Career of Evil

30

Strike was inured to the shifts between frenetic activity and enforced passivity demanded by investigations. Nevertheless, the weekend following their round-trip to Barrow, Market Harborough and Corby found him in a strange state of tension.

The gradual re-immersion in civilian life that had taken place over the past couple of years had brought with it pressures from which he had been protected while in the military. His half-sister Lucy, the only sibling with whom he had shared a childhood, called early on Saturday morning to ask why he had not responded to her invitation to his middle nephew’s birthday party. He explained that he had been away, unable to access mail sent to the office, but she barely listened.

“Jack hero-worships you, you know,” she said. “He really wants you to come.”

“Sorry, Lucy,” said Strike, “can’t make it. I’ll send him a present.”

Had Strike still been in the SIB, Lucy would not have felt entitled to exert emotional blackmail. It had been easy to avoid family obligations then, while he was traveling the world. She had seen him as an inextricable part of the army’s immense and implacable machine. When he steadily refused to yield to her word picture of a desolate eight-year-old nephew looking in vain for Uncle Cormoran at the garden gate, she desisted, asking instead how the hunt for the man who had sent the leg was progressing. Her tone implied that there was something disreputable about being sent a leg. Keen to get her off the phone, Strike told her untruthfully that he was leaving everything up to the police.

Fond as he was of his younger sister, he had come to accept that their relationship rested almost entirely on shared and largely traumatic memories. He never confided in Lucy unless forced to do so by external events, for the simple reason that confidences usually elicited alarm or anxiety. Lucy lived in a state of perennial disappointment that he was still, at the age of thirty-seven, holding out against all those things that she believed necessary to make him happy: a job with regular hours, more money, a wife and children.

Glad to have got rid of her, Strike made himself his third mug of tea of the morning and laid back down on the bed with a pile of newspapers. Several of them displayed a photograph of MURDER VICTIM KELSEY PLATT, wearing a navy school uniform, a smile on her plain, pimply face.

Dressed only in boxers, his hairy belly no smaller for the plentiful takeaways and chocolate bars that had filled it in the last fortnight, he munched his way through a packet of Rich Tea biscuits and skimmed several of the stories, but they told him nothing he did not already know, so he turned instead to the anticipatory comment about the next day’s Arsenal — Liverpool match.

His mobile rang while he was reading. He had not realized how tightly wound he was: he reacted so fast that Wardle was taken by surprise.

“Bloody hell, that was quick. What were you doing, sitting on it?”

“What’s going on?”

“We’ve been over to Kelsey’s sister’s place — name’s Hazel, she’s a nurse. We’re looking into all Kelsey’s day-to-day contacts, we’ve gone through her room and we’ve got her laptop. She’d been online, on some message board for people who want to hack bits off themselves, and she was asking about you.”

Strike scratched his dense, curly hair, staring at the ceiling, listening.

“We’ve got personal details for a couple of the people she was interacting with regularly on the boards. I should have pictures by Monday — where will you be?”

“Here, in the office.”

“Her sister’s boyfriend, the ex-fireman, says Kelsey kept asking him about people trapped in buildings and car accidents and all sorts. She really wanted to get rid of that leg.”

“Jesus,” muttered Strike.

After Wardle had hung up, Strike found himself unable to focus on the backroom reshuffles at the Emirates. After a few minutes he abandoned the pretense that he was absorbed in the fate of Arsène Wenger’s management team and resumed his staring at the cracks in the ceiling, absently turning his mobile over and over.

In the blinding relief that the leg had not been Brittany Brockbank’s, he had given less thought to the victim than he would ordinarily have done. Now, for the first time, he wondered about Kelsey and the letter that she had sent him, which he had not bothered to read.

The idea of anybody seeking amputation was repugnant to Strike. Round and round in his hand he turned his mobile, marshaling everything he knew about Kelsey, trying to build a mental picture out of a name and mingled feelings of pity and distaste. She had been sixteen; she had not got on with her sister; she had been studying childcare... Strike reached for his notebook and began to write: Boyfriend at college? Lecturer? She had gone online, asking about him. Why? Where had she got the idea that he, Strike, had amputated his own leg? Or had she evolved a fantasy out of newspaper reports about him?

Mental illness? Fantasist? he wrote.

Wardle was already looking into her online contacts. Strike paused in his writing, remembering the photograph of Kelsey’s head with its full cheeks in the freezer, staring out of its frosted eyes. Puppy fat. He had thought all along that she looked far too young for twenty-four. In truth, she had looked young for sixteen.

He let his pencil fall and continued to turn his mobile over and over in his left hand, thinking...

Was Brockbank a “true” pedophile, as a psychologist Strike had met in the context of another military rape case had put it? Was he a man who was only sexually attracted to children? Or was he a different kind of violent abuser, a man who targeted young girls merely because they were most readily available and easiest to cow into silence, but who had wider sexual tastes if an easy victim became available? In short, was a babyish-looking sixteen-year-old too old to appeal sexually to Brockbank, or would he rape any easily silenced female if he got the chance? Strike had once had to deal with a nineteen-year-old soldier who had attempted to rape a sixty-seven-year-old. Some men’s violent sexual nature required only opportunity.

Strike had not yet called the number that Ingrid had given him for Brockbank. His dark eyes drifted to the tiny window that showed a feebly sunlit sky. Perhaps he should have passed Brockbank’s number to Wardle. Perhaps he ought to call it now...

Yet even as Strike began to scroll down the list of contacts, he reconsidered. What had he achieved so far by confiding his suspicions to Wardle? Nothing. The policeman was busy in his operations room, doubtless sifting leads, busy with his own lines of inquiry and giving Strike’s — as far as the private detective could tell — only slightly more credence than he would have given anyone who had hunches but no proof. The fact that Wardle, with all his resources, had not yet located Brockbank, Laing or Whittaker, did not suggest that he was prioritizing the men.

No, if Strike wanted to find Brockbank he ought surely to maintain the cover that Robin had created: that of the lawyer looking to win the ex-major compensation. The traceable backstory they had created with his sister in Barrow might prove valuable. In fact, thought Strike, sitting up on the bed, it might be an idea to call Robin right now and give her Brockbank’s number. She was alone, he knew, in the Ealing flat, while Matthew was home in Masham. He could call and perhaps—

Oh no you don’t, you silly fucker.

A vision of himself and Robin in the Tottenham had bloomed in his head, a vision of where a phone call might lead. They were both at a loose end. A drink to discuss the case...

On a Saturday night? Piss off.

Strike got up suddenly, as though the bed had become painful to lie on, dressed and headed out to the supermarket.

On his way back into Denmark Street carrying bulging plastic bags he thought he spotted Wardle’s plainclothes policeman, stationed in the area to keep an eye out for large men in beanie hats. The young man in a donkey jacket was hyperaware, his eyes lingering a tad too long on the detective as he walked past, his shopping swinging.

Elin called Strike much later, after he had eaten a solitary evening meal in his flat. As usual, Saturday night was out of bounds for a meeting. He could hear her daughter playing in the background as she talked. They had already arranged to see each other for dinner on Sunday, but she had called to ask whether he fancied meeting her earlier. Her husband was determined to force the sale of the valuable flat in Clarence Terrace and she had started looking for a new property.

“Do you want to come and look at it with me?” she asked. “I’ve got an appointment at the show flat tomorrow at two.”

He knew, or thought he knew, that the invitation sprang, not from some eager hope that he would one day be living with her there — they had only been dating for three months — but because she was a woman who would always choose company when possible. Her air of cool self-sufficiency was misleading. They might never have met had she not preferred to attend a party full of her brother’s unknown colleagues and friends rather than spend a few hours alone. There was nothing wrong with that, of course, nothing wrong with being sociable, except that for a year now Strike had organized his life to suit himself and the habit was hard to break.

“Can’t,” he said, “sorry. I’m on a job until three.”

The lie convincingly told. She took it reasonably well. They agreed to meet at the bistro on Sunday evening as previously planned, which meant that he would be able to watch Arsenal — Liverpool in peace.

After he had hung up, he thought again of Robin, alone in the flat she shared with Matthew. Reaching for a cigarette, he turned on the TV and sank back onto his pillows in the dark.

Robin was having a strange weekend. Determined not to sink into moroseness just because she was alone and Strike had gone off to Elin’s (where had that thought come from? Of course he had gone; after all, it was the weekend, and it was no business of hers where he chose to spend it), she had spent hours on her laptop, doggedly pursuing one old line of inquiry, and one new.

Late on Saturday night she made an online discovery that caused her to jog three victory laps of the tiny sitting room and almost phone Strike to tell him. It took several minutes, with her heart thumping and her breath coming fast, to calm down, and to tell herself that the news would keep until Monday. It would be much more satisfying to tell him in person.

Knowing that Robin was alone, her mother called her twice over the weekend, both times pressing for a date when she could come down to London.

“I don’t know, Mum, not just now,” sighed Robin on Sunday morning. She was sitting in her pajamas on the sofa, laptop open in front of her again, trying to hold an online conversation with a member of the BIID community who called themselves <<Δēvōŧėė>>. She had only picked up her mother’s call because she was afraid ignoring it might result in an unannounced visit.

“What about tomorrow?” asked Linda.

“No,” said Robin at once. Like Strike, she lied with fluent conviction, “I’m midway through a job. The following week’s better.”

“I haven’t seen him,” said Linda. “Robin, are you typing?”

“No,” lied Robin again, her fingers suspended over the keyboard. “Who haven’t you seen?”

“Matthew, of course!”

“Oh. Well, no, I didn’t think he’d come calling this weekend.”

She tried typing more quietly.

“Did you go to Mr. Cunliffe’s birthday party?” she asked, trying to drown out the sound of the laptop keys.

“Of course we didn’t!” said Linda. “Well, let me know what day’s best week after next, and I’ll book my ticket. It’s Easter; it’ll be busy.”

Robin agreed, returned Linda’s affectionate good-bye and directed her full attention to <<Δēvōŧėė>>. Unfortunately, after Robin refused to give him or her (she was almost positive that he was male) a picture, <<Δēvōŧėė>> lost interest in their back and forth on the noticeboards and went quiet.

She had expected Matthew to return from his father’s on Sunday evening, but he did not. When she checked the calendar in the kitchen at eight, she realized that he had always intended to take Monday off. Presumably she had agreed to this, back when the weekend had been planned, and told Matthew that she would ask Strike for a day’s holiday, too. It was lucky that they had split up, really, she told herself bracingly: she had dodged one more row about her working hours.

However, she cried later, alone in the bedroom that was thick with relics of their shared past: the fluffy elephant he had given her on their first Valentine’s Day together — he had not been so suave in those days; she could remember him turning red as he had produced it — and the jewelry box he had given her for her twenty-first. Then there were all the photographs showing them beaming during holidays in Greece and Spain, and dressed up at Matthew’s sister’s wedding. The biggest picture of the lot showed them arm in arm on Matthew’s graduation day. He was in his academic gown and Robin stood beside him in a summer dress, beaming as she celebrated an achievement of which she had been robbed by a man in a gorilla mask.