Career of Evil

11

Strike and Robin took turns tailing Platinum over the next couple of days. Strike made excuses to meet during the working day and insisted that Robin leave for home during daylight hours, when the Tube was still busy. On Thursday evening, Strike followed Platinum until the Russian was safely back under the ever-suspicious gaze of Two-Times, then returned to Octavia Street in Wandsworth, where he was still living to avoid the press.

This was the second time in his detective career that Strike had been forced to take refuge with his friends Nick and Ilsa. Theirs was probably the only place he could have borne to stay, but Strike still felt strangely undomesticated within the orbit of a dual-career married couple. Whatever the drawbacks of the cramped attic space above his office, he had total freedom to come and go as he pleased, to eat at 2 a.m. when he had come in from a surveillance job, to move up and down the clanging metal stairs without fear of waking housemates. Now he felt unspoken pressure to be present for the occasional shared meal, feeling antisocial when he helped himself from the fridge in the small hours, even though he had been invited to do so.

On the other hand, Strike had not needed the army to teach him to be tidy and organized. The years of his youth that had been spent in chaos and filth had caused an opposite reaction. Ilsa had already remarked on the fact that Strike moved around the house without leaving any real mark on it, whereas her husband, a gastroenterologist, might be found by the trail of discarded belongings and imperfectly closed drawers.

Strike knew from acquaintances back in Denmark Street that press photographers were still hanging around the door to his office and he was resigned to spending the rest of the week in Nick and Ilsa’s guest room, which had bare white walls and a melancholy sense of awaiting its true destiny. They had been trying unsuccessfully for years to have a child. Strike never inquired as to their progress and sensed that Nick, in particular, was grateful for his restraint.

He had known them both for a long time, Ilsa for most of his life. Fair-haired and bespectacled, she came from St. Mawes in Cornwall, which was the most constant home that Strike had ever known. He and Ilsa had been in the same primary school class. Whenever he had gone back to stay with Ted and Joan, as had happened regularly through his youth, they had resumed a friendship initially based on the fact that Joan and Ilsa’s mother were themselves old schoolmates.

Nick, whose sandy hair had begun receding in his twenties, was a friend from the comprehensive in Hackney where Strike had finished his school career. Nick and Ilsa had met at Strike’s eighteenth birthday party in London, dated for a year, then split up when they went off to separate universities. In their midtwenties they had met again, by which time Ilsa was engaged to another lawyer and Nick dating a fellow doctor. Within weeks both relationships were over; a year later, Nick and Ilsa had married, with Strike as best man.

Strike returned to their house at half past ten in the evening. As he closed the front door Nick and Ilsa greeted him from the sitting room and urged him to help himself to their still-plentiful takeaway curry.

“What’s this?” he asked, looking around, disconcerted, at long lengths of Union Jack bunting, many sheets of scribbled notes and what looked like two hundred red, white and blue plastic cups in a large polythene bag.

“We’re helping organize the street party for the royal wedding,” said Ilsa.

“Jesus Christ almighty,” said Strike darkly, heaping his plate with lukewarm Madras.

“It’ll be fun! You should come.”

Strike threw her a look that made her snigger.

“Good day?” asked Nick, passing Strike a can of Tennent’s.

“No,” said Strike, accepting the lager with gratitude. “Another job canceled. I’m down to two clients.”

Nick and Ilsa made sympathetic noises, and there followed a comradely silence while he shoveled curry into his mouth. Tired and dispirited, Strike had spent most of the journey home contemplating the fact that the arrival of the severed leg was having, as he had feared, the effect of a wrecking ball on the business he had been working so hard to build up. His photograph was currently proliferating online and in the papers, in connection with a horrible, random act. It had been a pretext for the papers to remind the world that he was himself one-legged, a fact of which he was not ashamed, but which he was hardly likely to use in advertising; a whiff of something strange, something perverse, was attached to him now. He was tainted.

“Any news about the leg?” asked Ilsa, once Strike had demolished a considerable amount of curry and was halfway down the can of lager. “Have the police got anything?”

“I’m meeting Wardle tomorrow night to catch up, but it doesn’t sound like they’ve got much. He’s been concentrating on the gangster.”

He had not given Nick and Ilsa details about three of the men he thought might be dangerous and vengeful enough to have sent him the leg, but he had mentioned that he had once run across a career criminal who had previously cut off and mailed a body part. Understandably, they had immediately taken Wardle’s view that he was the likely culprit.

For the first time in years, sitting on their comfortable green sofa, Strike remembered that Nick and Ilsa had met Jeff Whittaker. Strike’s eighteenth birthday party had taken place at the Bell pub in Whitechapel; his mother was by this time six months pregnant. His aunt’s face had been a mask of mingled disapproval and forced jollity and his Uncle Ted, usually the peacemaker, had been unable to disguise his anger and disgust as a patently high Whittaker had interrupted the disco to sing one of his self-penned songs. Strike remembered his own fury, his longing to be away, to be gone to Oxford, to be rid of it all, but perhaps Nick and Ilsa would not remember much about that: they had been engrossed in each other that night, dazed and amazed by their sudden, profound mutual attraction.

“You’re worried about Robin,” said Ilsa, more statement than question.

Strike grunted agreement, his mouth full of naan bread. He had had time to reflect on it over the last four days. In this extremity, and through no fault of her own, she had become a vulnerability, a weak spot, and he suspected that whoever had decided to re-address the leg to her had known it. If his employee had been male, he would not currently feel so worried.

Strike had not forgotten that Robin had hitherto been an almost unqualified asset. She was able to persuade recalcitrant witnesses to speak when his own size and naturally intimidating features inclined them to refuse. Her charm and ease of manner had allayed suspicion, opened doors, smoothed Strike’s path a hundred times. He knew he owed her; he simply wished that, right now, she would bow out of the way, stay hidden until they had caught the sender of the severed leg.

“I like Robin,” said Ilsa.

“Everyone likes Robin,” said Strike thickly, through a second mouthful of naan. It was the truth: his sister Lucy, the friends who called in at the office, his clients — all made a point of telling Strike how much they liked the woman who worked with him. Nevertheless, he detected a note of faint inquiry in Ilsa’s voice that made him keen to make any discussion of Robin impersonal, and he felt vindicated when Ilsa’s next question was:

“How’s it going with Elin?”

“All right,” said Strike.

“Is she still trying to hide you from her ex?” asked Ilsa, a faint sting in the inquiry.

“Don’t like Elin, do you?” said Strike, taking the discussion unexpectedly into the enemy camp for his own amusement. He had known Ilsa on and off for thirty years: her flustered denial was exactly what he had expected.

“I do like — I mean, I don’t really know her, but she seems — anyway, you’re happy, that’s what counts.”

He had thought that this would be sufficient to make Ilsa drop the subject of Robin — she was not the first of his friends to say that he and Robin got on so well, wasn’t there a possibility...? Hadn’t he ever considered...? — but Ilsa was a lawyer and not easily scared away from pursuing a line of questioning.

“Robin postponed her wedding, didn’t she? Have they set a new—?”

“Yep,” said Strike. “Second of July. She’s taking a long weekend to go back to Yorkshire and — do whatever you do for weddings. Coming back on Tuesday.”

He had been Matthew’s unlikely ally in insisting that Robin take Friday and Monday off, relieved to think that she would be two hundred and fifty miles away in her family home. She had been deeply disappointed that she would not be able to come along to the Old Blue Last in Shoreditch and meet Wardle, but Strike thought he had detected a faint trace of relief at the idea of a break.

Ilsa looked slightly aggrieved at the news that Robin still intended to marry someone other than Strike, but before she could say anything else Strike’s mobile buzzed in his pocket. It was Graham Hardacre, his old SIB colleague.

“Sorry,” he told Nick and Ilsa, setting down his plate of curry and standing up, “got to take this, important — Hardy!”

“Can you talk, Oggy?” asked Hardacre, as Strike headed back to the front door.

“I can now,” said Strike, reaching the end of the short garden path in three strides and stepping out into the dark street to walk and smoke. “What’ve you got for me?”

“To be honest,” said Hardacre, who sounded stressed, “it’d be a big help if you came up here and had a look, mate. I’ve got a Warrant Officer who’s a real pain in the arse. We didn’t get off on the right foot. If I start sending stuff out of here and she gets wind of it—”

“And if I come up?”

“Make it early in the morning and I could leave stuff open on the computer. Carelessly, y’know?”

Hardacre had previously shared information with Strike that, strictly speaking, he ought not to have done. He had only just moved to 35 Section: Strike was not surprised that he did not want to jeopardize his position.

The detective crossed the road, sat down on the low garden wall of the house opposite, lit a cigarette and asked: “Would it be worth coming up to Scotland for?”

“Depends what you want.”

“Old addresses — family connections — medical and psychiatric records couldn’t hurt. Brockbank was invalided out, what was it, 2003?”

“That’s right,” said Hardacre.

A noise behind Strike made him stand and turn: the owner of the wall on which he had been sitting was emptying rubbish into his dustbin. He was a small man of around sixty, and by the light of the streetlamp Strike saw his annoyed expression elide into a propitiatory smile as he took in Strike’s height and breadth. The detective strolled away, past semidetached houses whose leafy trees and hedges were rippling in the spring breeze. There would be bunting, soon, to celebrate the union of yet another couple. Robin’s wedding day would follow not long after.

“You won’t have much on Laing, I s’pose,” Strike said, his voice faintly interrogative. The Scot’s army career had been shorter than Brockbank’s.

“No — but Christ, he sounds a piece of work,” said Hardacre.

“Where’d he go after the Glasshouse?”

The Glasshouse was the military jail in Colchester, where all convicted military personnel were transferred before being placed in a civilian prison.

“HMP Elmley. We’ve got nothing on him after that; you’d need the probation service.”

“Yeah,” said Strike, exhaling smoke at the starry sky. He and Hardacre both knew that as he was no longer any kind of policeman, he had no more right than any other member of the public to access the probation service’s records. “Whereabouts in Scotland did he come from, Hardy?”

“Melrose. He put down his mother as next of kin when he joined up — I’ve looked him up.”

“Melrose,” repeated Strike thoughtfully.

He considered his two remaining clients: the moneyed idiot who got his kicks trying to prove he was a cuckold and the wealthy wife and mother who was paying Strike to gather evidence of the way her estranged husband was stalking their sons. The father was in Chicago and Platinum’s movements could surely go uncharted for twenty-four hours.

There remained, of course, the possibility that none of the men he suspected had anything to do with the leg, that everything was in his mind.

A harvest of limbs...

“How far from Edinburgh is Melrose?”

“’Bout an hour, hour and a half’s drive.”

Strike ground out his cigarette in the gutter.

“Hardy, I could come up Sunday night on the sleeper, nip into the office early, then drive down to Melrose, see whether Laing’s gone back to his family, or if they know where he is.”

“Nice one. I’ll pick you up at the station if you let me know when you’re getting in, Oggy. In fact,” Hardacre was gearing himself up for an act of generosity, “if it’s only a day trip you’re after, I’ll lend you my car.”

Strike did not immediately return to his curious friends and his cold curry. Smoking another cigarette, he strolled around the quiet street, thinking. Then he remembered that he was supposed to be attending a concert at the Southbank Centre with Elin on Sunday evening. She was keen to foster an interest in classical music that he had never pretended was more than lukewarm. He checked his watch. It was too late to ring and cancel now; he would need to remember to do so next day.

As he returned to the house, his thoughts drifted back to Robin. She spoke very little about the wedding that was now a mere two and a half months away. Hearing her tell Wardle about the disposable wedding cameras she had ordered had brought home to Strike how soon she would become Mrs. Matthew Cunliffe.

There’s still time, he thought. For what, he did not specify, even to himself.