Career of Evil

26

“Psychology’s loss,” said Strike, “is private detection’s gain. That was bloody good going, Robin.”

He raised his can of McEwan’s and toasted her. They were sitting in the parked Land Rover, eating fish and chips a short distance away from the Olympic Takeaway. Its bright windows intensified the surrounding darkness. Silhouettes passed regularly across the rectangles of light, metamorphosed into three-dimensional humans as they entered the bustling chip shop, and turned back into shadows as they left.

“So his wife left him.”

“Yep.”

“And Holly says he hasn’t seen the kids since?”

“Right.”

Strike sipped his McEwan’s, thinking. He wanted to believe that Brockbank really had lost contact with Brittany, but what if the evil bastard had somehow tracked her down?

“We still don’t know where he is, though,” Robin sighed.

“Well, we know he isn’t here and that he hasn’t been here for around a year,” said Strike. “We know he still blames me for what’s wrong with him, that he’s still abusing little girls and that he’s a fuck sight saner than they thought he was in the hospital.”

“Why d’you say that?”

“Sounds like he’s kept the accusation of child abuse quiet. He’s holding down jobs when he could be sitting at home claiming disability benefit. I suppose working gives him more opportunities to meet young girls.”

“Don’t,” murmured Robin as the memory of Holly’s confession suddenly gave way to that of the frozen head, looking so young, so plump, so dimly surprised.

“That’s Brockbank and Laing both at large in the UK, both hating my guts.”

Chomping chips, Strike rummaged in the glove compartment, extracted the road atlas and for a while was quiet, turning pages. Robin folded the remainder of her fish and chips in its newspaper wrappings and said:

“I’ve got to ring my mother. Back in a bit.”

Leaning against a streetlamp a short distance away she called her parents’ number.

“Are you all right, Robin?”

“Yes, Mum.”

“What’s going on between you and Matthew?”

Robin looked up at the faintly starry sky.

“I think we’ve split up.”

“You think?” said Linda. She sounded neither shocked nor sad, merely interested in the full facts.

Robin had been worried that she might cry when she had to say it aloud, yet no tears stung her eyes, nor did she need to force herself to speak calmly. Perhaps she was toughening up. The desperate life story of Holly Brockbank and the gruesome end of the unknown girl in Shepherd’s Bush certainly gave a person perspective.

“It only happened on Monday night.”

“Was this because of Cormoran?”

“No,” said Robin. “Sarah Shadlock. It turns out Matt was sleeping with her while I was... at home. When — you know when. After I dropped out.”

Two young men meandered out of the Olympic, definitely the worse for drink, shouting and swearing at each other. One of them spotted Robin and nudged the other. They veered towards her.

“Thoo orlrigh’, darlin’?”

Strike got out of the car and slammed the door, looming darkly, a head taller than both of them. The youths swayed away in sudden silence. Strike lit a cigarette leaning up against the car, his face in shadow.

“Mum, are you still there?”

“He told you this on Monday night?” asked Linda.

“Yes,” said Robin.

“Why?”

“We were rowing about Cormoran again,” Robin muttered, aware of Strike yards away. “I said, ‘It’s a platonic relationship, like you and Sarah’ — and then I saw his face — and then he admitted it.”

Her mother gave a long, deep sigh. Robin waited for words of comfort or wisdom.

“Dear God,” said Linda. There was another long silence. “How are you really, Robin?”

“I’m all right, Mum, honestly. I’m working. It’s helping.”

“Why are you in Barrow, of all places?”

“We’re trying to trace one of the men Strike thinks might’ve sent him the leg.”

“Where are you staying?”

“We’re going to go to the Travelodge,” said Robin. “In separate rooms, obviously,” she hastened to add.

“Have you spoken to Matthew since you left?”

“He keeps sending me texts telling me he loves me.”

As she said it, she realized that she had not read his last. She had only just remembered it.

“I’m sorry,” Robin told her mother. “The dress and the reception and everything... I’m so sorry, Mum.”

“They’re the last things I’m worried about,” said Linda and she asked yet again: “Are you all right, Robin?”

“Yes, I promise I am.” She hesitated, then said, almost defiantly, “Cormoran’s been great.”

“You’re going to have to talk to Matthew, though,” said Linda. “After all this time... you can’t not talk to him.”

Robin’s composure broke; her voice trembled with rage and her hands shook as the words poured out of her.

“We were at the rugby with them just two weekends ago, with Sarah and Tom. She’s been hanging around ever since they were at uni — they were sleeping together while I was — while I — he’s never cut her out of his life, she’s always hugging him, flirting with him, shit-stirring between him and me — at the rugby it was Strike, oh, he’s so attractive, just the two of you in the office, is it? — and all this time I’ve thought it just went one way, I knew she’d tried to get him into bed at uni but I never — eighteen months, they were sleeping together — and you know what he said to me? She was comforting him... I had to give in and say she could come to the wedding because I’d asked Strike without telling Matt, that was my punishment, because I didn’t want her there. Matt has lunch with her whenever he’s near her offices—”

“I’m going to come down to London and see you,” said Linda.

“No, Mum—”

“For a day. Take you out for lunch.”

Robin gave a weak laugh.

“Mum, I don’t take a lunch hour. It isn’t that kind of job.”

“I’m coming to London, Robin.”

When her mother’s voice became firm like that, there was no point arguing.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

“Well, you can let me know and I’ll book the train.”

“I... oh, OK,” said Robin.

When they had bidden each other good-bye she realized that she had tears in her eyes at last. Much as she might pretend otherwise, the thought of seeing Linda brought much comfort.

She looked over at the Land Rover. Strike was still leaning up against it, and he too was on the phone. Or was he merely pretending? She had been talking loudly. He could be tactful when he chose.

She looked down at the mobile in her hands and opened Matthew’s message.

There he went again: he did not really believe that the relationship was at an end. Let me know whether you want me to tell Dad... as though it were a storm in a teacup, as though she would never take it so far as not to attend his father’s party... I don’t even like your bloody father...

Angry, she typed and sent the response.

She got back into the car. Strike seemed to be genuinely talking on the phone. The road atlas lay open on the passenger seat: he had been looking at the Leicestershire town of Market Harborough.

“Yeah, you too,” she heard Strike say. “Yeah. See you when I get back.”

Elin, she thought.

He climbed back into the car.

“Was that Wardle?” she asked innocently.

“Elin,” he said.

Does she know you’ve gone away with me? Just the two of us?

Robin felt herself turn red. She did not know where that thought had come from. It wasn’t as though...

“You want to go to Market Harborough?” she asked, holding up the map.

“Might as well,” said Strike, taking another swig of beer. “It’s the last place Brockbank worked. Could get a lead; we’d be stupid not to check it out... and if we’re going through there...”

He lifted the book out of her hands and flicked over a few pages.

“It’s only twelve miles from Corby. We could swing by and see whether the Laing who was shacked up with a woman there in 2008 is our Laing. She’s still living there: Lorraine MacNaughton’s the name.”

Robin was used to Strike’s prodigious memory for names and details.

“OK,” she said, pleased to think that the morning would bring more investigation, not simply a long drive back to London. Perhaps, if they found something interesting, there would be a second night on the road and she need not see Matthew for another twelve hours — but then she remembered that Matthew would be heading north the following night, for his father’s birthday. She would have the flat to herself in any case.

“Could he have tracked her down?” Strike wondered aloud, after a silence.

“Sorry — what? Who?”

“Could Brockbank have tracked Brittany down and killed her after all this time? Or am I barking up the wrong tree because I feel so fucking guilty?”

He gave the door of the Land Rover a soft thump with his fist.

“The leg, though,” said Strike, arguing against himself. “It’s scarred just like hers was. That was a thing between them: ‘I tried to saw off your leg when you were little and your mum walked in.’ Fucking evil bastard. Who else would send me a scarred leg?”

“Well,” said Robin slowly, “I can think of a reason a leg was chosen, and it might not have anything at all to do with Brittany Brockbank.”

Strike turned to look at her.

“Go on.”

“Whoever killed that girl could have sent you any part of her and achieved the same result,” said Robin. “An arm, or — or a breast” — she did her best to keep her tone matter-of-fact — “would have meant the police and the press swarming all over us just the same. The business would still have been compromised and we’d have been just as shaken up — but he chose to send a right leg, cut exactly where your right leg was amputated.”

“I suppose it ties in with that effing song. Although—” Strike reconsidered. “No, I’m talking crap, aren’t I? An arm would’ve worked just as well for that. Or a neck.”

“He’s making clear reference to your injury,” Robin said. “What does your missing leg mean to him?”

“Christ knows,” said Strike, watching her profile as she talked.

“Heroism,” said Robin.

Strike snorted.

“There’s nothing heroic about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“You’re a decorated veteran.”

“I wasn’t decorated for being blown up. That happened before.”

“You’ve never told me that.”

She turned to face him, but he refused to be sidetracked.

“Go on. Why the leg?”

“Your injury’s a legacy of war. It represents bravery, adversity overcome. Your amputation’s mentioned every single time they talk about you in the press. I think — for him — it’s tied up with fame and achievement and — and honor. He’s trying to denigrate your injury, to tie it to something horrible, divert the public’s perception away from you as hero towards you as a man in receipt of part of a dismembered girl. He wants to cause you trouble, yes, but he wants to diminish you in the process. He’s somebody who wants what you’ve got, who wants recognition and importance.”

Strike bent down and took a second can of McEwan’s out of the brown bag at his feet. The crack of the ring pull reverberated in the cold air.

“If you’re right,” said Strike, watching his cigarette smoke curl away into the darkness, “if what’s riling this maniac is that I got famous, Whittaker goes to the top of the list. That was all he ever wanted: to be a celebrity.”

Robin waited. He had told her virtually nothing about his stepfather, although the internet had supplied her with many of the details that Strike had withheld.

“He was the most parasitic fucker I’ve ever met,” said Strike. “It’d be like him to try and siphon off a bit of fame from someone else.”

She could feel him becoming angry again beside her in the small space. He reacted consistently at every mention of each of the three suspects: Brockbank made him guilty, Whittaker angry. Laing was the only one he discussed with anything like objectivity.

“Hasn’t Shanker come up with anything yet?”

“Says he’s in Catford. Shanker’ll track him down. Whittaker’ll be there, somewhere, in some filthy corner. He’s definitely in London.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“Just London, isn’t it?” said Strike, staring across the car park at the terraced houses. “He came from Yorkshire originally, Whittaker, you know, but he’s pure cockney now.”

“You haven’t seen him for ages, have you?”

“I don’t need to. I know him. He’s part of the junk that washes up in the capital looking for the big time and never leaves. He thought London was the only place that deserved him. Had to be the biggest stage for Whittaker.”

Yet Whittaker had never managed to claw his way out of the dirty places of the capital where criminality, poverty and violence bred like bacteria, the underbelly where Shanker still dwelled. Nobody who had not lived there would ever understand that London was a country unto itself. They might resent it for the fact that it held more power and money than any other British city, but they could not understand that poverty carried its own flavor there, where everything cost more, where the relentless distinctions between those who had succeeded and those who had not were constantly, painfully visible. The distance between Elin’s vanilla-columned flat in Clarence Terrace and the filthy Whitechapel squat where his mother had died could not be measured in mere miles. They were separated by infinite disparities, by the lotteries of birth and chance, by faults of judgment and lucky breaks. His mother and Elin, both beautiful women, both intelligent, one sucked down into a morass of drugs and human filth, the other sitting high over Regent’s Park behind spotless glass.

Robin, too, was thinking about London. It had Matthew in its spell, but he had no interest in the labyrinthine worlds she probed daily during her detective work. He looked excitedly towards the surface glitter: the best restaurants, the best areas to live, as though London were a huge Monopoly board. He had always had a divided allegiance to Yorkshire, to their hometown Masham. His father was Yorkshire-born, while his late mother had come from Surrey and had carried with her an air of having gone north on sufferance. She had persistently corrected any Yorkshire turns of speech in Matthew and his sister Kimberley. His carefully neutral accent had been one of the reasons that Robin’s brothers had not been impressed when they had started dating: in spite of her protestations, in spite of his Yorkshire name, they had sensed the wannabe southerner.

“It’d be a strange place to come from, this, wouldn’t it?” said Strike, still looking out over the terraces. “It’s like an island. I’ve never heard that accent before either.”

A man’s voice sounded somewhere nearby, singing a rousing song. Robin thought at first that the tune was a hymn. Then the man’s unique voice was joined by more voices and the breeze changed direction so that they heard a few lines quite distinctly:

“School song,” said Robin, smiling. She could see them now, a group of middle-aged men in black suits, singing loudly as they walked up Buccleuch Street.

“Funeral,” guessed Strike. “Old schoolmate. Look at them.”

As the black-suited men drew level with the car, one of them spotted Robin looking.

“Barrow Boys’ Grammar School!” he shouted at her, fist raised as though he had just scored a goal. The men cheered, but there was melancholy to their drink-fueled swagger. They began singing the song again as they passed out of sight.

“Hometowns,” said Strike.

He was thinking about men like his Uncle Ted, a Cornishman to his bones, who lived and would die in St. Mawes, part of the fabric of the place, remembered as long as there were locals, beaming out of fading photographs of the Life Boat on pub walls. When Ted died — and Strike hoped it would be twenty, thirty years hence — they would mourn him as the unknown Barrovian Grammar boy was being mourned: with drink, with tears, but in celebration that he had been given to them. What had dark, hulking Brockbank, child rapist, and fox-haired Laing, wife-torturer, left behind in the towns of their birth? Shudders of relief that they had gone, fear that they had returned, a trail of broken people and bad memories.

“Shall we go?” Robin asked quietly and Strike nodded, dropping the burning stub of his cigarette into his last inch of McEwan’s, where it emitted a small, satisfying hiss.