The Ink Black Heart, page 97
After a while, and unsure why she was doing it, Robin reached for the pen on her bedside table and wrote down a fifth name: Zoltan, Rachel ’s first-ever online friend, whom Rachel believed had then adopted another online persona, called… What had it been? For some reason Robin had a vague mental image of a harlequin.
She now bent over the side of her bed to pick up her charging laptop, opened it and searched ‘harlequin’.
‘Scaramouche,’ she said aloud, once she’d read an article about stock characters in Italian Commedia dell’Arte. Scaramouche was a clown: cunning, boastful and fundamentally cowardly, an odd name to choose if you were trying to persuade young women into sex. Again, without really knowing why she was doing it, Robin wrote Scaramouche beneath Zoltan, stared for a moment at the six names, then reached again for her laptop.
99
We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise…
Emily Dickinson
Aspiration
‘If you’re not going to say anything,’ came Pat’s deep, irritable voice from the outer office, ‘stop bloody calling.’
It was half-past one on Monday afternoon and Strike, who was sitting at his desk in the inside office, crutches propped against the wall, was eating biscuits while he dealt with his overburdened email inbox. Now he called through to Pat,
‘Same number? Just breathing again?’
‘Couldn’t hear any breathing this time,’ said Pat, coming to the open door, e-cigarette in hand. Behind her, the outer office was almost empty but for the phone sitting on the floor and the piles of case files Pat was sorting, ready to go into the new filing cabinets. ‘Just silence. Bloody idiot.’
‘Might call that number back when I’ve dealt with this lot,’ said Strike, returning to an email from the landlord, who seemed to feel that the bombing justified an increase in rent, a view Strike didn’t share. ‘You all right?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ asked Pat suspiciously.
‘Being back in here,’ said Strike. ‘After what happened.’
‘I’m fine. They’ve got them all now, haven’t they? And I hope they throw away the bloody key,’ Pat added, moving back to her files.
Strike returned to his email. A couple of minutes later, having sent a polite but firm response to the landlord, he started writing an update for Allan Yeoman. He was still trying to word his opening paragraph in a way that suggested progress without actually mentioning any when he heard Pat say,
‘You’re not supposed to be in today.’
Strike glanced up, assuming Robin had arrived early, but it was Dev Shah who appeared in the doorway between the inner and outer offices, wearing a broad grin.
‘Nailed them,’ he told Strike. ‘Fingers and his old dear.’
‘You serious?’ said Strike, gladly abandoning his email.
‘Yep. Chatted her up last night in the Connaught bar. She was there with her sister. Or a woman who uses the same plastic surgeon.’
Dev pulled out his wallet, extracted a smartly engraved business card and handed it to Strike, who saw the name Azam Masoumi, followed by ‘Dealer in Antiquities and Objets d’Art’.
‘Mr Masoumi arranges the sale of valuables for private clients,’ said Dev, ‘and he doesn’t charge anything like the commission of the big auction houses.’
‘That’s very good of him. I’ll bet he’s discreet as well.’
‘Mr Masoumi prides himself on his discretion,’ said Dev, deadpan. ‘Some clients don’t want it known that they’re selling valuable objects. Mr Masoumi completely understands their predicament.’
‘And that did it?’
‘Not on its own,’ said Dev. ‘I also had to buy her and her sister a shit-ton of drinks and guess she was fifteen years younger than she is. The bar closed and she invited me back to Fingers’ flat for a nightcap.’
‘Was Fingers there?’
‘No, which was bloody lucky, because I don’t think he’d have liked to see how his mum was behaving.’
‘Frisky, was she?’
‘It all started getting very Mrs Robinson. When I made noises about leaving, she tried to keep my interest by showing me a Fabergé box and a head of Alexander the Great, which she says were gifts from her estranged husband.’
‘He’s going to be seriously fucking estranged once he hears all this. Did you get pictures?’
‘Yep,’ said Dev, pulling his mobile out of his pocket and showing Strike the images of the two objects, which together were worth over a million pounds.
‘And you got out of there without being Mrs Robinson-ed?’
‘Narrowly escaped by making a dinner date for tonight.’
‘You,’ said Strike, struggling into a standing position on his one leg, and holding out his hand, ‘have just won Employee of the Week.’
‘Do I get a certificate?’
‘I’ll get Pat to type one up once her computer gets here.’
‘Leg bad again?’ asked Dev, glancing down at Strike’s empty trouser leg.
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Strike, dropping heavily back into his chair.
‘Where’s everyone else?’
‘Barclay’s flying back from Glasgow as we speak – he’s been visiting his parents – Midge is on her day off and Robin’s about to arrive, as is our new furniture.’
‘Want me to hang around and help?’
‘No, you’ve earned your time off. I’m planning to bung the delivery guys a hundred quid if anything needs putting together.’
Ten minutes after Dev had left, Robin arrived. She was as delighted as Strike to learn that the Fingers case was now wrapped up, but shocked by the sight of Strike in the flesh. His skin had a slightly grey tinge, his eyes were bloodshot and he was sporting forty-eight hours’ worth of stubble. However, she passed no comment, merely holding up the USB stick she’d brought with her.
‘When the printer arrives, I’ll be able to show you everything I’ve got on Anomie’s troll posse. What’re you up to?’
‘Trying to compose an email to Allan Yeoman, but there’s a limit to how often you can say “promising developments” without actually reporting a development.’
‘Hopefully Grant Ledwell will ’fess up this evening.’
‘He’d better,’ said Strike, ‘or I’m going to have to find a positive spin for “this investigation is fucked”.’
The first delivery of furniture arrived at three o’clock, and the next two hours were dedicated to filling up the new filing cabinets, assembling Pat’s desk, setting up her new computer and printer, and stripping plastic wrap from the new sofa, which was covered in red fabric.
‘You didn’t want fake leather again?’ said Robin as she and Pat rolled the sofa into position while Strike watched, balanced on his crutches and frustrated by his inability to help.
‘I got sick of the old one farting every time I moved on it,’ said Strike.
‘This’ll stain if anyone spills coffee on it,’ said Pat, e-cigarette clamped between her teeth. She moved around her new desk and lowered her bony frame into her new computer chair.
‘But this is better than the old one,’ she admitted grudgingly.
‘Almost worth getting bombed for, wasn’t it?’ said Strike, looking around the outer office, which, between the fresh paint and the new furniture, had never looked so smart.
‘When are they going to replace the glass?’ asked Pat, pointing at the still boarded-up half of the door onto the landing. ‘I like being able to see the outline of whoever’s outside. Gives you early warning.’
‘Glazier’s coming end of the week,’ said Strike. ‘I’d better finish that email to Yeoman.’
He moved on his crutches back into the inner office. Robin had just started printing off the results of her investigations into Lepine’s Disciple and his friends when the office phone rang again.
‘Strike Detective Agency,’ said Pat.
Pat listened for a few seconds, then said,
‘What d’you want? If you’re trying to be funny—’
‘Same number as before?’ said Strike, reappearing at the door between the two rooms. Pat nodded. ‘Give it to me,’ he said, but Pat, whose surly expression had changed suddenly to one of suspicion, covered the mouthpiece with her hand and said,
‘She’s asking for Robin.’
Robin pressed the pause button on the printer and held out her hand for the receiver, but Pat, still looking at Strike, whispered,
‘She sounds like a weirdo.’
‘Pat,’ said Robin firmly. ‘Give it to me.’
Looking as though no good could come of it, Pat handed over the receiver.
‘Hello?’ said Robin. ‘This is Robin Ellacott speaking.’
A voice whispered in Robin’s ear.
‘Were you Jessica?’
Robin locked eyes with Strike.
‘Who is this?’ Robin asked.
‘Were you?’ said the faint voice.
‘Who am I speaking to?’ Robin said.
Now she could hear the girl breathing. Those shallow breaths surely indicated terror.
‘Do I know you?’ Robin asked.
‘Yes,’ whispered the voice. ‘I think so. If you were Jessica.’
Robin slipped her hand over the mouthpiece and said quietly: ‘It’s Zoe Haigh. She wants to know whether I was Jessica.’
Wondering whether the admission was worth the risk, Strike hesitated, then nodded. Robin removed her hand from the receiver and said,
‘Zoe?’
‘Yes,’ said the voice. ‘I – I –’
‘Are you all right? Has something happened?’
‘I’m so scared,’ whispered the girl.
‘Why are you scared?’ asked Robin.
‘Please… will you come and see me?’
‘Of course,’ said Robin. ‘Are you at home now?’
‘Yes,’ said Zoe.
‘All right. Stay there, I’ll be there as fast as I can.’
‘OK,’ whispered Zoe. ‘Thank you.’
The line went dead.
‘She wants to see me,’ said Robin, checking her watch. ‘Maybe it’d be better if you got a taxi to Ledwell and I’ll—’
‘The hell you will. What if it’s a set-up? What if she’s the bait and Anomie’s lying in wait?’
‘Then we’ll find out who they are,’ said Robin, turning the printer back on.
‘Right before you get your throat slit, you mean?’ said Strike over the swish of pages.
Pat’s head was turning between the partners, as though she was watching a tennis match.
‘Zoe’s flat is up two flights of stairs,’ said Robin, without looking at Strike.
‘And how d’you think I got back in here? Levitated?’ asked Strike, omitting to mention that he’d done most of the journey on his backside.
‘Strike, I honestly don’t think Zoe is luring me to my doom.’
‘You didn’t think we’d find Vikas Bhardwaj with his jugular severed either.’
‘Funny,’ said Robin coolly, now turning to face her partner, ‘I don’t remember you predicting that either.’
‘The difference,’ said Strike impatiently, ‘is that I’ve learned my bloody lesson. I’m coming with you. If we go to Junction Road now, we’ll have plenty of time before Ledwell’s at nine.’
When Strike had disappeared back into the inner office to collect his phone and wallet, Pat said, in the low growl that passed for her whisper,
‘He’s right, you know.’
‘No he bloody isn’t,’ said Robin, taking the pages out of the printer and reaching up onto the shelf behind Pat for a plastic sleeve to put them in. ‘If he tries punching anyone else, or if he falls downstairs again, he’ll be out of action for—’
She broke off as Strike returned to the outer office, still glowering.
‘Ready?’
Robin knew, by the expression on her partner’s face, that he’d overheard what she’d just said.
100
But a wild courage sits triumphant there,
The stormy grandeur of a proud despair;
A daring spirit, in its woes elate,
Mightier than death, untameable by fate.
Felicia Hemans
The Wife of Asdrubal
Neither detective spoke during the first ten minutes of the drive to Junction Road. Strike was smouldering with quiet resentment about the fact that Robin currently considered him a liability rather than an asset. Ever sensitive to her partner’s moods, Robin felt the prickly quality of his silence, and spent the early part of the journey trying to muster both the courage and the right words to address it.
At last, as they sat waiting for a traffic light to change, she said, eyes on the road ahead,
‘You said to me once that we’ve got to be honest with each other or we’re screwed.’
Strike kept his silence until the light turned green and they were moving forward again.
‘So?’
‘You said you worried more about me when I was out on my own than you’d worry about a male subcontractor, because the odds were always going to be against me if I came up against a violent—’
‘Exactly,’ said Strike, ‘which is why—’
‘Can I finish?’ said Robin, her tone calm, though her pulse was racing.
‘Carry on,’ said Strike coldly.
‘And you told me I needed to fix my panic attacks, because you didn’t want it on your conscience if I screwed up and got hurt again.’
Strike, who now knew exactly where the conversation was heading, set his jaw in a manner that Robin, had she seen it, would have described as mulish.
‘I’ve never nagged you about you looking after yourself,’ said Robin, her eyes still fixed on the road. ‘Not once. It’s your life, and your body. But the day you told me I had to get therapy, you said it wasn’t only me who’d have to live with the consequences if I got myself killed.’
‘So?’ said Strike again.
A mixture of masochism and sadism made him want to force her to be explicit. Now starting to feel aggravated, Robin said,
‘I know you’re in pain. You look terrible.’
‘Cheers. Just the shot in the arm I needed.’
‘Oh, for God’s—’ said Robin, now barely keeping a curb on her temper. ‘You’d never let anyone else go out on a job in your condition. How exactly do you think you’re going to defend yourself, or me, if—?’
‘So I’m dead weight in my own fucking agency, am I?’
‘Don’t twist my words, you know exactly what I’m saying—’
‘Yeah, I’m a middle-aged cripple you’d rather leave in the car—’
‘Who said anything about your age?’
‘—while you walk merrily into what could be—’
‘“Merrily”? Could you be any more patronising?’
‘—a fucking ambush—’
‘I’ve factored that in and—’
‘Oh, you’ve factored that in, have you? That’ll stop you being fucking stabbed through the neck when you walk in the door—’
‘FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, STRIKE!’ Robin shouted, slapping the steering wheel with both hands, the tension she’d been carrying with her since the bombing finding cathartic relief at last, ‘I DON’T WANT YOU TO FUCKING KILL YOURSELF! I know you feel – I don’t know – emasculated by being on crutches, or something—’
‘No, I bloody don’t—’
‘You talk about honesty, but you’re not fucking honest, not with me, not with yourself! You know why I’m saying this: I don’t want to lose you. Happy now?’
‘No, I’m not fucking happy,’ said Strike automatically, which was both true and untrue: in some barely acknowledged part of his brain he’d registered her words, and they’d lightened a burden he’d barely known he was carrying. ‘I think we’re dealing with a fucking serial killer here—’
‘So do I!’ said Robin, infuriated by the lack of acknowledgement of something it had cost her a great deal to admit. ‘But I know Zoe, and you don’t!’
‘Know her? You had one twenty-minute walk with her—’
‘Sometimes, twenty minutes is enough! She was terrified on the phone just now, and I don’t think it’s because Anomie had a knife to her throat: it’s because she’s about to betray Anomie! I know you think I’m some ditsy, naive fool who “merrily” walks into dangerous situations—’
‘I don’t think that,’ said Strike. ‘I don’t.’
Now there was silence in the BMW. Strike was processing what he’d just heard. I don’t want to lose you. Was that something a woman would say about what he feared, in his darkest moments, he’d become? A crock, a fat, forty-year-old, one-legged chain-smoker, deluded about his attractiveness and competence, still imagining himself the gifted amateur boxer with a washboard stomach who’d been capable of pulling the most beautiful woman at Oxford University?
But Robin wasn’t feeling comforted; on the contrary, she felt vulnerable and exposed, because she’d just said what she’d been trying not to say for a long time, and was scared that Strike had heard in that ‘I don’t want to lose you’ more than her worry that he’d do himself some cataclysmic injury in hauling himself up the steep concrete steps in Zoe’s building. She feared he’d divined her pain at the idea of Madeline, and her wish for an intimacy that she was trying to persuade herself she didn’t crave.
After a few minutes she said, trying to keep her voice even and rational,
‘You are this agency. It’d be nothing without you. I’ve never told you to rest up, or stop smoking, or eat better. It wasn’t my business – but now you’re making it my business. I’ve got a rape alarm in my bag and whoever’s in Zoe’s room when I get there, I’ll make sure they know I didn’t come alone. You look mean enough, even sitting in a car. Anyone looking out of the window’s going to think twice about hurting me, knowing you’re right outside, but you won’t be able to get up those stairs without endangering yourself, and I’d be more worried about you than myself if somebody came at us.’
Strike said nothing, because he was enduring the always-humiliating experience of facing his own hypocrisy and delusion. If it came to a knife fight, he was less than useless.
She now bent over the side of her bed to pick up her charging laptop, opened it and searched ‘harlequin’.
‘Scaramouche,’ she said aloud, once she’d read an article about stock characters in Italian Commedia dell’Arte. Scaramouche was a clown: cunning, boastful and fundamentally cowardly, an odd name to choose if you were trying to persuade young women into sex. Again, without really knowing why she was doing it, Robin wrote Scaramouche beneath Zoltan, stared for a moment at the six names, then reached again for her laptop.
99
We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise…
Emily Dickinson
Aspiration
‘If you’re not going to say anything,’ came Pat’s deep, irritable voice from the outer office, ‘stop bloody calling.’
It was half-past one on Monday afternoon and Strike, who was sitting at his desk in the inside office, crutches propped against the wall, was eating biscuits while he dealt with his overburdened email inbox. Now he called through to Pat,
‘Same number? Just breathing again?’
‘Couldn’t hear any breathing this time,’ said Pat, coming to the open door, e-cigarette in hand. Behind her, the outer office was almost empty but for the phone sitting on the floor and the piles of case files Pat was sorting, ready to go into the new filing cabinets. ‘Just silence. Bloody idiot.’
‘Might call that number back when I’ve dealt with this lot,’ said Strike, returning to an email from the landlord, who seemed to feel that the bombing justified an increase in rent, a view Strike didn’t share. ‘You all right?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ asked Pat suspiciously.
‘Being back in here,’ said Strike. ‘After what happened.’
‘I’m fine. They’ve got them all now, haven’t they? And I hope they throw away the bloody key,’ Pat added, moving back to her files.
Strike returned to his email. A couple of minutes later, having sent a polite but firm response to the landlord, he started writing an update for Allan Yeoman. He was still trying to word his opening paragraph in a way that suggested progress without actually mentioning any when he heard Pat say,
‘You’re not supposed to be in today.’
Strike glanced up, assuming Robin had arrived early, but it was Dev Shah who appeared in the doorway between the inner and outer offices, wearing a broad grin.
‘Nailed them,’ he told Strike. ‘Fingers and his old dear.’
‘You serious?’ said Strike, gladly abandoning his email.
‘Yep. Chatted her up last night in the Connaught bar. She was there with her sister. Or a woman who uses the same plastic surgeon.’
Dev pulled out his wallet, extracted a smartly engraved business card and handed it to Strike, who saw the name Azam Masoumi, followed by ‘Dealer in Antiquities and Objets d’Art’.
‘Mr Masoumi arranges the sale of valuables for private clients,’ said Dev, ‘and he doesn’t charge anything like the commission of the big auction houses.’
‘That’s very good of him. I’ll bet he’s discreet as well.’
‘Mr Masoumi prides himself on his discretion,’ said Dev, deadpan. ‘Some clients don’t want it known that they’re selling valuable objects. Mr Masoumi completely understands their predicament.’
‘And that did it?’
‘Not on its own,’ said Dev. ‘I also had to buy her and her sister a shit-ton of drinks and guess she was fifteen years younger than she is. The bar closed and she invited me back to Fingers’ flat for a nightcap.’
‘Was Fingers there?’
‘No, which was bloody lucky, because I don’t think he’d have liked to see how his mum was behaving.’
‘Frisky, was she?’
‘It all started getting very Mrs Robinson. When I made noises about leaving, she tried to keep my interest by showing me a Fabergé box and a head of Alexander the Great, which she says were gifts from her estranged husband.’
‘He’s going to be seriously fucking estranged once he hears all this. Did you get pictures?’
‘Yep,’ said Dev, pulling his mobile out of his pocket and showing Strike the images of the two objects, which together were worth over a million pounds.
‘And you got out of there without being Mrs Robinson-ed?’
‘Narrowly escaped by making a dinner date for tonight.’
‘You,’ said Strike, struggling into a standing position on his one leg, and holding out his hand, ‘have just won Employee of the Week.’
‘Do I get a certificate?’
‘I’ll get Pat to type one up once her computer gets here.’
‘Leg bad again?’ asked Dev, glancing down at Strike’s empty trouser leg.
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Strike, dropping heavily back into his chair.
‘Where’s everyone else?’
‘Barclay’s flying back from Glasgow as we speak – he’s been visiting his parents – Midge is on her day off and Robin’s about to arrive, as is our new furniture.’
‘Want me to hang around and help?’
‘No, you’ve earned your time off. I’m planning to bung the delivery guys a hundred quid if anything needs putting together.’
Ten minutes after Dev had left, Robin arrived. She was as delighted as Strike to learn that the Fingers case was now wrapped up, but shocked by the sight of Strike in the flesh. His skin had a slightly grey tinge, his eyes were bloodshot and he was sporting forty-eight hours’ worth of stubble. However, she passed no comment, merely holding up the USB stick she’d brought with her.
‘When the printer arrives, I’ll be able to show you everything I’ve got on Anomie’s troll posse. What’re you up to?’
‘Trying to compose an email to Allan Yeoman, but there’s a limit to how often you can say “promising developments” without actually reporting a development.’
‘Hopefully Grant Ledwell will ’fess up this evening.’
‘He’d better,’ said Strike, ‘or I’m going to have to find a positive spin for “this investigation is fucked”.’
The first delivery of furniture arrived at three o’clock, and the next two hours were dedicated to filling up the new filing cabinets, assembling Pat’s desk, setting up her new computer and printer, and stripping plastic wrap from the new sofa, which was covered in red fabric.
‘You didn’t want fake leather again?’ said Robin as she and Pat rolled the sofa into position while Strike watched, balanced on his crutches and frustrated by his inability to help.
‘I got sick of the old one farting every time I moved on it,’ said Strike.
‘This’ll stain if anyone spills coffee on it,’ said Pat, e-cigarette clamped between her teeth. She moved around her new desk and lowered her bony frame into her new computer chair.
‘But this is better than the old one,’ she admitted grudgingly.
‘Almost worth getting bombed for, wasn’t it?’ said Strike, looking around the outer office, which, between the fresh paint and the new furniture, had never looked so smart.
‘When are they going to replace the glass?’ asked Pat, pointing at the still boarded-up half of the door onto the landing. ‘I like being able to see the outline of whoever’s outside. Gives you early warning.’
‘Glazier’s coming end of the week,’ said Strike. ‘I’d better finish that email to Yeoman.’
He moved on his crutches back into the inner office. Robin had just started printing off the results of her investigations into Lepine’s Disciple and his friends when the office phone rang again.
‘Strike Detective Agency,’ said Pat.
Pat listened for a few seconds, then said,
‘What d’you want? If you’re trying to be funny—’
‘Same number as before?’ said Strike, reappearing at the door between the two rooms. Pat nodded. ‘Give it to me,’ he said, but Pat, whose surly expression had changed suddenly to one of suspicion, covered the mouthpiece with her hand and said,
‘She’s asking for Robin.’
Robin pressed the pause button on the printer and held out her hand for the receiver, but Pat, still looking at Strike, whispered,
‘She sounds like a weirdo.’
‘Pat,’ said Robin firmly. ‘Give it to me.’
Looking as though no good could come of it, Pat handed over the receiver.
‘Hello?’ said Robin. ‘This is Robin Ellacott speaking.’
A voice whispered in Robin’s ear.
‘Were you Jessica?’
Robin locked eyes with Strike.
‘Who is this?’ Robin asked.
‘Were you?’ said the faint voice.
‘Who am I speaking to?’ Robin said.
Now she could hear the girl breathing. Those shallow breaths surely indicated terror.
‘Do I know you?’ Robin asked.
‘Yes,’ whispered the voice. ‘I think so. If you were Jessica.’
Robin slipped her hand over the mouthpiece and said quietly: ‘It’s Zoe Haigh. She wants to know whether I was Jessica.’
Wondering whether the admission was worth the risk, Strike hesitated, then nodded. Robin removed her hand from the receiver and said,
‘Zoe?’
‘Yes,’ said the voice. ‘I – I –’
‘Are you all right? Has something happened?’
‘I’m so scared,’ whispered the girl.
‘Why are you scared?’ asked Robin.
‘Please… will you come and see me?’
‘Of course,’ said Robin. ‘Are you at home now?’
‘Yes,’ said Zoe.
‘All right. Stay there, I’ll be there as fast as I can.’
‘OK,’ whispered Zoe. ‘Thank you.’
The line went dead.
‘She wants to see me,’ said Robin, checking her watch. ‘Maybe it’d be better if you got a taxi to Ledwell and I’ll—’
‘The hell you will. What if it’s a set-up? What if she’s the bait and Anomie’s lying in wait?’
‘Then we’ll find out who they are,’ said Robin, turning the printer back on.
‘Right before you get your throat slit, you mean?’ said Strike over the swish of pages.
Pat’s head was turning between the partners, as though she was watching a tennis match.
‘Zoe’s flat is up two flights of stairs,’ said Robin, without looking at Strike.
‘And how d’you think I got back in here? Levitated?’ asked Strike, omitting to mention that he’d done most of the journey on his backside.
‘Strike, I honestly don’t think Zoe is luring me to my doom.’
‘You didn’t think we’d find Vikas Bhardwaj with his jugular severed either.’
‘Funny,’ said Robin coolly, now turning to face her partner, ‘I don’t remember you predicting that either.’
‘The difference,’ said Strike impatiently, ‘is that I’ve learned my bloody lesson. I’m coming with you. If we go to Junction Road now, we’ll have plenty of time before Ledwell’s at nine.’
When Strike had disappeared back into the inner office to collect his phone and wallet, Pat said, in the low growl that passed for her whisper,
‘He’s right, you know.’
‘No he bloody isn’t,’ said Robin, taking the pages out of the printer and reaching up onto the shelf behind Pat for a plastic sleeve to put them in. ‘If he tries punching anyone else, or if he falls downstairs again, he’ll be out of action for—’
She broke off as Strike returned to the outer office, still glowering.
‘Ready?’
Robin knew, by the expression on her partner’s face, that he’d overheard what she’d just said.
100
But a wild courage sits triumphant there,
The stormy grandeur of a proud despair;
A daring spirit, in its woes elate,
Mightier than death, untameable by fate.
Felicia Hemans
The Wife of Asdrubal
Neither detective spoke during the first ten minutes of the drive to Junction Road. Strike was smouldering with quiet resentment about the fact that Robin currently considered him a liability rather than an asset. Ever sensitive to her partner’s moods, Robin felt the prickly quality of his silence, and spent the early part of the journey trying to muster both the courage and the right words to address it.
At last, as they sat waiting for a traffic light to change, she said, eyes on the road ahead,
‘You said to me once that we’ve got to be honest with each other or we’re screwed.’
Strike kept his silence until the light turned green and they were moving forward again.
‘So?’
‘You said you worried more about me when I was out on my own than you’d worry about a male subcontractor, because the odds were always going to be against me if I came up against a violent—’
‘Exactly,’ said Strike, ‘which is why—’
‘Can I finish?’ said Robin, her tone calm, though her pulse was racing.
‘Carry on,’ said Strike coldly.
‘And you told me I needed to fix my panic attacks, because you didn’t want it on your conscience if I screwed up and got hurt again.’
Strike, who now knew exactly where the conversation was heading, set his jaw in a manner that Robin, had she seen it, would have described as mulish.
‘I’ve never nagged you about you looking after yourself,’ said Robin, her eyes still fixed on the road. ‘Not once. It’s your life, and your body. But the day you told me I had to get therapy, you said it wasn’t only me who’d have to live with the consequences if I got myself killed.’
‘So?’ said Strike again.
A mixture of masochism and sadism made him want to force her to be explicit. Now starting to feel aggravated, Robin said,
‘I know you’re in pain. You look terrible.’
‘Cheers. Just the shot in the arm I needed.’
‘Oh, for God’s—’ said Robin, now barely keeping a curb on her temper. ‘You’d never let anyone else go out on a job in your condition. How exactly do you think you’re going to defend yourself, or me, if—?’
‘So I’m dead weight in my own fucking agency, am I?’
‘Don’t twist my words, you know exactly what I’m saying—’
‘Yeah, I’m a middle-aged cripple you’d rather leave in the car—’
‘Who said anything about your age?’
‘—while you walk merrily into what could be—’
‘“Merrily”? Could you be any more patronising?’
‘—a fucking ambush—’
‘I’ve factored that in and—’
‘Oh, you’ve factored that in, have you? That’ll stop you being fucking stabbed through the neck when you walk in the door—’
‘FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, STRIKE!’ Robin shouted, slapping the steering wheel with both hands, the tension she’d been carrying with her since the bombing finding cathartic relief at last, ‘I DON’T WANT YOU TO FUCKING KILL YOURSELF! I know you feel – I don’t know – emasculated by being on crutches, or something—’
‘No, I bloody don’t—’
‘You talk about honesty, but you’re not fucking honest, not with me, not with yourself! You know why I’m saying this: I don’t want to lose you. Happy now?’
‘No, I’m not fucking happy,’ said Strike automatically, which was both true and untrue: in some barely acknowledged part of his brain he’d registered her words, and they’d lightened a burden he’d barely known he was carrying. ‘I think we’re dealing with a fucking serial killer here—’
‘So do I!’ said Robin, infuriated by the lack of acknowledgement of something it had cost her a great deal to admit. ‘But I know Zoe, and you don’t!’
‘Know her? You had one twenty-minute walk with her—’
‘Sometimes, twenty minutes is enough! She was terrified on the phone just now, and I don’t think it’s because Anomie had a knife to her throat: it’s because she’s about to betray Anomie! I know you think I’m some ditsy, naive fool who “merrily” walks into dangerous situations—’
‘I don’t think that,’ said Strike. ‘I don’t.’
Now there was silence in the BMW. Strike was processing what he’d just heard. I don’t want to lose you. Was that something a woman would say about what he feared, in his darkest moments, he’d become? A crock, a fat, forty-year-old, one-legged chain-smoker, deluded about his attractiveness and competence, still imagining himself the gifted amateur boxer with a washboard stomach who’d been capable of pulling the most beautiful woman at Oxford University?
But Robin wasn’t feeling comforted; on the contrary, she felt vulnerable and exposed, because she’d just said what she’d been trying not to say for a long time, and was scared that Strike had heard in that ‘I don’t want to lose you’ more than her worry that he’d do himself some cataclysmic injury in hauling himself up the steep concrete steps in Zoe’s building. She feared he’d divined her pain at the idea of Madeline, and her wish for an intimacy that she was trying to persuade herself she didn’t crave.
After a few minutes she said, trying to keep her voice even and rational,
‘You are this agency. It’d be nothing without you. I’ve never told you to rest up, or stop smoking, or eat better. It wasn’t my business – but now you’re making it my business. I’ve got a rape alarm in my bag and whoever’s in Zoe’s room when I get there, I’ll make sure they know I didn’t come alone. You look mean enough, even sitting in a car. Anyone looking out of the window’s going to think twice about hurting me, knowing you’re right outside, but you won’t be able to get up those stairs without endangering yourself, and I’d be more worried about you than myself if somebody came at us.’
Strike said nothing, because he was enduring the always-humiliating experience of facing his own hypocrisy and delusion. If it came to a knife fight, he was less than useless.
