‘That’s you,’ said Jack, pointing at the picture, ‘getting your medal.’
‘Have you got a medal?’ asked Nina, smiling and wide-eyed.
‘Thanks, Jack,’ said Strike.
‘I want to be a soldier,’ said Jack.
‘Your fault, Corm,’ said Greg, with what Strike could not help feeling was a certain animus. ‘Buying him soldier toys. Telling him about your gun.’
‘Two guns,’ Jack corrected his father. ‘You had two guns,’ he told Strike. ‘But you had to give them back.’
‘Good memory,’ Strike told him. ‘You’ll go far.’
Lucy appeared with the homemade cake, blazing with thirty-six candles and decorated with what looked like hundreds of Smarties. As Greg turned out the light and everyone began to sing, Strike experienced an almost overwhelming desire to leave. He would ring a cab the instant he could escape the room; in the meantime, he hoisted a smile onto his face and blew out his candles, avoiding the gaze of Marguerite, who was smouldering at him with an unnerving lack of restraint from a nearby chair. It was not his fault that he had been made to play the decorated helpmeet of abandoned women by his well-meaning friends and family.
Strike called a cab from the downstairs bathroom and announced half an hour later, with a decent show of regret, that he and Nina would have to leave; he had to be up early the next day.
Out in the crowded and noisy hall, after Strike had neatly dodged being kissed on the mouth by Marguerite, while his nephews worked off their overexcitement and a late-night sugar rush, and Greg helped Nina officiously into her coat, Nick muttered to Strike:
‘I didn’t think you fancied little women.’
‘I don’t,’ Strike returned quietly. ‘She nicked something for me yesterday.’
‘Yeah? Well, I’d show your gratitude by letting her go on top,’ said Nick. ‘You could squash her like a beetle.’
16
… let not our supper be raw, for you shall have blood enough, your belly full.
Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton,
The Honest Whore
Strike knew immediately upon waking the following morning that he was not in his own bed. It was too comfortable, the sheets too smooth; the daylight stippling the covers fell from the wrong side of the room and the sound of the rain pattering against the window was muffled by drawn curtains. He pushed himself up into a sitting position, squinting around at Nina’s bedroom, glimpsed only briefly by lamplight the previous evening, and caught sight of his own naked torso in a mirror opposite, thick dark chest hair making a black blot against the pale blue wall behind him.
Nina was absent, but he could smell coffee. As he had anticipated, she had been enthusiastic and energetic in bed, driving away the slight melancholy that had threatened to follow him from his birthday celebrations. Now, though, he wondered how quickly he would be able to extricate himself. To linger would be to raise expectations he was not prepared to meet.
His prosthetic leg was propped against the wall beside the bed. On the point of sliding himself out of bed to reach it he drew back, because the bedroom door opened and in walked Nina, fully dressed and damp-haired, with newspapers under her arm, two mugs of coffee in one hand and a plate of croissants in the other.
‘I nipped out,’ she said breathlessly. ‘God, it’s horrible out there. Feel my nose, I’m frozen.’
‘You didn’t have to do that,’ he said, gesturing to the croissants.
‘I’m starving and there’s a fabulous bakery up the road. Look at this – News of the World – Dom’s big exclusive!’
A photograph of the disgraced peer whose hidden accounts Strike had revealed to Culpepper filled the middle of the front page, flanked on three sides by pictures of two of his lovers and of the Cayman Island documents Strike had wrested from his PA. LORD PORKER OF PAYWELL screamed the headline. Strike took the paper from Nina and skim-read the story. Culpepper had kept his word: the heartbroken PA was not mentioned anywhere.
Nina was sitting beside Strike on the bed, reading along with him, emitting faintly amused comments: ‘Oh God, how anyone could, look at him’ and ‘Oh wow, that’s disgusting’.
‘Won’t do Culpepper any harm,’ Strike said, closing the paper when both had finished. The date at the top of the front page caught his eye: 21 November. It was his ex-fiancée’s birthday.
A small, painful tug under the solar plexus and a sudden gush of vivid, unwelcome memories… a year ago, almost to the hour, he had woken up beside Charlotte in Holland Park Avenue. He remembered her long black hair, wide hazel-green eyes, a body the like of which he would never see again, never be permitted to touch… They had been happy, that morning: the bed a life raft bobbing on the turbulent sea of their endlessly recurring troubles. He had presented her with a bracelet, the purchase of which had necessitated (though she did not know it) the taking out of a loan at horrifying rates of interest… and two days later, on his own birthday, she had given him an Italian suit, and they had gone out to dinner and actually fixed on a date when they would marry at last, sixteen years after they had first met…
But the naming of a day had marked a new and dreadful phase in their relationship, as though it had damaged the precarious tension in which they were used to living. Charlotte had become steadily more volatile, more capricious. Rows and scenes, broken china, accusations of his unfaithfulness (when it had been she, as he now believed, who had been secretly meeting the man to whom she was now engaged)… they had struggled on for nearly four months until, in a final, filthy explosion of recrimination and rage, everything had ended for good.
A rustle of cotton: Strike looked around, almost surprised to find himself still in Nina’s bedroom. She was about to strip off her top, intending to get back into bed with him.
‘I can’t stay,’ he told her, stretching across for his prosthesis again.
‘Why not?’ she asked with her arms folded across her front, gripping the hem of her shirt. ‘Come on – it’s Sunday!’
‘I’ve got to work,’ he lied. ‘People need investigating on Sundays too.’
‘Oh,’ she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact but looking crestfallen.
He drank his coffee, keeping the conversation bright but impersonal. She watched him strap his leg on and head for the bathroom, and when he returned to dress she was curled up in a chair, munching a croissant with a slightly forlorn air.
‘You’re sure you don’t know where this house was? The one Quine and Fancourt inherited?’ he asked her as he pulled on his trousers.
‘What?’ she said, confused. ‘Oh – God, you’re not going looking for that, are you? I told you, it’ll have been sold years ago!’
‘I might ask Quine’s wife about it,’ said Strike.
He told her that he would call her, but briskly, so that she might understand these to be empty words, a matter of form, and left her house with a feeling of faint gratitude, but no guilt.
The rain jabbed again at his face and hands as he walked down the unfamiliar street, heading for the Tube station. Christmassy fairy lights twinkled from the window of the bakery where Nina had just bought croissants. Strike’s large hunched reflection slid across the rain-spotted surface, clutching in one cold fist the plastic carrier bag which Lucy had helpfully given him to carry his cards, his birthday whisky and the box of his shiny new watch.
His thoughts slid irresistibly back to Charlotte, thirty-six but looking twenty-five, celebrating her birthday with her new fiancé. Perhaps she had received diamonds, Strike thought; she had always said she didn’t care for such things, but when they had argued the glitter of all he could not give her had sometimes been flung back hard in his face…
Successful bloke? Greg had asked of Owen Quine, by which he meant: ‘Big car? Nice house? Fat bank balance?’
Strike passed the Beatles Coffee Shop with its jauntily positioned black-and-white heads of the Fab Four peering out at him, and entered the relative warmth of the station. He did not want to spend th
is rainy Sunday alone in his attic rooms in Denmark Street. He wanted to keep busy on the anniversary of Charlotte Campbell’s birth.
Pausing to take out his mobile, he telephoned Leonora Quine.
‘Hello?’ she said brusquely.
‘Hi, Leonora, it’s Cormoran Strike here—’
‘Have you found Owen?’ she demanded.
‘Afraid not. I’m calling because I’ve just heard that your husband was left a house by a friend.’
‘What house?’
She sounded tired and irritable. He thought of the various moneyed husbands he had come up against professionally, men who hid bachelor apartments from their wives, and wondered whether he had just given away something that Quine had been keeping from his family.
‘Isn’t it true? Didn’t a writer called Joe North leave a house jointly to—?’
‘Oh, that,’ she said. ‘Talgarth Road, yeah. That was thirty-odd years ago, though. What d’you wanna know about that for?’
‘It’s been sold, has it?’
‘No,’ she said resentfully, ‘because bloody Fancourt never let us. Out of spite, it is, because he never uses it. It just sits there, no use to anyone, mouldering away.’
Strike leaned back against the wall beside the ticket machines, his eyes fixed on a circular ceiling supported by a spider’s web of struts. This, he told himself again, is what comes of taking on clients when you’re wrecked. He should have asked if they owned any other properties. He should have checked.
‘Has anyone gone to see whether your husband’s there, Mrs Quine?’
She emitted a hoot of derision.
‘He wouldn’t go there!’ she said, as though Strike were suggesting that her husband had hidden in Buckingham Palace. ‘He hates it, he never goes near it! Anyway, I don’t think it’s got furniture or nothing.’
‘Have you got a key?’
‘I dunno. But Owen’d never go there! He hasn’t been near it in years. It’d be an ’orrible place to stay, old and empty.’
‘If you could have a look for the key—’
‘I can’t go tearing off to Talgarth Road, I’ve got Orlando!’ she said, predictably. ‘Anyway, I’m telling you, he wouldn’t—’
‘I’m offering to come over now,’ said Strike, ‘get the key from you, if you can find it, and go and check. Just to make sure we’ve looked everywhere.’
‘Yeah, but – it’s Sunday,’ she said, sounding taken aback.
‘I know it is. D’you think you could have a look for the key?’
‘All right, then,’ she said after a short pause. ‘But,’ with a last burst of spirit, ‘he won’t be there!’
Strike took the Tube, changing once, to Westbourne Park and then, collar turned up against the icy deluge, marched towards the address that Leonora had scribbled down for him at their first meeting.
It was another of those odd pockets of London where millionaires sat within a stone’s throw of working-class families who had occupied their homes for forty years or more. The rain-washed scene presented an odd diorama: sleek new apartment blocks behind quiet nondescript terraces, the luxurious new and the comfortable old.
The Quines’ family home was in Southern Row, a quiet back street of small brick houses, a short walk from a whitewashed pub called the Chilled Eskimo. Cold and wet, Strike squinted up at the sign overhead as he passed; it depicted a happy Inuit relaxing beside a fishing hole, his back to the rising sun.
The door of the Quines’ house was a peeling sludge green. Everything about the frontage was dilapidated, including the gate hanging on by only one hinge. Strike thought of Quine’s predilection for comfortable hotel rooms as he rang the doorbell and his opinion of the missing man fell a little further.
‘You were quick,’ was Leonora’s gruff greeting on opening the door. ‘Come in.’
He followed her down a dim, narrow hallway. To the left, a door stood ajar onto what was clearly Owen Quine’s study. It looked untidy and dirty. Drawers hung open and an old electric typewriter sat skewed on the desk. Strike could picture Quine tearing pages from it in his rage at Elizabeth Tassel.
‘Any luck with the key?’ Strike asked Leonora as they entered the dark, stale-smelling kitchen at the end of the hall. The appliances all looked as though they were at least thirty years old. Strike had an idea that his Aunt Joan had owned the identical dark brown microwave back in the eighties.
‘Well, I found them,’ Leonora told him, gesturing towards half a dozen keys lying on the kitchen table. ‘I dunno whether any of them’s the right one.’
None of them was attached to a key ring and one of them looked too big to open anything but a church door.
‘What number Talgarth Road?’ Strike asked her.
‘Hundred and seventy-nine.’
‘When were you last there?’
‘Me? I never been there,’ she said with what seemed genuine indifference. ‘I wasn’t int’rested. Silly thing to do.’
‘What was?’
‘Leaving it to them.’ In the face of Strike’s politely enquiring face she said impatiently, ‘That Joe North, leaving it to Owen and Michael Fancourt. He said it was for them to write in. They’ve never used it since. Useless.’
‘And you’ve never been there?’
‘No. They got it round the time I had Orlando. I wasn’t int’rested,’ she repeated.
‘Orlando was born then?’ Strike asked, surprised. He had been vaguely imagining Orlando as a hyperactive ten-year-old.
‘In eighty-six, yeah,’ said Leonora. ‘But she’s handicapped.’
‘Oh,’ said Strike. ‘I see.’
‘Upstairs sulking now, cos I had to tell her off,’ said Leonora, in one of her bursts of expansiveness. ‘She nicks things. She knows it’s wrong but she keeps doing it. I caught her taking Edna-Next-Door’s purse out of her bag when she come round yesterday. It wasn’t cos of the money,’ she said quickly, as though he had made an accusation. ‘It’s cos she liked the colour. Edna understands cos she knows her, but not everyone does. I tell her it’s wrong. She knows it’s wrong.’
‘All right if I take these and try them, then?’ Strike asked, scooping the keys into his hand.
‘If y’want,’ said Leonora, but she added defiantly, ‘He won’t be there.’
Strike pocketed his haul, turned down Leonora’s afterthought offer of tea or coffee and returned to the cold rain.
He found himself limping again as he walked towards Westbourne Park Tube station, which would mean a short journey with minimal changes. He had not taken as much care as usual in attaching his prosthesis in his haste to get out of Nina’s flat, nor had he been able to apply any of those soothing products that helped protect the skin beneath it.
Eight months previously (on the very day that he had later been stabbed in his upper arm) he had taken a bad fall down some stairs. The consultant who had examined it shortly afterwards had informed him that he had done additional, though probably reparable, damage to the medial ligaments in the knee joint of his amputated leg and advised ice, rest and further investigation. But Strike had not been able to afford rest and had not wished for further tests, so he had strapped up the knee and tried to remember to elevate his leg when sitting. The pain had mostly subsided but occasionally, when he had done a lot of walking, it began to throb and swell again.
The road along which Strike was trudging curved to the right. A tall, thin, hunched figure was walking behind him, its head bowed so that only the top of a black hood was visible.
Of course, the sensible thing to do would be to go home, now, and rest his knee. It was Sunday. There was no need for him to go marching all over London in the rain.
He won’t be there, said Leonora in his head.
But the alternative was returning to Denmark Street, listening to the rain hammering against the badly fitting window beside his bed under the eaves, with photo albums full of Charlotte too close, in the boxes on the landing…
Better to move, to work, to think about othe
r people’s problems…
Blinking in the rain, he glanced up at the houses he was passing and glimpsed in his peripheral vision the figure following twenty yards behind him. Though the dark coat was shapeless, Strike had the impression from the short, quick steps, that the figure was female.
Now Strike noticed something curious about the way she was walking, something unnatural. There was none of the self-preoccupation of the lone stroller on a cold wet day. Her head was not bowed in protection against the elements, nor was she maintaining a steady pace with the simple view of achieving a destination. She kept adjusting her speed in tiny but, to Strike, noticeable increments, and every few steps the hidden face beneath the hood presented itself to the chilly onslaught of the driving rain, then vanished again into shadow. She was keeping him in her sights.
What had Leonora said at their first meeting?
I think I’ve been followed. Tall, dark girl with round shoulders.
Strike experimented by speeding up and slowing down infinitesimally. The space between them remained constant; her hidden face flickered up and down more frequently, a pale pink blur, to check his position.
She was not experienced at following people. Strike, who was an expert, would have taken the opposite pavement, pretended to be talking on a mobile phone; concealed his focused and singular interest in the subject…
For his own amusement, he faked a sudden hesitation, as though he had been caught by a doubt as to the right direction. Caught off guard, the dark figure stopped dead, paralysed. Strike strolled on again and after a few seconds heard her footsteps echoing on the wet pavement behind him. She was too foolish even to realise that she had been rumbled.
Westbourne Park station came into sight a little way ahead: a long, low building of golden brick. He would confront her there, ask her the time, get a good look at her face.
Turning into the station, he drew quickly to the far side of the entrance, waiting for her, out of sight.