Career of Evil

13

On Saturday morning, Robin and her mother took the ancient family Land Rover from their small hometown of Masham to the dressmaker’s in Harrogate where Robin’s wedding dress was being altered. The design had been modified because it had initially been made for a wedding in January and was now to be worn in July.

“You’ve lost more weight,” said the elderly dressmaker, sticking pins down the back of the bodice. “You don’t want to go any thinner. This dress was meant for a bit of curve.”

Robin had chosen the fabric and design of the dress over a year ago, loosely based on an Elie Saab model that her parents, who would also be forking out for half of her elder brother Stephen’s wedding in six months’ time, could never have afforded. Even this cut-price version would have been impossible on the salary Strike paid Robin.

The lighting in the changing room was flattering, yet Robin’s reflection in the gilt-framed mirror looked too pale, her eyes heavy and tired. She was not sure that altering the dress to make it strapless had been successful. Part of what she had liked about the design in the first place had been the long sleeves. Perhaps, she thought, she was simply jaded from having lived with the idea of the dress for so long.

The changing room smelled of new carpet and polish. While Robin’s mother Linda watched the dressmaker pin, tuck and twitch the yards of chiffon Robin, depressed by her own reflection, focused instead on the little corner stand carrying crystal tiaras and fake flowers.

“Remind me, have we fixed on a headdress?” asked the dressmaker, who had the habit of using the first person plural so often found in nursing staff. “We were leaning towards a tiara for the winter wedding, weren’t we? I think it might be worth trying flowers with the strapless.”

“Flowers would be nice,” Linda agreed from the corner of the dressing room.

Mother and daughter closely resembled each other. Though her once slender waist had thickened and the faded red-gold hair piled untidily on top of her head was now laced with silver, Linda’s blue-gray eyes were her daughter’s and they rested now upon her second child with an expression of concern and shrewdness that would have been comically familiar to Strike.

Robin tried on an array of fake floral headdresses and liked none of them.

“Maybe I’ll stick with the tiara,” she said.

“Or fresh flowers?” suggested Linda.

“Yes,” said Robin, suddenly keen to get away from the carpet smell and her pale, boxed-in reflection. “Let’s go and see whether the florist could do something.”

She was glad to have the changing room to herself for a few minutes. As she worked her way out of the dress and pulled her jeans and sweater back on, she tried to analyze her low mood. While she regretted that she had been forced to miss Strike’s meeting with Wardle, she had been looking forward to putting a couple of hundred miles between her and the faceless man in black who had handed her a severed leg.

Yet she had no sense of escape. She and Matthew had rowed yet again on the train coming north. Even here, in the changing room in James Street, her multiplying anxieties haunted her: the agency’s dwindling caseload, the fear of what would happen if Strike could no longer afford to employ her. Once dressed, she checked her mobile. No messages from Strike.

She was almost monosyllabic among the buckets of mimosa and lilies a quarter of an hour later. The florist fussed and fiddled, holding blooms against Robin’s hair and accidentally letting drops of cold, greenish water fall from the long stem of a rose onto her cream sweater.

“Let’s go to Bettys,” suggested Linda when a floral headdress had at last been ordered.

Bettys of Harrogate was a local institution, the spa town’s long-established tea room. There were hanging flower baskets outside, where customers queued under a black, gold and glass canopy, and within were tea-canister lamps and ornamental teapots, squashy chairs and waitresses in broderie anglaise uniforms. It had been a treat to Robin, ever since she was small, to peer through the glass counter at rows of fat marzipan pigs, to watch her mother buying one of the luxurious fruitcakes laced with alcohol that came in its own special tin.

Today, sitting beside the window staring out at primary-colored flowerbeds resembling the geometric shapes cut out of plasticine by small children, Robin declined anything to eat, asked for a pot of tea and flipped over her mobile again. Nothing.

“Are you all right?” Linda asked her.

“Fine,” said Robin. “I was just wondering if there was any news.”

“What kind of news?”

“About the leg,” said Robin. “Strike met Wardle last night — the Met officer.”

“Oh,” said Linda and silence fell between them until their tea arrived.

Linda had ordered a Fat Rascal, one of Bettys’ large scones. She finished buttering it before she asked:

“You and Cormoran are going to try and find out who sent that leg yourselves, are you?”

Something in her mother’s tone made Robin proceed warily.

“We’re interested in what the police are doing, that’s all.”

“Ah,” said Linda, chewing, watching Robin.

Robin felt guilty for being irritable. The wedding dress was expensive and she had not been appreciative.

“Sorry for being snappy.”

“That’s all right.”

“It’s just, Matthew’s on my case all the time about working for Cormoran.”

“Yes, we heard something about that last night.”

“Oh God, Mum, I’m sorry!”

Robin had thought they’d kept the row quiet enough not to wake her parents. They had argued on the way up to Masham, suspended hostilities while having supper with her parents, then resumed the argument in the living room after Linda and Michael had gone to bed.

“Cormoran’s name came up a lot, didn’t it? I assume Matthew’s—?”

“He’s not worried,” said Robin.

Matthew determinedly treated Robin’s work as a kind of joke, but when forced to take it seriously — when, for instance, somebody sent her a severed leg — he became angry rather than concerned.

“Well, if he’s not worried, he should be,” said Linda. “Somebody sent you part of a dead woman, Robin. It’s not so long ago that Matt called us to say you were in hospital with concussion. I’m not telling you to resign!” she added, refusing to be cowed by Robin’s reproachful expression. “I know this is what you want! Anyway” — she forced the larger half of her Fat Rascal into Robin’s unresisting hand — “I wasn’t going to ask whether Matt was worried. I was going to ask whether he was jealous.”

Robin sipped her strong Bettys Blend tea. Vaguely she contemplated taking some of these tea bags back to the office. There was nothing as good as this in Ealing Waitrose. Strike liked his tea strong.

“Yes, Matt’s jealous,” she said at last.

“I’m assuming he’s got no reason?”

“Of course not!” said Robin hotly. She felt betrayed. Her mother was always on her side, always—

“There’s no need to get fired up,” said Linda, unruffled. “I wasn’t suggesting you’d done anything you shouldn’t.”

“Well, good,” said Robin, eating the scone without noticing it. “Because I haven’t. He’s my boss, that’s all.”

“And your friend,” suggested Linda, “judging by the way you talk about him.”

“Yes,” said Robin, but honesty compelled her to add, “it’s not like a normal friendship, though.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn’t like talking about personal stuff. Blood out of a stone.”

Except for one notorious evening — barely mentioned between them since — when Strike had got so drunk he could hardly stand, voluntary information about his private life had been virtually nonexistent.

“You get on well, though?”

“Yeah, really well.”

“A lot of men find it hard to hear how well their other halves get on with other men.”

“What am I supposed to do, only ever work with women?”

“No,” said Linda. “I’m just saying: Matthew obviously feels threatened.”

Robin sometimes suspected that her mother regretted the fact that her daughter had not had more boyfriends before committing herself to Matthew. She and Linda were close; she was Linda’s only daughter. Now, with the tearoom clattering and tinkling around them, Robin realized that she was afraid that Linda might tell her it wasn’t too late to back out of the wedding if she wanted to. Tired and low though she was, and in spite of the fact that they had had several rocky months, she knew that she loved Matthew. The dress was made, the church was booked, the reception almost paid for. She must plow on, now, and get to the finishing line.

“I don’t fancy Strike. Anyway, he’s in a relationship: he’s seeing Elin Toft. She’s a presenter on Radio Three.”

She hoped that this information would distract her mother, an enthusiastic devourer of radio programs while cooking and gardening.

“Elin Toft? Is she that very beautiful blonde girl who was on the telly talking about Romantic composers the other night?” asked Linda.

“Probably,” said Robin, with a pronounced lack of enthusiasm, and in spite of the fact that her diversionary tactic had been successful, she changed the subject. “So you’re getting rid of the Land Rover?”

“Yes. We’ll get nothing for it, obviously. Scrap, maybe... unless,” said Linda, struck by a sudden thought, “you and Matthew want it? It’s got a year’s tax left on it and it always scrapes through its MOT somehow.”

Robin chewed her scone, thinking. Matthew moaned constantly about their lack of car, a deficiency he attributed to her low salary. His sister’s husband’s A3 Cabriolet caused him almost physical pangs of envy. Robin knew he would feel very differently about a battered old Land Rover with its permanent smell of wet dog and wellington boots, but at one o’clock that morning in the family sitting room, Matthew had listed his estimates of the salary of all their contemporaries, concluding with a flourish that Robin’s pay lay right at the bottom of the league table. With a sudden spurt of malice, she imagined herself telling her fiancé, “But we’ve got the Land Rover, Matt, there’s no point trying to save for an Audi now!”

“It could be really useful for work,” she said aloud, “if we need to go outside London. Strike won’t need to hire a car.”

“Mm,” said Linda, apparently absently, but with her eyes fixed on Robin’s face.

They drove home to find Matthew laying the table with his future father-in-law. He was usually more helpful in the kitchen at her parents’ house than at home with Robin.

“How’s the dress looking?” he asked in what Robin supposed was an attempt at conciliation.

“All right,” said Robin.

“Is it bad luck to tell me about it?” he said and then, when she did not smile, “I bet you look beautiful, anyway.”

Softening, she reached out a hand and he winked, squeezing her fingers. Then Linda plonked a dish of mashed potato on the table between them and told him that she had given them the old Land Rover.

“What?” said Matthew, his face a study in dismay.

“You’re always saying you want a car,” said Robin, defensive on her mother’s behalf.

“Yeah, but — the Land Rover, in London?”

“Why not?”

“It’ll ruin his image,” said her brother Martin, who had just entered the room with the newspaper in his hand; he had been examining the runners for that afternoon’s Grand National. “Suit you down to the ground, though, Rob. I can just see you and Hopalong, off-roading to murder scenes.”

Matthew’s square jaw tightened.

“Shut up, Martin,” snapped Robin, glaring at her younger brother as she sat down at the table. “And I’d love to see you call Strike Hopalong to his face,” she added.

“He’d probably laugh,” said Martin airily.

“Because you’re peers?” said Robin, her tone brittle. “Both of you with your stunning war records, risking life and limb?”

Martin was the only one of the four Ellacott siblings who had not attended university, and the only one who still lived with their parents. He was always touchy at the slightest hint that he underachieved.

“The fuck’s that supposed to mean — I should be in the army?” he demanded, firing up.

“Martin!” said Linda sharply. “Mind your language!”

“Does she have a go at you for still having both legs, Matt?” asked Martin.

Robin dropped her knife and fork and walked out of the kitchen.

The image of the severed leg was before her again, with its shining white tibia sticking out of the dead flesh, those slightly grubby toenails whose owner had meant, perhaps, to clean or paint before anybody else would see them...

And now she was crying, crying for the first time since she had taken the package. The pattern on the old stair carpet blurred and she had to grope for the doorknob of her bedroom. She crossed to the bed and dropped, face down, onto the clean duvet, her shoulders shaking and her chest heaving, her hands pressed over her wet face as she tried to muffle the sound of her sobs. She did not want any of them to come after her; she did not want to have to talk or explain; she simply wanted to be alone to release the emotion she had tamped down to get through the working week.

Her brother’s glibness about Strike’s amputation was an echo of Strike’s own jokes about the dismembered leg. A woman had died in what were likely to have been terrible, brutal circumstances, and nobody seemed to care as much as Robin did. Death and a hatchet had reduced the unknown female to a lump of meat, a problem to be solved and she, Robin, felt as though she was the only person to remember that a living, breathing human being had been using that leg, perhaps as recently as a week ago...

After ten minutes’ solid weeping she rolled over onto her back, opened her streaming eyes and looked around her old bedroom as though it might give her succor.

This room had once seemed like the only safe place on earth. For the three months after she had dropped out of university she had barely left it, even to eat. The walls had been shocking pink back then, a mistaken decorating choice she had made when she was sixteen. She had dimly recognized that it did not work, but had not wanted to ask her father to repaint, so she had covered the garish glare with as many posters as possible. There had been a large picture of Destiny’s Child facing her at the foot of the bed. Though there was nothing there now but the smooth eau de nil wallpaper Linda had put up when Robin left home to join Matthew in London, Robin could still visualize Beyoncé, Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams staring at her out of the cover of their album Survivor. The image was indelibly connected with the worst time of her life.

The walls bore only two framed photographs these days: one of Robin with her old sixth form on their last day of school (Matthew at the back of the shot, the most handsome boy in the year, refusing to pull a face or wear a stupid hat) and the other of Robin, aged twelve, riding her old Highland pony Angus, a shaggy, strong and stubborn creature who had lived on her uncle’s farm and on whom Robin had doted, his naughtiness notwithstanding.

Depleted and exhausted, she blinked away more tears and wiped her wet face with the heels of her hands. Muffled voices rose from the kitchen below her room. Her mother, she was sure, would be advising Matthew to leave her alone for a while. Robin hoped that he would listen. She felt as though she would like to sleep through the rest of the weekend.

An hour later she was still lying on the double bed, staring drowsily out of the window at the top of the lime tree in the garden, when Matthew knocked and entered with a mug of tea.

“Your mum thought you could use this.”

“Thanks,” said Robin.

“We’re all going to watch the National together. Mart’s put a big bet on Ballabriggs.”

No mention of her distress or of Martin’s crass comments; Matthew’s manner implied that she had somehow embarrassed herself and he was offering her a way out. She knew at once that he had no conception of what the sight and feel of that woman’s leg had stirred up in her. No, he was simply annoyed that Strike, whom none of the Ellacotts had ever met, was once again taking up space in weekend conversation. It was Sarah Shadlock at the rugby all over again.

“I don’t like watching horses break their necks,” said Robin. “Anyway, I’ve got some work to do.”

He stood looking down at her, then walked out, closing the door with a little too much force, so that it jumped open again behind him.

Robin sat up, smoothed her hair, took a deep breath and then went to fetch her laptop case from on top of the dressing table. She had felt guilty bringing it along on their trip home, guilty for hoping that she might find time for what she was privately calling her lines of inquiry. Matthew’s air of generous forgiveness had put paid to that. Let him watch the National. She had better things to do.

Returning to the bed, she made a pile of pillows behind her, opened the laptop and navigated to certain bookmarked webpages that she had talked to nobody about, not even Strike, who would no doubt think she was wasting her time.

She had already spent several hours pursuing two separate but related lines of inquiry suggested by the letters that she had insisted Strike should take to Wardle: the communication from the young woman who wished to remove her own leg, and the missive from the person who wished to do things to Strike’s stump that had made Robin feel faintly queasy.

Robin had always been fascinated by the workings of the human mind. Her university career, though cut short, had been dedicated to the study of psychology. The young woman who had written to Strike seemed to be suffering from body integrity identity disorder, or BIID: the irrational desire for the removal of a healthy body part.

Having read several scientific papers online, Robin now knew that sufferers of BIID were rare and that the precise cause of their condition was unknown. Visits to support sites had already shown her how much people seemed to dislike sufferers of the condition. Angry comments peppered the message boards, accusing BIID sufferers of coveting a status that others had had thrust upon them by bad luck and illness, of wanting to court attention in a grotesque and offensive manner. Equally angry retorts followed the attacks: did the writer really think the sufferer wanted to have BIID? Did they not understand how difficult it was to be transabled — wanting, needing, to be paralyzed or amputated? Robin wondered what Strike would think of the BIID sufferers’ stories, were he to read them. She suspected that his reaction would not be sympathetic.

Downstairs, the sitting room door opened and she heard a brief snatch of a commentator’s voice, her father telling their old chocolate Labrador to get out because it had farted and Martin’s laughter.

To her own frustration, the exhausted Robin could not remember the name of the young girl who had written to Strike, asking for advice on cutting off her leg, but she thought it had been Kylie or something similar. Scrolling slowly down the most densely populated support site she had found, she kept an eye out for usernames that might in any way connect to her, because where else would a teenager with an unusual fixation go to share her fantasy, if not cyberspace?

The bedroom door, still ajar since Matthew’s exit, swung open as the banished Labrador, Rowntree, came waddling into the bedroom. He reported to Robin for an absentminded rub of his ears, then flopped down beside the bed. His tail bumped against the floor for a while and then he fell wheezily asleep. To the accompaniment of his snuffling snores, Robin continued to comb the message boards.

Quite suddenly, she experienced one of those jolts of excitement with which she had become familiar since starting work for Strike, and which were the immediate reward of looking for a tiny piece of information that might mean something, nothing or, occasionally, everything.

Holding her breath, Robin opened the thread.

That was all. Robin combed more threads on the forum, but Nowheretoturn had not pursued their inquiry, nor did they appear again. That meant nothing; they might have changed their username. Robin searched until satisfied that she had probed every corner of the site, but Strike’s name did not recur.

Her excitement ebbed away. Even assuming that the letter-writer and Nowheretoturn were the same person, her belief that Strike’s amputation had been self-inflicted had been clear in the letter. There weren’t many famous amputees on whom you might be able to pin the hope that their condition was voluntary.

Shouts of encouragement were now emanating from the sitting room below. Abandoning the BIID boards, Robin turned to her second line of inquiry.

She liked to think that she had developed a tougher skin since working at the detective agency. Nevertheless, her first forays into the fantasies of acrotomophiliacs — those who were sexually attracted to amputees — which had been accessed with only a few clicks of the mouse, had left her with a cringing feeling in her stomach that lingered long after she had left the internet. Now she found herself reading the outpourings of a man (she assumed he was a man) whose most exciting sexual fantasy was a woman with all four limbs amputated above the elbow and knee joints. The precise point at which limbs were cut seemed to be a particular preoccupation. A second man (they could not be women, surely) had masturbated since early youth over the idea of accidentally guillotining off his own and his best friend’s legs. Everywhere was discussion of the fascination of the stumps themselves, of the restricted movement of amputees, of what Robin assumed was disability as an extreme manifestation of bondage.

While the distinctive nasal voice of the commentator on the Grand National gabbled incomprehensibly from below, and her brother’s shouts of encouragement became louder, Robin scanned more message boards, seeking any mention of Strike and also searching for a connecting line between this paraphilia and violence.

Robin found it notable that none of the people pouring their amputee and amputation fantasies onto this forum seemed to be aroused by violence or pain. Even the man whose sexual fantasy involved him and his friend cutting off their own legs together was clear and articulate on that subject: the guillotining was merely the necessary precursor to the achievement of stumps.

Would a person aroused by Strike-as-amputee cut off a woman’s leg and send it to him? That was the sort of thing Matthew might think would happen, Robin thought scornfully, because Matthew would assume that anyone odd enough to find stumps attractive would be crazy enough to dismember somebody else: indeed, he would think it likely. However, from what Robin remembered of the letter from RL, and after perusing the online outpourings of his fellow acrotomophiliacs, she thought it much more likely that what RL meant by “making it up” to Strike was likely to mean practices that Strike would probably find a lot less appetizing than the original amputation.

Of course, RL might be both an acrotomophiliac and a psychopath...

“YES! FUCKING YES! FIVE HUNDRED QUID!” screamed Martin. From the rhythmic thumping emanating from the hall, it sounded as though Martin had found the sitting room inadequate for the full performance of a victory dance. Rowntree woke, jumped to his feet and let out a groggy bark. The noise was such that Robin did not hear Matthew approaching until he pushed the door open. Automatically, she clicked the mouse repeatedly, backtracking through the sites devoted to the sexual fetishization of amputees.

“Hi,” she said. “I take it Ballabriggs won.”

“Yeah,” said Matthew.

For the second time that day, he held out a hand. Robin slid the laptop aside and Matthew pulled her to her feet and hugged her. With the warmth of his body came relief, seeping through her, calming her. She could not stand another night’s bickering.

Then he pulled away, his eyes fixed on something over her shoulder.

“What?”

She looked down at the laptop. There in the middle of a glowing white screen of text was a large boxed definition:

There was a brief silence.

“How many horses died?” asked Robin in a brittle voice.

“Two,” Matthew answered, and walked out of the room.