Career of Evil

5

Much later, after he had seen Robin safely onto the Tube, Strike returned to the office and sat alone in silence at her desk, lost in thought.

He had seen plenty of dismembered corpses, seen them rotting in mass graves and lying, freshly blown apart, by roadsides: severed limbs, flesh pulped, bones crushed. Unnatural death was the business of the Special Investigation Branch, the plainclothes wing of the Royal Military Police, and his and his colleagues’ reflexive reaction had often been humor. That was how you coped when you saw the dead torn and mutilated. Not for the SIB the luxury of corpses washed and prettified in satin-lined boxes.

Boxes. It had looked quite ordinary, the cardboard box in which the leg had come. No markings to indicate its origin, no trace of a previous addressee, nothing. The whole thing had been so organized, so careful, so neat — and this was what unnerved him, not the leg itself, nasty object though it was. What appalled him was the careful, meticulous, almost clinical modus operandi.

Strike checked his watch. He was supposed to be going out with Elin this evening. His girlfriend of two months was in the throes of a divorce that was proceeding with the chilly brinkmanship of a grandmaster chess tournament. Her estranged husband was very wealthy, something that Strike had not realized until the first night he had been permitted to come back to the marital home and found himself in a spacious, wood-floored apartment overlooking Regent’s Park. The shared custody arrangements meant that she was only prepared to meet Strike on nights when her five-year-old daughter was not at home, and when they went out, they chose the capital’s quieter and more obscure restaurants as Elin did not wish her estranged husband to know that she was seeing anyone else. The situation suited Strike perfectly. It had been a perennial problem in his relationships that the normal nights for recreation were often nights that he had to be out tailing other people’s unfaithful partners, and he had no particular desire to kindle a close relationship with Elin’s daughter. He had not lied to Robin: he did not know how to talk to children.

He reached for his mobile. There were a few things he could do before he left for dinner.

The first call went to voicemail. He left a message asking Graham Hardacre, his ex-colleague in the Special Investigation Branch, to call him. He was not sure where Hardacre was currently stationed. The last time they had spoken, he had been due a move from Germany.

To Strike’s disappointment, his second call, which was to an old friend whose life path had run more or less in the opposite direction to that of Hardacre, was not picked up either. Strike left a second, almost identical message, and hung up.

Pulling Robin’s chair closer to the computer, he turned it on and stared at the homepage without seeing it. The image that was filling his mind, entirely against his will, was of his mother, naked. Who had known the tattoo was there? Her husband, obviously, and the many boyfriends who had woven in and out of her life, and anyone else who might have seen her undressed in the squats and the filthy communes in which they had intermittently lived. Then there was the possibility that had occurred to him in the Tottenham, but which he had not felt equal to sharing with Robin: that Leda had, at some point, been photographed in the nude. It would have been entirely in character.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He got as far as Leda Strike nak before deleting, letter by letter, with an angry, jabbing forefinger. There were places no normal man wanted to go, phrases you did not want to leave on your internet search history, but also, unfortunately, tasks you did not want to delegate.

He contemplated the search box he had emptied, the cursor blinking dispassionately at him, then typed fast in his usual two-fingered style: Donald Laing.

There were plenty of them, especially in Scotland, but he could rule out anyone who had been paying rent or voting in elections while Laing had been in jail. After careful elimination and bearing in mind Laing’s approximate age, Strike narrowed his focus to a man who appeared to have been living with a woman called Lorraine MacNaughton in Corby in 2008. Lorraine MacNaughton was now registered as living there alone.

He deleted Laing’s name and substituted Noel Brockbank. There were fewer of them in the UK than there had been Donald Laings, but Strike reached a similar dead end. There had been an N. C. Brockbank living alone in Manchester in 2006, but if that was Strike’s man, it suggested that he had split up with his wife. Strike was not sure whether that would be a good or a bad thing...

Slumping back in Robin’s chair, Strike moved on to considering the likely consequences of being sent an anonymous severed leg. The police would have to ask the public for information soon, but Wardle had promised to warn Strike before they gave a press conference. A story this bizarre and grotesque would always be news, but interest would be increased — and it gave him no pleasure to reflect on it — because the leg had been sent to his office. Cormoran Strike was newsworthy these days. He had solved two murders under the noses of the Met, both of which would have fascinated the public, even had a private detective not solved them: the first, because the victim had been a beautiful young woman, the second, because it had been a strange, ritualistic killing.

How, Strike wondered, would the sending of the leg affect the business he had been working so hard to build up? He could not help feeling that the consequences were likely to be serious. Internet searches were a cruel barometer of status. Sometime soon, Googling Cormoran Strike would not return to the top of the page glowing encomiums on his two most famous and successful cases, but the brutal fact that he was a man in receipt of a body part, a man who had at least one very nasty enemy. Strike was sure he understood the public well enough, or at least the insecure, frightened and angry section of it that was the private investigator’s bread and butter, to know they were unlikely to be drawn to a business that received severed legs in the post. At best, new clients would assume that he and Robin had troubles enough of their own; at worst, that they had, through recklessness or ineptitude, got into something way over their heads.

He was about to turn off the computer when he changed his mind and, with even more reluctance than he had brought to the job of searching for his mother in the nude, typed in Brittany Brockbank.

There were a few of them on Facebook, on Instagram, working for companies of which he had never heard, beaming out of selfies. He scrutinized the images. They were nearly all in their twenties, the age she would be now. He could discount those who were black, but there was no telling which of the others, brunette, blonde or redhead, pretty or plain, photographed beaming or moody or caught unawares, was the one he sought. None were wearing glasses. Was she too vain to wear them in a picture? Had she had her eyes lasered? Perhaps she eschewed social media. She had wanted to change her name, he remembered that. Or perhaps the reason for her absence was more fundamental — she was dead.

He looked at his watch again: time to go and change.

It can’t be her, he thought, and then, let it not be her.

Because if it was her, it was his fault.