“I am,” said Strike. “Definitely ill, is he?”
“The neighbor reckons he needs sticks. He’s been in and out of hospital a lot, apparently.”
The leather-padded screen overhead was showing last month’s Arsenal–Liverpool match with the sound turned down. Strike watched as van Persie sank the penalty that he had thought, watching back on his tiny portable at the flat, might help Arsenal to a desperately needed win. It hadn’t happened, of course. The Gunners’ fortunes were currently sinking with his own.
“You seeing anyone?” asked Wardle abruptly.
“What?” said Strike, startled.
“Coco liked the look of you,” said Wardle, making sure that Strike saw him smirking as he said it, the better to impress upon Strike that he thought this ludicrous. “The wife’s friend, Coco. Red hair, remember?”
Strike remembered that Coco was a burlesque dancer.
“I said I’d ask,” said Wardle. “I’ve told her you’re a miserable bastard. She says she doesn’t mind.”
“Tell her I’m flattered,” said Strike, which was the truth, “but yeah, I’m seeing someone.”
“Not your work partner, is it?” asked Wardle.
“No,” said Strike. “She’s getting married.”
“You missed a trick there, mate,” said Wardle, yawning. “I would.”
“So, let me get this straight,” said Robin in the office next morning. “As soon as we find out that Laing actually does live in Wollaston Close, you want me to stop watching it.”
“Hear me out,” said Strike, who was making tea. “He’s away, according to the neighbors.”
“You’ve just told me you don’t think he’s really gone to Scotland!”
“The fact that the door of his flat’s been closed ever since you’ve been watching it suggests he’s gone somewhere.”
Strike dropped tea bags into two mugs.
“I don’t buy the friend’s funeral bit, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d popped back to Melrose to try and beat some cash out of his demented mother. That could easily be our Donnie’s idea of holiday fun.”
“One of us should be there for when he comes back—”
“One of us will be there,” said Strike soothingly, “but in the meantime, I want you to switch to—”
“Brockbank?”
“No, I’m doing Brockbank,” said Strike. “I want you to have a bash at Stephanie.”
“Who?”
“Stephanie. Whittaker’s girl.”
“Why?” asked Robin loudly, as the kettle boiled in its usual crescendo of rattling lid and rambunctious bubbles, condensation steaming up the window behind it.
“I want to see whether she can tell us what Whittaker was doing the day Kelsey was killed, and on the night that girl got her fingers hacked off in Shacklewell. The third and the twenty-ninth of April, to be precise.”
Strike poured water on the tea bags and stirred in milk, the teaspoon pinging off the sides of the mug. Robin was not sure whether she was pleased or aggrieved by the suggested change to her routine. On balance, she thought she was glad, but her recent suspicions that Strike was trying to sideline her were not easily dispelled.
“You definitely still think Whittaker could be the killer?”
“Yep,” said Strike.
“But you haven’t got any—”
“I haven’t got any evidence for any of them, have I?” said Strike. “I’m just going to keep going until I either get some or clear all of them.”
He handed her a mug of tea and sank down on the mock-leather sofa, which for once did not fart beneath him. A minor triumph, but in the absence of others, better than nothing.
“I hoped I’d be able to rule out Whittaker on how he’s looking these days,” said Strike, “but, you know, it could’ve been him in that beanie hat. I know one thing: he’s exactly the same bastard he was when I knew him. I’ve blown it completely with Stephanie, she’s not going to talk to me now, but you might be able to do something with her. If she can give him an alibi for those dates, or point us towards someone else who can, we’ll have to rethink. If not, he stays on the list.”
“And what are you going to be doing while I’m on Stephanie?”
“Sticking with Brockbank. I’ve decided,” said Strike, stretching out his legs and taking a fortifying drink of tea, “I’m going into the strip club today, find out what’s happened to him. I’m tired of eating kebabs and hanging round clothes shops waiting for him to show up.”
Robin did not say anything.
“What?” said Strike, watching her expression.
“Nothing.”
“Come off it.”
“OK… what if he is there?”
“I’ll cross that bridge—I’m not going to hit him,” said Strike, correctly reading her thoughts.
“OK,” said Robin, but then, “you hit Whittaker, though.”
“That was different,” said Strike, and when she did not respond, “Whittaker’s special. He’s family.”
She laughed, but reluctantly.
When Strike withdrew fifty pounds from a cashpoint prior to entering the Saracen off Commercial Road, the machine churlishly showed him a negative balance in his current account. His expression grim, Strike handed over a tenner to the short-necked bouncer on the door and pushed his way through the strips of black plastic masking the interior, which was dimly lit, but insufficiently to mask the overall impression of shabbiness.
The interior of the old pub had been ripped out in its entirety. The refashioned decor gave the impression of a community center gone bad, dimly lit and soulless. The floor was of polished pine, which reflected the wide neon strip running the length of the bar that took up one side of the room.
It was shortly after midday, but there was already a girl gyrating on a small stage at the far end of the pub. Bathed in red light and standing in front of angled mirrors so that every inch of dimpled flesh could be appreciated, she was removing her bra to the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.” A grand total of four men were sitting on high stools, one to each elevated table, dividing their attention between the girl now swinging clumsily around a pole and a big-screen TV showing Sky Sports.
Strike headed straight for the bar, where he found himself facing a sign that read “Any customer caught masturbating will be ejected.”
“What can I get you, love?” asked a girl with long hair, purple eye-shadow and a nose ring.
Strike ordered a pint of John Smith’s and took a seat at the bar. Other than the bouncer, the only other male employee on view was the man sitting behind a turntable beside the stripper. He was stocky, blond, middle-aged and did not remotely resemble Brockbank.
“I was hoping to meet a friend here,” Strike told the barmaid, who, having no further customers, was leaning on the bar, staring dreamily at the television and picking her long nails.
“Yeah?” she said, sounding bored.
“Yeah,” said Strike. “He said he was working here.”
A man in a fluorescent jacket approached the bar and she moved away to serve him without another word.
“Start Me Up” ended and so did the stripper’s act. Naked, she hopped off the stage, grabbed a wrap and disappeared through a curtain at the back of the pub. Nobody clapped.
A woman in a very short nylon kimono and stockings slid out from behind the curtain and began walking around the pub, holding out an empty beer glass to punters, who one by one put their hands in their pockets and gave her some change. She reached Strike last. He dropped in a couple of quid. She headed straight for the stage, where she put her pint glass of coins carefully beside the DJ’s turntable, wriggled out of her kimono and stepped on to the stage in bra, pants, stockings and heels.
“Gentlemen, I think you’re going to enjoy this… Big welcome, please, for the lovely Mia!”
She began to jiggle to Gary Numan’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” There was not the remotest synchronicity between her movements and the track.
/> The barmaid resumed her lounging position near Strike. The view of the TV was clearest from where he sat.
“Yeah, like I was saying,” Strike began again, “a friend of mine told me he’s working here.”
“Mm-hm,” she said.
“Name of Noel Brockbank.”
“Yeah? I don’t know him.”
“No,” said Strike, making a show of scanning the place, although he had already established that Brockbank was nowhere to be seen. “Maybe I’ve got the wrong place.”
The first stripper pushed her way out from behind the curtain, having changed into a bubblegum-pink spaghetti-strapped minidress that barely skimmed her crotch, and was somehow more indecent than her previous nakedness. She approached the man in the fluorescent jacket and asked him something, but he shook his head. Looking around, she caught Strike’s eye, smiled and approached him.
“Hiya,” she said. Her accent was Irish. Her hair, which he had thought blonde in the red light of the stage, turned out to be vivid copper. Beneath the thick orange lipstick and the thick false eyelashes hid a girl who looked as though she should still have been at school. “I’m Orla. Who’re you?”
“Cameron,” said Strike, which was what people usually called him after failing to grasp his first name.
“D’ya fancy a private dance then, Cameron?”
“Where does that happen?”
“Troo there,” she said, pointing towards the curtain where she had changed. “I’ve never seen you in here before.”
“No. I’m looking for a friend.”
“What’s her name?”
“It’s a him.”
“Yeh’ve come to the wrong place fer hims, darlin’,” she said.
She was so young he felt mildly dirty just hearing her call him darling.
“Can I buy you a drink?” Strike asked.
She hesitated. There was more money in a private dance, but perhaps he was the kind of guy who needed warming up first.
“Go on, then.”
Strike paid an exorbitant amount for a vodka and lime, which she sipped primly on a seat beside him, most of her breasts hanging out of the dress. The texture of her skin reminded him of the murdered Kelsey: smooth and firm, with plenty of youthful fat. There were three small blue stars inked on her shoulder.
“Maybe you know my friend?” Strike said. “Noel Brockbank.”
She was no fool, little Orla. Suspicion and calculation mingled in the sharp sideways look she gave him. She was wondering, like the masseuse back in Market Harborough, whether he was police.
“He owes me money,” said Strike.
She continued to scrutinize him for a moment, her smooth forehead furrowed, then apparently swallowed the lie.
“Noel,” she repeated. “I tink he’s gone. Hang on—Edie?”
The bored barmaid did not take her eyes from the TV.
“Hmm?”
“What was the name of yer man that Des sacked the other week? Guy who only lasted a few days?”
“Dunno what he was called.”
“Yeah, I tink it was Noel who was sacked,” Orla told Strike. Then, with a sudden and endearing bluntness, she said: “Gimme a tenner an’ I’ll make sure for ya.”
With a mental sigh, Strike handed over a note.
“Wait there, now,” said Orla cheerfully. She slipped off her bar stool, tucked the tenner into the elastic of her pants, tugged her dress down inelegantly and sauntered over to the DJ, who scowled over at Strike while Orla spoke to him. He nodded curtly, his jowly face glowing in the red light, and Orla came trotting back looking pleased with herself.
“I tort so!” she told Strike. “I wasn’t here when it happened, but he had a fit or sometin’.”
“A fit?” repeated Strike.
“Yeah, it was only his first week on the job. Big guy, wasn’t he? Wit a big chin?”
“That’s right,” said Strike.
“Yeah, an’ he was late, and Des wasn’t happy. Dat’s Des, over dare,” she added unnecessarily, pointing out the DJ who was watching Strike suspiciously while changing the track from “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” “Des was givin’ out to him about being late and your man just dropped to the floor an’ started writhin’ around. They say,” added Orla, with relish, “he pissed himself.”
Strike doubted that Brockbank would have urinated over himself to escape a dressing down from Des. It sounded as though he had genuinely had an epileptic fit.
“Then what happened?”
“Your mate’s gorlfriend come runnin’ out the back—”
“What girlfriend’s this?”
“Hang on—Edie?”
“Hm?”
“Who’s dat black gorl, now, with the extensions? The one with the great knockers? The one Des doesn’t like?”
“Alyssa,” said Edie.
“Alyssa,” Orla told Strike. “She come runnin’ out the back and was screamin’ at Des to phone an ambulance.”
“Did he?”
“Yeah. Dey took yer man away, and Alyssa went with him.”
“And has Brock—has Noel been back since?”
“He’s no bloody use as a bouncer if he’s gonna fall down and piss himself just ’cause someone’s shoutin’ at him, is he?” said Orla. “I heard Alyssa wanted Des to give him a second chance, but Des doesn’t give second chances.”
“So Alyssa called Des a tight cunt,” said Edie, emerging suddenly from her listlessness, “and he sacked her too. Silly bitch. She needs the money. She’s got kids.”
“When did all this happen?” Strike asked Orla and Edie.
“Couple of weeks ago,” said Edie. “But he was a creep, that guy. Good riddance.”
“In what way was he a creep?” asked Strike.
“You can always tell,” said Edie with a kind of hard-bitten weariness. “Always. Alyssa’s got fucking terrible taste in men.”
The second stripper was now down to her thong and twerking enthusiastically towards her scanty audience. Two older men had just entered the club and hesitated before approaching the bar, their eyes on the thong, which was clearly about to come off.
“You don’t know where I’d find Noel, do you?” Strike asked Edie, who seemed too bored to demand money for the information.
“He’s living with Alyssa, somewhere in Bow,” said the barmaid. “She got herself a council house but she was always bitching about the place. I don’t know exactly where it is,” she said, forestalling Strike’s question. “I never went round or nothing.”
“I tort she liked it,” said Orla vaguely. “She said there was a good nursery.”
The stripper had wriggled out of her thong and was waving it over her head, lasso-style. Having seen all there was to see, the two new punters drifted to the bar. One of them, a man old enough to be Orla’s grandfather, fixed his rheumy eyes on her cleavage. She sized him up, businesslike, then turned to Strike.
“So, you wanna private dance or not?”
“I don’t think I will,” said Strike.
Before the words were even fully out of his mouth she had put down her glass, wriggled off the chair and slid towards the sixty-year-old, who grinned, revealing more gaps than teeth.
A hulking figure appeared at Strike’s side: the neckless bouncer.
“Des wants a word,” he said in what would have been a menacing tone had his voice not been surprisingly high-pitched for a man so broad.
Strike looked around. The DJ, who was glaring across the room at him, beckoned.
“Is there a problem?” Strike asked the bouncer.
“Des’ll tell you, if there is,” was the faintly ominous answer.
So Strike crossed the room to speak to the DJ, and stood like a massive schoolboy summoned to the headmaster at his lectern. Fully alive to the absurdity of the situation, he had to wait while a third stripper deposited her glass of coins safely beside the turntable, wriggled out of her purple robe and ascended the stage in black lac
e and Perspex heels. She was heavily tattooed and, beneath thick makeup, spotty.
“Gentlemen, tits, ass and class from—Jackaline!”
“Africa” by Toto began. Jackaline began to spin around the pole, at which she was far more accomplished than either of her colleagues, and Des covered the microphone with his hand and leaned forwards.
“Right, pal.”
He appeared both older and harder than he had in the red light of the stage, his eyes shrewd, a scar as deep as Shanker’s running along his jaw.
“What are you asking about that bouncer for?”
“He’s a friend of mine.”
“He never had a contract.”
“I never said he had.”
“Unfair dismissal my fucking arse. He never told me he had fucking fits. Have you been sent here by that Alyssa bitch?”
“No,” said Strike. “I was told Noel worked here.”
“She’s a mad fucking cow.”
“I wouldn’t know. It’s him I’m looking for.”
Scratching an armpit, Des glowered at Strike while, four feet away, Jackaline slipped her bra straps from her shoulders and glared over her shoulder at the half-dozen punters watching.
“Bollocks was that bastard ever in the Special Forces,” said Des aggressively, as though Strike had insisted he had been.
“Is that what he told you?”
“It’s what she said. Alyssa. They wouldn’t take a fucking wreck like that. Anyway,” said Des, eyes narrowed, “there was other stuff I didn’t like.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“That’s my business. You tell her that from me. It wasn’t just his fucking fit. You tell her to ask Mia why I didn’t want him back, and you tell Alyssa if she does one more stupid fucking thing to my car, or sends one more of her friends round trying to get something on me, I’ll fucking have her in court. You tell her that!”
“Fair enough,” said Strike. “Got an address?”
“Fuck off, all right?” snarled Des. “Fuck off out of here.”
He leaned into the microphone.
“Nice,” he said, with a kind of professional leer, as Jackaline jiggled her breasts rhythmically in the scarlet light. Des made a “hop it” gesture to Strike and returned to his stack of old vinyl records.