Career of Evil

14

Half past eight on Sunday evening found Strike standing outside Euston station, smoking what would be his last cigarette until he arrived in Edinburgh in nine hours’ time.

Elin had been disappointed that he was going to miss the evening concert, and instead they had spent most of the afternoon in bed, an alternative that Strike had been more than happy to accept. Beautiful, collected and rather cool outside the bedroom, Elin was considerably more demonstrative inside it. The memory of certain erotic sights and sounds — her alabaster skin faintly damp under his mouth, her pale lips wide in a moan — added savor to the tang of nicotine. Smoking was not permitted in Elin’s spectacular flat on Clarence Terrace, because her young daughter had asthma. Strike’s post-coital treat had instead been to fight off sleep while she showed him a recording of herself talking about the Romantic composers on the bedroom television.

“You know, you look like Beethoven,” she told him thoughtfully, as the camera closed in on a marble bust of the composer.

“With a buggered nose,” said Strike. He had been told it before.

“And why are you going to Scotland?” Elin had asked as he reattached his prosthetic leg while sitting on the bed in her bedroom, which was decorated in creams and whites and yet had none of the depressing austerity of Ilsa and Nick’s spare room.

“Following a lead,” said Strike, fully aware that he was overstating the case. There was nothing except his own suspicions to connect Donald Laing and Noel Brockbank to the severed leg. Nevertheless, and much though he might silently lament the nearly three hundred quid the round-trip was costing him, he did not regret the decision to go.

Grinding the stub of his cigarette under the heel of his prosthetic foot, he proceeded into the station, bought himself a bag of food at the supermarket and clambered onto the overnight train.

The single berth, with its fold-down sink and its narrow bunk, might be tiny, but his army career had taken him to far more uncomfortable places. He was pleased to find that the bed could just accommodate his six foot three and after all, a small space was always easier to navigate once his prosthesis had been removed. Strike’s only gripe was that the compartment was overheated: he kept his attic flat at a temperature every woman he knew would have deplored as icy, not that any woman had ever slept in his attic flat. Elin had never even seen the place; Lucy, his sister, had never been invited over lest it shatter her delusion that he was making plenty of money these days. In fact, now he came to think about it, Robin was the only woman who had ever been in there.

The train jolted into motion. Benches and pillars flickered past the window. Strike sank down on the bunk, unwrapped the first of his bacon baguettes and took a large mouthful, remembering as he did so Robin sitting at his kitchen table, white-faced and shaken. He was glad to think of her at home in Masham, safely out of the way of possible harm: at least he could stow one nagging worry.

The situation in which he now found himself was deeply familiar. He might have been back in the army, traveling the length of the UK as cheaply as possible, to report to the SIB station in Edinburgh. He had never been stationed there. The offices, he knew, were in the castle that stood on top of a jagged rock outcrop in the middle of the city.

Later, after swaying along the rattling corridor to pee, he undressed to his boxer shorts and lay on top of the thin blankets to sleep, or rather to doze. The side-to-side rocking motion was soothing, but the heat and the changing pace of the train kept jarring him out of sleep. Ever since the Viking in which he was being driven had blown up around him in Afghanistan, taking half his leg and two colleagues with it, Strike had found it difficult to be driven by other people. Now he discovered that this mild phobia extended to trains. The whistle of an engine speeding past his carriage in the opposite direction woke him like an alarm three times; the slight sway as the train cornered made him imagine the terror of the great metal monster overbalancing, rolling, crashing and smashing apart...

The train pulled into Edinburgh Waverley at a quarter past five, but breakfast was not served until six. Strike woke to the sound of a porter moving down the carriage, delivering trays. When Strike opened his door, balancing on one leg, the uniformed youth let out an uncontrolled yelp of dismay, his eyes on the prosthesis which lay on the floor behind Strike.

“Sorry, pal,” he said in a thick Glaswegian accent as he looked from the prosthesis to Strike’s leg, realizing that the passenger had not, after all, hacked off his own leg. “Whit a reddy!”

Amused, Strike took the tray and closed the door. After a wakeful night he wanted a cigarette much more than a reheated, rubbery croissant, so he set about reattaching the leg and getting dressed, gulping black coffee as he did so, and was among the first to step out into the chilly Scottish early morning.

The station’s situation gave the odd feeling of being at the bottom of an abyss. Through the concertinaed glass ceiling Strike could make out the shapes of dark Gothic buildings towering above him on higher ground. He found the place near the taxi rank where Hardacre had said he would pick him up, sat down on a cold metal bench and lit up, his backpack at his feet.

Hardacre did not appear for twenty minutes, and when he did so, Strike felt a profound sense of misgiving. He had been so grateful to escape the expense of hiring a car that he had felt it would be churlish to ask Hardacre what he drove.

A Mini. A fucking Mini...

“Oggy!”

They performed the American half-hug, half-handshake that had permeated even the armed forces. Hardacre was barely five foot eight, an amiable-looking investigator with thinning, mouse-colored hair. Strike knew his nondescript appearance hid a sharp investigative brain. They had been together for the Brockbank arrest, and that alone had been enough to bond them, with the mess it had landed them in afterwards.

Only when he watched his old friend folding himself into the Mini did it seem to occur to Hardacre that he ought to have mentioned the make of car he drove.

“I forgot you’re such a big bastard,” he commented. “You gonna be all right to drive this?”

“Oh yeah,” said Strike, sliding the passenger seat as far back as it could go. “Grateful for the lend, Hardy.”

At least it was an automatic.

The little car wound its way out of the station and up the hill to the soot-black buildings that had peered down at Strike through the glass roof. The early morning was a cool gray.

“S’posed to be nice later,” muttered Hardacre as they drove up the steep, cobbled Royal Mile, past shops selling tartan and flags of the lion rampant, restaurants and cafés, boards advertising ghost tours and narrow alleyways affording fleeting glimpses of the city stretched out below to their right.

At the top of the hill the castle came into view: darkly forbidding against the sky, surrounded by high, curved stone walls. Hardacre took a right, away from the crested gates where tourists keen to beat the queues were already lurking. At a wooden booth he gave his name, flashed his pass and drove on, aiming for the entrance cut in the volcanic rock, which led to a floodlit tunnel lined with thick power cables. Leaving the tunnel, they found themselves high above the city, cannons ranged on the battlements beside them, giving on to a misty view of the spires and rooftops of the black and gold city stretching out to the Firth of Forth in the distance.

“Nice,” said Strike, moving to the cannons for a better look.

“Not bad,” agreed Hardacre, with a matter-of-fact glance down at the Scottish capital. “Over here, Oggy.”

They entered the castle through a wooden side door. Strike followed Hardacre along a chilly, narrow stone-flagged corridor and up a couple of flights of stairs that were not easy on the knee joint of Strike’s right leg. Prints of Victorian military men in dress uniforms hung at unequal intervals on the walls.

A door on the first landing led into a corridor lined with offices, carpeted in shabby dark pink, with hospital-green walls. Though Strike had never been there before, it felt instantly familiar in a way that the old squat in Fulbourne Street could not touch. This had been his life: he could have settled down at an unoccupied desk and been back at work within ten minutes.

The walls bore posters, one reminding investigators of the importance of and procedures relating to the Golden Hour — that short period of time after an offense when clues and information were most plentiful and easiest to gather — another showing photographs of Drugs of Abuse. There were whiteboards covered with updates and deadlines for various live cases — “awaiting phone & DNA analysis,” “SPA Form 3 required” — and metal file cases carrying mobile fingerprint kits. The door to the lab stood open. On a high metal table sat a pillow in a plastic evidence bag; it was covered in dark brown bloodstains. A cardboard box next to it contained bottles of spirits. Where there was bloodshed, there was always alcohol. An empty bottle of Bell’s stood in the corner, supporting a red military cap, the very item of clothing after which the corps was nicknamed.

A short-haired blonde in a pin-striped suit approached, going in the opposite direction:

“Strike.”

He did not recognize her immediately.

“Emma Daniels. Catterick, 2002,” she said with a grin. “You called our Staff Sergeant a negligent twat.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, while Hardacre sniggered. “He was. You’ve had your hair cut.”

“And you’ve got famous.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Strike.

A pale young man in shirtsleeves put his head out of an office further down the corridor, interested in the conversation.

“Gotta get on, Emma,” said Hardacre briskly. “Knew they’d be interested if they saw you,” he told Strike, once he had ushered the private detective into his office and closed the door behind them.

The room was rather dark, due largely to the fact that the window looked directly out onto a bare face of craggy rock. Photographs of Hardacre’s kids and a sizable collection of beer steins enlivened the decor, which comprised the same shabby pink carpet and pale green walls as the corridor outside.

“All right, Oggy,” said Hardacre, tapping at his keyboard, then standing back to let Strike sit down at his desk. “Here he is.”

The SIB was able to access records across all three services. There on the computer monitor was a headshot of Noel Campbell Brockbank. It had been taken before Strike met him, before Brockbank had taken the hits to the face that had permanently sunken one of his eye sockets and enlarged one of his ears. A dark crew cut, a long, narrow face, tinged blue around the jaw and with an unusually high forehead: Strike had thought when they had first met that his elongated head and slightly lopsided features made it look as though Brockbank’s head had been squeezed in a vice.

“I can’t let you print anything out, Oggy,” said Hardacre as Strike sat down on the wheeled computer chair, “but you could take a picture of the screen. Coffee?”

“Tea, if you’ve got any. Cheers.”

Hardacre left the room, closing the door carefully behind him, and Strike took out his mobile to take pictures of the screen. When he was confident he had a decent likeness he scrolled down to see Brockbank’s full record, making a note of his date of birth and other personal details.

Brockbank had been born on Christmas Day in the year of Strike’s own birth. He had given a home address in Barrow-in-Furness when he had joined the army. Shortly before serving in Operation Granby — better known to the public as the first Gulf war — he had married a military widow with two daughters, one of them Brittany. His son had been born while he was serving in Bosnia.

Strike went through the record, making notes as he did so, all the way down to the life-changing injury that had put paid to Brockbank’s career. Hardacre reentered the room with two mugs and Strike muttered thanks as he continued to peruse the digital file. There was no mention in here of the crime of which Brockbank had been accused, which Strike and Hardacre had investigated and of which they both remained convinced that Brockbank was guilty. The fact that he had eluded justice was one of the biggest regrets of Strike’s military career. His most vivid memory of the man was Brockbank’s expression, feral in its wildness, as he launched himself at Strike bearing a broken beer bottle. He had been around Strike’s own size, perhaps even taller. The sound of Brockbank hitting the wall when Strike punched him had been, Hardacre said later, like a car ramming the side of the flimsy army accommodation.

“He’s drawing a nice fat military pension, I see,” muttered Strike, scribbling down the various locations to which it had been sent since Brockbank had left the military. He had gone home first: Barrow-in-Furness. Then Manchester, for a little under a year.

“Ha,” said Strike quietly. “So it was you, you bastard.”

Brockbank had left Manchester for Market Harborough, then returned to Barrow-in-Furness.

“What’s this here, Hardy?”

“Psych report,” said Hardacre, who had sat down on a low chair by the wall and was perusing a file of his own. “You shouldn’t be looking at that at all. Very careless of me to have left it up there.”

“Very,” agreed Strike, opening it.

However, the psychiatric report did not tell Strike much that he did not already know. Only once he had been hospitalized had it become clear that Brockbank was an alcoholic. There had been much debate among his doctors as to which of his symptoms could be attributed to alcohol, which to PTSD and which to his traumatic brain injuries. Strike had to Google some of the words as he went: aphasia — difficulty finding the right word; dysarthria — disordered speech; alexithymia — difficulty understanding or identifying one’s own emotions.

Forgetfulness had been very convenient to Brockbank around that time. How difficult would it have been for him to fake some of these classic symptoms?

“What they didn’t take into account,” said Strike, who had known and liked several other men with traumatic brain injury, “was that he was a cunt to start with.”

“True that,” said Hardacre, sipping his coffee while he worked.

Strike closed down Brockbank’s files and opened Laing’s. His photograph tallied exactly with Strike’s memories of the Borderer, who had been only twenty when they had first met: broad and pale, his hair growing low on his forehead, with the small, dark eyes of a ferret.

Strike had good recall of the details of Laing’s brief army career, which he himself had ended. Having taken a note of Laing’s mother’s address in Melrose, he skim-read the rest of the document and then opened the attached psychiatric report.

Strong indications of anti-social and borderline personality disorders... likely to present continuing risk of harm to others...

A loud knock on the office door caused Strike to close down the records on screen and get to his feet. Hardacre had barely reached the door when a severe-looking woman in a skirt suit appeared.

“Got anything for me on Timpson?” she barked at Hardacre, but she gave Strike a suspicious glare and he guessed that she had already been well aware of his presence.

“I’ll cut away now, Hardy,” he said at once. “Great to catch up.”

Hardacre introduced him briefly to the Warrant Officer, gave a potted version of his and Strike’s previous association and walked Strike out.

“I’ll be here late,” he said as they shook hands at the door. “Ring me when you know what time you’ll have the car back. Happy travels.”

As Strike made his way carefully down the stone stairs, it was impossible not to reflect that he could have been here, working alongside Hardacre, subject to the familiar routines and demands of the Special Investigation Branch. The army had wanted to keep him, even with his lower leg gone. He had never regretted his decision to leave, but this sudden, brief re-immersion in his old life gave rise to an inevitable nostalgia.

As he stepped out into the weak sunshine that was gleaming through a rupture in the thick clouds, he had never been more conscious of the change in his status. He was free, now, to walk away from the demands of unreasonable superiors and the confinement of a rock-bound office, but he had also been stripped of the might and status of the British Army. He was completely alone as he resumed what might well prove a wild goose chase, armed only with a few addresses, in pursuit of the man who had sent Robin a woman’s leg.