Career of Evil

18

The first time that Robin had ever entered Strike’s office had been on her first morning as an engaged woman. Unlocking the glass door today, she remembered watching the new sapphire on her finger darken, shortly before Strike had come hurtling out of the office and nearly knocked her down the metal staircase to her death.

There was no ring on her finger anymore. The place where it had sat all these months felt hypersensitive, as though it had left her branded. She was carrying a small holdall that contained a change of outfit and a few toiletries.

You can’t cry here. You mustn’t cry here.

Automatically she performed the usual start-of-the-working-day tasks: took off her coat, hung it up with her handbag on a peg beside the door, filled and switched on the kettle, and stowed the holdall under her desk, where Strike would not see it. She kept turning back to check that she’d done what she had meant to do, feeling disembodied, like a ghost whose chilly fingers might slip through the handles of handbags and kettles.

It had taken four days to dismantle a relationship that had lasted nine years. Four days of mounting animosity, of grudges aired and accusations hurled. Some of it seemed so trivial, looking back. The Land Rover, the Grand National, her decision to take her laptop home. On Sunday there had been a petty squabble about whose parents were paying for the wedding cars, which had led yet again to an argument about her pitiful pay packet. By the time they had got into the Land Rover on Monday morning to drive back home, they had barely been speaking.

Then last night, at home in West Ealing, had come the explosive argument that had rendered all the squabbling that had gone before trivial, mere warning tremors of the seismic disaster that would lay waste to everything.

Strike would be down shortly. She could hear him moving around in the flat upstairs. Robin knew that she must not look shaky or unable to cope. Work was all she had now. She would have to find a room in somebody else’s flat, which would be all she would be able to afford on the pittance Strike paid her. She tried to imagine future housemates. It would be like being back in halls of residence.

Don’t think about that now.

As she made tea she realized that she had forgotten to bring in the tin of Bettys tea bags she had bought shortly after trying on her wedding dress for the last time. The thought almost overset her, but by a powerful effort of will she restrained the urge to cry and took her mug to the computer, ready to trawl through the emails she had not been able to answer during their week of exile from the office.

Strike, she knew, had only just got back from Scotland: he had returned on the overnight train. She would make conversation about that when he appeared, so as to keep attention away from her red, swollen eyes. Before leaving the flat this morning she had tried to improve their appearance with ice and cold water, but with limited success.

Matthew had tried to block her path as she headed out of the flat. He had looked ghastly too.

“Look, we’ve got to talk. We’ve got to.”

Not anymore, thought Robin, whose hands shook as she lifted the hot tea to her lips. I haven’t got to do anything I don’t want to do anymore.

The brave thought was undermined by a single hot tear that leaked without warning down her cheek. Horrified, she brushed it away; she had not thought that she had any tears left to cry. Turning to her monitor she began typing a reply to a client who had queried his invoice, hardly knowing what she wrote.

Clanging footsteps on the stairs outside made her brace herself. The door opened. Robin looked up. The man who stood there was not Strike.

Primal, instinctive fear ripped through her. There was no time to analyze why the stranger had such an effect on her; she only knew that he was dangerous. In an instant she had calculated that she would not be able to reach the door in time, that her rape alarm was in her coat pocket and that her best weapon was the sharp letter-opener lying inches from her left hand.

He was gaunt and pale, his head was shaven, a few freckles were scattered across a broad nose and his mouth was wide and thick lipped. Tattoos covered his wrists, knuckles and neck. A gold tooth glinted on one side of his grinning mouth. A deep scar ran from the middle of his upper lip towards his cheekbone, dragging his mouth upwards in a permanent Elvis-style sneer. He wore baggy jeans and a tracksuit top and he smelled strongly of stale tobacco and cannabis.

“’S’up?” he said. He repeatedly clicked the fingers of both hands hanging at his sides as he moved into the room. Click, click, click. “You all alone, yeah?”

“No,” she said, her mouth completely dry. She wanted to grab the letter-opener before he came any closer. Click, click, click. “My boss is just—”

“Shanker!” said Strike’s voice from the doorway.

The stranger turned.

“Bunsen,” he said and stopped clicking his fingers, held out a hand and gave Strike a dap greeting. “’Ow you doin’, bruv?”

Dear God, thought Robin, limp with relief. Why hadn’t Strike told her that the man was coming? She turned away, busying herself with email so that Strike would not see her face. As Strike led Shanker into the inner office and closed the door behind them, she caught the word “Whittaker.”

Ordinarily she would have wished that she could be in there, listening. She finished her email and supposed that she ought to offer them coffee. First she went to splash more cold water on her face in the tiny bathroom on the landing, which retained a strong smell of drains no matter how many air-fresheners she bought out of petty cash.

Strike, meanwhile, had seen just enough of Robin to be shocked by her appearance. He had never seen her face so pale, nor her eyes so puffy and bloodshot. Even as he sat down at his desk, eager to hear what information on Whittaker Shanker had brought to his office, the thought crossed his mind: What’s the bastard done to her? And for a fraction of a second, before fixing all his attention on Shanker, Strike imagined punching Matthew and enjoying it.

“Why you lookin’ so ugly, Bunsen?” asked Shanker, stretching himself out in the chair opposite and clicking his fingers enthusiastically. He had had the tic since his teens and Strike pitied the person who would try to make him stop.

“Knackered,” said Strike. “Got back from Scotland a couple of hours ago.”

“Never been to Scotland,” said Shanker.

Strike was not aware that Shanker had ever been out of London in his life.

“So what’ve you got for me?”

“’E’s still around,” said Shanker, ceasing his finger-clicking to pull a pack of Mayfairs out of his pocket. He lit one with a cheap lighter without asking whether Strike minded. With a mental shrug, Strike took out his own Benson & Hedges and borrowed the lighter. “Seen ’is dealer. Geezer says ’e’s in Catford.”

“He’s left Hackney?”

“Unless ’e’s left a clone of ’imself behind ’e musta done, Bunsen. I didn’t check for clones. Gimme another ton an’ I’ll go see.”

Strike gave a short snort of amusement. People underestimated Shanker at their peril. Given that he looked as though he had done every kind of illegal substance in his time, his restlessness often misled acquaintances into assuming he was on something. In fact, he was sharper and soberer than many a businessman at the end of their working day, if incurably criminal.

“Got an address?” said Strike, pulling a notebook towards him.

“Not yet,” said Shanker.

“Is he working?”

“’E tells ev’ryone ’e’s a road manager for some metal band.”

“But?”

“’E’s pimping,” said Shanker matter-of-factly.

There was a knock on the door.

“Anyone want coffee?” asked Robin. Strike could tell that she was deliberately keeping her face out of the light. His eyes found her left hand: the engagement ring was missing.

“Cheers,” said Shanker. “Two sugars.”

“Tea would be great, thanks,” said Strike, watching her move away as he reached into his desk for the old tin ashtray he had swiped from a bar in Germany. He pushed it across to Shanker before the latter could tap his lengthening ash on the floor.

“How d’you know he’s pimping?”

“I know this uvver geezer who met ’im with the brass,” said Shanker. Strike was familiar with the cockney slang: brass nail — “tail.” “Says Whittaker lives with ’er. Very young. Just legal.”

“Right,” said Strike.

He had dealt with prostitution in its various aspects ever since he had become an investigator, but this was different: this was his ex-stepfather, a man whom his mother had loved and romanticized, to whom she had borne a child. He could almost smell Whittaker in the room again: his filthy clothes, his animal stink.

“Catford,” he repeated.

“Yeah. I’ll keep looking if you want,” said Shanker, disregarding the ashtray and flicking his ash onto the floor. “’Ow much is it wurf to you, Bunsen?”

While they were still negotiating Shanker’s fee, a discussion that proceeded with good humor but the underlying seriousness of two men who knew perfectly well that he would do nothing without payment, Robin brought in the coffee. With the light full on her face, she looked ghastly.

“I’ve done the most important emails,” she told Strike, pretending not to notice his inquiring look. “I’ll head off and do Platinum now.”

Shanker looked thoroughly intrigued by this announcement, but nobody explained.

“You OK?” Strike asked her, wishing that Shanker were not present.

“Fine,” said Robin, with a pathetic attempt at a smile. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

“‘’Ead off and do platinum’?” repeated Shanker curiously over the sound of the outer door closing.

“It’s not as good as it sounds,” said Strike, leaning back in his seat to look out of the window. Robin left the building in her trench coat and headed off up Denmark Street and out of sight. A large man in a beanie hat came out of the guitar shop opposite and set off in the same direction, but Strike’s attention had already been recalled by Shanker, who said:

“Someone really sent you a fucking leg, Bunsen?”

“Yep,” said Strike. “Cut it off, boxed it up and delivered it by hand.”

“Fuck me backwards,” said Shanker, whom it took a great deal to shock.

After Shanker had left in possession of a wad of cash for services already rendered, and the promise of the same again for further details on Whittaker, Strike phoned Robin. She did not pick up, but that wasn’t unusual if she was somewhere she couldn’t easily talk. He texted her:

then sat down in her vacated chair, ready to do his fair share of answering inquiries and paying invoices.

However, he found it hard to focus after the second night on a sleeper. Five minutes later he checked his mobile but Robin had not responded, so he got up to make himself another mug of tea. As he raised the mug to his lips he caught a faint whiff of cannabis, transferred from hand to hand as he and Shanker said farewell.

Shanker came originally from Canning Town but had cousins in Whitechapel who, twenty years previously, had become involved in a feud with a rival gang. Shanker’s willingness to help out his cousins had resulted in him lying alone in the gutter at the end of Fulbourne Street, bleeding copiously from the deep gash to his mouth and cheek that disfigured him to this day. It was there that Leda Strike, returning from a late-evening excursion to purchase Rizlas, had found him.

To walk past a boy of her own son’s age while he lay bleeding in the gutter would have been impossible for Leda. The fact that the boy was clutching a bloody knife, that he was screaming imprecations and clearly in the grip of some kind of drug made no difference at all. Shanker found himself being mopped up and talked to as he had not been talked to since his own mother had died when he was eight. When he refused point blank to let the strange woman call an ambulance, for fear of what the police would do to him (Shanker had just stuck his knife through the thigh of his attacker), Leda took what, to her, was the only possible course: she helped him home to the squat and looked after him personally. After cutting up Band Aids and sticking them clumsily over the deep cut in a semblance of stitches, she cooked him a sloppy mess full of cigarette ash and told her bemused son to find a mattress where Shanker could sleep.

Leda treated Shanker from the first as though he were a long-lost nephew, and in return he had worshipped her in the way that only a broken boy clinging to the memory of a loving mother could. Once healed, he availed himself of her sincere invitation to drop round whenever he felt like it. Shanker talked to Leda as he could talk to no other human being and was perhaps the only person who could see no flaw in her. To Strike, he extended the respect he felt for his mother. The two boys, who in almost every other regard were as different as it was possible to be, were further bonded by a silent but powerful hatred of Whittaker, who had been insanely jealous of the new element in Leda’s life but wary of treating him with the disdain he showed Strike.

Strike was sure that Whittaker had recognized in Shanker the same deficit from which he himself suffered: a lack of normal boundaries. Whittaker had concluded, rightly, that his teenage stepson might well wish him dead, but that he was restrained by a desire not to distress his mother, a respect for the law and a determination not to make an irrevocable move that would forever blight his own prospects. Shanker, however, knew no such restraints and his long periods of cohabitation with the fractured family kept a precarious curb on Whittaker’s growing tendency towards violence.

In fact, it had been the regular presence of Shanker in the squat that had made Strike feel he could safely leave for university. He had not felt equal to putting into words what he most feared when he took leave of Shanker, but Shanker had understood.

“No worries, Bunsen, mate. No worries.”

Nevertheless, he could not always be there. On the day that Leda had died, Shanker had been away on one of his regular, drug-related business trips. Strike would never forget Shanker’s grief, his guilt, his uncontrollable tears when they next met. While Shanker had been negotiating a good price for a kilo of premium Bolivian cocaine in Kentish Town, Leda Strike had been slowly stiffening on a filthy mattress. The finding of the post-mortem was that she had ceased to breathe a full six hours before any of the other squat dwellers tried to rouse her from what they had thought was a profound slumber.

Like Strike, Shanker had been convinced from the first that Whittaker had killed her, and such was the violence of his grief and his desire for instant retribution that Whittaker might well have been glad he was taken into custody before Shanker could get his hands on him. Inadvisably allowed into the witness box to describe a maternal woman who had never touched heroin in her life, Shanker had screamed “That fucker done it!” attempted to clamber over the barrier towards Whittaker and been bundled unceremoniously out of court.

Consciously pushing away these memories of the long-buried past, which smelled no better for being dug up again, Strike took a swig of hot tea and checked his mobile again. There was still no word from Robin.