Career of Evil

36

When his alarm went off on Thursday morning, Strike extended one heavy arm and slapped the button on top of the old clock so hard that it toppled off his bedside table onto the floor. Squinting, he had to concede that the sunlight glowing through his thin curtains seemed to confirm the alarm’s raucous assertion. The temptation to roll over and sink back into sleep was almost overwhelming. He lay with his forearm over his eyes for a few more seconds, blocking out the day, then, with a mingled sigh and groan, he threw back the covers. As he groped for the handle of the bathroom door shortly afterwards, he reflected that he must have averaged three hours’ sleep over the preceding five nights.

As Robin had foreseen, sending her home had meant he had to choose between tailing Platinum and Mad Dad. Having recently witnessed the latter jumping out at his small sons unexpectedly, and seen their tears of fright, Strike had decided that Mad Dad ought to be prioritized. Leaving Platinum to her blameless routine, he had spent large parts of the week covertly photographing the skulking father, racking up image after image of the man spying on his boys and accosting them whenever their mother was not present.

When not covering Mad Dad, Strike had been busy with his own investigations. The police were moving far too slowly for his liking so, still without the slightest proof that Brockbank, Laing or Whittaker had any connection with Kelsey Platt’s death, Strike had packed almost every free hour of the preceding five days with the kind of relentless, round-the-clock police work that he had previously only given the army.

Balanced on his only leg, he wrenched the dial on the shower clockwise and allowed the icy water to pummel him awake, cooling his puffy eyes and raising gooseflesh through the dark hair on his chest, arms and legs. The one good thing about his tiny shower was that, if he slipped, there was no room to fall. Once clean, he hopped back to the bedroom, where he toweled himself roughly and turned on the TV.

The royal wedding would take place the following day and the preparations dominated every news channel he could find. While he strapped on his prosthesis, dressed and consumed tea and toast, presenters and commentators kept up a constant, excitable stream of commentary about the people who were already sitting out in tents along the route and outside Westminster Abbey, and the numbers of tourists pouring into London to witness the ceremony. Strike turned off the television and headed downstairs to the office, yawning widely and wondering how this multimedia barrage of wedding talk would be affecting Robin, whom he had not seen since the previous Friday, when the Jack Vettriano card containing a grisly little surprise had arrived.

In spite of the fact that he had just finished a large mug of tea upstairs, Strike automatically switched on the kettle when he arrived in the office, then put down on Robin’s desk the list of strip joints, lap-dancing clubs and massage parlors he had begun compiling in his few free hours. When Robin arrived, he intended to ask her to continue researching and telephoning all the places she could find in Shoreditch, a job she could do safely from her own home. If he could have enforced her cooperation, he would have sent her back to Masham with her mother. The memory of her white face had haunted him all week.

Stifling a second enormous yawn, he slumped down at Robin’s desk to check his emails. In spite of his intention to send her home, he was looking forward to seeing her. He missed her presence in the office, her enthusiasm, her can-do attitude, her easy, unforced kindness, and he wanted to tell her about the few advances he had made during his dogged pursuit of the three men currently obsessing him.

He had now notched up nearly twelve hours in Catford, trying to glimpse Whittaker entering or leaving his flat over the chip shop, which stood on a busy pedestrian street running along the rear of the Catford Theatre. Fishmongers, wig shops, cafés and bakeries curved around the perimeter of the theater, and each had a flat above it boasting three arched windows in triangular formation. The thin curtains of the flat where Shanker believed Whittaker to be living were constantly closed. Market stalls filled the street by day, providing Strike with useful cover. The mingled smells of incense from the dream-catcher stall and the slabs of raw fish lying on ice nearby filled his nostrils until he barely noticed them.

For three evenings Strike had watched from the stage door of the theater, opposite the flat, seeing nothing but shadowy forms moving behind the flat’s curtains. Then, on Wednesday evening, the door beside the chip shop had opened to reveal an emaciated teenage girl.

Her dark, dirty hair was pulled back off a sunken, rabbity face, which had the violet-shadowed pallor of a consumptive. She wore a crop top, a zip-up gray hoodie and leggings that gave her thin legs the look of pipe cleaners. Arms crossed tightly across her thin torso, she entered the chip shop by leaning on the door until it gave, then half falling into it. Strike hurried across the road so fast that he caught the door as it swung closed and took a place immediately behind her in the queue.

When she reached the counter the man serving addressed her by name.

“All right, Stephanie?”

“Yeah,” she said in a low voice. “Two Cokes, please.”

She had multiple piercings in her ears, nose and lip. After counting out payment in coins she left, head bowed, without looking at Strike.

He returned to his darkened doorway across the road where he ate the chips he had just bought, his eyes never moving from the lit windows above the chippy. Her purchase of two Cokes suggested that Whittaker was up there, perhaps sprawled naked on a mattress, as Strike had so often seen him in his teens. Strike had thought himself detached, but the awareness as he had stood in the chip-shop queue that he might be mere feet from the bastard, separated only by a flimsy wood and plaster ceiling, had made his pulse race. Stubbornly he watched the flat until the lights in the windows went off around one in the morning, but there had been no sign of Whittaker.

He had been no luckier with Laing. Careful perusal of Google Street View suggested that the balcony on which the fox-haired Laing had posed for his JustGiving photograph belonged to a flat in Wollaston Close, a squat, shabby block of flats that stood a short distance from the Strata. Neither phone nor voter registration records for the property revealed any trace of Laing, but Strike still held out hope that he might be living there as the guest of another, or renting and living without a landline. He had spent hours on Tuesday evening keeping watch over the flats, bringing with him a pair of night-vision goggles that enabled him to peer through uncurtained windows once darkness fell, but saw no hint of the Scot entering, leaving or moving around inside any of the flats. Having no wish to tip Laing off that he was after him, Strike had decided against door-to-door inquiries, but had lurked by day near the brick arches of a railway bridge nearby, which had been filled in to create tunnel-like spaces. Small businesses lived here: an Ecuadorian café, a hairdresser’s. Eating and drinking silently among cheerful South Americans, Strike had been conspicuous by his silence and moroseness.

Strike’s fresh yawn turned into another groan of tiredness as he stretched in Robin’s computer chair, so that he did not hear the first clanging footsteps on the stairs in the hallway. By the time he had realized that somebody was approaching and checked his watch — it was surely too early for Robin, who had told him her mother’s train would leave at eleven — a shadow was climbing the wall outside the frosted glass. A knock on the door, and to Strike’s astonishment, Two-Times entered the office.

A paunchy middle-aged businessman, he was considerably wealthier than his crumpled, nondescript appearance would suggest. His face, which was entirely forgettable, neither handsome nor homely, was today screwed up in consternation.

“She’s dumped me,” he told Strike without preamble.

He dropped onto the mock-leather sofa in an eruption of fake flatulence that took him by surprise; for the second time, Strike assumed, that day. It must have been a shock to the man to be dumped, when his usual procedure was to collect evidence of infidelity and present it to the blonde in question, thus severing the connection. The better Strike had got to know his client, the more he had understood that, for Two-Times, this constituted some kind of satisfying sexual climax. The man appeared to be a peculiar mixture of masochist, voyeur and control freak.

“Really?” said Strike, getting to his feet and heading towards the kettle; he needed caffeine. “We’ve been keeping a very close eye on her and there hasn’t been a hint of another man.”

In fact, he had done nothing about Platinum all week except to take Raven’s calls, a few of which he had allowed to go to voicemail while he had been tailing Mad Dad. He now wondered whether he had listened to all of them. He hoped to Christ that Raven had not been warning him that another rich man had shown up, ready to defray some of Platinum’s student expenses in return for exclusive privileges, or he would have to say good-bye to Two-Times’s cash for good.

“Why’s she dumped me then?” demanded Two-Times.

Because you’re a fucking weirdo.

“Well, I can’t swear there isn’t someone else,” said Strike, choosing his words carefully as he poured instant coffee into a mug. “I’m just saying she’s been bloody clever about it if there is. We’ve been tailing her every move,” he lied. “Coffee?”

“I thought you were supposed to be the best,” grumbled Two-Times. “No, I don’t drink instant.”

Strike’s mobile rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and checked the caller: Wardle.

“Sorry, I need to take this,” he told his disgruntled client, and did so.

“Hi, Wardle.”

“Malley’s ruled out,” said Wardle.

It was a mark of Strike’s exhaustion that these words meant nothing to him for a second or two. Then the realization dawned that Wardle was talking about the gangster who had once cut off a man’s penis, and of whose probable guilt in the matter of the leg Wardle had seemed convinced.

“Digger — right,” said Strike, to show that he was paying attention. “He’s out, is he?”

“It can’t’ve been him. He was in Spain when she was killed.”

“Spain,” repeated Strike.

Two-Times drummed his thick fingers on the arm of the sofa.

“Yeah,” said Wardle, “bloody Menorca.”

Strike took a swig of coffee so strong he might as well have emptied boiling water straight into the jar. A headache was building in the side of his skull. He rarely got headaches.

“But we’ve made progress with those two whose pictures I showed you,” said Wardle. “The bloke and the girl who were posting on that freaks’ website where Kelsey was asking questions about you.”

Strike dimly remembered the pictures Wardle had shown him of a young man with lopsided eyes and a woman with black hair and glasses.

“We’ve interviewed them and they never met her; they only had online contact. Plus, he’s got a rock-solid alibi for the date she died: he was doing a double shift at Asda — in Leeds. We’ve checked.

“But,” said Wardle, and Strike could tell he was leading up to something he thought promising, “there’s a bloke who’s been hanging round the forum, calls himself ‘Devotee,’ who’s been freaking them all out a bit. He’s got a thing for amputees. He liked to ask the women where they wanted to be amputated and apparently he tried to meet a couple of them. He’s gone very quiet lately. We’re trying to track him down.”

“Uh huh,” said Strike, very conscious of Two-Times’s mounting irritation. “Sounds hopeful.”

“Yeah, and I haven’t forgotten that letter you got from the bloke who liked your stump,” said Wardle. “We’re looking into him, too.”

“Great,” said Strike, hardly aware of what he was saying, but holding up a hand to show Two-Times — who was on the verge of getting up from the sofa — that he was almost done. “Listen, I can’t talk now, Wardle. Maybe later.”

When Wardle had hung up, Strike attempted to placate Two-Times, who had worked himself up into a state of weak anger while forced to wait for the phone call to end. Precisely what he thought Strike could do about the fact that his girlfriend had chucked him was a question that the detective, who could not afford to jettison possible repeat business, did not ask. Swigging tar-black coffee while the pain built in his head, Strike’s dominant emotion was a fervent wish that he was in a position to tell Two-Times to fuck off.

“So what,” asked his client, “are you going to do about it?”

Strike was unsure whether he was being asked to force Platinum back into the relationship, track her all over London in the hopes of discovering another boyfriend or refund Two-Times’s money. Before he could answer, however, he heard more footsteps on the metal stairs, and female voices. Two-Times barely had time for more than a startled, questioning look at Strike before the glass door opened.

Robin looked taller to Strike than the Robin he kept in his memory: taller, better-looking and more embarrassed. Behind her — and under normal circumstances he would have been interested and amused by the fact — was a woman who could only be her mother. Though a little shorter and definitely broader, she had the same strawberry-blonde hair, the same blue-gray eyes and an expression of beneficent shrewdness that was deeply familiar to Robin’s boss.

“I’m so sorry,” said Robin, catching sight of Two-Times and halting abruptly. “We can wait downstairs — come on, Mum—”

Their unhappy client got to his feet, definitely cross.

“No, no, not at all,” he said. “I didn’t have an appointment. I’ll go. Just my final invoice, then, Strike.”

He pushed his way out of the office.

An hour and a half later, Robin and her mother were sitting in silence as their taxi moved towards King’s Cross, Linda’s suitcase swaying a little on the floor.

Linda had been insistent that she wanted to meet Strike before she left for Yorkshire.

“You’ve been working for him for over a year. Surely he won’t mind if I look in to say hello? I’d like to see where you work, at least, so I can picture it when you’re talking about the office...”

Robin had resisted as hard as she could, embarrassed by the very idea of introducing her mother to Strike. It felt childish, incongruous and silly. She was particularly concerned that appearing with her mother in tow would reinforce Strike’s evident belief that she was too shaken up to deal with the Kelsey case.

Bitterly did Robin now regret betraying her distress when the Vettriano card had arrived. She ought to have known better than to let any hint of fear show, especially after telling him about the rape. He said it had made no difference, but she knew better: she’d had plenty of experience of people telling her what was, and wasn’t, good for her.

The taxi bowled along the Inner Circle and Robin had to remind herself that it was not her mother’s fault that they had blundered in on Two-Times. She ought to have called Strike first. The truth was that she had hoped that Strike would be out, or upstairs; that she would be able to show Linda around the office and take her away without having to introduce them. She had been afraid that, if she phoned him, Strike would make a point of being there to meet her mother, out of a characteristic blend of mischief and curiosity.

Linda and Strike had chatted away while Robin made tea, keeping deliberately quiet. She strongly suspected that one of the reasons Linda wanted to meet Strike was to assess the precise degree of warmth that existed between him and her daughter. Helpfully, Strike looked appalling, a good ten years older than his real age, with that blue-jawed, sunken-eyed look that he got when he forfeited sleep for work. Linda would surely be hard pressed to imagine that Robin was nursing a secret infatuation now she had seen her boss.

“I liked him,” said Linda as the red-brick palace of St. Pancras came into view, “and I have to say, he might not be pretty, but he’s got something about him.”

“Yes,” said Robin coldly. “Sarah Shadlock feels the same way.”

Shortly before they had left for the station, Strike had asked for five minutes with her alone in the inner office. There, he had handed her the beginnings of a list of massage parlors, strip joints and lap-dancing clubs in Shoreditch and asked her to begin the laborious process of ringing them all in search of Noel Brockbank.

“The more I think about it,” Strike had said, “the more I think he’ll still be working as a heavy or a bouncer. What else is there for him, big bloke with brain damage and his history?”

Out of deference to the listening Linda, Strike had omitted to add that he was sure Brockbank would still be working in the sex industry, where vulnerable women might be most easily found.

“OK,” Robin had replied, leaving Strike’s list where he had put it on her desk. “I’ll see Mum off and come back—”

“No, I want you to do it from home. Keep a record of all the calls; I’ll reimburse you.”

A mental picture of the Destiny’s Child Survivor poster had flickered in Robin’s mind.

“When do I come back into the office?”

“Let’s see how long that takes you,” he said. Correctly reading her expression, he had added: “Look, I think we’ve just lost Two-Times for good. I can cover Mad Dad alone—”

“What about Kelsey?”

“You’re trying to trace Brockbank,” he said, pointing at the list in her hand. Then (his head was pounding, though Robin did not know it), “Look, everyone’ll be off work tomorrow, it’s a bank holiday, the royal wedding—”

It could not have been clearer: he wanted her out of the way. Something had changed while she had been out of the office. Perhaps Strike was remembering that, after all, she had not been trained by the military police, had never seen dismembered limbs before a leg was delivered to their door, that she was not, in short, the kind of partner who was of use to him in this extremity.

“I’ve just had five days off—”

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, losing patience, “you’re only making lists and phone calls — why d’you have to be in here to do it?”

You’re only making lists and phone calls.

She remembered how Elin had called her Strike’s secretary.

Sitting in the taxi with her mother, a lava slide of anger and resentment swept away rationality. He had called her his partner in front of Wardle, back when he had needed her to look at the photographs of a dismembered body. There had been no new contract, though, no formal renegotiation of their working relationship. She was a faster typist than Strike, with his wide hairy fingers: she dealt with the bulk of the invoices and emails. She did most of the filing too. Perhaps, Robin thought, Strike himself had told Elin that she was his secretary. Perhaps calling her partner had been a sop to her, a mere figure of speech. Maybe (she was deliberately inflaming her own resentment now, and she knew it) Strike and Elin discussed Robin’s inadequacies during their sneaky dinners away from Elin’s husband. He might have confided in Elin how much he now regretted taking on a woman who, after all, had been a mere temp when she had come to him. He had probably told Elin about the rape too.

It was a difficult time for me too, you know.

You’re only making lists and phone calls.

Why was she crying? Tears of rage and frustration were trickling down her face.

“Robin?” said Linda.

“It’s nothing, nothing,” said Robin savagely, wiping under her eyes with the heels of her hands.

She had been desperate to get back to work after five days in the house with her mother and Matthew, after the awkward three-cornered silences in the tiny space, the whispered conversations she knew that Linda had had with Matthew while she was in the bathroom, and about which she had chosen not to ask. She did not want to be trapped at home all over again. Irrational though it might have been, she felt safer in the middle of London, keeping an eye out for that large figure in the beanie hat, than she did in her flat in Hastings Road.

They pulled up at last outside King’s Cross. Robin was trying hard to keep her emotions under control, conscious of Linda’s sideways looks as they crossed the crowded station towards her platform. She and Matthew would be alone again tonight, with the looming prospect of that final, definitive talk. She had not wanted Linda to come and stay, yet her imminent departure forced Robin to admit that there had been a comfort in her mother’s presence that she had barely acknowledged.

“Right,” said Linda once her case had been safely stowed in the luggage rack and she had returned to the platform to spend the last couple of minutes with her daughter. “This is for you.”

She was holding out five hundred pounds.

“Mum, I can’t take—”

“Yes, you can,” said Linda. “Put it towards a deposit on a new place to live — or a pair of Jimmy Choos for the wedding.”

They had gone window-shopping in Bond Street on Tuesday, staring through the shop windows at flawless jewels, at handbags that cost more than secondhand cars, at designer clothing to which neither woman could even aspire. It felt a long way from the shops of Harrogate. Robin had gazed most covetously through the shoe-shop windows. Matthew did not like her to wear very high heels; defiantly, she had voiced a hankering for some five-inch spikes.

“I can’t,” repeated Robin as the station echoed and bustled around them. Her parents were sharing the expense of her brother Stephen’s wedding later in the year. They had already paid a sizable deposit on her reception, which had been postponed once; they had bought the dress and paid for its alterations, lost one deposit on the wedding cars...

“I want you to,” said Linda sternly. “Either invest it in your single life or buy wedding shoes.”

Fighting more tears, Robin said nothing.

“You’ve got Dad’s and my full support whatever you decide,” said Linda, “but I want you to ask yourself why you haven’t let anyone else know why the wedding’s off. You can’t keep living in limbo like this. It’s not good for either of you. Take the money. Decide.”

She wrapped Robin in a tight embrace, kissed her just beneath the ear and got back on the train. Robin managed to smile all the time she was waving good-bye, but when the train had finally pulled away, taking her mother back to Masham, to her father, to Rowntree the Labrador and everything that was friendly and familiar, Robin dropped down on a cold metal bench, buried her face in her hands and wept silently into the banknotes Linda had given her.

“Cheer up, darling. Plenty more fish in the sea.”

She looked up. An unkempt man stood in front of her. His belly spilled widely over his belt and his smile was lascivious.

Robin got slowly to her feet. She was as tall as he was. Their eyes were on a level.

“Sod off,” she said.

He blinked. His smile turned to a scowl. As she strode away, stuffing Linda’s money into her pocket, she heard him shout something after her, but she neither knew nor cared what it had been. A vast unfocused rage rose in her, against men who considered displays of emotion a delicious open door; men who ogled your breasts under the pretense of scanning the wine shelves; men for whom your mere physical presence constituted a lubricious invitation.

Her fury billowed to encompass Strike, who had sent her home to Matthew because he now considered her a liability; who would rather endanger the business that she had helped build up, soldiering on single-handedly, than let her do what she was good at, what she sometimes outshone him at, because of the permanent handicap she had in his eyes acquired by being in the wrong stairwell at the wrong time, seven years previously.

So yes, she would ring his bloody lap-dancing clubs and his strip joints in search of the bastard who had called her “little girl,” but there was something else she would do too. She had been looking forward to telling Strike about it, but there had been no time with Linda’s train due, and she had felt no inclination after he told her to stay at home.

Robin tightened her belt and marched on, frowning, feeling fully justified in continuing to follow one lead, unbeknownst to Strike, alone.