The Running Grave

T’ai/Peace

No plain not followed by a slope.

No going not followed by a return.

He who remains persevering in danger

Is without blame.

Do not complain about this truth;

Enjoy the good fortune you still possess.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

134

Evil can indeed be held in check but not permanently abolished. It always returns. This conviction might induce melancholy, but it should not; it ought only to keep us from falling into illusion when good fortune comes to us.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

The long lawn sloping down to the Thames behind Sir Colin Edensor’s house had gained a number of brightly coloured objects since the last time Strike and Robin had seen it. There was a red and yellow car large enough for a small child to sit in and propel themselves along with their feet, a miniature goalpost, a blow-up paddling pool decorated with tropical fish and a quantity of smaller objects, one of which was a battery-powered bubble machine. It was this that was attracting the delighted attention of the white-haired toddler who was now answering to the name Sally rather than Qing, and two dark-haired little boys of around the same age. Their shrieks, shouts and laughter carried into the kitchen as they attempted to catch and pop the stream of bubbles issuing from the purple box on the grass.

Four adults were supervising the toddlers, to make sure they didn’t stray too close to the river at the foot of the garden: James and Will Edensor, James’ wife Kate and Lin Doherty. Inside the kitchen, watching the group on the lawn, sat Sir Colin Edensor, Strike, Robin, Pat and her husband Dennis.

‘I can never,’ said Sir Colin, for the third time, ‘thank you enough. Any of you,’ he added, including the Chaunceys in his glance around the table.

‘Nice to see them getting on,’ said Pat in her baritone, watching the re-christened Qing chasing bubbles.

‘What happened when James and Will met for the first time?’ asked Robin, who didn’t want to seem too nosy, but was very interested in the answer.

‘Well, James shouted a lot,’ said Sir Colin, smiling. ‘Told Will what he thought of him, in about fifteen different ways. Funnily enough, I think Will actually welcomed it.’

Robin wasn’t surprised. Will Edensor had wanted to atone for his sins, and with immunity from prosecution guaranteed, and the Drowned Prophet proven to be a mirage, where else was he to get the punishment he craved, but from his older brother?

‘He agreed with every word James said. He cried about his mother, said he knew nothing could ever make right what he’d done, said James was justified in hating him, that he understood if James never wanted to have anything to do with him again. That rather took the wind out of James’s sails,’ said Sir Colin.

‘And they’re going to live here with you?’ asked Strike.

‘Yes, at least until we can sort out proper accommodation for Lin and little Sally. With the press milling around and so on, I think it’s best they’re here.’

‘She’ll need support,’ croaked Pat. ‘She’s never been in charge of the kid all by herself. Never run her own house. Sixteen, it’s a lot of responsibility. If you found her something round my way, I could keep an eye on ’em. My daughter and granddaughters would muck in. She needs other mothers round her, teach her the ropes. Get together and moan about the kids. That’s what she needs.’

‘You’ve done so much already, Mrs Chauncey,’ said Sir Colin.

‘I was her age, near enough, when I had my first,’ said Pat unemotionally. ‘I know what it takes. Anyway,’ she took a drag on her e-cigarette, ‘I like ’em. You brought Will up very well. Good manners.’

‘Yeah, he’s a nice lad,’ said Dennis. ‘We all did stupid things when we were young, didn’t we?’

Sir Colin now took his eyes off the group on the lawn to turn to Robin.

‘I see they’ve found more bodies at Chapman Farm.’

‘I think they’re going to be finding them for weeks to come,’ said Robin.

‘And none of the deaths were registered?’

‘None except the prophets’.’

‘You don’t want coroners involved, if you’ve been refusing people medical help,’ said Strike. ‘Our police contact says they’ve got three skeletons of babies, presumably stillbirths, out of the field so far. There’ll probably be more. They’ve been on that land since the eighties.’

‘I doubt they’ll be able to identify all the remains,’ said Robin. ‘They were recruiting runaways and the homeless as well as wealthy people. It’s going to be a big job tracing all the babies who were sold, as well.’

‘It beggars belief that they got away with it for so long,’ said Sir Colin.

‘“Live and let live”, isn’t it?’ said Strike. ‘If nobody wants to speak out, and with the charity work there as a smokescreen, plus all the useful celebrity idiots…’

The previous fortnight had seen a multitude of front pages devoted to the UHC in both broadsheets and tabloids. Fergus Robertson was busy morning and night, sharing inside details nobody else knew. It was he who’d ambushed an outraged Giles Harmon outside his house in Bloomsbury, he who’d first broken the news of the alleged child trafficking and he who’d doorstepped the MP who was a church Principal, who’d been suspended by his party pending investigations into substantial undeclared donations he’d received from the UHC. The packaging multimillionaire, too foolish to have hidden behind his lawyers, had made several injudicious and unintentionally incriminating comments to the press jostling outside his offices. Mazu, Taio, Jiang and Joe Jackson were in custody. Dr Andy Zhou’s arrest had caused a flurry of statements from wealthy women who’d been cupped and hypnotised, massaged and detoxified, all of whom refused to believe the handsome doctor could have done anything wrong. A carefully phrased statement had also been issued by Noli Seymour’s agent, expressing shock and horror at the findings at Chapman Farm, of which Noli had naturally had no suspicion.

Jonathan Wace had been arrested while trying to drive over the border into Mexico. He was smiling in the gentle, self-deprecating way Robin knew so well in the photograph that showed him handcuffed and being led away. Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

The temple at Chapman Farm had been thoroughly searched by police, and the means by which illusions had been conducted had been leaked to journalists, along with photographs of whips and the box. The various bodily fluids that lingered in the mattresses and bedding of the Retreat Rooms were being tested and the Chapman Farm woods were cordoned off. The axe and soil Midge had stolen had been handed to the police, and Wardle had called Strike with the news that the thigh bone of a young child had been dug up close to the rotting wooden posts. Evidently the pigs hadn’t managed to consume all of Daiyu Wace before Jordan Reaney had to get back to bed, and Abigail Wace reach the yard in time to watch the truck bearing the straw figure pass, in the dark.

Meanwhile ex-church members were coming forward in increasing numbers. Guilt and shame had kept them silent, sometimes for decades, but reassured by the possibility of immunity from prosecution for their own coerced actions, which ranged from administering beatings and helping bury bodies illegally to failing to secure medical assistance for a fourteen-year-old who’d died in childbirth, they were now ready to find catharsis in testifying against the Waces.

But there were still those who saw no evil in anything that had been done. Danny Brockles, the ex-addict who’d travelled the country with Jonathan Wace to extol the merits of the church, had been interviewed. All evidence of wrongdoing, he said, sobbing, had been planted by the agents of the Adversary. The public needed to understand that satanic forces were behind this attempt to destroy Papa J and the church (but the public seemed to understand no such thing, judging by the angry and indignant comments posted online beneath every article on the UHC). And Becca Pirbright, who remained at liberty, had twice appeared on television, composed and personable, calm and charming, disdainful of what she termed lurid, scaremongering and sensational reporting, denying all personal wrongdoing and describing Jonathan and Mazu Wace as two of the best human beings she’d ever known in her life.

Robin, watching Becca at home, found herself again thinking of the church as a virus. She was certain many, if not most, members would be cured by this eruption of revelations, by the evidence that they’d been thoroughly hoodwinked, that Papa J was no hero, but a conman, a rapist and an accessory to murder. Yet so many lives had been destroyed… Robin had heard that Louise Pirbright had tried to hang herself in the hospital to which she’d been taken upon release. Robin could quite see why Louise preferred death than to have to live with the knowledge that her foolish decision to follow Jonathan Wace into his cult twenty-four years previously had led to the death of two of her sons, and total estrangement from both of her daughters. Emily, who’d been found unconscious in the box when police entered the farm, had been sent to the same hospital as Louise, but when offered a meeting with her mother by well-intentioned medics, had informed them she never wanted to see Louise again.

Murphy was inclined to be triumphalist about the church’s demise, but Robin found it hard to celebrate. Murphy and Strike kept telling her that the child abuse accusations against her would be dropped any day now, but she’d had no word to that effect. Even worse than her personal fear of prosecution was her dread of the church reforming and rebuilding. When she said as much to Murphy, he’d told her she was too pessimistic, but watching Becca smiling on television, clearly unshaken in her belief in the Lotus Way, Robin could only hope that the world would watch more closely and ask more questions, when the next five-sided temple appeared on a piece of vacant land.

‘And what about the Waces?’ Sir Colin asked Strike, while the children on the lawn continued to chase bubbles.

‘Confidentially,’ said Strike, ‘Mazu hasn’t spoken a word since her arrest. Literally not a word. One of our police contacts told us she won’t even talk to her own lawyer.’

‘Shock, do you think?’ said Sir Colin.

‘Power play,’ said Robin. ‘She’ll continue to act as though she’s the divine mother of the Drowned Prophet until her dying breath.’

‘But surely she knows, now…?’

‘I think,’ said Robin, ‘if she ever allowed herself to accept that Daiyu was murdered, and her husband knew all along, and made sure to get her killer out of the way to safety, it would drive her out of her mind.’

‘And has Abigail confessed?’ Sir Colin asked Strike.

‘No,’ said Strike. ‘She’s like her father: brazen it out as long as you can, but her boyfriends are turning on her. Now they’ve realised they might be accused of being accessories to attempted murder, they can’t wait to get off the sinking ship. Confidentially, one of her fireman colleagues saw her pocketing the gun and ammo when she found it in a burned-out drug den. He says he assumed she was going to hand them over to the police. ’Course, he’d have to say that – he’s married, and he doesn’t want it to come out that she was sleeping with him, as well.

‘Reaney’s currently denying he knows anything about axes and pigs, but a guy who was in the men’s dormitory that night remembers Reaney sneaking back inside, in the early hours. Reaney was in his underwear: he’d obviously had to get rid of his bloody tracksuit somewhere. Then he accused everyone of nicking it, when he woke up.

‘I think Abigail will be found guilty of Kevin’s murder, and for trying to kill Robin and me, and I think she and Reaney are both going to be done for Daiyu’s murder.’

‘Abigail must be seriously disturbed,’ said the compassionate Sir Colin. ‘She must have had a dreadful childhood.’

‘A lot of people have dreadful childhoods and don’t take to strangling small children,’ said the implacable Strike, to nods of agreement from Dennis and Pat.

Strike was thinking of Lucy as he spoke. He’d spent the previous day with his sister, accompanying her to view two prospective nursing homes for their uncle. Afterwards they’d had a coffee together in a café, and Strike had told his sister about Mazu attempting to kill Robin in the Rupert Court Temple.

‘That evil bitch,’ said the horrified Lucy.

‘Yeah, but we got her, Luce,’ said Strike, ‘and the baby’s back with her mother.’

Strike had half-expected more tears, but to his surprise, Lucy beamed at him.

‘I know I nag you, Stick,’ she said. ‘I know I do, but as long as you’re happy, I don’t care if you’re not – you know. Married with kids, and all that. You do wonderful things. You help people. You’ve helped me, taking this case, putting that woman behind bars. And what you said about Leda… you’ve really helped me, Stick.’

Touched, Strike reached out to squeeze her hand.

‘I s’pose you’re just not cut out for the whole settling down with one woman thing, and that’s OK,’ said Lucy, now smiling a little tearfully. ‘I promise I’ll never go on about it again.’

135

… if one is intent on retaining his clarity of mind, good fortune will come from this grief. For here we are dealing not with a passing mood, as in the nine in the third place, but with a real change of heart.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

A week after they’d visited the Edensors, Strike, with a heavy heart but a sense of obligation, agreed to meet Amelia Crichton, Charlotte’s sister, at her place of work.

He’d asked himself whether he was truly honour-bound to do this. The UHC case had mercifully relegated Charlotte’s suicide to the back of his mind, but now that it was over – now that the shattered lives and suicides were being tallied, and the storm which had caught these people up had passed, leaving them broken in an unfamiliar landscape – he was left with his own personal debt to the dead, one he didn’t particularly want to pay. He could imagine optimistic souls telling him that, much like Lucy with regards to Leda and the Aylmerton Community, he’d find some kind of resolution in this meeting with Charlotte’s sister, but he had no such expectation.

No, he thought, as he dressed in a sober suit – because military habits of proper respect for the dead and bereaved are hard to overcome, and however little he liked Amelia or the prospect of this meeting, he owed her this, at least – it was far more likely that Charlotte’s sister was the one who’d achieve resolution today. Very well, then: he’d give Amelia satisfaction, and in doing so, offer Charlotte one more chance at a clean sucker punch via her proxy, before they were finally done.

Strike’s BMW, from which the police had now dug out a bullet, remained in the repair shop, so he took a taxi to Elizabeth Street in Belgravia. Here, he found Amelia’s eponymous shop, which was full of expensive curtain fabrics, tasteful ceramics and chinoiserie table lamps.

She emerged from a back room on hearing the bell over the door ring. Dark-haired like Charlotte, she had similar hazel-flecked green eyes, but there the resemblance ended. Amelia was thin-lipped, with a patrician profile she’d inherited from her father.

‘I’ve booked us a table at the Thomas Cubitt,’ she told him, in lieu of any greeting.

So they walked the short distance to the restaurant, which lay just a few doors down from the shop. Once seated at a white-clothed table, Amelia asked for two menus and a glass of wine, while Strike ordered a beer.

Amelia waited for the drinks to arrive and the waiter to disappear again before drawing a deep breath and saying,

‘So: I asked you to meet me, because Charlotte left a note. She wanted me to show it to you.’

Of course she fucking did.

Amelia took a large swig of Pinot Noir and Strike a similarly large slug of his beer.

‘But I’m not going to,’ said Amelia, setting down her glass. ‘I thought I had to, immediately after—I thought I owed it to her, whatever… whatever it said. But I’ve had a lot of time to think things over while I’ve been in the country, and I don’t think… maybe you’ll be angry,’ said Amelia, taking a deep breath, ‘but when the police were done with it… I burned it.’

‘I’m not angry,’ said Strike.

She looked taken aback.

‘I… I can still tell you, broadly, what she said. Your bit, anyway. It was long. Several pages. Nobody was spared.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’ she said, with a trace of the acerbity he remembered from their prior acquaintance.

‘Sorry your sister killed herself,’ said Strike. ‘Sorry she left a letter you’re probably finding it hard to forget.’

Unlike Sir Colin Edensor, who’d been born working class, and unlike Lucy, whose childhood had been unclassifiable, Amelia Crichton didn’t cry in public. However, she did press her thin lips together and blink rather rapidly.

‘It was… horrible, seeing it all written down, in her handwriting,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Knowing what she was about to do… but, as I say, if you want me to tell you what she said about you, I can, and then I’ll have done what she asked – more or less.’

‘I’m pretty sure I know,’ said Strike. ‘She said, if I’d picked up the phone, it would all have been different. That after all the pain and abuse I doled out to her, she still loved me. That she knows I’m now having an affair with my detective partner, which started days after I walked out on her, proving how little I valued our relationship. That I’ve fallen in love with Robin because she’s biddable, and unchallenging, and hero-worships me, which is what men like me want, whereas Charlotte stood up to me, which was the root of all our problems. That one day I’ll get bored with Robin and realise what I’ve lost, but it’ll be too late, because I hurt Charlotte so deeply she’s done with life.’

He knew just how accurately he’d guessed the contents of Charlotte’s note by Amelia’s expression.

‘It wasn’t just you,’ said Amelia, now with a softer and sadder look than he’d ever seen on her face before. ‘She blamed everyone. Everyone. And only a single line about James and Mary: “Show them this, when they’re old enough to understand.” That’s the main reason I burned it, I can’t… I couldn’t let…’

‘You did the right thing.’

‘Ruairidh doesn’t think so,’ said Amelia miserably. Strike only vaguely remembered her husband: a Nicholas Delaunay type, but ex-Blues and Royals. ‘He said she wanted it kept, and I had a duty to—’

‘She was full of drink and drugs when she wrote that letter, and you’ve got a duty to the living,’ said Strike. ‘To her kids, above all. In her best moments – and she had them, as we both know – she always regretted the things she’d done when she was high, or angry. If there’s anything beyond, she’ll know she shouldn’t have written what she did.’

The waiter returned to take their food order. Strike doubted Amelia wanted food any more than he did, but social convention meant they both ordered a single course. Once they were alone again, Amelia said,

‘She was always so… unhappy.’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘I know.’

‘But she wouldn’t ever… there was a – a darkness in her.’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike, ‘and she was in love with it. It’s dangerous to make a cult of your own unhappiness. Hard to get out, once you’ve been in there too long. You forget how.’

He drank some more of his rapidly diminishing pint before saying,

‘I once quoted Aeschylus at her. “Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.” Didn’t go down well.’

‘You did Classics as well?’ said Amelia, mildly surprised. She’d never shown much interest in him as a human being while he’d been with Charlotte. He’d been a misfit, a ne’er-do-well of mongrel breeding.

‘No,’ said Strike, ‘but there was an alcoholic ex-Classics teacher in one of the squats my mother took me to live in. He used to drop pearls of wisdom like that, mainly to patronise us all.’

When Strike had told Robin the story of this man, and how he, Strike, had stolen his Classics books in revenge at being condescended to, she’d laughed. Amelia merely looked at him as though he were talking about life on some faraway planet.

Their salads arrived. Both ate quickly, making forced conversation about the congestion charge, how often each of them got into the country and whether the Labour Party could win a general election under Jeremy Corbyn. Strike didn’t ask whether Charlotte had genuinely had breast cancer, though he suspected, from the absence of any mention of it from Amelia, that she hadn’t. What did it matter, now?

Neither ordered pudding or coffee. With perhaps equal relief, they rose from the table barely three quarters of an hour after sitting down.

Back on the pavement, Amelia said unexpectedly,

‘You’ve done wonderfully well with your business. I’ve been reading about that church… it sounds the most dreadful place.’

‘It was,’ said Strike.

‘You actually helped out a friend of ours, recently, with a nasty man who was taking advantage of his mother. Well… thank you for meeting me. It’s been… thank you, anyway.’

She looked up at him uncertainly, and he bent down to allow her to give him the standard upper-class farewell, an air kiss in the vicinity of each cheek.

‘Well – goodbye and – and good luck.’

‘You too, Amelia.’

Strike heard her sensible heels tapping away on the pavement as he turned to walk away. The sun slid out from behind its cloud, and it was that, surely, and nothing else, that made Strike’s eyes sting.

136

Confucius says… Life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings.

Now the course is checked, now it runs straight again.

Here winged thoughts may pour freely forth in words,

There the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence.

But when two people are at one in their inmost hearts,

They shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

‘Oh, good,’ panted Robin, entering the office pink-faced, at speed. She’d just half-run along Denmark Street. ‘He’s not here yet – Ryan, I mean.’

‘He’s dropping by, is he?’ said Pat, typing with her e-cigarette jammed between her teeth as usual, and looking pleased at the prospect of seeing the handsome Murphy.

‘Yes,’ said Robin, taking off the jacket she didn’t need on such a warm September day. ‘He’s picking me up, we’re going away for a couple of days and I’m really late – but so’s he.’

‘Tick him off for it,’ said Pat, still typing. ‘You might get flowers.’

‘Pretty shady behaviour, Pat.’

The office manager removed her e-cigarette from between her teeth.

‘Know where he is?’

‘No,’ said Robin, who was now reaching for an empty case folder on the shelf. She understood Pat to be referring to Strike, who the office manager usually called ‘he’ when he wasn’t around.

‘Meeting her sister.’

‘Whose sister?’

‘Charlotte’s,’ said Pat in a loud whisper, though it was only the two of them in the office.

‘Oh,’ said Robin.

Deeply interested, but not wanting to gossip about Strike’s private life with their office manager, Robin took down the folder and rummaged in her bag.

‘I’m only back to file these notes. Could you tell Strike they’re in here when he gets back, if I’m already gone? He might want to look over them.’

Robin had just met the agency’s newest client, a professional cricketer, at his Chelsea flat. She’d expected the interview to last an hour, but it had gone on for two.

‘Will do. What’s he like, then, the new bloke?’ asked Pat, e-cigarette between her teeth. The man in question was tall, blond and good looking, and Pat had evinced a certain disappointment that he wasn’t going to have his preliminary interview at the office, but at home.

‘Er,’ said Robin who, in addition to not gossiping about Strike behind his back, also tried not to criticise clients in front of Pat. ‘Well, he didn’t like McCabes. That’s why he’s come back to us.’

In fact, she’d found the South African cricketer, who Strike had called an ‘arsehole’ after one phone conversation, an unpleasant combination of arrogant and inappropriately flirtatious, especially as his girlfriend had been lurking in the kitchen all through the interview. He’d given the impression he took it for granted that he was the best-looking man Robin had seen in a long while, and had made it clear he didn’t consider her entirely unworthy of notice. Robin had to assume the stunning brunette who’d seen her out of the flat at the end of the interview either took him at his own valuation, or enjoyed the gorgeous flat and the Bugatti too much to complain.

‘Is he as handsome in person?’ asked Pat, watching as Robin placed her notes inside the file, then scribbled the cricketer’s name on the front.

‘If you like that sort of thing,’ said Robin, as the glass door opened.

‘Sort of thing’s that?’ asked Strike, entering in his suit, his tie loosened and his vape pen in his hand.

‘Blond cricketers,’ said Robin, looking round. Her partner looked tired and downtrodden.

‘Ah,’ grunted Strike, hanging up his jacket. ‘Was he as much of an arsehole in person as he was on the phone?’

Seeing as the not-bitching-about-clients-in-front-of-Pat ship had now set sail full speed out of the harbour, Robin asked,

‘How bad was he on the phone?’

‘A good eight point five out of ten,’ said Strike.

‘Then he’s the same in person.’

‘Fancy updating me before you leave?’ said Strike, checking his watch. He knew Robin was due to take some long-overdue leave today. ‘Unless you need to get going?’

‘No, I’m waiting for Ryan,’ said Robin. ‘I’ve got time.’

They entered the inner office and Strike closed the door. The board on the wall that so recently had been covered in the UHC pictures and notes was empty again. The Polaroids were with the police, and the rest had been added to the case file, which was locked in the safe, pending its use in the forthcoming court case. Jacob’s body had now been identified, and the accusation of child abuse against Robin had at long last been dropped; the weekend away with Murphy was at least partly in celebration of this fact. Even Robin could see how much happier and healthier she looked in the mirror, now that this weight had been lifted off her.

‘So,’ said Robin, sitting down, ‘he thinks his estranged wife is having an affair with a married Mail journalist, hence the stream of scurrilous stories the Mail have had on him lately.’

‘Which journalist?’

‘Dominic Culpepper,’ said Robin.

‘Married now, then, is he?’

‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘to a Lady Violet somebody. Well, Lady Violet Culpepper, now.’

‘Should be juicy, when it breaks,’ said Strike, unsmiling. Depression was radiating from him as the smell of cigarette smoke had, before he’d embarked on his health kick.

‘Are you all right?’ Robin asked.

‘What?’ said Strike, though he’d heard her. ‘Yeah. I’m fine.’

But in reality, he’d called her into the inner office because he wanted her company as long as he could get it. Robin wondered whether she dared ask, and decided she did.

‘Pat told me you were meeting Charlotte’s sister.’

‘Did she?’ said Strike, though without rancour.

‘Did she ask to see you, or—?’

‘Yeah, she asked to see me,’ said Strike.

There was a short silence.

‘She wanted to meet me right after Charlotte died, but I couldn’t,’ said Strike. ‘Then she closed up shop and went off to the country with her kids for a month.’

‘I’m sorry, Cormoran,’ said Robin quietly.

‘Yeah, well,’ said Strike, with a slight shrug. ‘I gave her what she was after, I think.’

‘What was that?’

‘Dunno,’ said Strike, examining his vape pen. ‘Reassurance nobody could’ve stopped it happening? Except me,’ he added. ‘I could’ve.’

Robin felt desperately sorry for him, and knew it must have shown on her face, because when he glanced up at her he said,

‘I wouldn’t change anything.’

‘Right,’ said Robin, unsure of what else to say.

‘She called here,’ said Strike, dropping his gaze back to the vape pen in his hand, which he was turning over and over. ‘Three times, on the night she did it. I knew who it was and I didn’t answer. Then I listened to the messages and deleted them.’

‘You couldn’t have known—’

‘Yeah, I could,’ said Strike calmly, still turning the vape pen over in his hand, ‘she was a walking suicide even when I met her. She’d already tried a couple of times.’

Robin knew this from her conversations with Ilsa, who scathingly categorised Charlotte’s various suicide attempts into two categories: those meant to manipulate, and those that were genuine. However, Robin could no longer take Ilsa’s estimation at face value. Charlotte’s final attempt had been no empty gesture. She’d been determined to live no longer – unless, it seemed, Strike had answered the phone. The suicide of Carrie Curtis Woods, no matter that Robin now knew she’d been a collaborator in infanticide, would be a scar Robin bore forever. How it felt to know you might have prevented the death of somebody you’d loved for sixteen years, she had no idea.

‘Cormoran, I’m sorry,’ she said again.

‘Feel sorry for Amelia and her kids, not me,’ he said. ‘I was done. There’s nothing deader than dead love.’

For six years now, Robin had longed to know what Strike really felt for Charlotte Campbell, the woman he’d left for good on the very day Robin had arrived at the agency as a temp. Charlotte had been the most intimidating woman Robin had ever met: beautiful, clever, charming and also – Robin had seen evidence of it herself – devious and occasionally callous. Robin had felt guilty about hoarding every crumb of information about Strike and Charlotte’s relationship Ilsa had ever let fall, feeling she was betraying Strike in listening, in remembering. He’d always been so cagey about the relationship, even after some of the barriers between them had come down, even after Strike had openly called Robin his best friend.

Strike, meanwhile, was aware he was breaking a vow he’d made himself six years previously, when, fresh from the rupture with a woman he still loved, he’d noticed how sexy his temp was, almost at the same moment he’d noticed the engagement ring on her finger. He’d resolved then, knowing his own susceptibility, that there would be no easy slide into intimacy with a woman who, but for the engagement ring, he might willingly have rebounded onto. He’d been strict about not letting himself trawl for her sympathy. Even after his love for Charlotte had shrivelled into non-existence, leaving behind it a ghostly husk of pity and exasperation, Strike had maintained this reserve, because, against his will, his feelings for Robin were growing deeper and more complex, and her third finger was bare now, and he’d feared ruining the most important friendship of his life, and trashing the business for which both had sacrificed so much.

But today, with Charlotte dead, and with Robin perhaps destined for another engagement ring, Strike had things to say. Perhaps it was the delusion of the middle-aged male to think it would make any difference, but there came a time when a man needed to take charge of his own fate. So he inhaled nicotine, then said,

‘Last year, Charlotte begged me to get back together. I told her nothing on earth would make me help raise Jago Ross’s kids. This was after we – the agency – found out Jago was knocking his older daughters around. And she said I needn’t worry: it’d be shared custody now. In other words, she’d palm the kids off on him, if I was happy to come back.

‘I’d just handed her all the evidence a judge would need to keep those kids safe, and she told me she’d shunt them off on that bastard, thinking I’d say, “Great. Fuck ’em. Let’s go and get a drink.”’

Strike exhaled nicotine vapour. Robin hadn’t noticed she was holding her breath.

‘Always a bit of delusion in love, isn’t there?’ said Strike, watching the vapour rise to the ceiling. ‘You fill in the blanks with your own imagination. Paint them exactly the way you want them to be. But I’m a detective… some fucking detective. If I’d stuck to hard facts – if I’d done that, even in the first twenty-four hours I knew her – I’d have walked and never looked back.’

‘You were nineteen,’ said Robin. ‘Exactly the same age Will was, when he heard Jonathan Wace speak for the first time.’

‘Ha! You think I was in a cult, do you?’

‘No, but I’m saying… we’ve got to forgive who we were, when we didn’t know any better. I did the same thing, with Matthew. I did exactly that. Painted in the gaps the way I’d have liked them to be. Believed in Higher-Level Truths to explain away the bullshit. “He doesn’t really mean it.” “He isn’t really like that.” And, oh my God, the evidence was staring me in the face, and I bloody married him – and regretted it within an hour of him putting the ring on my finger.’

Hearing this, Strike remembered how he’d burst into her and Matthew’s wedding, at the very moment Robin had been about to say ‘I do’. He also remembered the hug he and Robin had shared, after he’d walked out of the reception, and she’d run out of her first dance to follow him, and he knew, now, there was no turning back.

‘So what did Amelia want?’ said Robin, bold enough to ask, now that Strike had told her this much. ‘Was she – she wasn’t blaming you, was she?’

‘No,’ said Strike. ‘She was carrying out her sister’s last wishes. Charlotte left a suicide note, with instructions to pass on a message to me.’

He smiled at Robin’s fearful expression.

‘It’s all right. Amelia burned it. Doesn’t matter – I could’ve written it myself – I told Amelia exactly what Charlotte wrote.’

Robin worried it might be indecent to ask, but Strike didn’t wait for the question.

‘She said that even though I was a bastard to her, she still loved me. That I’d know one day what I’d given up, that I’d never be happy, deep down, without her. That—’

Strike and Robin had once before sat in this office, after dark and full of whisky, and he’d come dangerously close to crossing the line between friend and lover. He’d felt then the fatalistic daring of the trapeze artist, preparing to swing out into the spotlight with only black air beneath him, and he felt the same now.

‘—she knew I was in love with you.’

A stab of cold shock, an electric charge to the brain: Robin couldn’t quite believe what she’d just heard. The passing seconds seemed to slow. She waited for Strike to say ‘which was her spite, obviously,’ or, ‘because she never understood that a man and a woman could just be friends’, or to make a joke. Yet he said nothing to defuse the grenade he’d just thrown, but simply looked at her.

Then Robin heard the outer door open, and Pat’s indistinct baritone, greeting someone with enthusiasm.

‘That’ll be Ryan,’ Robin said.

‘Right,’ said Strike.

Robin got to her feet in a state of confusion and shock, still clutching the cricketer’s folder in her hands, and opened the dividing door.

‘Sorry,’ said Murphy, who looked harried. ‘Did you get my text? I was late leaving and traffic’s bloody gridlocked.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Robin. ‘I was late back myself.’

‘Hi,’ said Murphy to Strike, who’d followed Robin into the outer office. ‘Congratulations.’

‘What for?’ said Strike.

‘The church case,’ said Murphy, with a half-laugh. ‘What, you’ve already moved on to some other world-shattering—?’

‘Oh that,’ said Strike. ‘Yeah. Well, it was mostly Robin.’

Robin took down her jacket.

‘Well – see you Monday,’ she said to Pat and Strike, unable to meet the latter’s eyes.

‘You taking that with you?’ Murphy asked Robin, looking at the folder in her hands.

‘Oh – no – sorry,’ said the flustered Robin. ‘This belongs here.’

She set the folder down beside Pat.

‘Bye,’ she said, and left.

Strike watched the glass door close, and listened to the pair’s footsteps dying away on the metal stairs.

‘They make a good couple,’ said Pat complacently.

‘We’ll see,’ said Strike.

Ignoring the office manager’s swift, penetrating look, he added,

‘I’ll be in the Flying Horse if you want me.’

Picking up his jacket and the folder Robin had left, he departed. Time would tell whether he’d just done something foolish or not, but Cormoran Strike had at last decided to practise what he’d preached to Charlotte, all those years ago. Happiness is a choice that requires an effort at times, and it was well past time for him to make the effort.