The bright pink daisy-like gerberas sat in a small vase on Pat’s desk now. Strike glanced at them before saying,
“All right, let’s start with Shifty. Morris, did you get anywhere with that bloke in the tracksuit?”
“Yeah, I did,” said Morris, consulting his notes. “His name’s Barry Fisher. He’s divorced with one kid and he’s a manager at Shifty’s gym.”
Appreciative, low-toned growls of approval and interest issued from Strike, Barclay and Hutchins. Robin contented herself with a slight eyebrow raise. It was her experience that the slightest hint of warmth or approval from her was interpreted by Morris as an invitation to flirtation.
“So, I’ve booked myself in for a trial session with one of their trainers,” said Morris.
Bet it’s with a woman, thought Robin.
“While I was talking to her, I saw him wandering about talking to some of the other girls. He’s definitely hetero, judging by how he was looking at one of the women on the cross-trainer. I’m going back Monday for a workout, if that’s all right with you, boss. Try and find out more about him.”
“Fine,” said Strike. “Well, this looks like our first solid lead: a link between Shifty and whatever’s going on inside Elinor Dean’s house.”
Robin, who’d spent the night before last sitting in her Land Rover outside Elinor’s house, said,
“It might not be relevant, but Elinor took an Amazon delivery yesterday morning. Two massive boxes. They looked quite light, but—”
“We should open a book,” Morris told Strike, talking over Robin. “Twenty on dominatrix.”
“Never seen the appeal in bein’ whipped,” said Barclay thoughtfully. “If I want pain, I jus’ forget to put the bins oot.”
“Bit mumsy-looking, though, isn’t she?” said Hutchins. “If I had SB’s money, I’d go for something a bit more—”
He sketched a slimmer figure in mid-air. Morris laughed.
“Ach, there’s no accountin’ for taste,” said Barclay. “Army mate o’ mine wouldnae look at anythin’ under thirteen stone. We usedtae call him the Pork Whisperer.”
The men laughed. Robin smiled, mainly because Barclay was looking at her, and she liked Barclay, but she felt too tired and demoralized to be truly amused. Pat was wearing a “boys will be boys” expression of bored tolerance.
“Unfortunately, I’ve got to go back to Cornwall on Sunday,” said Strike, “which I appreciate—”
“The fuck are ye gonna get tae Cornwall?” asked Barclay, as the office windows shook with the wind.
“Jeep,” said Strike. “My aunt’s dying. Looks like she’s got days.”
Robin looked at Strike, startled.
“I appreciate that leaves us stretched,” Strike continued matter-of-factly, “but it can’t be helped. I think it’s worth continuing to keep an eye on SB himself. Morris’ll do some digging with this bloke at the gym and the rest of you can divvy up shifts on Elinor Dean. Unless anyone’s got anything to add,” said Strike, pausing for comments. The men all shook their heads and Robin, too tired to mention the Amazon boxes again, remained silent. “Let’s have a look at Postcard.”
“I’ve got news,” said Barclay laconically. “She’s back at work. I’ve talked tae her. Yer woman,” he added, to Robin, “short. Big round glasses. Ambled over and started askin’ questions.”
“What about?” asked Morris, a smirk playing around his lips.
“Light effects in the landscapes o’ James Duffield Harding,” said Barclay. “What d’ye think I asked, who she fancied for the Champions League?”
Strike laughed, and so did Robin, this time, glad to see Morris looking foolish.
“Yeah, I read the notice by his portrait an’ looked him up on my phone round the corner,” said Barclay. “Wanted a way o’ getting ontae the subject o’ weather wi’ her. Anyway,” said the Glaswegian, “coupla minutes intae the conversation, talkin’ light effects an’ broodin’ skies an’ that, she brought up oor weatherman friend. Turned pink when she mentioned him. Said he’d described a viewer’s picture as ‘Turneresque’ last week.
“It’s her,” said Barclay, addressing Robin. “She wanted tae mention him for the pleasure of sayin’ his name. She’s Postcard.”
“Bloody well done,” Strike told Barclay.
“It’s Robin’s win,” said Barclay. “She made the pass. I jus’ tapped it in.”
“Thanks, Sam,” said Robin, pointedly, not looking at Strike, who registered both the tone and her expression.
“Fair point,” said Strike, “well done, both of you.”
Aware that he’d been short with Robin during their meeting about the Bamborough case, Strike sought to make amends by asking her opinion on which of the waiting list clients they ought to contact, now that the Postcard case was as good as wrapped up, and she said she thought the commodities broker who thought her husband was sleeping with their nanny.
“Great,” said Strike. “Pat, can you get in touch and tell her we’re ready to roll if she still wants him under surveillance? If nobody’s got anything else—”
“I have,” said Hutchins, generally the quietest person in the agency. “It’s about that roll of film you wanted passed to the Met.”
“Oh yeah?” said Strike. “Is there news?”
“My mate rang last night. There’s nothing to be done with it. You won’t get any prosecutions now.”
“Why not?” said Robin.
She sounded angrier than she’d meant to. The men all looked at her.
“Perpetrators’ faces all hidden,” said Hutchins. “That arm that appears for a moment: you can’t build a prosecution case on an out-of-focus ring.”
“I thought your contact said the roll had come out of a raid on one of Mucky Ricci’s brothels?” said Robin.
“He thinks it did,” Hutchins corrected her. “You won’t get DNA evidence off a can that old, that’s been kept in a shed and an attic and handled by a hundred people. It’s a no-go. Shame,” he said indifferently, “but there you are.”
Strike now heard his mobile ringing back on the partners’ desk, where he’d left it. Worried it might be Ted, he excused himself from the meeting and retreated into the inner office, closing the door behind him.
There was no caller ID on the number ringing his mobile.
“Cormoran Strike.”
“Hello, Cormoran,” said an unfamiliar, husky voice. “It’s Jonny.”
There was a brief silence.
“Your father,” Rokeby added.
Strike, whose tired mind was full of Joan, of the agency’s three open cases, of guilt about being grumpy with his partner, and the logistical demands he was placing on his employees by disappearing to Cornwall again, said nothing at all. Through the dividing door, he could hear the team still discussing the roll of film.
“Wanted a chat,” said Rokeby. “Is that all right?”
Strike felt suddenly disembodied; completely detached from everything, from the office, from his fatigue, from the concerns that had seemed all-important just seconds ago. It was as though he and his father’s voice existed alone and nothing else was fully real, except Strike’s adrenaline, and a primal desire to leave a mark that Rokeby wouldn’t quickly forget.
“I’m listening,” he said.
Another silence.
“Look,” said Rokeby, sounding slightly uneasy, “I don’t wanna do this by phone. Let’s meet. It’s been too fucking long. Water under the bridge. Let’s meet, let’s… I wanna—this can’t go on. This fucking—feud, or whatever it is.”
Strike said nothing.
“Come to the house,” said Rokeby. “Come over. Let’s talk, and… you’re not a kid any more. There are two sides to every story. Nothing’s black and white.”
He paused. Strike still said nothing.
“I’m proud of you, d’you know that?” said Rokeby. “I’m really fucking proud of you. What you’ve done and…”
The sentence petered out. Strike stared, motionles
s, at the blank wall in front of him. Beyond the partition wall, Pat was laughing at something Morris had said.
“Look,” repeated Rokeby, with just a tiny hint of temper now, because he was a man used to getting his own way. “I get it, I do, but what the fuck can I do? I can’t time travel. Al’s told me what you’ve been saying, and there’s a bunch of stuff you don’t know, about your mother and all her fucking men. If you just come over, we can have a drink, we can have it all out. And,” said Rokeby, quietly insinuating, “maybe I can help you out a bit, maybe there’s something you want I can help out with, peace offering, I’m open to suggestions…”
In the outer office, Hutchins and Barclay were taking their leave, ready to get back to their separate jobs. Robin was thinking only about how much she wanted to go home. She was supposed to have the rest of the day off, but Morris was hanging around, and she was sure he was waiting because he wanted to walk with her to the Tube. Pretending to have paperwork to look at, she was rifling through a filing cabinet while Morris and Pat chatted, hoping he’d leave. She’d just opened an old file on a prolific adulterer, when Strike’s voice filled the room from the inner office. She, Pat and Morris turned their heads. Several pages of the file Robin was balancing on top of the drawer slid to the floor.
“… so GO FUCK YOURSELF!”
Before Robin could exchange looks with Morris or Pat, the dividing door between inner and outer offices opened. Strike looked alarming: white, livid, his breath coming fast. He stormed through the outer office, grabbed his coat and could be heard heading down the metal staircase outside.
Robin picked up the fallen pages.
“Shit,” said Morris, grinning. “Wouldn’t have wanted to be on the end of that call.”
“Nasty temper,” said Pat, who looked weirdly satisfied. “Knew it, the moment I laid eyes on him.”
40
Thus as they words amongst them multiply,
They fall to strokes, the frute of too much talke…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
Robin found no polite way of avoiding walking to the Tube with Morris and in consequence was obliged to listen to two off-color jokes, and to lie about her Valentine’s plans, because she could just imagine Morris’s response if she told him Strike was coming over. Pretending that she hadn’t heard or registered Morris’s suggestion that they should get together one night to compare notes on lawyers, she parted from him at the bottom of the escalator with relief.
Tired and mildly depressed, Robin’s thoughts lingered on Morris as the Tube sped her back toward Earl’s Court. Was he so used to women responding readily to his undeniable handsomeness that he took it for granted he was eliciting a positive response? Or did the fault lie in Robin herself, who, for the sake of politeness, for the cohesion of the team, because she didn’t want to make trouble when the agency was so busy, continued to smile at his stupid jokes and chose not to say, loudly and clearly, “I don’t like you. We’re never going to date.”
She arrived home to find the flat full of the cheering and delicious smell of simmering beef and red wine. Max appeared to have gone out, but a casserole was sitting in the oven and Wolfgang was lying as close to the hot door as he could manage without burning himself, reminding Robin of fans who camped out overnight in hope of catching a glimpse of pop stars.
Instead of lying down on her bed and trying to get a few hours’ sleep before dinner, Robin, who’d been stung by Strike’s reminders that she hadn’t chased up Amanda Laws or found Paul Satchwell, made herself more coffee, opened her laptop and sat down at the small dining table. After sending Amanda Laws another email, she opened Google. When she did so, each letter of the logo turned one by one into a pastel-colored, heart-shaped candy with a slogan on it: MR. RIGHT, PUPPY LUV and BLIND DATE, and for some reason, her thoughts moved to Charlotte Campbell. It would, of course, be very difficult for a married woman to meet her lover tonight. And who, she wondered, had Strike been telling to fuck off over the phone?
Robin set to work on Satchwell, trying to emulate Strike’s success in finding C. B. Oakden. She played around with Satchwell’s three names, reversing Paul and Leonard, trying initials and deliberate misspellings, but the men who appeared in answer to her searches didn’t look promising.
Was it possible that Margot’s tight-jeaned, hairy-chested artist had turned, over the space of four decades, into classic car collector Leo Satchwell, a rotund man with a goatee who wore tinted glasses? Unlikely, Robin decided, after wasting ten minutes on Leo: judging by the photographs on his Facebook page, in which he stood alongside other enthusiasts, he was barely five feet tall. There was a Brian Satchwell in Newport, but he had a lazy eye and was five years too young, and a Colin Satchwell in Eastbourne who ran an antiques business. She was still trying to find an image of Colin when she heard the front door open. A few minutes later, Max walked into the kitchen, with a bag of shopping in his hand.
“How’s the casserole doing?” he asked.
“Great,” said Robin, who hadn’t checked it.
“Get out of the way, Wolfgang, unless you want to be burned,” said Max, as he opened the oven door. To Robin’s relief, the casserole appeared to be doing well, and Max shut the door again.
Robin closed her laptop. A feeling that it was rude to sit typing while someone else was cooking in her vicinity persisted from the days when she’d lived with a husband who’d always resented her bringing work home.
“Max, I’m really sorry about this, but my brother’s bringing another friend with him tonight.”
“That’s fine,” said Max, unpacking his shopping.
“And they might be arriving early. They aren’t expecting to eat with us—”
“They’re welcome. This casserole serves eight. I was going to freeze the rest, but we can eat the lot tonight, I don’t mind.”
“That’s really nice of you,” said Robin, “but I know you want to talk to Cormoran alone, so I could take them—”
“No, the more the merrier,” said Max, who seemed mildly cheerful at the prospect of company. “I told you, I’ve decided to give up the recluse life.”
“Oh,” said Robin. “OK, then.”
She had some misgivings about what she feared might be quite an ill-assorted group, but telling herself her tiredness was making her pessimistic, she retired to her bedroom, where she spent the rest of the afternoon trying to find a photograph of Colin Satchwell. Finally, at six o’clock, after a great deal of cross-referencing, she located a picture on the website of a local church, where he appeared to be an alderman. Portly, with a low hairline, he in no way resembled the artist she sought.
Aware that she really ought to change and go upstairs to help Max, she was on the point of closing her laptop when a new email arrived. The subject line was one word: “Creed,” and with a spurt of nervous excitement, Robin opened it.
Hi Robin,
Quick update: I’ve passed the Creed request to the two people I mentioned. My Ministry of Justice contact was a bit more hopeful than I thought he’d be. This is confidential, but another family’s been lobbying for Creed to be interviewed again. Their daughter was never found, but they’ve always believed a pendant in Creed’s house belonged to her. My contact thinks something might be achievable if the Bamborough family joined forces with the Tuckers. I don’t know whether Cormoran would be allowed to conduct the interview, though. That decision would be taken by the Broadmoor authorities, the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office and my MoJ contact thinks it more likely to be police. I’ll let you know what’s going on as soon as I hear anything else.
Best, Izzy
Robin read this email through and allowed herself a flicker of optimism, though she didn’t intend to tell Strike what she was up to just yet. With luck, they’d be allowed to talk to the police interviewer before he or she went into Broadmoor. She typed an email of thanks, then began to get ready for dinner.
Her slightly improved mood survived looking in the
mirror and seeing how tired she looked, with gray shadows under her slightly bloodshot eyes, and hair that definitely needed washing. Making do with dry shampoo, Robin tied back her hair, changed into clean jeans and her favorite top, applied undereye concealer and was on the point of leaving her room when her mobile rang.
Afraid that it would be Strike canceling, she was positively relieved to see Ilsa’s name.
“Hi, Ilsa!”
“Hi, Robin. Are you with Corm?”
“No,” said Robin. Instead of leaving her bedroom, she sat back down on the bed. “Are you OK?”
Ilsa sounded odd: weak and numb.
“D’you know where Corm is?”
“No, but he should be here in ten minutes. D’you want me to give him a message?”
“No. I—d’you know whether he’s been with Nick today?”
“No,” said Robin, now worried. “What’s going on, Ilsa? You sound terrible.”
Then she remembered that it was Valentine’s Day and registered the fact that Ilsa didn’t know where her husband was. Something more than worry overtook Robin: it was fear. Nick and Ilsa were the happiest couple she knew. The five weeks she’d lived with them after leaving Matthew had restored some of Robin’s battered faith in marriage. They couldn’t split up: not Nick and Ilsa.
“It’s nothing,” said Ilsa.
“Tell me,” Robin insisted. “What—?”
Wrenching sobs issued through the phone.
“Ilsa, what’s happened?”
“I… I miscarried.”
“Oh God,” gasped Robin. “Oh no. Ilsa, I’m so sorry.”
She knew that Nick and Ilsa had been trying for some years to have a child. Nick never talked about it and Ilsa, only rarely. Robin had had no idea she was pregnant. She suddenly remembered Ilsa not drinking, on the night of her birthday.
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 50