Career of Evil

43

The next day, Strike had been in Pret A Manger on the King’s Road for five minutes when Robin arrived, carrying a white bag over her shoulder. He was as uninformed about female fashion as most male ex-soldiers, but even he recognized the name Jimmy Choo.

“Shoes,” he said, pointing, after he had ordered her a coffee.

“Well done,” said Robin, grinning. “Shoes. Yes. For the wedding,” she added, because after all, they ought to be able to acknowledge that it was happening. A strange taboo had seemed to exist around the subject since she had resumed her engagement.

“You’re still coming, right?” she added as they took a table beside the window.

Had he ever agreed that he was attending her wedding, Strike wondered. He had been given the reissued invitation, which like the first had been of stiff cream card engraved in black, but he could not remember telling her that he would be there. She watched him expectantly for an answer, and he was reminded of Lucy and her attempts to coerce him into attending his nephew’s birthday party.

“Yeah,” he said unwillingly.

“Shall I RSVP for you?” Robin asked.

“No,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

He supposed that it would entail calling her mother. This, he thought, was how women roped you in. They added you to lists and forced you to confirm and commit. They impressed upon you that if you didn’t show up a plate of hot food would go begging, a gold-backed chair would remain unoccupied, a cardboard place name would sit shamefully upon a table, announcing your rudeness to the world. Offhand, he could think of literally nothing he wanted to do less than watch Robin marry Matthew.

“D’you want — would you like me to invite Elin?” Robin asked valiantly, hoping to see his expression become a degree or two less surly.

“No,” said Strike without hesitation, but he read in her offer a kind of plea, and his real fondness for her caused his better nature to reassert itself. “Let’s see the shoes then.”

“You don’t want to see the—!”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

Robin lifted the box out of its bag with a reverence that amused Strike, took off the lid and unfolded the tissue paper inside. They were high, glittery champagne-colored heels.

“Bit rock ’n’ roll for a wedding,” said Strike. “I thought they’d be... I dunno... flowery.”

“You’ll hardly see them,” she said, stroking one of the stilettos with a forefinger. “They had some platforms, but—”

She did not finish the sentence. The truth was that Matthew did not like her too tall.

“So how are we going to handle Jason and Tempest?” she said, pushing the lid back down on the shoes and replacing them in the bag.

“You’re going to take the lead,” said Strike. “You’re the one who’s had contact with them. I’ll jump in if necessary.”

“You realize,” said Robin awkwardly, “that Jason’s going to ask you about your leg? That he thinks you — you lied about how you lost it?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“OK. I just don’t want you to get offended or anything.”

“I think I can handle it,” said Strike, amused by her look of concern. “I’m not going to hit him, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“Well, good,” said Robin, “because from his pictures you’d probably break him in two.”

They walked side by side up the King’s Road, Strike smoking, to the place where the entrance to the gallery sat a little retired from the road, behind the statue of a bewigged and stockinged Sir Hans Sloane. Passing through an arch in the pale brick wall, they entered a grassy square that might, but for the noise of the busy street behind them, have belonged to a country estate. Nineteenth-century buildings on three sides surrounded the square. Ahead, contained in what might once have been barracks, was Gallery Mess.

Strike, who had vaguely imagined a canteen tacked on to the gallery, now realized that he was entering a far more upmarket space and remembered with some misgivings both his overdraft and his agreement to pay for what was almost certainly going to be lunch for four.

The room they entered was long and narrow, with a second, wider area visible through arched openings to their left. White tablecloths, suited waiters, high-vaulted ceilings and contemporary art all over the walls increased Strike’s dread of how much this was going to cost him as they followed the maître d’ into the inner portion of the room.

The pair they sought was easy to spot among the tastefully dressed, mostly female clientele. Jason was a stringy youth with a long nose who wore a maroon hoodie and jeans and looked as though he might take flight at the slightest provocation. Staring down at his napkin, he resembled a scruffy heron. Tempest, whose black bob had certainly been dyed and who wore thick, square black-rimmed spectacles, was his physical opposite: pale, dumpy and doughy, her small, deep-set eyes like raisins in a bun. Wearing a black T-shirt with a multicolored cartoon pony stretched across an ample chest, she was sitting in a wheelchair adjacent to the table. Both had menus open in front of them. Tempest had already ordered herself a glass of wine.

When she spotted Strike and Robin approaching, Tempest beamed, stretched out a stubby forefinger and poked Jason on the shoulder. The boy looked around apprehensively; Strike registered the pronounced asymmetry of his pale blue eyes, one of which was a good centimeter higher than the other. It gave him an oddly vulnerable look, as though he had been finished in a hurry.

“Hi,” said Robin, smiling and reaching out a hand to Jason first. “It’s nice to meet you at last.”

“Hi,” he muttered, proffering limp fingers. After one quick glance at Strike he looked away, turning red.

“Well, hello!” said Tempest, sticking her own hand out to Strike, still beaming. Deftly she reversed her wheelchair a few inches and suggested that he pull up a chair from a neighboring table. “This place is great. It’s so easy to get around in, and the staff are really helpful. Excuse me!” she said loudly to a passing waiter, “Could we have two more menus, please?”

Strike sat down beside her, while Jason shunted up to make room for Robin beside him.

“Lovely space, isn’t it?” said Tempest, sipping her wine. “And the staff are wonderful about the wheelchair. Can’t help you enough. I’m going to be recommending it on my site; I do a list of disability-friendly venues.”

Jason drooped over his menu, apparently afraid to make eye contact with anyone.

“I’ve told him not to mind what he orders.” Tempest told Strike comfortably. “He didn’t realize how much you’ll have made from solving those cases. I’ve told him: the press will have paid you loads just for your story. I suppose that’s what you do now, try and solve the really high-profile ones?”

Strike thought of his plummeting bank balance, his glorified bedsit over the office and the shattering effect the severed leg had had on his business.

“We try,” he said, avoiding looking at Robin.

Robin chose the cheapest salad and a water. Tempest ordered a starter as well as a main course, urged Jason to imitate her, then collected in the menus to return them to the waiter with the air of a gracious hostess.

“So, Jason,” Robin began.

Tempest at once talked over Robin, addressing Strike.

“Jason’s nervous. He hadn’t really thought through what the repercussions of meeting you might be. I had to point them out to him; we’ve been on the phone day and night, you should see the bills — I should charge you, ha, ha! But seriously—”

Her expression became suddenly grave.

“—we’d really like your assurance up front that we’re not going to be in trouble for not telling the police everything. Because it wasn’t as though we had any useful information. She was just a poor kid with problems. We don’t know anything. We only met up with her once, and we haven’t got a clue who killed her. I’m sure you know much more about it than we do. I was pretty worried when I heard Jason had been talking to your partner, to be honest, because I don’t think anyone really appreciates how much we’re persecuted as a community. I’ve had death threats myself — I should hire you to investigate them, ha ha.”

“Who’s made death threats against you?” asked Robin in polite surprise.

“It’s my website, you see,” said Tempest, ignoring Robin and addressing Strike. “I run it. It’s like I’m den mother — or Mother Superior, ha ha... anyway, I’m the one everyone confides in and comes to for advice, so obviously, I’m the one who gets attacked when ignorant people target us. I suppose I don’t help myself. I fight other people’s battles a lot, don’t I, Jason? Anyway,” she said, pausing only to take a greedy sip of wine, “I can’t advise Jason to talk to you without a guarantee he’s not going to get in any trouble.”

Strike wondered what possible authority she thought he had in the matter. The reality was that both Jason and Tempest had concealed information from the police and, whatever their reasons for doing so, and whether or not the information turned out to be valuable, their behavior had been foolish and potentially harmful.

“I don’t think either of you will be in trouble,” he lied easily.

“Well, OK, that’s good to hear,” said Tempest with some complacency, “because we do want to help, obviously. I mean, I said to Jason, if this man’s preying on the BIID community, which is possible — I mean, bloody hell, it’s our duty to help. It wouldn’t surprise me, either, the abuse we get on the website, the hatred. It’s unbelievable. I mean, obviously it stems from ignorance, but we get abuse from people you’d expect to be on our side, who know exactly what it’s like to be discriminated against.”

Drinks arrived. To Strike’s horror, the Eastern European waiter upended his bottle of Spitfire beer into a glass containing ice.

“Hey!” said Strike sharply.

“The beer isn’t cold,” said the waiter, surprised by what he clearly felt was Strike’s overreaction.

“For fuck’s sake,” muttered Strike, fishing the ice out of his glass. It was bad enough that he was facing a hefty lunch bill, without ice in his beer. The waiter gave Tempest her second glass of wine with a slightly huffy air. Robin seized her chance:

“Jason, when you first made contact with Kelsey—”

But Tempest set down her glass and drowned Robin out.

“Yeah, I checked all my records, and Kelsey first visited the site back in December. Yeah, I told the police that, I let them see everything. She asked about you,” Tempest told Strike in a tone that suggested he ought to be flattered to have secured a mention on her website, “and then she got talking to Jason and they exchanged email addresses, and from then on they were in direct contact, weren’t you, Jason?”

“Yeah,” he said weakly.

“Then she suggested meeting up and Jason got in touch with me — didn’t you, Jason? — and basically he thought he’d feel more comfortable if I came along, because after all, it’s the internet, isn’t it? You never know. She could’ve been anyone. She could’ve been a man.”

“What made you want to meet Kel—?” Robin began to ask Jason, but again, Tempest talked over her.

“They were both interested in you, obviously,” said Tempest to Strike. “Kelsey got Jason interested, didn’t she, Jason? She knew all about you,” said Tempest, smiling slyly as though they shared disreputable secrets.

“So what did Kelsey tell you about me, Jason?” Strike asked the boy.

Jason turned scarlet at being addressed by Strike and Robin wondered suddenly whether he could be gay. From her extensive perusal of the message boards she had detected an erotic undertone to some, though not all, of the posters’ fantasies, <<Δēvōŧėė>> being the most blatant of them.

“She said,” mumbled Jason, “her brother knew you. That he’d worked with you.”

“Really?” said Strike. “Are you sure she said her brother?”

“Yeah.”

“Because she didn’t have one. Only a sister.”

Jason’s lopsided eyes traveled nervously over the objects on the table before returning to Strike.

“I’m pretty sure she said brother.”

“Worked with me in the army, did he?”

“No, not in the army, I don’t think. Later.”

She lied all the time... If it was Tuesday she’d say it was Wednesday.

“Now, I thought she said her boyfriend told her,” said Tempest. “She told us she had a boyfriend called Neil, Jason — remember?”

“Niall,” mumbled Jason.

“Oh, was it? All right, Niall. He picked her up after we had coffee, remember?”

“Hang on,” said Strike, raising a hand, and Tempest paused obediently. “You saw Niall?”

“Yes,” said Tempest. “He picked her up. On his motorbike.”

There was a brief silence.

“A man on a motorbike picked her up from — where did you meet her?” asked Strike, his calm tone belying his suddenly pounding pulse.

“Café Rouge on Tottenham Court Road,” said Tempest.

“That’s not far from our office,” said Robin.

Jason turned an even darker red.

“Oh, Kelsey and Jason knew that, ha ha! You were hoping to see Cormoran pop in, weren’t you, Jason? Ha ha ha,” laughed Tempest merrily as the waiter returned with her starter.

“A man on a motorbike picked her up, Jason?”

Tempest’s mouth was full and, at last, Jason was able to speak.

“Yeah,” he said with a furtive look at Strike. “He was waiting for her along the road.”

“Could you see what he looked like?” asked Strike, correctly anticipating the answer.

“No, he was sort of — sort of tucked around the corner.”

“He kept his helmet on,” said Tempest, washing down a mouthful with wine, the quicker to rejoin the conversation.

“What color was the motorbike, can you remember?” Strike asked.

Tempest rather thought it had been black and Jason was sure it had been red, but they agreed that it had been parked far too far away to recognize the make.

“Can you remember anything else Kelsey said about her boyfriend?” asked Robin.

Both shook their heads.

Their main courses arrived midway through a lengthy explanation by Tempest of the advocacy and support services offered by the website she had developed. Only with her mouth full of chips did Jason finally find the courage to address Strike directly.

“Is it true?” he said suddenly. His face again grew bright red as he said it.

“Is what true?” asked Strike.

“That you — that—”

Chewing vigorously, Tempest leaned towards Strike in her wheelchair, placed her hand on his forearm and swallowed.

“That you did it yourself,” she whispered, with the ghost of a wink.

Her thick thighs had subtly readjusted themselves as she lifted them off the chair, bearing their own weight, instead of hanging behind the mobile torso. Strike had been in Selly Oak Hospital with men left paraplegic and quadriplegic by the injuries they had sustained in war, seen their wasted legs, the compensations they had learned to make in the movement of their upper bodies to accommodate the dead weight below. For the first time, the reality of what Tempest was doing hit him forcibly. She did not need the wheelchair. She was entirely able-bodied.

Strangely, it was Robin’s expression that kept Strike calm and polite, because he found vicarious release in the look of distaste and fury she threw Tempest. He addressed Jason.

“You’ll need to tell me what you’ve been told before I can tell you whether it’s true or not.”

“Well,” said Jason, who had barely touched his Black Angus burger, “Kelsey said you went to the pub with her brother and you got — got drunk and told him the truth. She reckoned you walked off your base in Afghanistan with a gun and you went as far as you could in the dark, then you — shot yourself in the leg, and then you got a doctor to amputate it for you.”

Strike took a large swig of beer.

“And I did this why?”

“What?” said Jason, blinking confusedly.

“Was I trying to get invalided out of the army, or—?”

“Oh, no!” said Jason, looking strangely hurt. “No, you were” — he blushed so hard it seemed unlikely that there was enough blood left in the rest of his body — “like us. You needed it,” he whispered. “You needed to be an amputee.”

Robin suddenly found that she could not look at Strike and pretended to be contemplating a curious painting of a hand holding a single shoe. At least, she thought it showed a hand holding a shoe. It might equally have been a brown plant pot with a pink cactus growing out of it.

“The — brother — who told Kelsey all about me — did he know she wanted to take off her own leg?”

“I don’t think so, no. She said I was the only one she’d ever told.”

“So you think it was just coincidence he mentioned—?”

“People keep it quiet,” said Tempest, shoehorning herself back into the conversation at the first opportunity. “There’s a lot of shame, a lot of shame. I’m not out at work,” she said blithely, waving towards her legs. “I have to say it’s a back injury. If they knew I’m transabled they’d never understand. And don’t get me started on the prejudice from the medical profession, which is absolutely unbelievable. I’ve changed GPs twice; I wasn’t going to put up with being offered bloody psychiatric help again. No, Kelsey told us she’d never been able to tell anyone, poor little love. She had nobody to turn to. Nobody understood. That’s why she reached out to us — and to you, of course,” she told Strike, smiling with a little condescension because, unlike her, he had ignored Kelsey’s appeal. “You’re not alone, mind. Once people have successfully achieved what they’re after they tend to leave the community. We get it — we understand — but it would mean a lot if people hung around just to describe what it feels like to finally be in the body you’re meant to be in.”

Robin was worried that Strike might explode, here in this polite white space where art lovers conversed in soft voices. However, she had reckoned without the self-control that the ex — Special Investigation Branch officer had learned through long years of interrogations. His polite smile to Tempest might have been a little grim, but he merely turned again to Jason and asked:

“So you don’t think it was Kelsey’s brother’s idea for her to contact me?”

“No,” said Jason, “I think that was all her own idea.”

“So what exactly did she want from me?”

“Well, obviously,” interposed Tempest, half-laughing, “she wanted advice on how to do what you’d done!”

“Is that what you think, Jason?” asked Strike and the boy nodded.

“Yeah... she wanted to know how badly she’d have to injure her leg to get it taken off, and I think she had a sort of idea you’d introduce her to the doctor who did yours.”

“That’s the perennial problem,” said Tempest, clearly oblivious to the effect she was having on Strike, “finding reliable surgeons. They’re usually completely unsympathetic. People have died trying to do it themselves. There was a wonderful surgeon in Scotland who performed a couple of amputations on BIID sufferers, but then they stopped him. That was a good ten years ago. People go abroad, but if you can’t pay, if you can’t afford travel... you can see why Kelsey wanted to get her mitts on your contact list!”

Robin let her knife and fork fall with a clatter, feeling on Strike’s behalf all the offense that she assumed him to be experiencing. His contact list! As though his amputation was a rare artefact that Strike had bought on the black market...

Strike questioned both Jason and Tempest for another fifteen minutes before concluding that they knew nothing more of any use. The picture they painted of their one meeting with Kelsey was of an immature and desperate girl whose urge to be amputated was so powerful that she would, by the consent of both of her cyberfriends, have done anything to achieve it.

“Yeah,” sighed Tempest, “she was one of those. She’d already had a go when she was younger, with some wire. We’ve had people so desperate they’ve put their legs on train tracks. One guy tried to freeze his leg off in liquid nitrogen. There was a girl in America who deliberately botched a ski jump, but the danger with that is you might not get exactly the degree of disability you’re after—”

“So what degree are you after?” Strike asked her. He had just put up a hand for the bill.

“I want my spinal cord severed,” said Tempest with total composure. “Paraplegic, yeah. Ideally I’ll have it done by a surgeon. In the meantime, I just get on with it,” she said, gesturing again to her wheelchair.

“Using the disabled bathrooms and stairlifts, the works, eh?” asked Strike.

“Cormoran,” said Robin in a warning voice.

She had thought this might happen. He was stressed and sleep-deprived. She supposed she ought to be glad that they had got all the information they needed first.

“It’s a need,” said Tempest composedly. “I’ve known ever since I was a child. I’m in the wrong body. I need to be paralyzed.”

The waiter had arrived; Robin held out her hand for the bill, because Strike hadn’t noticed him.

“Quickly, please,” she said to the waiter, who looked sullen. He was the man Strike had barked at for putting ice in his beer glass.

“Know many disabled people, do you?” Strike was asking Tempest.

“I know a couple,” she said. “Obviously we’ve got a lot in—”

“You’ve got fuck all in common. Fuck all.”

“I knew it,” muttered Robin under her breath, snatching the chip and pin machine out of the waiter’s grip and shoving in her Visa card. Strike stood up, towering over Tempest, who looked suddenly unnerved, while Jason shrank back in his seat, looking as though he wanted to disappear inside his hoodie.

“C’mon, Corm—” said Robin, ripping her card out of the machine.

“Just so you know,” said Strike, addressing both Tempest and Jason as Robin grabbed her coat and tried to pull him away from the table, “I was in a car that blew up around me.” Jason had put his hands over his scarlet face, his eyes full of tears. Tempest merely gaped. “The driver was ripped in two — that’d get you some attention, eh?” he said savagely to Tempest. “Only he was dead, so not so fucking much. The other guy lost half his face — I lost a leg. There was nothing voluntary about—”

“OK,” said Robin, taking Strike’s arm. “We’re off. Thanks very much for meeting us, Jason—”

“Get some help,” said Strike loudly, pointing at Jason as he allowed Robin to pull him away, diners and waiters staring. “Get some fucking help. With your head.”

They were out in the leafy road, nearly a block away from the gallery, before Strike’s breathing began to return to normal.

“OK,” he said, though Robin had not spoken. “You warned me. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right,” she said mildly. “We got everything we wanted.”

They walked on in silence for a few yards.

“Did you pay? I didn’t notice.”

“Yes. I’ll take it out of petty cash.”

They walked on. Well-dressed men and women passed them, busy, bustling. A bohemian-looking girl with dreadlocks floated past in a long paisley dress, but a five-hundred-pound handbag revealed that her hippy credentials were as fake as Tempest’s disability.

“At least you didn’t punch her,” said Robin. “In her wheelchair. In front of all the art lovers.”

Strike began to laugh. Robin shook her head.

“I knew you’d lose it,” she sighed, but she was smiling.