Once he’d seen It off to work that morning he had hurried out of the house to wait for The Secretary at her home station, which had been a smart decision, because she hadn’t gone to the office at all. He had thought the arrival of the leg might disrupt her routine and he had been right. He was nearly always right.
He knew how to follow people. At some points today he had been wearing a beanie hat, at others he had been bareheaded. He had stripped to his T-shirt, then worn his jacket and then his jacket turned inside out, sunglasses on, sunglasses off.
The Secretary’s value to him — over and above the value any female had to him, if he could get her alone — was in what he was going to do, through her, to Strike. His ambition to be avenged on Strike — permanently, brutally avenged — had grown in him until it became the central ambition of his life. He had always been this way. If someone crossed him they were marked and at some point, whenever opportunity presented itself, even if it took years, they would get theirs. Cormoran Strike had done him more harm than any other human being ever, and he was going to pay a just price.
He had lost track of Strike for several years and then an explosion of publicity had revealed the bastard: celebrated, heroic. This was the status he had always wanted, had craved. It had been like drinking acid, choking down the fawning articles about the cunt, but he had devoured everything he could, because you needed to know your target if you wanted to cause maximum damage. He intended to inflict as much pain on Cormoran Strike as was — not humanly possible, because he knew himself to be something more than human — as was superhumanly possible. It would go way beyond a knife in the ribs in the dark. No, Strike’s punishment was going to be slower and stranger, frightening, tortuous and finally devastating.
Nobody would ever know he’d done it; why should they? He’d escaped without detection three times now: three women dead and nobody had a clue who’d done it. This knowledge enabled him to read today’s Metro without the slightest trace of fear; to feel only pride and satisfaction at the hysterical accounts of the severed leg, to savor the whiff of fear and confusion that rose from each story, the bleating incomprehension of the sheep-like masses who scent a wolf.
All he needed now was for The Secretary to take one short walk down a deserted stretch of road... but London throbbed and teemed with people all day long and here he was, frustrated and wary, watching her as he hung around the London School of Economics.
She was tracking someone too, and it was easy to see who that was. Her target had bright platinum hair extensions and led The Secretary, midafternoon, all the way back to Tottenham Court Road.
The Secretary disappeared inside a pub opposite the lap-dancing club into which her mark had gone. He debated following her inside, but she seemed dangerously watchful today, so he entered a cheap Japanese restaurant with plate-glass windows opposite the pub, took a table near the window and waited for her to emerge.
It would happen, he told himself, staring through his shades into the busy road. He would get her. He had to hold on to that thought, because this evening he was going to have to return to It and the half-life, the lie-life, that allowed the real Him to walk and breathe in secret.
The smeared and dusty London window reflected his naked expression, stripped of the civilized coating he wore to beguile the women who had fallen prey to his charm and his knives. To the surface had risen the creature that lived within, the creature that wanted nothing except to establish its dominance.
8
I seem to see a rose,
I reach out, then it goes.
As Strike had been expecting ever since the news of the severed leg hit the media, his old acquaintance Dominic Culpepper of the News of the World had contacted him early on Tuesday morning in a state of advanced ire. The journalist refused to accept that Strike might have had legitimate reasons for choosing not to contact Culpepper the very second he had realized that he was in receipt of a severed limb, and Strike further compounded this offense by declining the invitation to keep Culpepper informed of every fresh development in the case, in return for a hefty retainer. Culpepper had previously put paid work Strike’s way and the detective suspected, by the time the call terminated, that this source of income would henceforth be closed to him. Culpepper was not a happy man.
Strike and Robin did not speak until midafternoon. Strike, who was carrying a backpack, called from a crowded Heathrow Express train.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Pub opposite Spearmint Rhino,” she said. “It’s called the Court. Where are you?”
“Coming back from the airport. Mad Dad got on the plane, thank Christ.”
Mad Dad was a wealthy international banker whom Strike was tailing on behalf of his wife. The couple were having an extremely contentious custody battle. The husband’s departure for Chicago would mean that Strike would have a few nights’ respite from observing him as he sat in his car outside his wife’s house at four in the morning, night-vision goggles trained on his young sons’ window.
“I’ll come and meet you,” said Strike. “Sit tight — unless Platinum cops off with someone, obviously.”
Platinum was the Russian economics student and lap-dancer. Their client was her boyfriend, a man whom Strike and Robin had nicknamed “Two-Times,” partly because this was the second time they had investigated a blonde girlfriend for him, and also because he seemed addicted to finding out where and how his lovers were betraying him. Robin found Two-Times both sinister and pitiable. He had met Platinum at the club Robin was now watching, and Robin and Strike had been given the job of finding out whether any other men were being granted the additional favors she was now giving Two-Times.
The odd thing was that, little though he might believe or like it, Two-Times seemed to have picked an atypically monogamous girlfriend this time. After watching her movements for several weeks, Robin had learned that she was a largely solitary creature, lunching alone with books and rarely interacting with her colleagues.
“She’s obviously working at the club to help pay for her course,” Robin had told Strike indignantly, after a week’s tailing. “If Two-Times doesn’t want other men ogling her, why doesn’t he help her out financially?”
“The main attraction is that she gives other men lap dances,” Strike had replied patiently. “I’m surprised it’s taken him this long to go for someone like her. Ticks all his boxes.”
Strike had been inside the club shortly after they took the job and he had secured the services of a sad-eyed brunette by the unlikely name of Raven to keep an eye on his client’s girlfriend. Raven was to check in once a day, to tell them what Platinum was up to and inform them immediately if the Russian girl appeared to be giving out her phone number or being overattentive to any client. The rules of the club forbade touching or soliciting but Two-Times remained convinced (“Poor, sad bastard,” said Strike) that he was only one among many men taking her out to dinner and sharing her bed.
“I still don’t understand why we have to watch the place,” Robin sighed into the phone, not for the first time. “We could take Raven’s calls anywhere.”
“You know why,” said Strike, who was preparing to disembark. “He likes the photographs.”
“But they’re only of her walking to and from work.”
“Doesn’t matter. Turns him on. Plus, he’s convinced that one of these days she’s going to leave the club with some Russian oligarch.”