‘Anomie?’ said Robin. ‘That’s weird. Nils was just—’
‘Yeah, the name was one of the reasons I knew it was Wally. I heard Nils explaining it to him – he’ll have gorrit off the window in the kitchen.’
‘Oh, you know this guy personally?’
‘Yeah, we were both in The Ink Black Heart, like. Voiced characters. I was only in a couple of episodes, because I had to go back and look after me da’ for a bit, and when I got back someone else had taken over, doing a fake fucking Scouse accent.’
From his expression, Robin deduced that Pez hadn’t been happy about this.
‘Wally’s gorra mate who can code – I remember him telling me about the guy trying to get some game made by a developer – and this troll, Anomie, runs an online game based on the cartoon, with a mate. So, yeah – not rocket science, is it?
‘Gonna get another pint,’ said Pez. ‘Sure you don’t want another wine?’
‘No, I’ll finish this first,’ said Robin.
Pez went to the bar, while Robin’s mind raced. Several of the things Pez had just said about himself fitted the tentative profile of Anomie she and Strike had come up with, and yet she’d imagined that if she sat face to face with Anomie she’d feel it, know it instinctively, because the malevolence and sadism they’d displayed during their long persecution of Edie Ledwell would leak from them, however cunningly they might try to conceal it. Pez Pierce might not have been her ideal drinking companion, but she couldn’t imagine him devoting hours of his life to the game, or to a relentless campaign of harassment conducted over Twitter. He was a gifted artist, a success with women, a lover of music: he seemed to Robin to live a mostly satisfying life in the physical world and not to need the dubious pleasures of an anonymous online persona.
When he returned to the table and sat down, Robin said:
‘Why did they replace you on the cartoon? Wouldn’t it have been better to use someone who’s genuinely from Liverpool than someone faking the accent? I hate people imitating my accent,’ she added. ‘There’s a guy at work who thinks it’s really funny to start up with the “ee bah gum” stuff whenever I speak in a meeting.’
‘Fucking Londoners, innit?’ said Pez. He drank from his fresh pint. ‘Edie said they didn’t know when I’d be back from me da’s, so they went on without me. Let’s not talk about that fucking cartoon,’ he added. ‘I told you, I wanna night off.’
‘OK,’ said Robin, taking care to look taken aback and a little offended again.
‘Ah, no – look, I’m sorry,’ said Pez, unbending at once in the face of her coolness. ‘I just – I still can’t get me head round it, like. Wor ’appened.’
‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ said Robin. ‘It’s horrendous.’
Pez slid his arm over the back of her chair again.
‘Did I mention you’re fucking gorgeous?’
Robin let him press his mouth to hers again. This kiss was gentler, not a protracted affair of clashing teeth, tongue and saliva, which seemed only appropriate, mere seconds after discussion of murder. When Pez had released her, Robin said quietly,
‘Maybe it would help you to talk about it.’
‘Offering to be my therapist?’ he asked, looking into her eyes while stroking her shoulder blade.
‘Well, I’m not licensed,’ said Robin, ‘but on the bright side, I offer services you can’t get on the NHS.’
He let out another shout of laughter, and before he could ask exactly what she was thinking of, Robin said seriously,
‘Maybe you should speak to someone. This must have been really traumatic for you, and you’ve got enough stress in your life, haven’t you, with your dad being ill and everything?’
He looked slightly taken aback by that.
‘Why did you and your boyfriend split up?’
‘He cheated,’ said Robin, ‘with a friend of mine. Why’re you asking that?’
‘Because you’re gorgeous and sweet. He must’ve been a right dick.’
Oh, not again, thought Robin, as Pez moved in for yet another kiss. It was the longest so far: at least he wasn’t touching her hair, but as his mouth ground against hers harder than ever and his tongue moved in her mouth, he slid both arms around her, so that he almost pulled her out of her chair.
‘Control yourself,’ she whispered against his mouth, half laughing as she extricated herself with some difficulty. ‘God. People are staring.’
‘Just wanted some of that non-NHS therapy.’
‘You’ve forgotten the talking part,’ said Robin, and mainly to stop him kissing her again she now downed the rest of her glass of wine, while Pez continued to stroke her upper back.
‘That’s the spirit,’ he said, watching her drink.
‘I wasn’t kidding,’ said Robin lightly. ‘You’ve been through something horrible. I can tell you’re upset.’
‘Ar, don’t go thinking I’ve lost me best friend,’ said Pez roughly. ‘I fell out with her long before it happened.’
‘Why?’ asked Robin.
‘You don’t wanna hear about that,’ said Pez. ‘Trust me. You don’t wanna know.’
‘OK,’ said Robin, and once again she allowed a little more coolness into her voice, as well as a trace of hurt. Jessica Robins didn’t like being treated as though she ranked only slightly higher than a pint of lager in terms of distractions. She liked a bit of conversation before being persuaded into bed. After a few seconds’ charged silence, Pez said,
‘All right, bur I warned you. OK, well – one of the other guys voicing one of the characters on the cartoon was hanging round in the computer room at North Grove, waiting for his scene or wharrever. I walked in and I noticed him shut down what he was looking at pretty fast, like, and I was curious, like. Never liked this guy. Public school, rich parents, tryna tell everyone else how much privilege they had. One time Wally dug up a picture of this guy’s prep school. Gorrit off the internet, like. Blew it up an’ stuck it on the wall with Tim’s face pasted over one of these little pricks in their little pink caps, an’ he wrote over it, “Tim learning to despise white cis-het privilege”.’
Robin laughed.
‘Tim didn’t like that,’ said Pez with a certain satisfaction. ‘Norrat all. I’ve met people like him on jobs. Middle-class arseholes who resent you for growing up working class. Like they think you’re showing off. Trying to get an unfair advantage in the oppression stakes or something.’
Robin laughed again.
‘Anyway… d’you know what lolicon is?’
‘No, what is it?’
‘It’s cartoons of little girls. Drawings of them doing stuff. You know – sexy stuff. It’s a Japanese thing, or that’s where it started. It’s all over the net now.’
‘Oh,’ said Robin, her mind now racing. ‘I mean… gross.’
‘Yeah… so that’s what Timmy Superwoke was looking at when I walked in. He didn’t have time to wipe the history, because Edie come in right after me and told him she needed him for the scene, like. I went straight over and checked what he’d been browsing.
‘Anyway, I told Edie what he’d been looking at, once they’d all gone home, like, and we had a row. She didn’t believe me. She fuckin’ hero-worshipped this guy. She always wanted to be liked by clever people. She’d never done A levels or nothing. No higher education. She couldn’t see this Tim guy was a prick. She thought he was clever just because he’s got that kind of accent, like.
‘But she went and asked him about wor I’d said. He said I was lying, and she believed him. Then we had a proper row, because I said if he was kinky for kids, she shouldn’t be bringing him into North Grove to help with children’s classes, like. I know it was only drawings,’ said Pez, ‘but some of it was proper hardcore. She told me I was bitter and all sorts of shit.’
‘Why would she think you were bitter?’ asked Robin, sounding suitably indignant on Pez’s behalf.
‘Because they’d had the big success, I s’spose,’ said Pez darkly. ‘So after tha’, we didn’t talk a lot.’
He drank some more beer, looking sullen, then went on,
‘See, before she met Josh – that’s the guy she did the cartoon with – we had a kind of thing going. Not serious. And we were working on a thing togeth—’
Pez cut himself off.
‘And now I’ve gor her fucking boyfriend coming round tryna make me hand over what’s mine. Well, he can fuck right off,’ said Pez, though Robin thought she detected some unease beneath the anger and bravado. ‘It’s mine and I’m fucking keeping it.’
So you haven’t lost it, thought Robin, but sweet, kind Jessica Robins expressed only sympathy for her date’s justifiable resentment, before offering to buy him a fourth pint.
68
The jealous doubt, the burning pain,
That rack the lover’s heart and brain;
The fear that will not own it fear,
The hope that cannot disappear…
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
The Troubadour, Canto 2
Tired of the confines of the office and his attic flat, Strike had decided to spend the evening at The Tottenham, where he could enjoy a couple of pints while continuing his online investigations. However, The Tottenham had been atypically full for a Thursday night, so he’d headed instead to The Angel, only to find a sign on the bar declaring that the use of mobiles and laptops was forbidden in the establishment.
His craving for beer increasing with each thwarted attempt to get some, he came to rest at last in The Cambridge, a large and noisy pub situated on the edge of Theatreland, where he’d no sooner sat down with his first pint of Doom Bar than Robin had called, asking him to take over as Buffypaws in Drek’s Game. In consequence, he’d had to abandon the lines of investigation he’d planned and had spent the last two hours pretending to be Buffypaws in the company of successive pints, and a burger and chips. Other than one private-channel conversation with Fiendy1, his stint in the game had been uneventful, Anomie absent throughout.
At a quarter to ten, with Strike still in The Cambridge and becoming increasingly bored of the game, his mobile rang.
‘Strike.’
‘Evening,’ said Nutley. ‘Got a bit on Kea Niven.’
Strike had sent their newest subcontractor to King’s Lynn in the hope of finally ruling Kea out of the investigation. The choice of Nutley had been largely dictated by Strike’s desire to keep the man out of his own vicinity.
‘Go on,’ said Strike, picking up a pen and drawing his notebook closer to him.
‘She’s been out for a drink with some friends,’ said Nutley. ‘Local wine bar.’
‘Walking all right, then, is she?’ asked Strike.
‘She’s got a stick with her,’ said Nutley, ‘and her mates have been going up and down to the bar for her.’
He waited to be prompted. This habit was one of many of Nutley’s that Strike found extremely irritating.
‘Is that it?’
‘No,’ said Nutley, sounding amused that Strike could think so. ‘’Bout twenty minutes ago, her mobile rang and she went outside the bar to take the call. I went too. Pretended I wanted a fag.’
Nutley paused to be praised for his initiative. When Strike’s only response was silence, Nutley continued,
‘Yeah, so she was talking to someone on the phone and got kind of hysterical. Wanting to know why they hadn’t called her back sooner and stuff. She was saying she’s got to get a message to Josh and wanted this person to arrange it. She said people on Edit are saying terrible things about her and they aren’t true and it’s all been faked, or something. And,’ said Nutley, with the air of a man about to produce a rabbit out of a hat, ‘she said she thinks Anomie’s behind it. The stuff on Edit.’
‘You sure she wasn’t saying “Reddit”?’ asked Strike, not bothering to keep the exasperation out of his voice.
‘What?’
‘Reddit,’ repeated Strike.
‘Yeah, it might’ve been,’ said Nutley, after considering the point for a few seconds, ‘but like I say, she was kind of hysterical, it was hard to hear exactly what she was going on about. They’re all arty types, though, aren’t they, so I thought Edit might be some kind of—’
‘Did you get the name of the person she was talking to?’
‘Didn’t hear her say a name.’
Of course you fucking didn’t.
‘OK, good job, Nutley,’ said Strike, his tone contradicting his words. ‘Write it up for the file and call me if anything else happens.’
Once Nutley had rung off, Strike turned back to Drek’s Game, very much wishing he too had somebody he could send up and down to the bar in his stead. The surrounding tables were full of people laughing and talking: he was the only solitary drinker, a forty-year-old oddball with his laptop, gaming alone while craving a smoke. He’d just avoided being attacked by a digital vampire, then successfully steered Buffypaws past a stone lion with the help of Robin’s cheat sheet (‘type “You is bad stony mukfluk, bwah”’) when a text arrived from his half-sister Prudence.
He still hadn’t met her, of course. While he’d been laid up with his leg and overwhelmed by work, she’d been preoccupied with her injured daughter.
Hi. Sylvie’s doing much better, so I wondered how you might be fixed for next Thursday for a quick drink?
Deciding he needn’t answer immediately, Strike returned his attention to his laptop screen. Five minutes later, his mobile buzzed with a second text, then rang before he could look at it: it was Robin calling, so he answered immediately.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’ve just left Pez. Has Anomie been in the game?’
‘No,’ said Strike, and Robin groaned. ‘But I’ve had a one-on-one chat with Fiendy1, who knows his football, I must say. Sanest person I’ve met on here so far. You should’ve told me Buffypaws was a Man U supporter, though.’
‘Shit, wasn’t that in the notes? Sorry. It was the first team I could think of.’
‘’S’fine, I got by,’ said Strike. ‘I’d’ve thought it was only polite to make it Arsenal, though. How was Pez?’
‘I’ve just sent you a recording of the interview. I haven’t listened back to it, so I don’t know how much my mobile picked up. The pub was quite noisy.’
‘Having the same problem,’ said Strike, raising his voice over a gaggle of particularly raucous people who’d just arrived at the next table.
