Career of Evil

23

Mist lay in thick, soft layers like cobweb over the treetops of Regent’s Park next morning. Strike, who had swiftly silenced his alarm so as not to wake Elin, stood balancing on his single foot at the window, the curtain behind him to block out the light. For a minute he looked out upon the ghostly park and was transfixed by the effect of the rising sun on leafy branches rising from the sea of vapor. You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it, but the battle to get through the days made it easy to forget that this totally cost-free luxury existed. He carried memories like this from his childhood, especially those parts of it that he had spent in Cornwall: the glitter of the sea as you first saw it on a morning as blue as a butterfly’s wing; the mysterious emerald-and-shadow world of the Gunnera Passage at Trebah Garden; distant white sails bobbing like seabirds on blustery gunmetal waves.

Behind him in the dark bed, Elin shifted and sighed. Strike moved carefully out from behind the curtain, took the prosthesis leaning against the wall and sat down on one of her bedroom chairs to attach it. Then, still moving as quietly as possible, he headed for the bathroom with the day’s clothes in his arms.

They’d had their first row the previous evening: a landmark in every relationship. The total absence of communication when he failed to turn up for their date on Tuesday ought to have been a warning, but he had been too busy with Robin and a dismembered body to give it much thought. True, she had been frosty when he had phoned to apologize, but the fact that she had so readily agreed to a rescheduled date had not prepared him for a near-glacial reception when he had turned up in person twenty-four hours later. After a dinner eaten to the accompaniment of painful, stilted conversation he had offered to clear out and leave her to her resentment. She had become briefly angry as he reached for his coat, but it was the feeble spurt of a damp match; she had then crumbled into a tearful, semi-apologetic tirade in which he learned, firstly, that she was in therapy, secondly, that her therapist had identified a tendency towards passive aggression and, thirdly, that she had been so deeply wounded by his failure to turn up on Tuesday that she had drunk an entire bottle of wine alone in front of the television.

Strike had apologized again, offering in extenuation a difficult case, a tricky and unexpected development, expressing sincere remorse for having forgotten their date, but added that if she could not forgive, he had better clear out.

She had flung herself into his arms; they had gone straight to bed and had the best sex of their brief relationship.

Shaving in Elin’s immaculate bathroom with its sunken lights and snow-white towels, Strike reflected that he had got off pretty lightly. If he had forgotten to turn up to a date with Charlotte, the woman with whom he had been involved, on and off, for sixteen years, he would have been carrying physical wounds right now, searching for her in the cold dawn, or perhaps trying to restrain her from throwing herself from the high balcony.

He had called what he felt for Charlotte love and it remained the most profound feeling he had had for any woman. In the pain it had caused him and its lasting after-effects it had more resembled a virus that, even now, he was not sure he had overcome. Not seeing her, never calling her, never using the new email address she had set up to show him her distraught face on the day of her wedding to an old boyfriend: this was his self-prescribed treatment, which was keeping the symptoms at bay. Yet he knew he had been left impaired, that he no longer had the capacity to feel in the way that he had once felt. Elin’s distress of the previous evening had not touched him at his core in the way Charlotte’s had once done. He felt as though his capacity for loving had been blunted, the nerve endings severed. He had not intended to wound Elin; he did not enjoy seeing her cry; yet the ability to feel empathetic pain seemed to have closed down. A small part of him, in truth, had been mentally planning his route home as she sobbed.

Strike dressed in the bathroom then moved quietly back into the dimly lit hall, where he stowed his shaving things in the holdall he had packed for Barrow-in-Furness. A door stood ajar to his right. On a whim, he pushed it wider.

The little girl whom he had never met slept here when not at her father’s. The pink and white room was immaculate, with a ceiling mural of fairies around the cornice. Barbies sat in a neat line on a shelf, their smiles vacant, their pointy breasts covered in a rainbow of gaudy dresses. A fake-fur rug with a polar bear’s head lay on the floor beside a tiny white four-poster.

Strike knew hardly any little girls. He had two godsons, neither of whom he had particularly wanted, and three nephews. His oldest friend back in Cornwall had daughters, but Strike had virtually nothing to do with them; they rushed past him in a blur of ponytails and casual waves: “Hi Uncle Corm, bye Uncle Corm.” He had grown up, of course, with a sister, although Lucy had never been indulged with sugar-pink-canopied four-posters, much as she might have wanted them.

Brittany Brockbank had had a cuddly lion. It came back to him suddenly, out of nowhere, looking at the polar bear on the floor: a cuddly lion with a comical face. She had dressed it in a pink tutu and it had been lying on the sofa when her stepfather came running at Strike, a broken beer bottle in his hand.

Strike turned back to the hall, feeling in his pocket. He always carried a notebook and pen on him. He scribbled a brief note to Elin, alluding to the best part of the previous night, and left it on the hall table so as not to risk waking her. Then, as quietly as he had done everything else, he hoisted his holdall onto his shoulder and let himself out of the flat. He was meeting Robin at West Ealing station at eight.

The last traces of mist were lifting from Hastings Road when Robin left her house, flustered and heavy-eyed, a carrier bag of food in one hand and a holdall full of clean clothes in the other. She unlocked the rear of the old gray Land Rover, swung the clothes into it and hurried around to the driver’s seat with the food.

Matthew had just tried to hug her in the hall and she had forcibly resisted, two hands on his smooth warm chest, pushing him away, shouting at him to get off. He had been wearing only boxer shorts. Now she was afraid that he might be struggling into some clothes, ready to give chase. She slammed the car door and dragged on her seatbelt, eager to be gone, but as she turned the key in the ignition Matthew burst out of the house, barefoot, in T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. She had never seen his expression so naked, so vulnerable.

“Robin,” he called as she stepped on the accelerator and pulled away from the curb. “I love you. I love you!”

She spun the wheel and moved precariously out of the parking space, missing their neighbor’s Honda by inches. She could see Matthew shrinking in the rearview mirror; he, whose self-possession was usually total, was proclaiming his love at the top of his voice, risking the neighbors’ curiosity, their scorn and their laughter.

Robin’s heart thumped painfully in her chest. A quarter past seven; Strike would not be at the station yet. She turned left at the end of the road, intent only on putting distance between herself and Matthew.

He had risen at dawn, while she was trying to pack without waking him.

“Where are you going?”

“To help Strike with the investigation.”

“You’re going away overnight?”

“I expect so.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

She was afraid to tell him their destination in case he came after them. Matthew’s behavior when she had arrived home the previous evening had left her shaken. He had cried and begged. She had never seen him like that, not even after his mother’s death.

“Robin, we’ve got to talk.”

“We’ve talked enough.”

“Does your mother know where you’re going?”

“Yes.”

She was lying. Robin had not told her mother about the ruptured engagement yet, nor that she was heading off north with Strike. After all, she was twenty-six; it was none of her mother’s business. She knew, though, that Matthew was really asking whether she had told her mother that the wedding was off, because they were both aware that she would not have been getting in the Land Rover to drive off to an undisclosed location with Strike if their engagement had still been intact. The sapphire ring was lying exactly where she had left it, on a bookshelf loaded with his old accountancy textbooks.

“Oh shit,” Robin whispered, blinking away tears as she turned at random through the quiet streets, trying not to focus on her naked finger, or on the memory of Matthew’s anguished face.

One short walk took Strike much further than simple physical distance. This, he thought as he smoked his first cigarette of the day, was London: you started in a quiet, symmetrical Nash terrace that resembled a sculpture in vanilla ice-cream. Elin’s pin-striped Russian neighbor had been getting into his Audi, and Strike had received a curt nod in response to his “Morning.” A short walk past the silhouettes of Sherlock Holmes at Baker Street station and he was sitting on a grimy Tube train surrounded by chattering Polish workmen, fresh and businesslike at 7 a.m. Then bustling Paddington, forcing a path through commuters and coffee shops, holdall over shoulder. Finally a few stops on the Heathrow Connect, accompanied by a large West Country family who were already dressed for Florida in spite of the early morning chill. They watched the station signs like nervous meerkats, their hands gripping their suitcase handles as though expecting an imminent mugging.

Strike arrived at West Ealing station fifteen minutes early and desperate for a cigarette. Dropping the holdall by his feet he lit up, hoping that Robin would not be too prompt, because he doubted that she would want him smoking in the Land Rover. He had only taken a couple of satisfying drags, however, when the box-like car rounded the corner, Robin’s bright red-gold head clearly visible through the windscreen.

“I don’t mind,” she called over the running engine as he hoisted his holdall back onto his shoulder and made to extinguish the cigarette, “as long as you keep the window open.”

He climbed inside, shoved his bag into the back and slammed the door.

“You can’t make it smell worse than it already does,” said Robin, managing the stiff gears with her usual expertise. “It’s pure dog in here.”

Strike pulled on a seatbelt as they accelerated away from the pavement, looking around at the interior of the car. Shabby and scuffed, a pungent fug of Wellington boot and Labrador certainly pervaded. It reminded Strike of military vehicles that he had driven across all terrains in Bosnia and Afghanistan, but at the same time it added something to his picture of Robin’s background. This Land Rover spoke of muddy tracks and plowed fields. He remembered her saying that an uncle had a farm.

“Did you ever have a pony?”

She glanced at him, surprised. In that fleeting full-face look he noted the heaviness of her eyes, her pallor. She had clearly not slept much.

“What on earth do you want to know that for?”

“This feels like the kind of car you’d take to the gymkhana.”

Her reply had a touch of defensiveness:

“Yes, I did.”

He laughed, pushing the window down as far as it would go and resting his left hand there with the cigarette.

“Why is that funny?”

“I don’t know. What was it called?”

“Angus,” she said, turning left. “He was a bugger. Always carting me off.”

“I don’t trust horses,” said Strike, smoking.

“Have you ever been on one?”

It was Robin’s turn to smile. She thought it might be one of the few places where she would see Strike truly discomforted, on the back of a horse.

“No,” said Strike. “And I intend to keep it that way.”

“My uncle’s got something that’d carry you,” said Robin. “Clydesdale. It’s massive.”

“Point taken,” said Strike drily, and she laughed.

Smoking in silence as she concentrated on navigating through the increasingly heavy morning traffic, Strike noted how much he liked making her laugh. He also recognized that he felt much happier, much more comfortable, sitting here in this ramshackle Land Rover talking inconsequential nonsense with Robin than he had felt last night at dinner with Elin.

He was not a man who told himself comfortable lies. He might have argued that Robin represented the ease of friendship; Elin, the pitfalls and pleasures of a sexual relationship. He knew that the truth was more complicated, and certainly made more so by the fact that the sapphire ring had vanished from Robin’s finger. He had known, almost from the moment they had met, that Robin represented a threat to his peace of mind, but endangering the best working relationship of his life would be an act of willful self-sabotage that he, after years of a destructive on-off relationship, after the hard graft and sacrifice that had gone into building his business, could not and would not let happen.

“Are you ignoring me on purpose?”

“What?”

It was just plausible that he had not heard her, so noisy was the old Land Rover’s engine.

“I said, how are things with Elin?”

She had never asked him outright about a relationship before. Strike supposed the confidences of two nights ago had moved them onto a different level of intimacy. He would have avoided this, if he could.

“All right,” he said repressively, throwing away his cigarette butt and pulling up the window, which marginally reduced the noise.

“She forgave you, then?”

“What for?”

“For completely forgetting that you had a date!” said Robin.

“Oh, that. Yeah. Well, no — then, yeah.”

As she turned onto the A40, Strike’s ambiguous utterance brought to Robin a sudden, vivid mental image: of Strike, with his hairy bulk and his one and a half legs, entangled with Elin, blonde and alabaster against pure white sheets... she was sure that Elin’s sheets would be white and Nordic and clean. She probably had somebody to do her laundry. Elin was too upper middle class, too wealthy, to iron her own duvet covers in front of the TV in a cramped sitting room in Ealing.

“How about Matthew?” Strike asked her as they moved out onto the motorway. “How’d that go?”

“Fine,” said Robin.

“Bollocks,” said Strike.

Though another laugh escaped her, Robin was half inclined to resent his demand for more information when she was given so little about Elin.

“Well, he wants to get back together.”

“Course he does,” said Strike.

“Why ‘of course’?”

“If I’m not allowed to fish, you aren’t.”

Robin was not sure what to say to that, though it gave her a small glow of pleasure. She thought it might be the very first time that Strike had ever given any indication that he saw her as a woman, and she silently filed away the exchange to pore over later, in solitude.

“He apologized and kept asking me to put my ring back on,” Robin said. Residual loyalty to Matthew prevented her mentioning the crying, the begging. “But I...”

Her voice trailed away, and although Strike wanted to hear more, he asked no further questions, but pulled down the window and smoked another cigarette.

They stopped for a coffee at Hilton Park Services. Robin went to the bathroom while Strike queued for coffees in Burger King. In front of the mirror she checked her mobile. As she had expected, a message from Matthew was waiting, but the tone was no longer pleading and conciliatory.

“Sorry,” Robin muttered, moving aside to allow an impatient girl access to the hand-dryer.

She read Matthew’s text again. A satisfying gush of anger obliterated the mingled pity and pain engendered by that morning’s pursuit. Here, she thought, was the authentic Matthew: if you sleep with him, we’re over for good. So he did not really believe that she had meant it when she took off her ring and told him she no longer wished to marry him? It would be over “for good” only when he, Matthew, said so? It’s not like for like. Her infidelity would be worse than his by definition. To him, her journey north was simply an exercise in retaliation: a dead woman and a killer loose mere pretext for feminine spite.

Screw you, she thought, ramming the mobile back into her pocket as she returned to the café, where Strike sat eating a double Croissan’Wich with sausage and bacon.

Strike noted her flushed face, her tense jaw, and guessed that Matthew had been in touch.

“Everything all right?”

“Fine,” said Robin and then, before he could ask anything else, “So are you going to tell me about Brockbank?”

The question came out a little more aggressively than she had intended. The tone of Matthew’s text had riled her, as had the fact that it had raised in her mind the question of where she and Strike were actually going to sleep that night.

“If you want,” said Strike mildly.

He drew his phone out of his pocket, brought up the picture of Brockbank that he had taken from Hardacre’s computer and passed it across the table to Robin.

Robin contemplated the long, swarthy face beneath its dense dark hair, which was unusual, but not unattractive. As though he had read her mind, Strike said:

“He’s uglier now. That was taken when he’d just joined up. One of his eye sockets is caved in and he’s got a cauliflower ear.”

“How tall is he?” asked Robin, remembering the courier standing over her in his leathers, his mirrored visor.

“My height or bigger.”

“You said you met him in the army?”

“Yep,” said Strike.

She thought for a few seconds that he was not going to tell her anything more, until she realized that he was merely waiting for an elderly couple, who were dithering about where to sit, to pass out of earshot. When they had gone Strike said:

“He was a major, Seventh Armoured Brigade. He married a dead colleague’s widow. She had two small daughters. Then they had one of their own, a boy.”

The facts flowed, having just reread Brockbank’s file, but in truth Strike had never forgotten them. It had been one of those cases that stayed with you.

“The eldest stepdaughter was called Brittany. When she was twelve, Brittany disclosed sexual abuse to a school friend in Germany. The friend told her mother, who reported it. We were called in — I didn’t interview her personally, that was a female officer. I just saw the tape.”

What had crucified him was how grown-up she had tried to be, how together. She was terrified of what would happen to the family now she had blabbed, and was trying to take it back.

No, of course she hadn’t told Sophie that he had threatened to kill her little sister if she told on him! No, Sophie wasn’t lying, exactly — it had been a joke, that was all. She’d asked Sophie how to stop yourself having a baby because — because she’d been curious, everyone wanted to know stuff like that. Of course he hadn’t said he’d carve up her mum in little pieces if she told — the thing about her leg? Oh, that — well, that was a joke, too — it was all joking — he told her she had scars on her leg because he’d nearly cut her leg off when she was little, but her mum had walked in and seen him. He’d said he did it because she’d trodden on his flowerbeds when she was a toddler, but of course it was a joke — ask her mum. She’d got stuck in some barbed wire, that was all, and badly cut trying to pull herself free. They could ask her mum. He hadn’t cut her. He’d never cut her, not Daddy.

The involuntary expression she had made when forcing herself to say “Daddy” was with Strike still: she had looked like a child trying to swallow cold tripe, under threat of punishment. Twelve years old and she had learned life was only bearable for her family if she shut up and took whatever he wanted to do without complaint.

Strike had taken against Mrs. Brockbank from their first interview. She had been thin and over made-up, a victim, no doubt, in her way, but it seemed to Strike that she had voluntarily jettisoned Brittany to save the other two children, that she turned two blind eyes to the long absences from the house of her husband and eldest child, that her determination not to know was tantamount to collaboration. Brockbank had told Brittany that he would strangle both her mother and her sister if she ever spoke about what he did to her in the car when he took her on lengthy excursions into nearby woods, into dark alleyways. He would cut all of them up into little bits and bury them in the garden. Then he’d take Ryan — Brockbank’s small son, the only family member whom he seemed to value — and go where no one would ever find them.

“It was a joke, just a joke. I didn’t mean any of it.”

Thin fingers twisting, her glasses lopsided, her legs not long enough for her feet to reach the floor. She was still refusing point blank to be physically examined when Strike and Hardacre went to Brockbank’s house to bring him in.

“He was pissed when we got there. I told him why we’d come and he came at me with a broken bottle.

“I knocked him out,” said Strike without bravado, “but I shouldn’t’ve touched him. I didn’t need to.”

He had never admitted this out loud before, even though Hardacre (who had backed him to the hilt in the subsequent inquiry) had known it as well.

“If he came at you with a bottle—”

“I could’ve got the bottle off him without decking him.”

“You said he was big—”

“He was pretty pissed. I could’ve managed him without punching him. Hardacre was there, it was two on one.

“Truth is, I was glad he came at me. I wanted to punch him. Right hook, literally knocked him senseless — which is how he got away with it.”

“Got away with—”

“Got off,” said Strike. “Got clean away.”

“How?”

Strike drank more coffee, his eyes unfocused, remembering.

“He was hospitalized after I hit him because he had a massive epileptic seizure when he came out of the concussion. Traumatic brain injury.”

“Oh God,” said Robin.

“He needed emergency surgery to stop the bleeding from his brain. He kept having fits. They diagnosed TBI, PTSD and alcoholism. Unfit to stand trial. Lawyers came stampeding in. I was put on an assault charge.

“Luckily, my legal team found out that, the weekend before I hit him, he’d played rugby. They dug around a bit and found out he’d taken a knee to the head from an eighteen-stone Welshman and been stretchered off the field. A junior medic had missed the bleeding from his ear because he was covered in mud and bruises, and just told him to go home and take it easy. As it turned out, they’d missed a basal skull fracture, which my legal team found out when they got doctors to look at the post-match X-ray. The skull fracture had been done by a Welsh forward, not me.

“Even so, if I hadn’t had Hardy as a witness to the fact that he’d come at me with the bottle, I’d have been in it up to my neck. In the end, they accepted that I’d acted in self-defense. I couldn’t have known his skull was already cracked, or how much damage I’d do by punching him.

“Meanwhile, they found child porn on his computer. Brittany’s story tallied with frequent sightings of her being driven out, alone, by her stepfather. Her teacher was interviewed and said she was getting more and more withdrawn at school.

“Two years he’d been assaulting her and warning her he’d kill her, her mother and her sister if she told anyone. He had her convinced that he’d already tried to cut her leg off once. She had scarring all around her shin. He’d told her he was just sawing it off when the mother came in and stopped him. In her interview, the mother said the scarring was from an accident when she was a toddler.”

Robin said nothing. Both hands were over her mouth and her eyes were wide. Strike’s expression was frightening.

“He lay in hospital while they tried to get his fits under control, and whenever anyone tried to interview him he faked confusion and amnesia. He had lawyers swarming all over him, smelling a big fat payout: medical neglect, assault. He claimed he’d been a victim of abuse himself, that the child porn was just a symptom of his mental issues, his alcoholism. Brittany was insisting she’d made everything up, the mother was screaming to everyone that Brockbank had never laid a finger on any of the kids, that he was a perfect father, that she’d lost one husband and now she was going to lose another. Top brass just wanted the accusation to go away.

“He was invalided out,” said Strike, his dark eyes meeting Robin’s blue-gray ones. “He got off scot-free, with a payout and pension to boot, and off he went, Brittany in tow.”