Career of Evil

31

Robin’s mood was buoyed next day by the glorious spring morning that greeted her outside her front door. She did not forget to remain aware of her surroundings as she traveled by Tube towards Tottenham Court Road, but saw no sign of any large man in a beanie hat. What leapt to the eye on her morning commute was the mounting journalistic excitement about the royal wedding. Kate Middleton seemed to be on the front of virtually every newspaper held by her fellow travelers. It made Robin hyperaware all over again of that naked, sensitive place on her third finger where an engagement ring had sat for a year. However, excited as she was about sharing the results of her solo investigative work with Strike, Robin refused to be downcast.

She had just left Tottenham Court Road station when she heard a man shout her name. For a split second she feared an ambush by Matthew, then Strike appeared, forging a path through the crowd, backpack on his shoulder. Robin deduced that he had spent the night with Elin.

“Morning. Good weekend?” he asked. Then, before she could answer: “Sorry. No. Crap weekend, obviously.”

“Bits of it were all right,” said Robin as they wended their way through the usual obstacle course of barriers and holes in the road.

“What have you got?” Strike asked loudly over the interminable drills.

“Sorry?” she shouted.

“What. Have. You. Found. Out?”

“How do you know I’ve found anything out?”

“You’ve got that look,” he said. “The look you get when you’re dying to tell me something.”

She grinned.

“I need a computer to show you.”

They turned the corner into Denmark Street. A man dressed all in black stood outside their office door, holding a gigantic bunch of red roses.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” breathed Robin.

A spasm of fear receded: her mind had momentarily edited out the armful of blooms and seen only the man in black — but it wasn’t the courier, of course. This, she saw as they approached him, was a youth with long hair, an Interflora deliveryman wearing no helmet. Strike doubted the boy had ever handed over fifty red roses to a less enthusiastic recipient.

“His father’s put him up to this,” Robin said darkly, as Strike held open the door for her and she pushed her way inside, being none too gentle with the quivering floral display. “‘All women love roses,’ he’ll have said. That’s all it takes — a bunch of bloody flowers.”

Strike followed her up the metal staircase, amused but careful not to show it. He unlocked the office door and Robin crossed to her desk and dropped the roses unceremoniously onto it, where they quivered in their beribboned polythene bag of greenish water. There was a card. She did not want to open it in front of Strike.

“Well?” he asked, hanging his backpack on the peg beside the door. “What have you found out?”

Before Robin could say a word there was a rap on the door. Wardle’s shape was easily recognizable through the frosted glass: his wavy hair, his leather jacket.

“I was in the area. Not too early, is it? Bloke downstairs let me in.”

Wardle’s eyes traveled immediately to the roses on Robin’s desk.

“Birthday?”

“No,” she said shortly. “Do either of you want coffee?”

“I’ll do it,” said Strike, moving over to the kettle and still speaking to Robin. “Wardle’s got some stuff to show us.”

Robin’s spirits sank: was the policeman about to preempt her? Why hadn’t she called Strike on Saturday night, when she’d found it?

Wardle sat down on the mock-leather sofa that always emitted loud farting noises whenever anyone over a certain weight sat on it. Clearly startled, the policeman repositioned himself gingerly and opened a folder.

“It turns out Kelsey was posting on a website for other people who wanted to get limbs taken off,” Wardle told Robin.

Robin sat down in her usual seat behind her desk. The roses impeded her view of the policeman; she picked them up impatiently and deposited them on the floor beside her.

“She mentioned Strike,” Wardle went on. “Asked if anyone else knew anything about him.”

“Was she using the name Nowheretoturn?” asked Robin, trying to keep her voice casual. Wardle looked up, astonished, and Strike turned, a coffee spoon suspended in midair.

“Yeah, she was,” said the policeman, staring. “How the hell did you know that?”

“I found that message board last weekend,” said Robin. “I thought Nowheretoturn might be the girl who wrote the letter.”

“Christ,” said Wardle, looking from Robin to Strike. “We should offer her a job.”

“She’s got a job,” said Strike. “Go on. Kelsey was posting...”

“Yeah, well, she ended up exchanging email addresses with these two. Nothing particularly helpful, but we’re looking to establish whether they actually met her — you know, in Real Life,” said Wardle.

Strange, thought Strike, how that phrase — so prevalent in childhood to differentiate between the fantasy world of play and the dull adult world of fact — had now come to signify the life that a person had outside the internet. He handed Wardle and Robin their coffees, then went through to his inner office to fetch a chair, preferring not to share the farting sofa with Wardle.

When he returned, Wardle was showing Robin printed screenshots of the Facebook pages of two people.

She examined each of them carefully, then passed them on to Strike. One was a thick-set young woman with a round, pale face, bobbed black hair and glasses. The other was a light-haired man in his twenties with lopsided eyes.

“She blogs about being ‘transabled,’ whatever the fuck that is, and he’s all over message boards asking for help in hacking bits off himself. Both of them have got serious issues, if you ask me. Recognize either of them?”

Strike shook his head, as did Robin. Wardle sighed and took the pictures back.

“Long shot.”

“What about other men she’s been knocking around with? Any boys or lecturers at college?” asked Strike, thinking of the questions that had occurred to him on Saturday.

“Well, the sister says Kelsey claimed to have a mysterious boyfriend they were never allowed to meet. Hazel doesn’t believe he existed. We’ve spoken to a couple of Kelsey’s college friends and none of them ever saw a boyfriend, but we’re following it up.

“Speaking of Hazel,” Wardle went on, picking up his coffee and drinking some before continuing, “I’ve said I’ll pass on a message. She’d like to meet you.”

“Me?” said Strike, surprised. “Why?”

“I dunno,” said Wardle. “I think she wants to justify herself to everyone. She’s in a real state.”

“Justify herself?”

“She’s guilt-ridden because she treated the leg thing as weird and attention-seeking, and feels that’s why Kelsey went looking for someone else to help her with it.”

“She understands I never wrote back? That I never had actual contact with her?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve explained that to her. She still wants to talk to you. I dunno,” said Wardle slightly impatiently, “you got sent her sister’s leg — you know what people are like when they’re in shock. Plus, it’s you, isn’t it?” said Wardle, with a faint edge in his voice. “She probably thinks the Boy Wonder will solve it while the police are blundering.”

Robin and Strike avoided looking at each other and Wardle added grudgingly:

“We could’ve handled Hazel better. Our guys interrogated her partner a bit more aggressively than she liked. It put her on the defensive. She might like the idea of having you on the books: the detective who’s already saved one poor innocent from the nick.”

Strike decided to ignore the defensive undertone.

“Obviously, we had to question the bloke who was living with her,” Wardle added for Robin’s benefit. “That’s routine.”

“Yes,” said Robin. “Of course.”

“No other men in her life, except the sister’s partner and this alleged boyfriend?” asked Strike.

“She was seeing a male counselor, a skinny black guy in his fifties who was visiting family in Bristol on the weekend she died, and there’s a church youth group leader called Darrell,” said Wardle, “fat guy in dungarees. He cried his eyes out all through the interview. He was present and correct at the church on the Sunday; nothing checkable otherwise, but I can’t see him wielding a cleaver. That’s everyone we know about. Her course is nearly all girls.”

“No boys in the church youth group?”

“They’re nearly all girls as well. Oldest boy’s fourteen.”

“How would the police feel about me seeing Hazel?” Strike asked.

“We can’t stop you,” Wardle said, shrugging. “I’m for it, on the understanding that you’ll pass on anything useful, but I doubt there’s anything else there. We’ve interviewed everyone, we’ve been through Kelsey’s room, we’ve got her laptop and personally I’d bet none of the people we’ve talked to knew anything. They all thought she was off on a college placement.”

After thanks for the coffee and a particularly warm smile for Robin, which was barely returned, Wardle left.

“Not a word about Brockbank, Laing or Whittaker,” Strike grumbled as Wardle’s clanging footsteps faded from earshot. “And you never told me you’d been ferreting around on the net,” he added to Robin.

“I had no proof she was the girl who’d written the letter,” said Robin, “but I did think Kelsey might have gone online looking for help.”

Strike heaved himself to his feet, took her mug from her desk and was heading for the door when Robin said indignantly:

“Aren’t you interested in what I was going to tell you?”

He turned, surprised.

“That wasn’t it?”

“No!”

“Well?”

“I think I’ve found Donald Laing.”

Strike said nothing at all, but stood looking blank, a mug in each hand.

“You’ve — what? How?”

Robin turned on her computer, beckoned Strike over and began typing. He moved around to look over her shoulder.

“First,” she said, “I had to find out how to spell psoriatic arthritis. Then... look at this.”

She had brought up a JustGiving charity page. A man glared out of the small picture at the top.

“Bloody hell, that’s him!” said Strike, so loudly that Robin jumped. He set the mugs down and dragged his chair around the desk to look at the monitor. In doing so, he knocked over Robin’s roses.

“Shit — sorry—”

“I don’t care,” said Robin. “Sit here, I’ll clear them up.”

She moved out of the way and Strike took her place on the swivel chair.

It was a small photograph, which Strike enlarged by clicking on it. The Scot was standing on what seemed to be a cramped balcony with a balustrade of thick, greenish glass, unsmiling, with a crutch under his right arm. The short, bristly hair still grew low on his forehead, but it seemed to have darkened over the years, no longer red as a fox’s pelt. Clean-shaven, his skin looked pockmarked. He was less swollen in the face than he had been in Lorraine’s picture, but he had put on weight since the days when he had been muscled like a marble Atlas and had bitten Strike on the face in the boxing ring. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt and on his right forearm was the rose tattoo, which had undergone a modification: a dagger now ran through it, and drops of blood fell out of the flower towards the wrist. Behind Laing on his balcony was what looked like a blurry, jagged pattern of windows in black and silver.

He had used his real name:

The page had been created three months previously. He had raised 0 percent of the one thousand pounds he was hoping to meet.

“No rubbish about doing anything for the money,” Strike noted. “Just ‘gimme.’”

“Not give me,” Robin corrected him from the floor, where she was mopping up spilled flower water with bits of kitchen roll. “He’s giving it to the charity.”

“So he says.”

Strike was squinting at the jagged pattern behind Laing on the balcony.

“Does that remind you of anything? Those windows behind him?”

“I thought of the Gherkin at first,” said Robin, throwing the sodden towels in the bin and getting to her feet, “but the pattern’s different.”

“Nothing about where he’s living,” said Strike, clicking everywhere he could on the page to see what further information he might uncover. “JustGiving must have his details somewhere.”

“You somehow never expect evil people to get ill,” said Robin.

She checked her watch.

“I’m supposed to be on Platinum in fifteen. I’d better get going.”

“Yeah,” said Strike, still staring at Laing’s picture. “Keep in touch and — oh yeah: I need you to do something.”

He pulled his mobile out of his pocket.

“Brockbank.”

“So you do still think it might be him?” Robin said, pausing in the act of putting on her jacket.

“Maybe. I want you to call him, keep the Venetia Hall, personal injury lawyer thing going.”

“Oh. OK,” she said, pulling out her own mobile and keying in the number that he had shown her, but beneath her matter-of-fact manner she was quietly elated. Venetia had been her own idea, her creation, and now Strike was turning the whole line of inquiry over to her.

She was halfway up Denmark Street in the sunshine before Robin remembered that there had been a card with the now-battered roses, and that she had left it behind, unread.