To walk past a boy of her own son’s age while he lay bleeding in the gutter would have been impossible for Leda. The fact that the boy was clutching a bloody knife, that he was screaming imprecations and clearly in the grip of some kind of drug made no difference at all. Shanker found himself being mopped up and talked to as he had not been talked to since his own mother had died when he was eight. When he refused point blank to let the strange woman call an ambulance, for fear of what the police would do to him (Shanker had just stuck his knife through the thigh of his attacker), Leda took what, to her, was the only possible course: she helped him home to the squat and looked after him personally. After cutting up Band Aids and sticking them clumsily over the deep cut in a semblance of stitches, she cooked him a sloppy mess full of cigarette ash and told her bemused son to find a mattress where Shanker could sleep.
Leda treated Shanker from the first as though he were a long-lost nephew, and in return he had worshipped her in the way that only a broken boy clinging to the memory of a loving mother could. Once healed, he availed himself of her sincere invitation to drop round whenever he felt like it. Shanker talked to Leda as he could talk to no other human being and was perhaps the only person who could see no flaw in her. To Strike, he extended the respect he felt for his mother. The two boys, who in almost every other regard were as different as it was possible to be, were further bonded by a silent but powerful hatred of Whittaker, who had been insanely jealous of the new element in Leda’s life but wary of treating him with the disdain he showed Strike.
Strike was sure that Whittaker had recognized in Shanker the same deficit from which he himself suffered: a lack of normal boundaries. Whittaker had concluded, rightly, that his teenage stepson might well wish him dead, but that he was restrained by a desire not to distress his mother, a respect for the law and a determination not to make an irrevocable move that would forever blight his own prospects. Shanker, however, knew no such restraints and his long periods of cohabitation with the fractured family kept a precarious curb on Whittaker’s growing tendency towards violence.
In fact, it had been the regular presence of Shanker in the squat that had made Strike feel he could safely leave for university. He had not felt equal to putting into words what he most feared when he took leave of Shanker, but Shanker had understood.
“No worries, Bunsen, mate. No worries.”
Nevertheless, he could not always be there. On the day that Leda had died, Shanker had been away on one of his regular, drug-related business trips. Strike would never forget Shanker’s grief, his guilt, his uncontrollable tears when they next met. While Shanker had been negotiating a good price for a kilo of premium Bolivian cocaine in Kentish Town, Leda Strike had been slowly stiffening on a filthy mattress. The finding of the post-mortem was that she had ceased to breathe a full six hours before any of the other squat dwellers tried to rouse her from what they had thought was a profound slumber.
Like Strike, Shanker had been convinced from the first that Whittaker had killed her, and such was the violence of his grief and his desire for instant retribution that Whittaker might well have been glad he was taken into custody before Shanker could get his hands on him. Inadvisably allowed into the witness box to describe a maternal woman who had never touched heroin in her life, Shanker had screamed “That fucker done it!,” attempted to clamber over the barrier towards Whittaker and been bundled unceremoniously out of court.
Consciously pushing away these memories of the long-buried past, which smelled no better for being dug up again, Strike took a swig of hot tea and checked his mobile again. There was still no word from Robin.
19
Workshop of the Telescopes
He had known the second he laid eyes on The Secretary that morning that she was out of kilter, off-balance. Look at her, sitting in the window of the Garrick, the large students’ restaurant serving the LSE. She was plain today. Puffy, red-eyed, pale. He could probably take the seat next to her and the stupid bitch wouldn’t notice. Concentrating on the tart with the silver hair, who was working on a laptop a few tables away, she had no attention to spare for men. Suited him. She’d be noticing him before long. He’d be her last sight on earth.
He didn’t need to look like Pretty Boy today; he never approached them sexually if they were upset. That was when he became the friend in need, the avuncular stranger. Not all men are like that, darling. You deserve better. Let me walk you home. Come on, I’ll give you a lift. You could do almost anything with them if you made them forget you had a dick.
He entered the crowded restaurant, skulking around the counter, buying a coffee and finding himself a corner where he could watch her from behind.
Her engagement ring was missing. That was interesting. It shone a new light on the holdall she had been alternately carrying over her shoulder and hiding under tables. Was she planning to sleep somewhere other than the flat in Ealing? Might she be heading down a deserted street for once, a shortcut with poor lighting, a lonely underpass?
The very first time he’d killed had been like that: a simple question of seizing the moment. He remembered it in snapshots, like a slideshow, because it had been thrilling and new. That was before he had honed it to an art, before he had started playing it like the game it was.
She’d been plump and dark. Her mate had just left, got into a punter’s car and disappeared. The bloke in the car had not known that he was choosing which of them would survive the night.
He, meanwhile, had been driving up and down the street with his knife in his pocket. When he had been sure that she was alone, completely alone, he had drawn up and leaned across the passenger seat to talk to her through the window. His mouth had been dry as he asked for it. She had agreed a price and got in the car. They had driven down a nearby dead end where neither streetlights nor passersby would trouble them.
He got what he’d asked for, then, as she was straightening up, before he had even zipped up his flies, he had punched her, knocking her back into the car door, the back of her head banging off the window. Before she could make a sound he’d pulled out the knife.
The meaty thump of the blade in her flesh—the heat of her blood gushing over his hands—she did not even scream but gasped, moaned, sinking down in the seat as he pounded the blade into her again and again. He had torn the gold pendant from around her neck. He had not thought, then, about taking the ultimate trophy: a bit of her, but instead wiped his hands on her dress while she sat slumped beside him, twitching in her death throes. He had reversed out of the alleyway, trembling with fear and elation, and driven out of town with the body beside him, keeping carefully to the speed limit, looking in his rearview mirror every few seconds. There was a place he had checked out just a few days previously, a stretch of deserted countryside and an overgrown ditch. She had made a heavy, wet thump when he rolled her into it.
He had her pendant still, along with a few other souvenirs. They were his treasure. What, he wondered, would he take from The Secretary?
A Chinese boy near him was reading something on a tablet. Behavioral Economics. Dumb psychological crap. He had seen a psychologist once, been forced to.
“Tell me about your mother.”
The little bald man had literally said it, the joke line, the cliché. They were supposed to be smart, psychologists. He’d played along for the fun of it, telling the idiot about his mother: that she was a cold, mean, screwed-up bitch. His birth had been an inconvenience, an embarrassment to her, and she wouldn’t have cared if he’d lived or died.
“And your father?”
“I haven’t got a father,” he’d said.
“You mean you never see him?”
Silence.
“You don’t know who he is?”
Silence.
“Or you simply don’t like him?”
He said nothing. He was tired of playing along. People were brain dead if they fell for this kind of crap, but he had long since realized that other people were brain dead.
In any case, he’d told the truth: he had no father. The man who had filled that role, if you wanted to call it that—the one who had knocked him around day in, day out (“a hard man, but a fair man”)—had not fathered him. Violence and rejection, that was what family meant to him. At the same time, home was where he had learned to survive, to box clever. He had always known that he was superior, even when he’d been cowering under the kitchen table as a child. Yes, even then he’d known that he was made of better stuff than the bastard coming at him with his big fist and his clenched face…
The Secretary stood up, imitating the tart with the silver hair, who was just leaving with her laptop in a case. He downed his coffee in one and followed.
She was so easy today, so easy! She’d lost all her wariness; she barely had attention to spare for the platinum whore. He boarded the same Tube train as the pair of them, keeping his back to The Secretary but watching her reflection from between the reaching arms of a bunch of Kiwi tourists. He found it easy to slip into the crowd behind her when she left the train.
The three of them moved in procession, the silver-haired tart, The Secretary and him, up the stairs, onto the pavement, along the road to Spearmint Rhino… he was already late home, but he could not resist this. She had not stayed out after dark before and the holdall and the lack of engagement ring all added up to an irresistible opportunity. He would simply have to make up some story for It.
The silver-haired tart disappeared into the club. The Secretary slowed down and stood irresolute on the pavement. He slid out his mobile and pulled back into a shadowy doorway, watching her.
20
I never realized she was so undone.
Blue Öyster Cult, “Debbie Denise”
Lyrics by Patti Smith
Robin had forgotten her promise to Strike that she would not stay out after dark. In fact, she had hardly registered the fact that the sun had gone down until she realized that headlights were swooping past her and that the shop windows were lit up. Platinum had changed her routine today. She would usually have been inside Spearmint Rhino for several hours already, gyrating half naked for the benefit of strange men, not striding along the road, fully dressed in jeans, high-heeled boots and a fringed suede jacket. Presumably she had changed her shift, but she would soon be safely gyrating around a pole, which left the question of where Robin was going to spend the night.
Her mobile had been vibrating inside the pocket of her coat all day. Matthew had sent more than thirty texts.
We’ve got to talk.
Ring me, please.
Robin, we can’t sort anything out if you don’t talk to me.
As the day had worn on and her silence had not broken, he had started trying to call. Then the tone of his texts had changed.
Robin, you know I love you.
I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish I could change it, but I can’t.
It’s you I love, Robin. I always have and I always will.
She had not texted back, or picked up his calls, or rung him. All she knew was that she could not bear to go back to the flat, not tonight. What would happen tomorrow, or the next day, she had no idea. She was hungry, exhausted and numb.
Strike had become almost as importuning towards late afternoon.
Where are you? Ring me pls.
She had texted him back, because she could not face talking to him either.
Can’t speak. Platinum’s not at work.
She and Strike maintained a certain emotional distance, always, and she was afraid that if he were kind to her she would cry, revealing the sort of weakness that he would deplore in an assistant. With virtually no cases left, with the threat of the man who had sent the leg hanging over her, she must not give Strike another reason to tell her to stay at home.
He had not been satisfied with her response.
Call me asap.
She had ignored that one on the basis that she might easily have failed to receive it, being close to the Tube when he sent it and shortly afterwards having no reception as she and Platinum rode the Tube back to Tottenham Court Road. On emerging from the station Robin found another missed call from Strike on her phone, as well as a new text from Matthew.
I need to know whether you’re coming home tonight. I’m worried sick about you. Just text to tell me you’re alive, that’s all I’m asking.
“Oh, don’t flatter yourself,” muttered Robin. “Like I’d kill myself over you.”
A strangely familiar paunchy man in a suit walked past Robin, illuminated by the glow of Spearmint Rhino’s canopy. It was Two-Times. Robin wondered whether she imagined the self-satisfied smirk he gave her.
Was he going inside to watch his girlfriend gyrate for other men? Did he get a thrill out of having his sex life documented? Precisely what kind of weirdo was he?
Robin turned away. She needed to make a decision as to what to do tonight. A large man in a beanie hat appeared to be arguing into his mobile phone in a dark doorway a hundred yards away.
The disappearance of Platinum had robbed Robin of purpose. Where was she going to sleep? As she stood there, irresolute, a group of young men walked past her, deliberately close, one of them brushing against her holdall. She could smell Lynx and lager.
“Got your costume in there, darling?”
She became aware of the fact that she was standing outside a lap-dancing club. As she turned automatically in the direction of Strike’s office, her mobile rang. Without thinking, she answered it.
“Where the hell have you been?” said Strike’s angry voice in her ear.
She barely had time to be glad that he wasn’t Matthew before he said:
“I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day! Where are you?”
“On Tottenham Court Road,” she said, walking fast away from the still-jeering men. “Platinum’s only just gone inside and Two—”
“What did I tell you about not staying out after dark?”
“It’s well-lit,” said Robin.
She was trying to remember whether she had ever noticed a Travelodge near here. She needed somewhere clean and cheap. It must be cheap, because she was drawing on the joint account; she was determined not to spend more than she had put in.
“Are you all right?” asked Strike, slightly less aggressively.
A lump rose in her throat.
“Fine,” she said, as forcefully as she could. She was trying to be professional, to be what Strike wanted.
“I’m still at the office,” he said. “Did you say you’re on Tottenham Court Road?”
“I’ve got to go, sorry,” she said, in a tight, cold voice and hung up.
The fear of crying had become so overwhelming that she had to end the call. She thought he had been on the verge of offering to meet her, and if they met she would tell him everything, and she must not do that.
Tears were suddenly pouring down her face. She had no one else. There! She had admitted it to herself at last. The people they had meals with at weekends, the ones they went to watch rugby with: they were all Matthew’s friends, Matthew’s work colleagues, Matthew’s old university friends. She had nobody of her own but Strike.
“Oh God,” she said, wiping her eyes and nose on the sleeve of her coat.
“You all right, sweetheart?” called a toothless tramp from a doorway.
She was not sure why she ended up in the Tottenham, except that the bar staff knew her, she was familiar with where the Ladies was, and it was somewhere that Matthew had never been. All she wanted was a quiet corner in which she could look up cheap places to stay. She was also craving a drink, which was most unlike her. After splashing her face with cold water in the bathroom she bought herself a glass of red wine, took it to a table and pulled out her phone again. She had missed another call from Strike.
Men at the bar were looking over at her. She knew what she must look like, tear-stained and alone, her holdall beside her. Well, she couldn’t help that. She typed into her mobile: Travelodges near Tottenham Court Road, and waite
d for the slow response, drinking her wine faster than perhaps she ought to have done on a virtually empty stomach. No breakfast, no lunch: a bag of crisps and an apple consumed at the student café where Platinum had been studying were all she had eaten that day.
There was a Travelodge in High Holborn. That would have to do. She felt slightly calmer for knowing where she was going to spend the night. Careful not to make eye contact with any of the men at the bar, she went up to get a second glass of wine. Perhaps she ought to call her mother, she thought suddenly, but the prospect made her feel tearful all over again. She could not face Linda’s love and disappointment, not yet.
A large figure in a beanie hat entered the pub, but Robin was keeping her attention determinedly on her change and her wine, giving none of the hopeful men lurking at the bar the slightest reason to suppose that she wanted any of them to join her.
The second glass of wine made her feel much more relaxed. She remembered how Strike had got so drunk here, in this very pub, that he could barely walk. That had been the only night that he had ever shared personal information. Maybe that was the real reason she had been drawn here, she thought, raising her eyes to the colorful glass cupola overhead. This was the bar where you went to drink when you found out that the person you loved was unfaithful.
“You alone?” said a man’s voice.
“Waiting for someone,” she said.
He was slightly blurred when she looked up at him, a wiry blond man with bleached blue eyes, and she could tell that he did not believe her.
“Can I wait with you?”
“No, you fucking can’t,” said another, familiar voice.
Strike had arrived, massive, scowling, glaring at the stranger, who retreated with ill grace to a couple of friends at the bar.
“What are you doing here?” asked Robin, surprised to find that her tongue felt numb and thick after two glasses of wine.