Career of Evil

3

Robin’s scream reverberated off the windows. She backed away from the desk, staring at the obscene object lying there. The leg was smooth, slender and pale, and she had grazed it with her finger as she pulled its packaging open, felt the cold rubbery texture of the skin.

She had just managed to quell her scream by clamping her hands over her mouth when the glass door burst open beside her. Six foot three and scowling, Strike’s shirt hung open, revealing a monkeyish mass of dark chest hair.

“What the—?”

He followed her stricken gaze and saw the leg. She felt his hand close roughly over her upper arm and he steered her out onto the landing.

“How did it arrive?”

“Courier,” she said, allowing him to walk her up the stairs. “On a motorbike.”

“Wait here. I’ll call the police.”

When he had closed the door of his flat behind her she stood quite still, heart juddering, listening to his footsteps returning downstairs. Acid rose in her throat. A leg. She had just been given a leg. She had just carried a leg calmly upstairs, a woman’s leg in a box. Whose leg was it? Where was the rest of her?

She crossed to the nearest chair, a cheap affair of padded plastic and metal legs, and sat down, her fingers still pressed against her numb lips. The package, she remembered, had been addressed to her by name.

Strike, meanwhile, was at the office window that looked down into the road, scanning Denmark Street for any sign of the courier, his mobile pressed to his ear. By the time he returned to the outer office to scrutinize the open package on the desk, he had made contact with the police.

“A leg?” repeated Detective Inspective Eric Wardle on the end of the line. “A fucking leg?”

“And it’s not even my size,” said Strike, a joke he would not have made had Robin been present. His trouser leg was hitched up to reveal the metal rod that served as his right ankle. He had been in the process of dressing when he had heard Robin’s scream.

Even as he said it, he realized that this was a right leg, like his own lost limb, and that it had been cut below the knee, which was exactly where he had been amputated. His mobile still clamped to his ear, Strike peered more closely at the limb, his nostrils filling with an unpleasant smell like recently defrosted chicken. Caucasian skin: smooth, pale and unblemished but for an old greenish bruise on the calf, imperfectly shaven. The stubbly hairs were fair and the unpainted toenails a little grubby. The severed tibia shone icy white against the surrounding flesh. A clean cut: Strike thought it likely to have been made by an axe or a cleaver.

“A woman’s, did you say?”

“Looks like—”

Strike had noticed something else. There was scarring on the calf where the leg had been severed: old scarring, unrelated to the wound that had taken it from the body.

How many times during his Cornish childhood had he been caught unawares as he stood with his back to the treacherous sea? Those who did not know the ocean well forgot its solidity, its brutality. When it slammed into them with the force of cold metal they were appalled. Strike had faced, worked with and managed fear all his professional life, but the sight of that old scarring rendered him temporarily winded by a terror all the worse for its unexpectedness.

“Are you still there?” said Wardle on the end of the line.

“What?”

Strike’s twice-broken nose was within an inch of the place where the woman’s leg had been cut off. He was remembering the scarred leg of a child he had never forgotten... how long was it since he had seen her? How old would she be now?

“You called me first...?” Wardle prompted.

“Yeah,” said Strike, forcing himself to concentrate. “I’d rather you did it than anyone else, but if you can’t—”

“I’m on my way,” said Wardle. “Won’t be long. Sit tight.”

Strike turned off his phone and set it down, still staring at the leg. Now he saw that there was a note lying underneath it, a typed note. Trained by the British Army in investigative procedure, Strike resisted the powerful temptation to tug it out and read it: he must not taint forensic evidence. Instead he crouched down unsteadily so that he could read the address hanging upside down on the open lid.

The box had been addressed to Robin, which he did not like at all. Her name was correctly spelled, typed on a white sticker that bore the address of their office. This sticker overlay another. Squinting, determined not to reposition the box even to read the address more clearly, he saw that the sender had first addressed the box to “Cameron Strike,” then overlain it with the second sticker reading “Robin Ellacott.” Why had they changed their mind?

“Fuck,” said Strike quietly.

He stood up with some difficulty, took Robin’s handbag from the peg behind the door, locked the glass door and headed upstairs.

“Police are on their way,” he told her as he set her bag down in front of her. “Want a cup of tea?”

She nodded.

“Want brandy in it?”

“You haven’t got any brandy,” she said. Her voice was slightly croaky.

“Have you been looking?”

“Of course not!” she said, and he smiled at how indignant she sounded at the suggestion she might have been through his cupboards. “You’re just — you’re not the sort of person who’d have medicinal brandy.”

“Want a beer?”

She shook her head, unable to smile.

Once the tea had been made, Strike sat down opposite her with his own mug. He looked exactly what he was: a large ex-boxer who smoked too much and ate too much fast food. He had heavy eyebrows, a flattened and asymmetrical nose and, when not smiling, a permanent expression of sullen crossness. His dense, dark curly hair, still damp from the shower, reminded her of Jacques Burger and Sarah Shadlock. The row seemed a lifetime ago. She had only briefly thought of Matthew since coming upstairs. She dreaded telling him what had happened. He would be angry. He did not like her working for Strike.

“Have you looked at — at it?” she muttered, after picking up and setting down the boiling tea without drinking it.

“Yeah,” said Strike.

She did not know what else to ask. It was a severed leg. The situation was so horrible, so grotesque, that every question that occurred to her sounded ridiculous, crass. Do you recognize it? Why do you think they sent it? And, most pressing of all, why to me?

“The police’ll want to hear about the courier,” he said.

“I know,” said Robin. “I’ve been trying to remember everything about him.”

The downstairs door buzzer sounded.

“That’ll be Wardle.”

“Wardle?” she repeated, startled.

“He’s the friendliest copper we know,” Strike reminded her. “Stay put, I’ll bring him to you here.”

Strike had managed to make himself unpopular among the Metropolitan Police over the previous year, which was not entirely his fault. The fulsome press coverage of his two most notable detective triumphs had understandably galled those officers whose efforts he had trumped. However, Wardle, who had helped him out on the first of those cases, had shared in some of the subsequent glory and relations between them remained reasonably amicable. Robin had only ever seen Wardle in the newspaper reports of the case. Their paths had not crossed in court.

He turned out to be a handsome man with a thick head of chestnut hair and chocolate-brown eyes, who was wearing a leather jacket and jeans. Strike did not know whether he was more amused or irritated by the reflexive look Wardle gave Robin on entering the room — a swift zigzag sweep of her hair, her figure and her left hand, where his eyes lingered for a second on the sapphire and diamond engagement ring.

“Eric Wardle,” he said in a low voice, with what Strike felt was an unnecessarily charming smile. “And this is Detective Sergeant Ekwensi.”

A thin black female officer whose hair was smoothed back in a bun had arrived with him. She gave Robin a brief smile and Robin found herself taking disproportionate comfort from the presence of another woman. Detective Sergeant Ekwensi then let her eyes stray around Strike’s glorified bedsit.

“Where’s this package?” she asked.

“Downstairs,” said Strike, drawing the keys to the office out of his pocket. “I’ll show you. Wife OK, Wardle?” he added as he prepared to leave the room with Detective Sergeant Ekwensi.

“What do you care?” retorted the officer, but to Robin’s relief he dropped what she thought of as his counselor’s manner as he took the seat opposite her at the table and flipped open his notebook.

“He was standing outside the door when I came up the street,” Robin explained, when Wardle asked how the leg had arrived. “I thought he was a courier. He was dressed in black leather — all black except for blue stripes on the shoulders of his jacket. His helmet was plain black and the visor was down and mirrored. He must have been at least six feet tall. Four or five inches taller than me, even allowing for the helmet.”

“Build?” asked Wardle, who was scribbling in his notebook.

“Pretty big, I’d say, but he was probably padded out a bit by the jacket.”

Robin’s eyes wandered inadvertently to Strike as he reentered the room. “I mean, not—”

“Not a fat bastard like the boss?” Strike, who had overheard, suggested and Wardle, never slow to make or enjoy a dig at Strike, laughed under his breath.

“And he wore gloves,” said Robin, who had not smiled. “Black leather motorcycle gloves.”

“Of course he’d wear gloves,” said Wardle, adding a note. “I don’t suppose you noticed anything about the motorbike?”

“It was a Honda, red and black,” said Robin. “I noticed the logo, that winged symbol. I’d say 750cc. It was big.”

Wardle looked both startled and impressed.

“Robin’s a petrolhead,” said Strike. “Drives like Fernando Alonso.”

Robin wished that Strike would stop being cheery and flippant. A woman’s leg lay downstairs. Where was the rest of her? She must not cry. She wished she had had more sleep. That damn sofa... she had spent too many nights on the thing lately...

“And he made you sign for it?” asked Wardle.

“I wouldn’t say ‘made’ me,” said Robin. “He held out a clipboard and I did it automatically.”

“What was on the clipboard?”

“It looked like an invoice or...”

She closed her eyes in the effort to remember. Now she came to think of it, the form had looked amateurish, as though it had been put together on someone’s laptop, and she said as much.

“Were you expecting a package?” Wardle asked.

Robin explained about the disposable wedding cameras.

“What did he do once you’d taken it?”

“Got back on the bike and left. He drove off into Charing Cross Road.”

There was a knock on the door of the flat and Detective Sergeant Ekwensi reappeared holding the note that Strike had noticed lying beneath the leg, which was now enclosed in an evidence bag.

“Forensics are here,” she told Wardle. “This note was in the package. It would be good to know whether it means anything to Miss Ellacott.”

Wardle took the polythene-covered note and scanned it, frowning.

“It’s gibberish,” he said, then read aloud: “‘A harvest of limbs, of arms and of legs, of necks—’”

“‘—that turn like swans,’” interrupted Strike, who was leaning against the cooker and too far away to read the note, “‘as if inclined to gasp or pray.’”

The other three stared at him.

“They’re lyrics,” said Strike. Robin did not like the expression on his face. She could tell that the words meant something to him, something bad. With what looked like an effort, he elucidated: “From the last verse of ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt.’ By Blue Öyster Cult.”

Detective Sergeant Ekwensi raised finely penciled eyebrows.

“Who?”

“Big seventies rock band.”

“You know their stuff well, I take it?” asked Wardle.

“I know that song,” said Strike.

“Do you think you know who sent this?”

Strike hesitated. As the other three watched him, a confused series of images and memories passed rapidly through the detective’s mind. A low voice said, She wanted to die. She was the quicklime girl. The thin leg of a twelve-year-old girl, scarred with silvery crisscrossing lines. A pair of small dark eyes like a ferret’s, narrowed in loathing. The tattoo of a yellow rose.

And then — lagging behind the other memories, puffing into view, although it might have been another man’s first thought — he remembered a charge sheet that made mention of a penis cut from a corpse and mailed to a police informer.

“Do you know who sent it?” repeated Wardle.

“Maybe,” said Strike. He glanced at Robin and Detective Sergeant Ekwensi. “I’d rather talk about it alone. Have you got everything you want from Robin?”

“We’ll need your name and address and so on,” said Wardle. “Vanessa, can you take those?”

Detective Sergeant Ekwensi moved forwards with her notebook. The two men’s clanging footsteps faded from earshot. In spite of the fact that she had no desire to see the severed leg again, Robin felt aggrieved at being left behind. It had been her name on the box.

The grisly package was still lying on the desk downstairs. Two more of Wardle’s colleagues had been admitted by Detective Sergeant Ekwensi: one was taking photographs, the other talking on his mobile when their senior officer and the private detective walked past. Both looked curiously at Strike, who had achieved a measure of fame during the period in which he had managed to alienate many of Wardle’s colleagues.

Strike closed the door of his inner office and he and Wardle took the seats facing each other across Strike’s desk. Wardle turned to a fresh page of his notebook.

“All right, who d’you know who likes chopping up corpses and sending them through the post?”

“Terence Malley,” said Strike, after a momentary hesitation. “For a start.”

Wardle did not write anything, but stared at him over the top of his pen.

“Terence ‘Digger’ Malley?”

Strike nodded.

“Harringay Crime Syndicate?”

“How many Terence ‘Digger’ Malleys do you know?” asked Strike impatiently. “And how many have got a habit of sending people body parts?”

“How the hell did you get mixed up with Digger?”

“Joint ops with Vice Squad, 2008. Drug ring.”

“The bust he went down for?”

“Exactly.”

“Holy shit,” said Wardle. “Well, that’s bloody it, isn’t it? The guy’s an effing lunatic, he’s just out and he’s got easy access to half of London’s prostitutes. We’d better start dragging the Thames for the rest of her.”

“Yeah, but I gave evidence anonymously. He shouldn’t ever have known it was me.”

“They’ve got ways and means,” said Wardle. “Harringay Crime Syndicate — they’re like the fucking mafia. Did you hear how he sent Hatford Ali’s dick to Ian Bevin?”

“Yeah, I heard,” said Strike.

“So what’s the story with the song? The harvest of whatever the fuck it was?”

“Well, that’s what I’m worried about,” said Strike slowly. “It seems pretty subtle for the likes of Digger — which makes me think it might be one of the other three.”