Career of Evil

28

“This whole trip’s been a wasted detour. It isn’t Brittany. It can’t be Brockbank.”

Strike’s relief was stupendous. The colors of Adam and Eve Street seemed suddenly washed clean, the passersby brighter, more likable than they had been before he had taken the call. Brittany must, after all, be alive somewhere. This was not his fault. The leg had not been hers.

Robin said nothing. She could hear the triumph in Strike’s voice, feel his release. She, of course, had never met or seen Brittany Brockbank, and while she was glad the girl was safe, the fact remained that a girl had died in horrific circumstances. The guilt that had tumbled from Strike seemed to have fallen heavily into her own lap. She was the one who had skim-read Kelsey’s letter and simply filed it in the nutter drawer without response. Would it have made a difference, Robin wondered, if she had contacted Kelsey and advised her to get help? Or if Strike had called her and told her that he had lost his leg in battle, that whatever she had been told about his injury was a lie? Robin’s insides ached with regret.

“Are you sure?” she said aloud after a full minute’s silence, both of them lost in their own private thoughts.

“Sure about what?” asked Strike, turning to look at her.

“That it can’t be Brockbank.”

“If it’s not Brittany—” began Strike.

“You’ve just told me that girl—”

“Ingrid?”

“Ingrid,” said Robin, with a trace of impatience, “yes. You’ve just told me she says Brockbank’s obsessed with you. He holds you accountable for his brain damage and the loss of his family.”

Strike watched her, frowning, thinking.

“Everything I said last night about the killer wanting to denigrate you and belittle your war record would sit comfortably with everything we know about Brockbank,” Robin went on, “and don’t you think that meeting this Kelsey and perhaps seeing the scarring on her leg that was like Brittany’s, or hearing that she wanted to get rid of it could have — I don’t know — triggered something in him? I mean,” said Robin tentatively, “we don’t know exactly how the brain damage—”

“He’s not that fucking brain damaged,” snapped Strike. “He was faking in the hospital. I know he was.”

Robin said nothing, but sat behind the wheel and watched shoppers moving up and down Adam and Eve Street. She envied them. Whatever their private preoccupations, they were unlikely to include mutilation and murder.

“You make some good points,” said Strike at last. Robin could tell that she had taken the edge off his private celebration. He checked his watch. “C’mon, we’d better get off to Corby if we’re going to do it today.”

The twelve miles between the two towns were swiftly covered. Robin guessed from his surly expression that Strike was mulling over their discussion about Brockbank. The road was nondescript, the surrounding countryside flat, hedgerows and occasional trees lining the route.

“So, Laing,” said Robin, trying to move Strike out of what seemed an uncomfortable reverie. “Remind me—?”

“Laing, yeah,” said Strike slowly.

She was right to think that he had been lost in thoughts of Brockbank. Now he forced himself to focus, to regroup.

“Well, Laing tied up his wife and used a knife on her; accused of rape twice that I know of, but never done for it — and he tried to bite half my face off in the boxing ring. Basically, a violent, devious bastard,” said Strike, “but, like I told you, his mother-in-law reckons he was ill when he got out of jail. She says he went to Gateshead, but he can’t have stayed there long if he was living in Corby with this woman in 2008,” he said, checking the map again for Lorraine MacNaughton’s road. “Right age, right time frame... we’ll see. If Lorraine’s not in, we’ll go back after five o’clock.”

Following Strike’s directions, Robin drove through the very center of Corby town, which proved to be a sprawl of concrete and brick dominated by a shopping center. A massive block of council offices, on which aerials bristled like iron moss, dominated the skyline. There was no central square, no ancient church and certainly no stilted, half-timbered grammar school. Corby had been planned to house its explosion of migrant workers in the 1940s and 1950s; many of the buildings had a cheerless, utilitarian air.

“Half the street names are Scottish,” said Robin as they passed Argyll Street and Montrose Street.

“Used to call it Little Scotland, didn’t they?” said Strike, noting a sign for Edinburgh House. He had heard that in its industrial heyday, Corby had had the largest Scottish population south of the border. Saltires and lions rampant fluttered from balconies of flats. “You can see why Laing might’ve felt more at home here than in Gateshead. Could’ve had contacts in the area.”

Five minutes later they found themselves in the old part of town, whose pretty stone buildings retained traces of the village that Corby had been before the steelworks arrived. Shortly afterwards they came upon Weldon Road, where Lorraine MacNaughton lived.

The houses stood in solid blocks of six, each pair a mirror image of the other, so that their front doors sat side by side and the layout of the windows was reversed. Carved into the stone lintel over each door was a name.

“That’s hers,” said Strike, pointing at Summerfield, which was twinned with Northfield.

Summerfield’s front garden had been covered in fine gravel. Northfield’s grass needed mowing, which reminded Robin of her own flat back in London.

“I think we’d both better go in,” Strike said, unbuckling his seatbelt. “She’ll probably be more comfortable with you there.”

The doorbell seemed to be out of order. Strike therefore rapped sharply on the door with his knuckles. An explosion of furious barking told them that the house had at least one living inhabitant. Then they heard a woman’s voice, angry but somehow ineffectual.

“Shh! Be quiet! Stop it! Shh! No!”

The door opened and Robin had just caught a glimpse of a hard-faced woman of around fifty when a rough-coated Jack Russell came pelting out, growling and barking with ferocity, and sank its teeth into Strike’s ankle. Fortunately for Strike, but less so for the Jack Russell, its teeth connected with steel. It yelped and Robin capitalized on its shock by stooping swiftly, grabbing it by the scruff of the neck and lifting it up. So surprised was the dog at finding itself dangling in midair that it simply hung there.

“No biting,” said Robin.

Apparently deciding that a woman brave enough to pick it up was worthy of respect, the dog allowed her to take a firmer grip, twisted in midair and attempted to lick her hand.

“Sorry,” said the woman. “He was my mother’s. He’s a bloody nightmare. He likes you, look. Miracle.”

Her shoulder-length brown hair had gray roots. Deep marionette lines lay either side of a thin-lipped mouth. She was leaning on a stick, one of her ankles swollen and bandaged, the foot encased in a sandal that displayed yellowing toenails.

Strike introduced himself, then showed Lorraine his driving license and a business card.

“Are you Lorraine MacNaughton?”

“Yeah,” she said hesitantly. Her eyes flickered to Robin, who smiled reassuringly over the Jack Russell’s head. “You’re a — what did you say?”

“A detective,” said Strike, “and I was wondering whether you could tell me anything about Donald Laing. Telephone records show he was living here with you a couple of years ago.”

“Yeah, he was,” she said slowly.

“Is he still here?” Strike asked, although he knew the answer.

“No.”

Strike indicated Robin.

“Would it be all right if my colleague and I come in and ask you a few questions? We’re trying to find Mr. Laing.”

There was a pause. Lorraine chewed her inner lip, frowning. Robin cradled the Jack Russell, which was now enthusiastically licking her fingers where, no doubt, it could taste traces of Danish pastry. Strike’s torn trouser leg flapped in a light breeze.

“All right, come in,” said Lorraine, and she backed away on her crutches to admit them.

The frowzy front room smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke. There were countless old-ladyish touches: crocheted tissue-box covers, cheap frilled cushions and an array of fancily dressed teddy bears arranged on a polished sideboard. One wall was dominated by a painting of a saucer-eyed child dressed as a pierrot. Strike could no more imagine Donald Laing living here than he could visualize a bullock bedded down in the corner.

Once inside, the Jack Russell scrabbled to get down out of Robin’s arms, then started barking at Strike again.

“Oh, shut up,” groaned Lorraine. Sinking down onto the faded brown velvet sofa, she used both arms to lift her bandaged ankle back onto a leather pouffe, reached sideways to retrieve her packet of Superkings and lit up.

“I’m supposed to keep it raised,” she explained, cigarette waggling in her mouth as she picked up a full cut-glass ashtray and set it on her lap. “District nurse is in every day to change the dressings. Sit down.”

“What have you done?” asked Robin, squeezing past the coffee table to sit beside Lorraine on the sofa. The Jack Russell immediately jumped up beside her and, mercifully, stopped barking.

“I got a load of chip fat dropped on me,” said Lorraine. “At work.”

“Christ,” said Strike, settling himself in the armchair. “That must’ve been agony.”

“Yeah, it was. They say I’ll be off at least a month. Least it wasn’t far to go to casualty.”

Lorraine, it transpired, worked in the canteen of the local hospital.

“So what’s Donnie done?” Lorraine muttered, puffing smoke, once the subject of her injury had been thoroughly aired. “Robbery again, is it?”

“Why do you say that?” asked Strike carefully.

“He robbed me,” she said.

Robin saw, now, that the brusqueness was a façade. Lorraine’s long cigarette trembled as she said it.

“When was this?” asked Strike.

“When he walked out. Took all my jewelry. Mum’s wedding ring, everything. He knew what that meant to me. She’d not been dead a year. Yeah, one day he just walks out of the house and never comes back. I called the police, I thought he’d had an accident. Then I realized my purse was empty and my jewelry was gone.”

The humiliation had not left her. Her sunken cheeks flushed as she said it.

Strike felt in the inside pocket of his jacket.

“I want to make sure we’re talking about the same man. Does this picture look familiar?”

He handed her one of the photographs Laing’s ex-mother-in-law had given him in Melrose. Big and broad in his blue and yellow kilt, with his dark ferret-like eyes and that low-sprouting crop of fox-red hair, Laing was standing outside a registry office. Rhona clung to his arm, less than half his width in what looked like a poorly fitting, possibly secondhand wedding gown.

Lorraine examined the photograph for what seemed like a very long time. At last she said:

“I think it’s him. It could be.”

“You can’t see it, but he had a big tattoo of a yellow rose on his left forearm,” said Strike.

“Yeah,” said Lorraine heavily. “That’s right. He did.”

She smoked, staring at the picture.

“He’d been married, had he?” she asked, with a slight quaver in her voice.

“Didn’t he tell you?” asked Robin.

“No. Told me he’d never been.”

“How did you meet him?” asked Robin.

“Pub,” said Lorraine. “He didn’t look much like that when I knew him.”

She turned in the direction of the sideboard behind her and made a vague attempt to get up.

“Can I help?” Robin offered.

“In that middle drawer. There might be a picture.”

The Jack Russell began barking again as Robin opened a drawer containing an assortment of napkin rings, crocheted doilies, souvenir teaspoons, toothpicks and loose photographs. Robin extracted as many of the latter as she could and brought them back to Lorraine.

“That’s him,” said Lorraine, after sorting through many pictures that mostly featured a very elderly woman whom Robin assumed to be Lorraine’s mother. Lorraine passed the picture straight to Strike.

He would not have recognized Laing if he had passed him in the street. The former boxer was massively swollen, especially around the face. His neck was no longer visible; his skin seemed tight, his features distorted. One arm was around a smiling Lorraine’s shoulders, the other hung loose at his side. He was not smiling. Strike peered closer. The yellow rose tattoo was visible, but partially obscured by angry red skin plaques that mottled the whole expanse of his forearm.

“Is there something wrong with his skin?”

“Psoriatic arthritis,” said Lorraine. “He was bad with it. That’s why he was on the sick benefit. Had to stop work.”

“Yeah?” said Strike. “What had he been working as before?”

“He come down here as a manager for one of the big construction firms,” she said, “but then he got ill and couldn’t work. He’d had his own building company up in Melrose. He was the managing director.”

“Really?” said Strike.

“Yeah, family business,” said Lorraine, searching her stack of photographs. “He inherited it from his dad. There he is again, look.”

They were holding hands in this picture, which looked as though it had been taken in a beer garden. Lorraine beamed and Laing looked blank, his moon face shrinking his dark eyes to slits. He had the characteristic look of a man on medically prescribed steroids. The hair like a fox’s pelt was the same, but otherwise Strike was hard pressed to make out the features of the fit young boxer who had once bitten his face.

“How long were you together?”

“Ten months. I met him right after Mum died. She was ninety-two — she lived here with me. I was helping with Mrs. Williams next door and all; she was eighty-seven. Senile. Her son’s in America. Donnie was good to her. He mowed her lawn and got shopping.”

Bastard knew which side his bread was buttered, thought Strike. Ill, unemployed and broke as Laing had been at the time, a lonely middle-aged woman without dependents who could cook, who had her own house, who had just inherited money from her mother, must have been a godsend. It would have been worth faking a bit of compassion to get his feet under the table. Laing had had charm when he chose to use it.

“He seemed all right when we met,” said Lorraine morosely. “Couldn’t do enough for me then. He wasn’t well himself. Joints swollen and everything. He had to have injections off the doctor... He got a bit moody later, but I thought that was just his health. You don’t expect ill people to be always cheerful, do you? Not everyone’s like Mum. She was a bloody marvel, her health was that bad and she was always smiling and... and...”

“Let me get you a tissue,” said Robin and she leaned slowly towards the crochet-covered box, so as not to disarrange the Jack Russell, which had its head on her lap.

“Did you report the theft of your jewelry?” Strike asked, once Lorraine had received her tissue, which she plied between deep drags on her Superking.

“No,” she said gruffly. “What was the point? They were never going to find it.”

Robin guessed that Lorraine had not wanted to draw official attention to her humiliation, and sympathized.

“Was he ever violent?” Robin asked gently.

Lorraine looked surprised.

“No. Is that why you’re here? Has he hurt someone?”

“We don’t know,” said Strike.

“I don’t think he’d hurt anyone,” she said. “He wasn’t that kind of man. I said that to the police.”

“Sorry,” said Robin, stroking the now-dozing Jack Russell’s head. “I thought you didn’t report the robbery?”

“This was later,” said Lorraine. “Month or so after he’d gone. Somebody broke into Mrs. Williams’s place, knocked her out and robbed the house. The police wanted to know where Donnie was. I said, ‘He’s long gone, moved out.’ Anyway, he wouldn’t do that, I told them. He’d been good to her. He wouldn’t punch an old lady.”

They had once held hands in a beer garden. He had mowed the old lady’s lawn. She refused to believe Laing had been all bad.

“I assume your neighbor couldn’t give the police a description?” Strike asked.

Lorraine shook her head.

“She never came back, after. Died in a home. Got a family in Northfield now,” said Lorraine. “Three little kids. You should hear the noise — and they’ve got the bloody cheek to complain about the dog!”

They had hit a complete dead end. Lorraine had no idea where Laing had gone next. She could not remember him mentioning any place to which he was connected other than Melrose and she had never met any of his friends. Once she had realized that he was never coming back, she had deleted his mobile number from her phone. She agreed to let them take the two photographs of Laing, but other than that, had no more help to offer.

The Jack Russell protested loudly at Robin withdrawing her warm lap and showed every sign of wishing to take his displeasure out on Strike as the detective rose from his chair.

“Stop it, Tigger,” said Lorraine crossly, holding the struggling dog on the sofa with difficulty.

“We’ll see ourselves out,” Robin shouted over the dog’s frenzied barking. “Thanks so much for all your help!”

They left her there in her cluttered, smoky sitting room, bandaged ankle raised, probably a little sadder and more uncomfortable for their visit. The sound of the hysterical dog followed them all the way up the garden path.

“I feel like we could at least have made her a cup of tea or something,” said Robin guiltily as they got back into the Land Rover.

“She doesn’t know what a lucky escape she’s had,” said Strike bracingly. “Think about the poor old dear in there,” he pointed at Northfield, “beaten to shit for a couple of extra quid.”

“You think that was Laing?”

“Of course it was bloody Laing,” said Strike as Robin turned on the engine. “He’d cased the joint while he was supposedly helping her out, hadn’t he? And you notice that, for all he was supposed to be so ill with his arthritis, he was still capable of mowing lawns and half killing old women.”

Hungry and tired, her head aching from the stale cigarette smoke, Robin nodded and said that she supposed so. It had been a depressing interview and the prospect of a further two and a half hours’ drive to get back home was not appealing.

“D’you mind if we get going?” said Strike, checking his watch. “I told Elin I’ll be over tonight.”

“No problem,” said Robin.

Yet for some reason — perhaps due to her headache, perhaps because of the lonely woman sitting in Summerfield among the memories of loved ones who had left her — Robin could easily have wept all over again.