“Looking for you,” said Strike.
“How did you know I was—?”
“I’m a detective. How many of those have you had?” he asked, looking down at her wineglass.
“Only one,” she lied, so he went to the bar for another, and a pint of Doom Bar for himself. As he ordered, a large man in a beanie hat ducked out of the door, but Strike was more interested in keeping an eye on the blond man who was still staring over at Robin and only seemed to give up on her once Strike reappeared, glowering, with two drinks and sat down opposite her.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t give me that. You look like bloody death.”
“Well,” said Robin, taking a large slurp of wine, “consider my morale boosted.”
Strike gave a short laugh.
“Why have you got a holdall with you?” When she did not answer, he said, “Where’s your engagement ring?”
She opened her mouth to answer but a treacherous desire to cry rose to drown the words. After a short inner struggle and another gulp of wine she said:
“I’m not engaged anymore.”
“Why not?”
“This is rich, coming from you.”
I’m drunk, she thought, as though watching herself from outside her own body. Look at me. I’m drunk on two and a half glasses of wine, no food and no sleep.
“What’s rich?” asked Strike, confused.
“We don’t talk about personal… you don’t talk about personal stuff.”
“I seem to remember spilling my guts all over you in this very pub.”
“Once,” said Robin.
Strike deduced from her pink cheeks and her thickened speech that she was not on her second glass of wine. Both amused and concerned, he said:
“I think you need something to eat.”
“That’s ’zacktly what I said to you,” Robin replied, “that night when you were… and we ended up having a kebab—and I do not,” she said with dignity, “want a kebab.”
“Well,” said Strike, “y’know, it’s London. We can probably find you something that isn’t a kebab.”
“I like crisps,” said Robin, so he bought her some.
“What’s going on?” he repeated on his return. After a few seconds of watching her attempting to open the crisps he took them from her to do it himself.
“Nothing. I’m going to sleep in a Travelodge tonight, that’s all.”
“A Travelodge.”
“Yeah. There’s one in… there’s one…”
She looked down at her dead mobile and realized that she had forgotten to charge it the previous night.
“I can’t remember where it is,” she said. “Just leave me, I’m fine,” she added, groping in her holdall for something to blow her nose on.
“Yeah,” he said heavily, “I’m totally reassured now I’ve seen you.”
“I am fine,” she said fiercely. “I’ll be at work as usual tomorrow, you wait and see.”
“You think I came to find you because I’m worried about work?”
“Don’t be nice!” she groaned, burying her face in her tissues. “I can’t take it! Be normal!”
“What’s normal?” he asked, confused.
“G-grumpy and uncommunic—uncommunica—”
“What do you want to communicate about?”
“Nothing in particular,” she lied. “I just thought… keep things profess’nal.”
“What’s happened between you and Matthew?”
“What’s happening b’tween you and Elin?” she countered.
“How’s that important?” he asked, nonplussed.
“Same thing,” she said vaguely, draining her third glass. “I’d like ’nother—”
“You’re having a soft drink this time.”
She examined the ceiling while waiting for him. There were theatrical scenes painted up there: Bottom cavorted with Titania amid a group of fairies.
“Things are going OK with Elin,” he told her when he sat back down, having decided that an exchange of information was the easiest way to make her talk about her own problems. “It suits me, keeping it low key. She’s got a daughter she doesn’t want me getting too close to. Messy divorce.”
“Oh,” said Robin, blinking at him over her glass of Coke. “How did you meet her?”
“Through Nick and Ilsa.”
“How do they know her?”
“They don’t. They had a party and she came along with her brother. He’s a doctor, works with Nick. They hadn’t ever met her before.”
“Oh,” said Robin again.
She had briefly forgotten her own troubles, diverted by this glimpse into Strike’s private world. So normal, so unremarkable! A party and he had gone along and got talking to the beautiful blonde. Women liked Strike—she had come to realize that over the months they had worked together. She had not understood the appeal when she had started working for him. He was so very different from Matthew.
“Does Ilsa like Elin?” asked Robin.
Strike was startled by this flash of perception.
“Er—yeah, I think so,” he lied.
Robin sipped her Coke.
“OK,” said Strike, restraining his impatience with difficulty, “your turn.”
“We’ve split up,” she said.
Interrogation technique told him to remain silent, and after a minute or so the decision was vindicated.
“He… told me something,” she said. “Last night.”
Strike waited.
“And we can’t go back from that. Not that.”
She was pale and composed but he could almost feel the anguish behind the words. Still he waited.
“He slept with someone else,” she said in a small, tight voice.
There was a pause. She picked up her crisp packet, found that she had finished the contents and dropped it on the table.
“Shit,” said Strike.
He was surprised: not that Matthew had slept with another woman, but that he had admitted it. His impression of the handsome young accountant was of a man who knew how to run his life to suit himself, to compartmentalize and categorize where necessary.
“And not just once,” said Robin, in that same tight voice. “He was doing it for months. With someone we both know. Sarah Shadlock. She’s an old friend of his from university.”
“Christ,” said Strike. “I’m sorry.”
He was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain she was in. Yet the revelation had caused certain other feelings—feelings he usually kept under tight rein, considering them both misguided and dangerous—to flex inside him, to test their strength against their restraining bonds.
Don’t be a stupid fucker, he told himself. That’s one thing that can never happen. It’d screw everything up royally.
“What made him tell you?” Strike asked.
She did not answer, but the question brought back the scene in awful clarity.
Their magnolia sitting room was far too tiny to accommodate a couple in such a state of fury. They had driven all the way home from Yorkshire in the Land Rover that Matthew had not wanted. Somewhere along the way, an incensed Matthew had asserted that it was a matter of time before Strike made a pass at Robin and what was more, he suspected that she would welcome the advance.
“He’s my friend, that’s all!” she had bellowed at Matthew from beside their cheap sofa, their weekend bags still in the hall. “For you to suggest I’m turned on by the fact he’s had his leg—”
“You’re so bloody naive!” he had bellowed. “He’s your friend until he tries to get you into bed, Robin—”
“Who are you judging him by? Are you biding your time before you jump on your coworkers?”
“Of course I’m bloody not, but you’re so frigging starry-eyed about him—he’s a man, it’s just the two of you in the office—”
“He’s my friend, like you’re friends with Sarah Shadlock but you’ve never—”
She had seen it in
his face. An expression she had never noticed before passed across it like a shadow. Guilt seemed to slide physically over the high cheekbones, the clean jaw, the hazel eyes she had adored for years.
“—have you?” she said, her tone suddenly wondering. “Have you?”
He hesitated too long.
“No,” he had said forcefully, like a paused film jerking back into action. “Of course n—”
“You have,” she said. “You’ve slept with her.”
She could see it in his face. He did not believe in male-female friendships because he had never had one. He and Sarah had been sleeping together.
“When?” she had asked. “Not… was it then?”
“I didn’t—”
She heard the feeble protestation of a man who knows he has lost, who had even wanted to lose. That had haunted her all night and all day: on some level, he had wanted Robin to know.
Her strange calm, more stunned than accusatory, had led him on to tell her everything. Yes, it had been then. He felt terrible about it, he always had—but he and Robin hadn’t been sleeping together at the time and, one night, Sarah had been comforting him, and, well, things had got out of hand—
“She was comforting you?” Robin had repeated. Rage had come then, at last, unfreezing her from her state of stunned disbelief. “She was comforting you?”
“It was a difficult time for me too, you know!” he had shouted.
Strike watched as Robin shook her head unconsciously, trying to clear it, but the recollections had turned her pink and her eyes were sparkling again.
“What did you say?” she asked Strike, confused.
“I asked what made him tell you.”
“I don’t know. We were in the middle of a row. He thinks…” She took a deep breath. Two-thirds of a bottle of wine on an empty stomach was leading her to emulate Matthew’s honesty. “He doesn’t believe you and I are just friends.”
This was no surprise to Strike. He had read suspicion in every look Matthew had ever given him, heard insecurity in every chippy comment thrown his way.
“So,” Robin went on unsteadily, “I pointed out that we are just friends, and that he’s got a platonic friend himself, dear old Sarah Shadlock. So then it all came out. He and Sarah had an affair at university while I was… while I was at home.”
“That long ago?” Strike said.
“You think I shouldn’t mind if it was seven years ago?” she demanded. “If he’s lied about it ever since and we constantly see her?”
“I was just surprised,” said Strike evenly, refusing to be drawn into a fight, “that he’s owned up to it after all this time.”
“Oh,” said Robin. “Well, he was ashamed. Because of when it happened.”
“At university?” said Strike, confused.
“It was right after I dropped out,” said Robin.
“Ah,” said Strike.
They had never discussed what had made her leave her psychology degree and return to Masham.
Robin had not intended to tell Strike the story, but all resolutions were adrift tonight on the little sea of alcohol with which she had filled her hungry and exhausted body. What did it matter if she told him? Without that information he would not have the full picture or be able to advise her what to do next. She was relying on him, she realized dimly, to help her. Whether she liked it or not—whether he liked it or not—Strike was her best friend in London. She had never looked that fact squarely in the face before. Alcohol buoyed you up and it washed your eyes clean. In vino veritas, they said, didn’t they? Strike would know. He had an odd, occasional habit of quoting Latin.
“I didn’t want to leave uni,” said Robin slowly, her head swimming, “but something happened and afterwards I had problems…”
That was no good. That didn’t explain it.
“I was coming home from a friend’s, in another hall of residence,” she said. “It wasn’t that late… only eight o’clock or something… but there had been a warning out about him—on the local news—”
That was no good either. Far too much detail. What she needed was a bald statement of fact, not to talk him through every little bit of it, the way she’d had to in court.
She took a deep breath, looked into Strike’s face and read dawning comprehension there. Relieved not to have to spell it out, she asked:
“Please could I have some more crisps?”
When he returned from the bar he handed them to her in silence. She did not like the look on his face.
“Don’t go thinking—it doesn’t make any difference!” she said desperately. “It was twenty minutes of my life. It was something that happened to me. It isn’t me. It doesn’t define me.”
Strike guessed that they were phrases she had been led to embrace in some kind of therapy. He had interviewed rape victims. He knew the forms of words they were given to make sense of what, to a woman, was incomprehensible. A lot of things about Robin were explained now. The long allegiance to Matthew, for instance: the safe boy from home.
However, the drunken Robin read in Strike’s silence the thing she had most feared: a shift in the way he saw her, from equal to victim.
“It doesn’t make any difference!” she repeated furiously. “I’m still the same!”
“I know that,” he said, “but it’s still one fucking horrible thing to have happened to you.”
“Well, yes… it was…” she muttered, mollified. Then, firing up again: “My evidence got him. I noticed things about him while… He had this patch of white skin under his ear—they call it vitiligo—and one of his pupils was fixed, dilated.”
She was gabbling slightly now, wolfing down her third packet of crisps.
“He tried to strangle me; I went limp and played dead and he ran for it. He’d attacked two other girls wearing the mask and neither of them could tell the police anything about him. My evidence got him put away.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Strike.
She found this response satisfactory. They sat in silence for a minute while she finished the crisps.
“Only, afterwards, I couldn’t leave my room,” she said, as though there had been no pause. “In the end, the university sent me home. I was only supposed to take a term off, but I—I never went back.”
Robin contemplated this fact, staring into space. Matthew had urged her to stay at home. When her agoraphobia had resolved, which had taken more than a year, she had begun visiting him at his university in Bath, wandering hand in hand among dwellings of soft Cotswold stone, down sweeping Regency crescents, along the tree-lined banks of the River Avon. Every time they had gone out with his friends Sarah Shadlock had been there, braying at Matthew’s jokes, touching his arm, leading the conversation constantly to the good times they all enjoyed when Robin, the tedious girlfriend from home, was not present…
She was comforting me. It was a difficult time for me too, you know!
“Right,” said Strike, “we’ve got to get you a place to spend tonight.”
“I’m going to the Travel—”
“No, you’re not.”
He did not want her staying in a place where anonymous people might wander the corridors unchallenged, or could walk in off the street. Perhaps he was being paranoid, but he wanted her somewhere that a scream would not be lost in the raucous cries of hen parties.
“I could sleep in the office,” said Robin, swaying as she tried to stand; he grabbed her by the arm. “If you’ve still got that camp—”
“You’re not sleeping in the office,” he said. “I know a good place. My aunt and uncle stayed there when they came up to see The Mousetrap. C’mon, give me the holdall.”
He had once before put his arm around Robin’s shoulders but that had been quite different: he had been using her as a walking stick. This time it was she who could barely move in a straight line. He found her waist and held her steady as they left the pub.
“Matthew,” she said, as they moved off, “would not like this.”
Strike said nothing. In spite of everything he had heard, he was not as sure as Robin was that the relationship was over. They had been together nine years and there was a wedding dress ready and waiting in Masham. He had been careful to offer no criticism of Matthew that might be repeated to her ex-fiancé in the renewal of hostilities that was surely coming, because the accumulated ties of nine years could not be severed in a single night. His reticence was for Robin’s sake rather than his own. He had no fear of Matthew.
“Who was that man?” asked Robin sleepily, after they had walked a hundred yards in silence.
“Which man?”
“That man this morning… I thought he might be the leg man… he scared the hell out of me.”
“Ah… that’s Shanker. He’s an old friend.”
“He’s terrifying.”
“Shanker wouldn’t hurt you,” Strike assured her. Then, as an afterthought: “But don’t ever leave him alone in the office.”
“Why not?”
“He’ll nick anything that’s not nailed down. He does nothing for nothing.”
“Where did you meet him?”
The story of Shanker and Leda took them all the way to Frith Street, where quiet town houses looked down upon them, exuding dignity and order.
“Here?” said Robin, gazing open-mouthed up at Hazlitt’s Hotel. “I can’t stay here—this’ll be expensive!”
“I’m paying,” said Strike. “Think of it as this year’s bonus. No arguments,” he added, as the door opened and a smiling young man stood back to let them in. “It’s my fault you need somewhere safe.”
The wood-paneled hall was cozy, with the feeling of a private house. There was only one way in and nobody could open the front door from outside.
When he had given the young man his credit card Strike saw the unsteady Robin to the foot of the stairs.
“You can take tomorrow morning off if you—”
“I’ll be there at nine,” she said. “Cormoran, thanks for—for—”
“Not a problem. Sleep well.”
Frith Street was quiet as he closed the Hazlitt’s door behind him. Strike set off, his hands deep in his pockets, lost in thought.
She had been raped and left for dead. Holy shit.
Eight days previously some bastard had handed her a woman’s severed leg and she had not breathed a word of her past, not asked for special dispensation to take time off, nor deviated in any respect from the total professionalism she brought to work every morning. It was he, without even knowing her history, who had insisted on the best rape alarm, on nothing after dark, on checking in with her regularly through the working day…