“Right,” said Strike, after reading the results, “I’m going to Barrow-in-Furness tomorrow.”
“You’re—what?” asked Robin, bewildered. “Why?”
“Brockbank’s there—or he’s supposed to be.”
“How do you know?”
“I found out in Edinburgh that his pension’s being sent there and I’ve just looked up the old family address. Someone called Holly Brockbank’s living in the house now. Obviously a relative. She should know where he is. If I can establish that he’s been in Cumbria for the last few weeks, we’ll know he hasn’t been delivering legs or stalking you in London, won’t we?”
“What aren’t you telling me about Brockbank?” Robin asked, her blue-gray eyes narrowing.
Strike ignored the question.
“I want you to stay at home while I’m out of town. Sod Two-Times, he’s got only himself to blame if Platinum cops off with another punter. We can live without his money.”
“That’ll leave us with a single client,” Robin pointed out.
“I’ve got a feeling we’ll have none at all unless this nutter’s caught,” said Strike. “People aren’t going to want to come near us.”
“How are you going to get to Barrow?” asked Robin.
A plan was dawning. Hadn’t she foreseen this very eventuality?
“Train,” he said, “you know I can’t afford a hire car right now.”
“How about,” said Robin triumphantly, “I drive you in my new—well, it’s ancient, but it goes fine—Land Rover!”
“Since when have you had a Land Rover?”
“Since Sunday. It’s my parents’ old car.”
“Ah,” he said. “Well, that sounds great—”
“But?”
“No, it’d be a real help—”
“But?” repeated Robin, who could tell that he had some reservations.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be up there.”
“That doesn’t matter. You’ve just told me I’ll be moldering at home in any case.”
Strike hesitated. How much of her desire to drive him was rooted in the hope of wounding Matthew, he wondered. He could well imagine how the accountant would view an open-ended trip north, the two of them alone, staying overnight. A clean and professional relationship ought not to include using each other to make partners jealous.
“Oh shit,” he said suddenly, plunging his hand into his pocket for his mobile.
“What’s the matter?” asked Robin, alarmed.
“I’ve just remembered—I was supposed to be meeting Elin last night. Fuck—totally forgot. Wait there.”
He walked out into the street, leaving Robin to her lunch. Why, she wondered, her eyes on Strike’s large figure as he paced up and down outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, phone pressed to his ear, hadn’t Elin called or texted to ask where Strike was? From there it was an easy step to wondering—for the first time, no matter what Strike had suspected—what Matthew was going to say if she returned home only to pick up the Land Rover and disappeared with several days’ worth of clothes in a bag.
He can’t complain, she thought, with a bold attempt at defiance. It’s nothing to do with him anymore.
Yet the thought of having to see Matthew, even briefly, was unnerving.
Strike returned, rolling his eyes.
“Doghouse,” he said succinctly. “I’ll meet her tonight instead.”
Robin did not know why the announcement that Strike was off to meet Elin should lower her spirits. She supposed that she was tired. The various strains and emotional shocks of the last thirty-six hours were not to be overcome in one pub lunch. The office workers nearby were now screeching with laughter as a pair of fluffy handcuffs fell out of another package.
It isn’t her birthday, Robin realized. She’s getting married.
“Well, am I driving you, or what?” she asked curtly.
“Yeah,” said Strike, who appeared to be warming to the idea (or was he merely cheered by the thought of his date with Elin?). “You know what, that’d be great. Thanks.”
23
Moments of pleasure, in a world of pain.
Blue Öyster Cult, “Make Rock Not War”
Mist lay in thick, soft layers like cobweb over the treetops of Regent’s Park next morning. Strike, who had swiftly silenced his alarm so as not to wake Elin, stood balancing on his single foot at the window, the curtain behind him to block out the light. For a minute he looked out upon the ghostly park and was transfixed by the effect of the rising sun on leafy branches rising from the sea of vapor. You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it, but the battle to get through the days made it easy to forget that this totally cost-free luxury existed. He carried memories like this from his childhood, especially those parts of it that he had spent in Cornwall: the glitter of the sea as you first saw it on a morning as blue as a butterfly’s wing; the mysterious emerald-and-shadow world of the Gunnera Passage at Trebah Garden; distant white sails bobbing like seabirds on blustery gunmetal waves.
Behind him in the dark bed, Elin shifted and sighed. Strike moved carefully out from behind the curtain, took the prosthesis leaning against the wall and sat down on one of her bedroom chairs to attach it. Then, still moving as quietly as possible, he headed for the bathroom with the day’s clothes in his arms.
They’d had their first row the previous evening: a landmark in every relationship. The total absence of communication when he failed to turn up for their date on Tuesday ought to have been a warning, but he had been too busy with Robin and a dismembered body to give it much thought. True, she had been frosty when he had phoned to apologize, but the fact that she had so readily agreed to a rescheduled date had not prepared him for a near-glacial reception when he had turned up in person twenty-four hours later. After a dinner eaten to the accompaniment of painful, stilted conversation he had offered to clear out and leave her to her resentment. She had become briefly angry as he reached for his coat, but it was the feeble spurt of a damp match; she had then crumbled into a tearful, semi-apologetic tirade in which he learned, firstly, that she was in therapy, secondly, that her therapist had identified a tendency towards passive aggression and, thirdly, that she had been so deeply wounded by his failure to turn up on Tuesday that she had drunk an entire bottle of wine alone in front of the television.
Strike had apologized again, offering in extenuation a difficult case, a tricky and unexpected development, expressing sincere remorse for having forgotten their date, but added that if she could not forgive, he had better clear out.
She had flung herself into his arms; they had gone straight to bed and had the best sex of their brief relationship.
Shaving in Elin’s immaculate bathroom with its sunken lights and snow-white towels, Strike reflected that he had got off pretty lightly. If he had forgotten to turn up to a date with Charlotte, the woman with whom he had been involved, on and off, for sixteen years, he would have been carrying physical wounds right now, searching for her in the cold dawn, or perhaps trying to restrain her from throwing herself from the high balcony.
He had called what he felt for Charlotte love and it remained the most profound feeling he had had for any woman. In the pain it had caused him and its lasting after-effects it had more resembled a virus that, even now, he was not sure he had overcome. Not seeing her, never calling her, never using the new email address she had set up to show him her distraught face on the day of her wedding to an old boyfriend: this was his self-prescribed treatment, which was keeping the symptoms at bay. Yet he knew he had been left impaired, that he no longer had the capacity to feel in the way that he had once felt. Elin’s distress of the previous evening had not touched him at his core in the way Charlotte’s had once done. He felt as though his capacity for loving had been blunted, the nerve endings severed. He had not intended to wound Elin; he did not enjoy seeing her cry; yet the ability to feel empathetic pain seemed to have closed down. A small part of him, in truth, had been mentally
planning his route home as she sobbed.
Strike dressed in the bathroom then moved quietly back into the dimly lit hall, where he stowed his shaving things in the holdall he had packed for Barrow-in-Furness. A door stood ajar to his right. On a whim, he pushed it wider.
The little girl whom he had never met slept here when not at her father’s. The pink and white room was immaculate, with a ceiling mural of fairies around the cornice. Barbies sat in a neat line on a shelf, their smiles vacant, their pointy breasts covered in a rainbow of gaudy dresses. A fake-fur rug with a polar bear’s head lay on the floor beside a tiny white four-poster.
Strike knew hardly any little girls. He had two godsons, neither of whom he had particularly wanted, and three nephews. His oldest friend back in Cornwall had daughters, but Strike had virtually nothing to do with them; they rushed past him in a blur of ponytails and casual waves: “Hi Uncle Corm, bye Uncle Corm.” He had grown up, of course, with a sister, although Lucy had never been indulged with sugar-pink-canopied four-posters, much as she might have wanted them.
Brittany Brockbank had had a cuddly lion. It came back to him suddenly, out of nowhere, looking at the polar bear on the floor: a cuddly lion with a comical face. She had dressed it in a pink tutu and it had been lying on the sofa when her stepfather came running at Strike, a broken beer bottle in his hand.
Strike turned back to the hall, feeling in his pocket. He always carried a notebook and pen on him. He scribbled a brief note to Elin, alluding to the best part of the previous night, and left it on the hall table so as not to risk waking her. Then, as quietly as he had done everything else, he hoisted his holdall onto his shoulder and let himself out of the flat. He was meeting Robin at West Ealing station at eight.
The last traces of mist were lifting from Hastings Road when Robin left her house, flustered and heavy-eyed, a carrier bag of food in one hand and a holdall full of clean clothes in the other. She unlocked the rear of the old gray Land Rover, swung the clothes into it and hurried around to the driver’s seat with the food.
Matthew had just tried to hug her in the hall and she had forcibly resisted, two hands on his smooth warm chest, pushing him away, shouting at him to get off. He had been wearing only boxer shorts. Now she was afraid that he might be struggling into some clothes, ready to give chase. She slammed the car door and dragged on her seatbelt, eager to be gone, but as she turned the key in the ignition Matthew burst out of the house, barefoot, in T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. She had never seen his expression so naked, so vulnerable.
“Robin,” he called as she stepped on the accelerator and pulled away from the curb. “I love you. I love you!”
She spun the wheel and moved precariously out of the parking space, missing their neighbor’s Honda by inches. She could see Matthew shrinking in the rearview mirror; he, whose self-possession was usually total, was proclaiming his love at the top of his voice, risking the neighbors’ curiosity, their scorn and their laughter.
Robin’s heart thumped painfully in her chest. A quarter past seven; Strike would not be at the station yet. She turned left at the end of the road, intent only on putting distance between herself and Matthew.
He had risen at dawn, while she was trying to pack without waking him.
“Where are you going?”
“To help Strike with the investigation.”
“You’re going away overnight?”
“I expect so.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
She was afraid to tell him their destination in case he came after them. Matthew’s behavior when she had arrived home the previous evening had left her shaken. He had cried and begged. She had never seen him like that, not even after his mother’s death.
“Robin, we’ve got to talk.”
“We’ve talked enough.”
“Does your mother know where you’re going?”
“Yes.”
She was lying. Robin had not told her mother about the ruptured engagement yet, nor that she was heading off north with Strike. After all, she was twenty-six; it was none of her mother’s business. She knew, though, that Matthew was really asking whether she had told her mother that the wedding was off, because they were both aware that she would not have been getting in the Land Rover to drive off to an undisclosed location with Strike if their engagement had still been intact. The sapphire ring was lying exactly where she had left it, on a bookshelf loaded with his old accountancy textbooks.
“Oh shit,” Robin whispered, blinking away tears as she turned at random through the quiet streets, trying not to focus on her naked finger, or on the memory of Matthew’s anguished face.
One short walk took Strike much further than simple physical distance. This, he thought as he smoked his first cigarette of the day, was London: you started in a quiet, symmetrical Nash terrace that resembled a sculpture in vanilla ice-cream. Elin’s pin-striped Russian neighbor had been getting into his Audi, and Strike had received a curt nod in response to his “Morning.” A short walk past the silhouettes of Sherlock Holmes at Baker Street station and he was sitting on a grimy Tube train surrounded by chattering Polish workmen, fresh and businesslike at 7 a.m. Then bustling Paddington, forcing a path through commuters and coffee shops, holdall over shoulder. Finally a few stops on the Heathrow Connect, accompanied by a large West Country family who were already dressed for Florida in spite of the early morning chill. They watched the station signs like nervous meerkats, their hands gripping their suitcase handles as though expecting an imminent mugging.
Strike arrived at West Ealing station fifteen minutes early and desperate for a cigarette. Dropping the holdall by his feet he lit up, hoping that Robin would not be too prompt, because he doubted that she would want him smoking in the Land Rover. He had only taken a couple of satisfying drags, however, when the box-like car rounded the corner, Robin’s bright red-gold head clearly visible through the windscreen.
“I don’t mind,” she called over the running engine as he hoisted his holdall back onto his shoulder and made to extinguish the cigarette, “as long as you keep the window open.”
He climbed inside, shoved his bag into the back and slammed the door.
“You can’t make it smell worse than it already does,” said Robin, managing the stiff gears with her usual expertise. “It’s pure dog in here.”
Strike pulled on a seatbelt as they accelerated away from the pavement, looking around at the interior of the car. Shabby and scuffed, a pungent fug of Wellington boot and Labrador certainly pervaded. It reminded Strike of military vehicles that he had driven across all terrains in Bosnia and Afghanistan, but at the same time it added something to his picture of Robin’s background. This Land Rover spoke of muddy tracks and plowed fields. He remembered her saying that an uncle had a farm.
“Did you ever have a pony?”
She glanced at him, surprised. In that fleeting full-face look he noted the heaviness of her eyes, her pallor. She had clearly not slept much.
“What on earth do you want to know that for?”
“This feels like the kind of car you’d take to the gymkhana.”
Her reply had a touch of defensiveness:
“Yes, I did.”
He laughed, pushing the window down as far as it would go and resting his left hand there with the cigarette.
“Why is that funny?”
“I don’t know. What was it called?”
“Angus,” she said, turning left. “He was a bugger. Always carting me off.”
“I don’t trust horses,” said Strike, smoking.
“Have you ever been on one?”
It was Robin’s turn to smile. She thought it might be one of the few places where she would see Strike truly discomforted, on the back of a horse.
“No,” said Strike. “And I intend to keep it that way.”
“My uncle’s got something that’d carry you,” said Robin. “Clydesdale. It’s massive.”
“Point taken,” said Str
ike drily, and she laughed.
Smoking in silence as she concentrated on navigating through the increasingly heavy morning traffic, Strike noted how much he liked making her laugh. He also recognized that he felt much happier, much more comfortable, sitting here in this ramshackle Land Rover talking inconsequential nonsense with Robin than he had felt last night at dinner with Elin.
He was not a man who told himself comfortable lies. He might have argued that Robin represented the ease of friendship; Elin, the pitfalls and pleasures of a sexual relationship. He knew that the truth was more complicated, and certainly made more so by the fact that the sapphire ring had vanished from Robin’s finger. He had known, almost from the moment they had met, that Robin represented a threat to his peace of mind, but endangering the best working relationship of his life would be an act of willful self-sabotage that he, after years of a destructive on-off relationship, after the hard graft and sacrifice that had gone into building his business, could not and would not let happen.
“Are you ignoring me on purpose?”
“What?”
It was just plausible that he had not heard her, so noisy was the old Land Rover’s engine.
“I said, how are things with Elin?”
She had never asked him outright about a relationship before. Strike supposed the confidences of two nights ago had moved them onto a different level of intimacy. He would have avoided this, if he could.
“All right,” he said repressively, throwing away his cigarette butt and pulling up the window, which marginally reduced the noise.
“She forgave you, then?”
“What for?”
“For completely forgetting that you had a date!” said Robin.
“Oh, that. Yeah. Well, no—then, yeah.”