Career of Evil

47

Today — June the first — Robin was able to say for the first time: “I’m getting married next month.” July the second suddenly seemed very close. The dressmaker back in Harrogate wanted a final fitting, but she had no idea when she would be able to fit in a trip home. At least she had her shoes. Her mother was taking the RSVPs and updating her regularly on the guest list. Robin felt strangely disconnected from it all. Her tedious hours of surveillance in Catford Broadway, staking out the flat over the chip shop, were a world away from queries on the flowers, who should sit beside whom at the reception, and (this last from Matthew) whether or not she had yet asked Strike for the fortnight off for the honeymoon, which Matthew had booked and which was to be a surprise.

She did not know how the wedding could have come so close without her realizing. Next month, the very next month, she would become Robin Cunliffe — at least, she supposed she would. Matthew certainly expected her to take his name. He was incredibly cheerful these days, hugging her wordlessly when he passed her in the hall, raising not a single objection to the long hours she was working, hours that bled into their weekends.

He had driven her to Catford on the last few mornings because it was on the way to the company he was auditing in Bromley. He was being nice about the despised Land Rover now, even while he crashed the gears and stalled it at junctions, saying what a wonderful gift it had been, how kind Linda was to have given it to them, how useful a car was when he was sent somewhere out of town. During yesterday’s commute he had offered to remove Sarah Shadlock from the wedding guest list. Robin could tell that he had had to screw up his courage even to ask the question, afraid that mentioning Sarah’s name might provoke a row. She had thought about it for a while, wondering how she really felt, and finally said no.

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I’d rather she came. It’s fine.”

Removing Sarah from the list would tell Sarah that Robin had found out what had happened years before. She would rather pretend that she had always known, that Matthew had confessed long ago, that it was nothing to her; she had her pride. However, when her mother, who had also queried Sarah’s attendance, asked whom Robin wanted to put on Sarah’s free side, now that Sarah and Matthew’s mutual university friend Shaun couldn’t make it, Robin answered with a question.

“Has Cormoran RSVP’d?”

“No,” said her mother.

“Oh,” said Robin. “Well, he says he’s going to.”

“You want to put him next to Sarah, do you?”

“No, of course not!” snapped Robin.

There was a short pause.

“Sorry,” said Robin. “Sorry, Mum... stressed... no, could you sit Cormoran next to... I don’t know...”

“Is his girlfriend coming?”

“He says not. Put him anywhere, just not near bloody — I mean, not by Sarah.”

So, Robin settled in to wait for a glimpse of Stephanie on the warmest morning so far. The shoppers on Catford Broadway were wearing T-shirts and sandals; black women passed in brightly colored head wraps. Robin, who had put on a sundress under an old denim jacket, leaned back into one of her accustomed nooks in the theater building, pretending that she was talking on the mobile and killing time before she pretended to peruse the scented candles and incense sticks on the nearest stall.

It was difficult to maintain concentration when you were convinced that you had been sent on a wild goose chase. Strike might insist that he still thought Whittaker a suspect in Kelsey’s killing, but Robin was quietly unconvinced. She increasingly inclined to Wardle’s view that Strike had it in for his ex-stepfather and that his usually sound judgment was clouded by old grievances. Glancing up periodically at the unmoving curtains of Whittaker’s flat, she remembered that Stephanie had last been seen being bundled into the back of a transit van by Whittaker, and wondered whether she was even inside the flat.

From faint resentment that this was going to be another wasted day, she fell easily to dwelling on the main grudge she currently felt against Strike: his appropriation of the search for Noel Brockbank. Somehow Robin had come to feel that Brockbank was particularly her own suspect. Had she not successfully impersonated Venetia Hall, they would never have known that Brockbank was living in London, and if she had not had the wit to recognize that Nile was Noel, they would never have traced him to the Saracen. Even the low voice in her ear — Do A know you, little girl? — creepy as it had been, constituted a strange kind of connection.

The mingled smells of raw fish and incense that had come to represent Whittaker and Stephanie filled her nostrils as she leaned back against chilly stone and watched the unmoving door of his flat. Like foxes to a dustbin, her unruly thoughts slunk back to Zahara, the little girl who had answered Brockbank’s mobile. Robin had thought of her every day since they had spoken and had asked Strike for every detail about the little girl’s mother on his return from the strip club.

He had told Robin that Brockbank’s girlfriend was called Alyssa and that she was black, so Zahara must be too. Perhaps she looked like the little girl with stiff pigtails now waddling along the street, holding tight to her mother’s forefinger and staring at Robin with solemn dark eyes. Robin smiled, but the little girl did not: she merely continued to scrutinize Robin as she and her mother passed. Robin kept smiling until the little girl, twisting almost 180 degrees so as not to break eye contact with Robin, tripped over her tiny sandaled feet. She hit the ground and began to wail; her impassive mother scooped her up and carried her. Feeling guilty, Robin resumed her observation of Whittaker’s windows as the fallen toddler’s wails reverberated down the street.

Zahara almost certainly lived in the flat in Bow that Strike had told her about. Zahara’s mother complained about the flat, apparently, although Strike said that one of the girls...

One of the girls had said...

“Of course!” Robin muttered excitedly. “Of course!”

Strike wouldn’t have thought of that — of course he wouldn’t, he was a man! She began to press the keys on her phone.

There were seven nurseries in Bow. Absently replacing her mobile in her pocket and energized by her train of thought, Robin began her usual drift through the market stalls, casting the occasional glance up at the windows of Whittaker’s flat and at the perennially closed door, her mind entirely given over to the pursuit of Brockbank. She could think of two possible courses of action: stake out each of these seven nurseries, watching for a black woman picking up a girl called Zahara (and how would she know which was the right mother and daughter?) or... or... She paused beside a stall selling ethnic jewelry, barely seeing it, preoccupied by thoughts of Zahara.

Entirely by chance, she looked up from a pair of feather and bead earrings as Stephanie, whom Strike had accurately described, came out of the door beside the chip shop. Pale, red-eyed and blinking in the bright light like an albino rabbit, Stephanie leaned on the chip-shop door, toppled inside and proceeded to the counter. Before Robin could collect her wits, Stephanie had brushed past her holding a can of Coke and gone back into the building through the white door.

Shit.

“Nothing,” she told Strike on the phone an hour later. “She’s still in there. I didn’t have a chance to do anything. She was in and out in about three minutes.”

“Stick with it,” said Strike. “She might come out again. At least we know she’s awake.”

“Any luck with Laing?”

“Not while I was there, but I’ve had to come back to the office. Big news: Two-Times has forgiven me. He’s just left. We need the money — I could hardly refuse.”

“Oh, for God’s sake — how can he have another girlfriend already?” asked Robin.

“He hasn’t. He wants me to check out some new lap-dancer he’s flirting with, see whether she’s already in a relationship.”

“Why doesn’t he just ask her?”

“He has. She says she isn’t seeing anyone, but women are devious, cheating scum, Robin, you know that.”

“Oh yes, of course,” sighed Robin. “I forgot. Listen, I’ve had an idea about Br — Wait, something’s happening.”

“Everything all right?” he asked sharply.

“Fine... hang on...”

A transit van had rolled up in front of her. Keeping the mobile to her ear, Robin ambled around it, trying to see what was going on. As far as she could make out, the driver had a crew cut, but the sun on the windscreen dazzled her eyes, obscuring his features. Stephanie had appeared on the pavement. Arms wrapped tightly around herself, she trooped across the street and climbed into the back of the van. Robin stepped back to allow it to pass, pretending to talk into her mobile. Her eyes met those of the driver; they were dark and hooded.

“She’s gone, got in the back of an old van,” she told Strike. “The driver didn’t look like Whittaker. Could’ve been mixed race or Mediterranean. Hard to see.”

“Well, we know Stephanie’s on the game. She’s probably off to earn Whittaker some money.”

Robin tried not to resent his matter-of-fact tone. He had, she reminded herself, freed Stephanie from Whittaker’s stranglehold with a punch to the gut. She paused, looking into a newsagent’s window. Royal wedding ephemera was still very much in evidence. A Union Jack was hanging on the wall behind the Asian man at the till.

“What do you want me to do? I could go and cover Wollaston Close for you, if you’re off after Two-Times’ new girl. It makes — oof,” she gasped.

She had turned to walk away and collided with a tall man sporting a goatee, who swore at her.

“Sorry,” she gasped automatically as the man shoved his way past her into the newsagent’s.

“What just happened?” asked Strike.

“Nothing — I bumped into someone — listen, I’m going to go to Wollaston Close,” she said.

“All right,” said Strike after a perceptible pause, “but if Laing turns up, just try and get a picture. Don’t go anywhere near him.”

“I wasn’t intending to,” said Robin.

“Call me if there’s any news. Or even if there isn’t.”

The brief spurt of enthusiasm she had felt at the prospect of going back to Wollaston Close had faded by the time she had reached Catford station. She was not sure why she felt suddenly downcast and anxious. Perhaps she was hungry. Determined to break herself of the chocolate habit that was jeopardizing her ability to fit into the altered wedding dress, she bought herself an unappetizing-looking energy bar before boarding the train.

Chewing the sawdusty slab as the train carried her towards Elephant and Castle, she found herself absentmindedly rubbing her ribs where she had collided with the large man in the goatee. Being sworn at by random people was the price you paid for living in London, of course; she could not ever remember a stranger swearing at her in Masham, not even once.

Something made her suddenly look all around her, but there did not seem to be any large man in her vicinity, neither in the sparsely occupied carriage nor peering at her from the neighboring ones. Now she came to think of it, she had jettisoned some of her habitual vigilance that morning, lulled by the familiarity of Catford Broadway, distracted by her thoughts of Brockbank and Zahara. She wondered whether she would have noticed somebody else there, watching her... but that, surely, was paranoia. Matthew had dropped her off in the Land Rover that morning; how could the killer have followed her to Catford unless he had been waiting in some kind of vehicle at Hastings Road?

Nevertheless, she thought, she must guard against complacency. When she got off the train she noticed a tall dark man walking a little behind her, and deliberately stopped to let him pass. He did not give her a second look. I’m definitely being paranoid, she thought, dropping the unfinished energy bar into a bin.

It was half past one before she reached the forecourt of Wollaston Close, the Strata building looming over the shabby old flats like an emissary from the future. The long sundress and the old denim jacket that had fitted in so well in the market in Catford felt a little studentish here. Yet again pretending to be on her mobile, Robin looked casually upwards and her heart gave a little skip.

Something had changed. The curtains had been pulled back.

Hyperaware now, she maintained her course in case he was looking out of the window, intending to find a place in shadow where she could keep an eye on his balcony. So intent was she on finding the perfect place to lurk, and on maintaining the appearance of a natural conversation, that she had no attention to spare for where she was treading.

“No!” Robin squealed as her right foot skidded out from under her, her left became caught in the hem of her long skirt and she slid into an undignified half-splits before toppling sideways and dropping her mobile.

“Oh bugger,” she moaned. Whatever she had slipped in looked like vomit or even diarrhea: some was clinging to her dress, to her sandal, and she had grazed her hand on landing, but it was the precise identity of the thick, yellow-brown, glutinous lumpy stuff that worried her most.

Somewhere in her vicinity a man burst out laughing. Cross and humiliated, she tried to get up without spreading the muck further over her clothes and shoes and did not look immediately for the source of the jeering noise.

“Sorry, hen,” said a soft Scottish voice right behind her. She looked around sharply and several volts of electricity seemed to pass through her.

In spite of the warmth of the day, he was wearing a windstopper hat with long earflaps, a red and black check jacket and jeans. A pair of metal crutches supported most of his substantial weight as he looked down at her, still grinning. Deep pockmarks disfigured his pale cheeks, his chin and the pouches beneath his small, dark eyes. The flesh on his thick neck spilled over his collar.

A plastic bag containing what looked like a few groceries hung from one hand. She could just see the tattooed dagger tip that she knew ran through a yellow rose higher on his forearm. The drops of tattooed blood running down his wrist looked like injuries.

“Ye’ll need a tap,” he said, grinning broadly as he pointed at her foot and the hem of her dress, “and a scrubbing brush.”

“Yes,” said Robin shakily. She bent to pick up her mobile. The screen was cracked.

“I live up there,” he said, nodding towards the flat she had been watching on and off for a month. “Ye can come up if y’want. Clean yerself up.”

“Oh no — that’s all right. Thanks very much, though,” said Robin breathlessly.

“Nae problem,” said Donald Laing.

His gaze slithered down her body. Her skin prickled, as though he had run a finger down her. Turning on his crutches, he began to move away, the plastic bag swinging awkwardly. Robin stood where he had left her, conscious of the blood pounding in her face.

He did not look back. The earflaps of his hat swayed like spaniel’s ears as he moved painfully slowly around the side of the flats and out of sight.

“Oh my God,” whispered Robin. Hand and knee smarting where she had fallen, she absentmindedly pushed her hair out of her face. Only then did she realize, with relief, from the smell on her fingers, that the slippery substance had been curry. Hurrying to a corner out of sight of Donald Laing’s windows, she pressed the keys of the cracked mobile and called Strike.