Career of Evil

20

Robin had forgotten her promise to Strike that she would not stay out after dark. In fact, she had hardly registered the fact that the sun had gone down until she realized that headlights were swooping past her and that the shop windows were lit up. Platinum had changed her routine today. She would usually have been inside Spearmint Rhino for several hours already, gyrating half naked for the benefit of strange men, not striding along the road, fully dressed in jeans, high-heeled boots and a fringed suede jacket. Presumably she had changed her shift, but she would soon be safely gyrating around a pole, which left the question of where Robin was going to spend the night.

Her mobile had been vibrating inside the pocket of her coat all day. Matthew had sent more than thirty texts.

As the day had worn on and her silence had not broken, he had started trying to call. Then the tone of his texts had changed.

She had not texted back, or picked up his calls, or rung him. All she knew was that she could not bear to go back to the flat, not tonight. What would happen tomorrow, or the next day, she had no idea. She was hungry, exhausted and numb.

Strike had become almost as importuning towards late afternoon.

She had texted him back, because she could not face talking to him either.

She and Strike maintained a certain emotional distance, always, and she was afraid that if he were kind to her she would cry, revealing the sort of weakness that he would deplore in an assistant. With virtually no cases left, with the threat of the man who had sent the leg hanging over her, she must not give Strike another reason to tell her to stay at home.

He had not been satisfied with her response.

She had ignored that one on the basis that she might easily have failed to receive it, being close to the Tube when he sent it and shortly afterwards having no reception as she and Platinum rode the Tube back to Tottenham Court Road. On emerging from the station Robin found another missed call from Strike on her phone, as well as a new text from Matthew.

“Oh, don’t flatter yourself,” muttered Robin. “Like I’d kill myself over you.”

A strangely familiar paunchy man in a suit walked past Robin, illuminated by the glow of Spearmint Rhino’s canopy. It was Two-Times. Robin wondered whether she imagined the self-satisfied smirk he gave her.

Was he going inside to watch his girlfriend gyrate for other men? Did he get a thrill out of having his sex life documented? Precisely what kind of weirdo was he?

Robin turned away. She needed to make a decision as to what to do tonight. A large man in a beanie hat appeared to be arguing into his mobile phone in a dark doorway a hundred yards away.

The disappearance of Platinum had robbed Robin of purpose. Where was she going to sleep? As she stood there, irresolute, a group of young men walked past her, deliberately close, one of them brushing against her holdall. She could smell Lynx and lager.

“Got your costume in there, darling?”

She became aware of the fact that she was standing outside a lap-dancing club. As she turned automatically in the direction of Strike’s office, her mobile rang. Without thinking, she answered it.

“Where the hell have you been?” said Strike’s angry voice in her ear.

She barely had time to be glad that he wasn’t Matthew before he said:

“I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day! Where are you?”

“On Tottenham Court Road,” she said, walking fast away from the still-jeering men. “Platinum’s only just gone inside and Two—”

“What did I tell you about not staying out after dark?”

“It’s well-lit,” said Robin.

She was trying to remember whether she had ever noticed a Travelodge near here. She needed somewhere clean and cheap. It must be cheap, because she was drawing on the joint account; she was determined not to spend more than she had put in.

“Are you all right?” asked Strike, slightly less aggressively.

A lump rose in her throat.

“Fine,” she said, as forcefully as she could. She was trying to be professional, to be what Strike wanted.

“I’m still at the office,” he said. “Did you say you’re on Tottenham Court Road?”

“I’ve got to go, sorry,” she said, in a tight, cold voice and hung up.

The fear of crying had become so overwhelming that she had to end the call. She thought he had been on the verge of offering to meet her, and if they met she would tell him everything, and she must not do that.

Tears were suddenly pouring down her face. She had no one else. There! She had admitted it to herself at last. The people they had meals with at weekends, the ones they went to watch rugby with: they were all Matthew’s friends, Matthew’s work colleagues, Matthew’s old university friends. She had nobody of her own but Strike.

“Oh God,” she said, wiping her eyes and nose on the sleeve of her coat.

“You all right, sweetheart?” called a toothless tramp from a doorway.

She was not sure why she ended up in the Tottenham, except that the bar staff knew her, she was familiar with where the Ladies was, and it was somewhere that Matthew had never been. All she wanted was a quiet corner in which she could look up cheap places to stay. She was also craving a drink, which was most unlike her. After splashing her face with cold water in the bathroom she bought herself a glass of red wine, took it to a table and pulled out her phone again. She had missed another call from Strike.

Men at the bar were looking over at her. She knew what she must look like, tear-stained and alone, her holdall beside her. Well, she couldn’t help that. She typed into her mobile: Travelodges near Tottenham Court Road, and waited for the slow response, drinking her wine faster than perhaps she ought to have done on a virtually empty stomach. No breakfast, no lunch: a bag of crisps and an apple consumed at the student café where Platinum had been studying were all she had eaten that day.

There was a Travelodge in High Holborn. That would have to do. She felt slightly calmer for knowing where she was going to spend the night. Careful not to make eye contact with any of the men at the bar, she went up to get a second glass of wine. Perhaps she ought to call her mother, she thought suddenly, but the prospect made her feel tearful all over again. She could not face Linda’s love and disappointment, not yet.

A large figure in a beanie hat entered the pub, but Robin was keeping her attention determinedly on her change and her wine, giving none of the hopeful men lurking at the bar the slightest reason to suppose that she wanted any of them to join her.

The second glass of wine made her feel much more relaxed. She remembered how Strike had got so drunk here, in this very pub, that he could barely walk. That had been the only night that he had ever shared personal information. Maybe that was the real reason she had been drawn here, she thought, raising her eyes to the colorful glass cupola overhead. This was the bar where you went to drink when you found out that the person you loved was unfaithful.

“You alone?” said a man’s voice.

“Waiting for someone,” she said.

He was slightly blurred when she looked up at him, a wiry blond man with bleached blue eyes, and she could tell that he did not believe her.

“Can I wait with you?”

“No, you fucking can’t,” said another, familiar voice.

Strike had arrived, massive, scowling, glaring at the stranger, who retreated with ill grace to a couple of friends at the bar.

“What are you doing here?” asked Robin, surprised to find that her tongue felt numb and thick after two glasses of wine.

“Looking for you,” said Strike.

“How did you know I was—?”

“I’m a detective. How many of those have you had?” he asked, looking down at her wineglass.

“Only one,” she lied, so he went to the bar for another, and a pint of Doom Bar for himself. As he ordered, a large man in a beanie hat ducked out of the door, but Strike was more interested in keeping an eye on the blond man who was still staring over at Robin and only seemed to give up on her once Strike reappeared, glowering, with two drinks and sat down opposite her.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t give me that. You look like bloody death.”

“Well,” said Robin, taking a large slurp of wine, “consider my morale boosted.”

Strike gave a short laugh.

“Why have you got a holdall with you?” When she did not answer, he said, “Where’s your engagement ring?”

She opened her mouth to answer but a treacherous desire to cry rose to drown the words. After a short inner struggle and another gulp of wine she said:

“I’m not engaged anymore.”

“Why not?”

“This is rich, coming from you.”

I’m drunk, she thought, as though watching herself from outside her own body. Look at me. I’m drunk on two and a half glasses of wine, no food and no sleep.

“What’s rich?” asked Strike, confused.

“We don’t talk about personal... you don’t talk about personal stuff.”

“I seem to remember spilling my guts all over you in this very pub.”

“Once,” said Robin.

Strike deduced from her pink cheeks and her thickened speech that she was not on her second glass of wine. Both amused and concerned, he said:

“I think you need something to eat.”

“That’s ’zacktly what I said to you,” Robin replied, “that night when you were... and we ended up having a kebab — and I do not,” she said with dignity, “want a kebab.”

“Well,” said Strike, “y’know, it’s London. We can probably find you something that isn’t a kebab.”

“I like crisps,” said Robin, so he bought her some.

“What’s going on?” he repeated on his return. After a few seconds of watching her attempting to open the crisps he took them from her to do it himself.

“Nothing. I’m going to sleep in a Travelodge tonight, that’s all.”

“A Travelodge.”

“Yeah. There’s one in... there’s one...”

She looked down at her dead mobile and realized that she had forgotten to charge it the previous night.

“I can’t remember where it is,” she said. “Just leave me, I’m fine,” she added, groping in her holdall for something to blow her nose on.

“Yeah,” he said heavily, “I’m totally reassured now I’ve seen you.”

“I am fine,” she said fiercely. “I’ll be at work as usual tomorrow, you wait and see.”

“You think I came to find you because I’m worried about work?”

“Don’t be nice!” she groaned, burying her face in her tissues. “I can’t take it! Be normal!”

“What’s normal?” he asked, confused.

“G-grumpy and uncommunic — uncommunica—”

“What do you want to communicate about?”

“Nothing in particular,” she lied. “I just thought... keep things profess’nal.”

“What’s happened between you and Matthew?”

“What’s happening b’tween you and Elin?” she countered.

“How’s that important?” he asked, nonplussed.

“Same thing,” she said vaguely, draining her third glass. “I’d like ’nother—”

“You’re having a soft drink this time.”

She examined the ceiling while waiting for him. There were theatrical scenes painted up there: Bottom cavorted with Titania amid a group of fairies.

“Things are going OK with Elin,” he told her when he sat back down, having decided that an exchange of information was the easiest way to make her talk about her own problems. “It suits me, keeping it low key. She’s got a daughter she doesn’t want me getting too close to. Messy divorce.”

“Oh,” said Robin, blinking at him over her glass of Coke. “How did you meet her?”

“Through Nick and Ilsa.”

“How do they know her?”

“They don’t. They had a party and she came along with her brother. He’s a doctor, works with Nick. They hadn’t ever met her before.”

“Oh,” said Robin again.

She had briefly forgotten her own troubles, diverted by this glimpse into Strike’s private world. So normal, so unremarkable! A party and he had gone along and got talking to the beautiful blonde. Women liked Strike — she had come to realize that over the months they had worked together. She had not understood the appeal when she had started working for him. He was so very different from Matthew.

“Does Ilsa like Elin?” asked Robin.

Strike was startled by this flash of perception.

“Er — yeah, I think so,” he lied.

Robin sipped her Coke.

“OK,” said Strike, restraining his impatience with difficulty, “your turn.”

“We’ve split up,” she said.

Interrogation technique told him to remain silent, and after a minute or so the decision was vindicated.

“He... told me something,” she said. “Last night.”

Strike waited.

“And we can’t go back from that. Not that.”

She was pale and composed but he could almost feel the anguish behind the words. Still he waited.

“He slept with someone else,” she said in a small, tight voice.

There was a pause. She picked up her crisp packet, found that she had finished the contents and dropped it on the table.

“Shit,” said Strike.

He was surprised: not that Matthew had slept with another woman, but that he had admitted it. His impression of the handsome young accountant was of a man who knew how to run his life to suit himself, to compartmentalize and categorize where necessary.

“And not just once,” said Robin, in that same tight voice. “He was doing it for months. With someone we both know. Sarah Shadlock. She’s an old friend of his from university.”

“Christ,” said Strike. “I’m sorry.”

He was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain she was in. Yet the revelation had caused certain other feelings — feelings he usually kept under tight rein, considering them both misguided and dangerous — to flex inside him, to test their strength against their restraining bonds.

Don’t be a stupid fucker, he told himself. That’s one thing that can never happen. It’d screw everything up royally.

“What made him tell you?” Strike asked.

She did not answer, but the question brought back the scene in awful clarity.

Their magnolia sitting room was far too tiny to accommodate a couple in such a state of fury. They had driven all the way home from Yorkshire in the Land Rover that Matthew had not wanted. Somewhere along the way, an incensed Matthew had asserted that it was a matter of time before Strike made a pass at Robin and what was more, he suspected that she would welcome the advance.

“He’s my friend, that’s all!” she had bellowed at Matthew from beside their cheap sofa, their weekend bags still in the hall. “For you to suggest I’m turned on by the fact he’s had his leg—”

“You’re so bloody naive!” he had bellowed. “He’s your friend until he tries to get you into bed, Robin—”

“Who are you judging him by? Are you biding your time before you jump on your coworkers?”

“Of course I’m bloody not, but you’re so frigging starry-eyed about him — he’s a man, it’s just the two of you in the office—”

“He’s my friend, like you’re friends with Sarah Shadlock but you’ve never—”

She had seen it in his face. An expression she had never noticed before passed across it like a shadow. Guilt seemed to slide physically over the high cheekbones, the clean jaw, the hazel eyes she had adored for years.

“—have you?” she said, her tone suddenly wondering. “Have you?”

He hesitated too long.

“No,” he had said forcefully, like a paused film jerking back into action. “Of course n—”

“You have,” she said. “You’ve slept with her.”

She could see it in his face. He did not believe in male-female friendships because he had never had one. He and Sarah had been sleeping together.

“When?” she had asked. “Not... was it then?”

“I didn’t—”

She heard the feeble protestation of a man who knows he has lost, who had even wanted to lose. That had haunted her all night and all day: on some level, he had wanted Robin to know.

Her strange calm, more stunned than accusatory, had led him on to tell her everything. Yes, it had been then. He felt terrible about it, he always had — but he and Robin hadn’t been sleeping together at the time and, one night, Sarah had been comforting him, and, well, things had got out of hand—

“She was comforting you?” Robin had repeated. Rage had come then, at last, unfreezing her from her state of stunned disbelief. “She was comforting you?”

“It was a difficult time for me too, you know!” he had shouted.

Strike watched as Robin shook her head unconsciously, trying to clear it, but the recollections had turned her pink and her eyes were sparkling again.

“What did you say?” she asked Strike, confused.

“I asked what made him tell you.”

“I don’t know. We were in the middle of a row. He thinks...” She took a deep breath. Two-thirds of a bottle of wine on an empty stomach was leading her to emulate Matthew’s honesty. “He doesn’t believe you and I are just friends.”

This was no surprise to Strike. He had read suspicion in every look Matthew had ever given him, heard insecurity in every chippy comment thrown his way.

“So,” Robin went on unsteadily, “I pointed out that we are just friends, and that he’s got a platonic friend himself, dear old Sarah Shadlock. So then it all came out. He and Sarah had an affair at university while I was... while I was at home.”

“That long ago?” Strike said.

“You think I shouldn’t mind if it was seven years ago?” she demanded. “If he’s lied about it ever since and we constantly see her?”

“I was just surprised,” said Strike evenly, refusing to be drawn into a fight, “that he’s owned up to it after all this time.”

“Oh,” said Robin. “Well, he was ashamed. Because of when it happened.”

“At university?” said Strike, confused.

“It was right after I dropped out,” said Robin.

“Ah,” said Strike.

They had never discussed what had made her leave her psychology degree and return to Masham.

Robin had not intended to tell Strike the story, but all resolutions were adrift tonight on the little sea of alcohol with which she had filled her hungry and exhausted body. What did it matter if she told him? Without that information he would not have the full picture or be able to advise her what to do next. She was relying on him, she realized dimly, to help her. Whether she liked it or not — whether he liked it or not — Strike was her best friend in London. She had never looked that fact squarely in the face before. Alcohol buoyed you up and it washed your eyes clean. In vino veritas, they said, didn’t they? Strike would know. He had an odd, occasional habit of quoting Latin.

“I didn’t want to leave uni,” said Robin slowly, her head swimming, “but something happened and afterwards I had problems...”

That was no good. That didn’t explain it.

“I was coming home from a friend’s, in another hall of residence,” she said. “It wasn’t that late... only eight o’clock or something... but there had been a warning out about him — on the local news—”

That was no good either. Far too much detail. What she needed was a bald statement of fact, not to talk him through every little bit of it, the way she’d had to in court.

She took a deep breath, looked into Strike’s face and read dawning comprehension there. Relieved not to have to spell it out, she asked:

“Please could I have some more crisps?”

When he returned from the bar he handed them to her in silence. She did not like the look on his face.

“Don’t go thinking — it doesn’t make any difference!” she said desperately. “It was twenty minutes of my life. It was something that happened to me. It isn’t me. It doesn’t define me.”

Strike guessed that they were phrases she had been led to embrace in some kind of therapy. He had interviewed rape victims. He knew the forms of words they were given to make sense of what, to a woman, was incomprehensible. A lot of things about Robin were explained now. The long allegiance to Matthew, for instance: the safe boy from home.

However, the drunken Robin read in Strike’s silence the thing she had most feared: a shift in the way he saw her, from equal to victim.

“It doesn’t make any difference!” she repeated furiously. “I’m still the same!”

“I know that,” he said, “but it’s still one fucking horrible thing to have happened to you.”

“Well, yes... it was...” she muttered, mollified. Then, firing up again: “My evidence got him. I noticed things about him while... He had this patch of white skin under his ear — they call it vitiligo — and one of his pupils was fixed, dilated.”

She was gabbling slightly now, wolfing down her third packet of crisps.

“He tried to strangle me; I went limp and played dead and he ran for it. He’d attacked two other girls wearing the mask and neither of them could tell the police anything about him. My evidence got him put away.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Strike.

She found this response satisfactory. They sat in silence for a minute while she finished the crisps.

“Only, afterwards, I couldn’t leave my room,” she said, as though there had been no pause. “In the end, the university sent me home. I was only supposed to take a term off, but I–I never went back.”

Robin contemplated this fact, staring into space. Matthew had urged her to stay at home. When her agoraphobia had resolved, which had taken more than a year, she had begun visiting him at his university in Bath, wandering hand in hand among dwellings of soft Cotswold stone, down sweeping Regency crescents, along the tree-lined banks of the River Avon. Every time they had gone out with his friends Sarah Shadlock had been there, braying at Matthew’s jokes, touching his arm, leading the conversation constantly to the good times they all enjoyed when Robin, the tedious girlfriend from home, was not present...

She was comforting me. It was a difficult time for me too, you know!

“Right,” said Strike, “we’ve got to get you a place to spend tonight.”

“I’m going to the Travel—”

“No, you’re not.”

He did not want her staying in a place where anonymous people might wander the corridors unchallenged, or could walk in off the street. Perhaps he was being paranoid, but he wanted her somewhere that a scream would not be lost in the raucous cries of hen parties.

“I could sleep in the office,” said Robin, swaying as she tried to stand; he grabbed her by the arm. “If you’ve still got that camp—”

“You’re not sleeping in the office,” he said. “I know a good place. My aunt and uncle stayed there when they came up to see The Mousetrap. C’mon, give me the holdall.”

He had once before put his arm around Robin’s shoulders but that had been quite different: he had been using her as a walking stick. This time it was she who could barely move in a straight line. He found her waist and held her steady as they left the pub.

“Matthew,” she said, as they moved off, “would not like this.”

Strike said nothing. In spite of everything he had heard, he was not as sure as Robin was that the relationship was over. They had been together nine years and there was a wedding dress ready and waiting in Masham. He had been careful to offer no criticism of Matthew that might be repeated to her ex-fiancé in the renewal of hostilities that was surely coming, because the accumulated ties of nine years could not be severed in a single night. His reticence was for Robin’s sake rather than his own. He had no fear of Matthew.

“Who was that man?” asked Robin sleepily, after they had walked a hundred yards in silence.

“Which man?”

“That man this morning... I thought he might be the leg man... he scared the hell out of me.”

“Ah... that’s Shanker. He’s an old friend.”

“He’s terrifying.”

“Shanker wouldn’t hurt you,” Strike assured her. Then, as an afterthought: “But don’t ever leave him alone in the office.”

“Why not?”

“He’ll nick anything that’s not nailed down. He does nothing for nothing.”

“Where did you meet him?”

The story of Shanker and Leda took them all the way to Frith Street, where quiet town houses looked down upon them, exuding dignity and order.

“Here?” said Robin, gazing open-mouthed up at Hazlitt’s Hotel. “I can’t stay here — this’ll be expensive!”

“I’m paying,” said Strike. “Think of it as this year’s bonus. No arguments,” he added, as the door opened and a smiling young man stood back to let them in. “It’s my fault you need somewhere safe.”

The wood-paneled hall was cozy, with the feeling of a private house. There was only one way in and nobody could open the front door from outside.

When he had given the young man his credit card Strike saw the unsteady Robin to the foot of the stairs.

“You can take tomorrow morning off if you—”

“I’ll be there at nine,” she said. “Cormoran, thanks for — for—”

“Not a problem. Sleep well.”

Frith Street was quiet as he closed the Hazlitt’s door behind him. Strike set off, his hands deep in his pockets, lost in thought.

She had been raped and left for dead. Holy shit.

Eight days previously some bastard had handed her a woman’s severed leg and she had not breathed a word of her past, not asked for special dispensation to take time off, nor deviated in any respect from the total professionalism she brought to work every morning. It was he, without even knowing her history, who had insisted on the best rape alarm, on nothing after dark, on checking in with her regularly through the working day...

At the precise moment Strike became aware that he was walking away from Denmark Street rather than towards it, he spotted a man in a beanie hat twenty yards away, skulking on the corner of Soho Square. The amber tip of the cigarette swiftly vanished as the man turned and began to walk hurriedly away.

“’Scuse me, mate!”

Strike’s voice echoed through the quiet square as he sped up. The man in the hat did not look back, but broke into a run.

“Oi! Mate!”

Strike, too, began to run, his knee protesting with every jolting step. His quarry looked back once then took a sharp left, Strike moving as fast as he could in pursuit. Entering Carlisle Street, Strike squinted ahead at the crowd clustered around the entrance of the Toucan, wondering whether his man had joined it. Panting, he ran on past the pub drinkers, drawing up at the junction with Dean Street and revolving on the spot, looking for his quarry. He had a choice of taking a left, a right or continuing along Carlisle Street, and each offered a multitude of doorways and basement spaces in which the man in the beanie hat could have hidden, assuming he had not hailed a passing cab.

“Bollocks,” Strike muttered. His stump was sore against the end of his prosthesis. All he had was an impression of ample height and breadth, a dark coat and hat and the suspicious fact that he had run when called, run before Strike could ask him for the time, or a light, or directions.

He took a guess and headed right, up Dean Street. The traffic swooshed past him in either direction. For nearly an hour Strike continued to prowl the area, probing into dark doorways and basement cavities. He knew this was almost certainly a fool’s errand, but if — if — they had been followed by the man who had sent the leg, he was clearly a reckless bastard who might not have been scared away from Robin’s vicinity by Strike’s ungainly pursuit.

Men in sleeping bags glared at him as he moved far closer than members of the public usually dared; twice he startled cats out from behind dustbins, but the man in the beanie hat was nowhere to be seen.