‘Bollocks!’
A man heading inside the guitar shop opposite stared around in some perplexity for the source of the noise.
Strike withdrew his head and turned to glare at Denise, who was dusting herself down in the doorway to his office. Incredibly, she looked pleased with herself.
‘I tried to hold him in,’ she said proudly.
‘Yeah,’ said Strike, exercising considerable self-restraint. ‘I saw.’
‘The police are on their way.’
‘Fantastic.’
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘No,’ he said through gritted teeth.
‘Then I think I’ll go and freshen up the bathroom,’ she said, adding in a whisper, ‘I don’t think he used the flush.’
3
I fought out that fight alone and in the completest secrecy.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
As she walked along the unfamiliar Deptford street, Robin was raised to temporary light-heartedness, then wondered when she had last felt this way and knew that it had been over a year. Energised and uplifted by the afternoon sunshine, the colourful shopfronts and general bustle and noise, she was currently celebrating the fact that she never need see the inside of the Villiers Trust Clinic again.
Her therapist had been unhappy that she was terminating treatment.
‘We recommend a full course,’ she had said.
‘I know,’ Robin replied, ‘but, well, I’m sorry, I think this has done me as much good as it’s going to.’
The therapist’s smile had been chilly.
‘The CBT’s been great,’ Robin had said. ‘It’s really helped with the anxiety, I’m going to keep that up . . . ’
She had taken a deep breath, eyes fixed on the woman’s low-heeled Mary Janes, then forced herself to look her in the eye.
‘ . . . but I’m not finding this part helpful.’
Another silence had ensued. After five sessions, Robin was used to them. In normal conversation, it would be considered rude or passive aggressive to leave these long pauses and simply watch the other person, waiting for them to speak, but in psychodynamic therapy, she had learned, it was standard.
Robin’s doctor had given her a referral for free treatment on the NHS, but the waiting list had been so long that she had decided, with Matthew’s tight-lipped support, to pay for treatment. Matthew, she knew, was barely refraining from saying that the ideal solution would be to give up the job that had landed her with PTSD and which in his view paid far too poorly considering the dangers to which she had been exposed.
‘You see,’ Robin had continued with the speech she had prepared, ‘my life is pretty much wall to wall with people who think they know what’s best for me.’
‘Well, yes,’ said the therapist, in a manner that Robin felt would have been considered condescending beyond the clinic walls, ‘we’ve discussed—’
‘—and . . . ’
Robin was by nature conciliatory and polite. On the other hand, she had been urged repeatedly by the therapist to speak the unvarnished truth in this dingy little room with the spider plant in its dull green pot and the man-sized tissues on the low pine table.
‘ . . . and to be honest,’ she said, ‘you feel like just another one of them.’
Another pause.
‘Well,’ said the therapist, with a little laugh, ‘I’m here to help you reach your own conclusions about—’
‘Yes, but you do it by – by pushing me all the time,’ said Robin. ‘It’s combative. You challenge everything I say.’
Robin closed her eyes, as a great wave of weariness swept her. Her muscles ached. She had spent all week putting together flat-pack furniture, heaving around boxes of books and hanging pictures.
‘I come out of here,’ said Robin, opening her eyes again, ‘feeling wrung out. I go home to my husband, and he does it, too. He leaves big sulky silences and challenges me on the smallest things. Then I phone my mother, and it’s more of the same. The only person who isn’t at me all the time to sort myself out is—’
She pulled up short, then said:
‘—is my work partner.’
‘Mr Strike,’ said the therapist sweetly.
It had been a matter of contention between Robin and the therapist that she had refused to discuss her relationship with Strike, other than to confirm that he was unaware of how much the Shacklewell Ripper case had affected her. Their personal relationship, she had stated firmly, was irrelevant to her present issues. The therapist had raised him in every session since, but Robin had consistently refused to engage on the subject.
‘Yes,’ said Robin. ‘Him.’
‘By your own admission you haven’t told him the full extent of your anxiety.’
‘So,’ said Robin, ignoring the last comment, ‘I really only came today to tell you I’m leaving. As I say, I’ve found the CBT really useful and I’m going to keep using the exercises.’
The therapist had seemed outraged that Robin wasn’t even prepared to stay for the full hour, but Robin had paid for the entire session and therefore felt free to walk out, giving her what felt like a bonus hour in the day. She felt justified in not hurrying home to do more unpacking, but to buy herself a Cornetto and enjoy it as she wandered through the sun-drenched streets of her new area.
Chasing her own cheerfulness like a butterfly, because she was afraid it might escape, she turned up a quieter street, forcing herself to concentrate, to take in the unfamiliar scene. She was, after all, delighted to have left behind the old flat in West Ealing, with its many bad memories. It had become clear during his trial that the Shacklewell Ripper had been tailing and watching Robin for far longer than she had ever suspected. The police had even told her that they thought he had hung around Hastings Road, lurking behind parked cars, yards from her front door.
Desperate though she had been to move, it had taken her and Matthew eleven months to find a new place. The main problem was that Matthew had been determined to ‘take a step up the property ladder’, now that he had a better-paid new job and a legacy from his late mother. Robin’s parents, too, had expressed a willingness to help them, given the awful associations of the old flat, but London was excruciatingly expensive. Three times had Matthew set his heart on flats that were, realistically, well out of their price range. Three times had they failed to buy what Robin could have told him would sell for thousands more than they could offer.
‘It’s ridiculous!’ he kept saying, ‘it isn’t worth that!’
‘It’s worth whatever people are prepared to pay,’ Robin had said, frustrated that an accountant didn’t understand the operation of market forces. She had been ready to move anywhere, even a single room, to escape the shadow of the killer who continued to haunt her dreams.
On the point of doubling back towards the main road, her eye was caught by the opening in a brick wall, which was flanked by gateposts topped with the strangest finials she had ever seen.
A pair of gigantic, crumbling stone skulls sat on top of carved bones on gateposts, beyond which a tall square tower rose. The finials would have looked at home, Robin thought, moving closer to examine the empty black eye sockets, garnishing the front of a pirate’s mansion in some fantasy film. Peering through the opening, Robin saw a church and mossy tombs lying amid an empty rose garden in full bloom.
She finished her ice cream while wandering around St Nicholas’s, a strange amalgam of an old red-brick school grafted onto the rough stone tower. Finally she sat down on a wooden bench that had grown almost uncomfortably hot in the sun, stretched her aching back, drank in the delicious scent of warm roses and was suddenly transported, entirely against her will, back to the hotel suite in Yorkshire, almost a year ago, where a blood-red bouquet of roses had witnessed the aftermath of her abandonment of Matthew on the dance floor at her wedding reception.
Matthew, his father, his Aunt Sue, Robin’s parents and brother Stephen had all converged on the bridal suite where Robin had retreated to
escape Matthew’s fury. She had been changing out of her wedding dress when they had burst in, one after another, all demanding to know what was going on.
A cacophony had ensued. Stephen, first to grasp what Matthew had done in deleting Strike’s calls, started to shout at him. Geoffrey was drunkenly demanding to know why Strike had been allowed to stay for dinner given he hadn’t RSVPed. Matthew was bellowing at all of them to butt out, that this was between him and Robin, while Aunt Sue said over and over, ‘I’ve never seen a bride walk out of her first dance. Never! I’ve never seen a bride walk out of her first dance.’
Then Linda had finally grasped what Matthew had done, and began telling him off, too. Geoffrey had leapt to his son’s defence, demanding to know why Linda wanted her daughter to go back to a man who allowed her to get stabbed. Martin had arrived, extremely drunk, and had taken a swing at Matthew for reasons that nobody had ever explained satisfactorily, and Robin had retreated to the bathroom where, incredibly, given that she had barely eaten all day, she had thrown up.
Five minutes later, she had been forced to let Matthew in because his nose was bleeding and there, with their families still shouting at each other in the next door bedroom, Matthew had asked her, a wodge of toilet roll pressed to his nostrils, to come with him to the Maldives, not as a honeymoon, not any more, but to sort things out in private, ‘away,’ as he put it thickly, gesturing towards the source of the yelling, ‘from this. And there’ll be press,’ he added, accusingly. ‘They’ll be after you, for the Ripper business.’
He was cold-eyed over the bloody toilet paper, furious with her for humiliating him on the dance floor, livid with Martin for hitting him. There was nothing romantic in his invitation to board the plane. He was proposing a summit, a chance for calm discussion. If, after serious consideration, they came to the conclusion that the marriage was a mistake, they would come home at the end of the fortnight, make a joint announcement, and go their separate ways.
And at that moment, the wretched Robin, arm throbbing, shaken to the core by the feelings that had risen inside when she had felt Strike’s arms around her, knowing that the press might even now be trying to track her down, had seen Matthew, if not as an ally, at least as an escape. The idea of getting on a plane, of flying out of reach of the tsunami of curiosity, gossip, anger, solicitude and unsought advice that she knew would engulf her as long as she remained in Yorkshire, was deeply appealing.
So they had left, barely speaking during the flight. What Matthew had been thinking through those long hours, she had never enquired. She knew only that she had thought about Strike. Over and again, she had returned to the memory of their embrace as she watched the clouds slide past the window.
Am I in love with him? she had asked herself repeatedly, but without reaching any firm conclusion.
Her deliberations on the subject had lasted days, an inner torment she could not reveal to Matthew as they walked on white beaches, discussing the tensions and resentments that lay between the two of them. Matthew slept on the living-room sofa at night, Robin in the net-draped double bed upstairs. Sometimes they argued, at other times they retreated into hurt and furious silences. Matthew was keeping tabs on Robin’s phone, wanting to know where it was, constantly picking it up and checking it, and she knew that he was looking for messages or calls from her boss.
What made things worse was that there were none. Apparently Strike wasn’t interested in talking to her. The hug on the stairs, to which her thoughts kept scampering back like a dog to a blissfully pungent lamppost, seemed to have meant far less to him than it had to her.
Night after night, Robin walked by herself on the beach, listening to the sea’s deep breathing, her injured arm sweating beneath its rubber protective brace, her phone left at the villa so that Matthew had no excuse to tail her and find out whether she was talking secretly to Strike.
But on the seventh night, with Matthew back at the villa, she had decided to call Strike. Almost without acknowledging it to herself, she had formulated a plan. There was a landline at the bar and she knew the office number off by heart. It would be diverted to Strike’s mobile automatically. What she was going to say when she reached him, she didn’t know, but she was sure that if she heard him speak, the truth about her feelings would be revealed to her. As the phone rang in distant London, Robin’s mouth had become dry.
The phone was answered, but nobody spoke for a few seconds. Robin listened to the sounds of movement, then heard a giggle, and then at last somebody spoke.
‘Hello? This is Cormy-Warmy—’
As the woman broke into loud, raucous laughter, Robin heard Strike somewhere in the background, half-amused, half-annoyed and certainly drunk:
‘Gimme that! Seriously, give it—’
Robin had slammed the receiver back onto its rest. Sweat had broken out on her face and chest: she felt ashamed, foolish, humiliated. He was with another woman. The laughter had been unmistakably intimate. The unknown girl had been teasing him, answering his mobile, calling him (how revolting) ‘Cormy’.
She would deny phoning him, she resolved, if ever Strike asked her about the dropped call. She would lie through her teeth, pretend not to know what he was talking about . . .
The sound of the woman on the phone had affected her like a hard slap. If Strike could have taken somebody to bed so soon after their hug – and she would have staked her life on the fact that the girl, whoever she was, had either just slept with Strike, or was about to – then he wasn’t sitting in London torturing himself about his true feelings for Robin Ellacott.
The salt on her lips made her thirsty as she trudged through the night, wearing a deep groove in the soft white sand as the waves broke endlessly beside her. Wasn’t it possible, she asked herself, when she was cried out at last, that she was confusing gratitude and friendship with something deeper? That she had mistaken her love of detection for love of the man who had given her the job? She admired Strike, of course, and was immensely fond of him. They had passed through many intense experiences together, so that it was natural to feel close to him, but was that love?
Alone in the balmy, mosquito-buzzing night, while the waves sighed on the shore and she cradled her aching arm, Robin reminded herself bleakly that she had had very little experience with men for a woman approaching her twenty-eighth birthday. Matthew was all she had ever known, her only sexual partner, a place of safety to her for ten long years now. If she had developed a crush on Strike – she employed the old-fashioned word her mother might have used – mightn’t it also be the natural side effect of the lack of variety and experimentation most women of her age had enjoyed? For so long faithful to Matthew, hadn’t she been bound to look up one day and remember that there were other lives, other choices? Hadn’t she been long overdue to notice that Matthew was not the only man in the world? Strike, she told herself, was simply the one with whom she had been spending the most time, so naturally it had been he onto whom she projected her wondering, her curiosity, her dissatisfaction with Matthew.
Having, as she told herself, talked sense into that part of her that kept yearning for Strike, she reached a hard decision on the eighth evening of her honeymoon. She wanted to go home early and announce their separation to their families. She must tell Matthew that it had nothing to do with anybody else, but after agonising and serious reflection, she did not believe they were well suited enough to continue in the marriage.
She could still remember her feeling of mingled panic and dread as she had pushed open the cabin door, braced for a fight that had never materialised. Matthew had been sitting slumped on the sofa and when he saw her, he mumbled, ‘Mum?’
His face, arms and legs had been shining with sweat. As she moved towards him, she saw an ugly black tracing of veins up the inside of his left arm, as though somebody had filled them with ink.
‘Matt?’
Hearing her, he had realised that she was not his dead mother.
‘Don’t . . . feel well, Rob . . . ’
> She had dashed for the phone, called the hotel, asked for a doctor. By the time he arrived, Matthew was drifting in and out of delirium. They had found the scratch on the back of his hand and, worried, concluded that he might have cellulitis, which Robin could tell, from the faces of the worried doctor and nurse, was serious. Matthew kept seeing figures moving in the shadowy corners of the cabin, people who weren’t there.
‘Who’s that?’ he kept asking Robin. ‘Who’s that over there?’
‘There’s nobody else here, Matt.’
Now she was holding his hand while the nurse and doctor discussed hospitalisation.
‘Don’t leave me, Rob.’
‘I’m not going to leave you.’
Lethal White Page 6