W@nBee: that detective with one leg? yeah, hes a veteran.
Nowheretoturn: I heard he might of done it himself.
W@nBee: No, if you look up he’s was in Afganistan.
That was all. Robin combed more threads on the forum, but Nowheretoturn had not pursued their inquiry, nor did they appear again. That meant nothing; they might have changed their username. Robin searched until satisfied that she had probed every corner of the site, but Strike’s name did not recur.
Her excitement ebbed away. Even assuming that the letter-writer and Nowheretoturn were the same person, her belief that Strike’s amputation had been self-inflicted had been clear in the letter. There weren’t many famous amputees on whom you might be able to pin the hope that their condition was voluntary.
Shouts of encouragement were now emanating from the sitting room below. Abandoning the BIID boards, Robin turned to her second line of inquiry.
She liked to think that she had developed a tougher skin since working at the detective agency. Nevertheless, her first forays into the fantasies of acrotomophiliacs — those who were sexually attracted to amputees — which had been accessed with only a few clicks of the mouse, had left her with a cringing feeling in her stomach that lingered long after she had left the internet. Now she found herself reading the outpourings of a man (she assumed he was a man) whose most exciting sexual fantasy was a woman with all four limbs amputated above the elbow and knee joints. The precise point at which limbs were cut seemed to be a particular preoccupation. A second man (they could not be women, surely) had masturbated since early youth over the idea of accidentally guillotining off his own and his best friend’s legs. Everywhere was discussion of the fascination of the stumps themselves, of the restricted movement of amputees, of what Robin assumed was disability as an extreme manifestation of bondage.
While the distinctive nasal voice of the commentator on the Grand National gabbled incomprehensibly from below, and her brother’s shouts of encouragement became louder, Robin scanned more message boards, seeking any mention of Strike and also searching for a connecting line between this paraphilia and violence.
Robin found it notable that none of the people pouring their amputee and amputation fantasies onto this forum seemed to be aroused by violence or pain. Even the man whose sexual fantasy involved him and his friend cutting off their own legs together was clear and articulate on that subject: the guillotining was merely the necessary precursor to the achievement of stumps.
Would a person aroused by Strike-as-amputee cut off a woman’s leg and send it to him? That was the sort of thing Matthew might think would happen, Robin thought scornfully, because Matthew would assume that anyone odd enough to find stumps attractive would be crazy enough to dismember somebody else: indeed, he would think it likely. However, from what Robin remembered of the letter from RL, and after perusing the online outpourings of his fellow acrotomophiliacs, she thought it much more likely that what RL meant by “making it up” to Strike was likely to mean practices that Strike would probably find a lot less appetizing than the original amputation.
Of course, RL might be both an acrotomophiliac and a psychopath...
“YES! FUCKING YES! FIVE HUNDRED QUID!” screamed Martin. From the rhythmic thumping emanating from the hall, it sounded as though Martin had found the sitting room inadequate for the full performance of a victory dance. Rowntree woke, jumped to his feet and let out a groggy bark. The noise was such that Robin did not hear Matthew approaching until he pushed the door open. Automatically, she clicked the mouse repeatedly, backtracking through the sites devoted to the sexual fetishization of amputees.
“Hi,” she said. “I take it Ballabriggs won.”
“Yeah,” said Matthew.
For the second time that day, he held out a hand. Robin slid the laptop aside and Matthew pulled her to her feet and hugged her. With the warmth of his body came relief, seeping through her, calming her. She could not stand another night’s bickering.
Then he pulled away, his eyes fixed on something over her shoulder.
“What?”
She looked down at the laptop. There in the middle of a glowing white screen of text was a large boxed definition:
Acrotomophilia noun
A paraphilia in which sexual gratification is derived from fantasies or acts involving an amputee.
There was a brief silence.
“How many horses died?” asked Robin in a brittle voice.
“Two,” Matthew answered, and walked out of the room.
14
... you ain’t seen the last of me yet,
I’ll find you, baby, on that you can bet.
Half past eight on Sunday evening found Strike standing outside Euston station, smoking what would be his last cigarette until he arrived in Edinburgh in nine hours’ time.
Elin had been disappointed that he was going to miss the evening concert, and instead they had spent most of the afternoon in bed, an alternative that Strike had been more than happy to accept. Beautiful, collected and rather cool outside the bedroom, Elin was considerably more demonstrative inside it. The memory of certain erotic sights and sounds — her alabaster skin faintly damp under his mouth, her pale lips wide in a moan — added savor to the tang of nicotine. Smoking was not permitted in Elin’s spectacular flat on Clarence Terrace, because her young daughter had asthma. Strike’s post-coital treat had instead been to fight off sleep while she showed him a recording of herself talking about the Romantic composers on the bedroom television.
“You know, you look like Beethoven,” she told him thoughtfully, as the camera closed in on a marble bust of the composer.
“With a buggered nose,” said Strike. He had been told it before.
“And why are you going to Scotland?” Elin had asked as he reattached his prosthetic leg while sitting on the bed in her bedroom, which was decorated in creams and whites and yet had none of the depressing austerity of Ilsa and Nick’s spare room.
“Following a lead,” said Strike, fully aware that he was overstating the case. There was nothing except his own suspicions to connect Donald Laing and Noel Brockbank to the severed leg. Nevertheless, and much though he might silently lament the nearly three hundred quid the round-trip was costing him, he did not regret the decision to go.
Grinding the stub of his cigarette under the heel of his prosthetic foot, he proceeded into the station, bought himself a bag of food at the supermarket and clambered onto the overnight train.
The single berth, with its fold-down sink and its narrow bunk, might be tiny, but his army career had taken him to far more uncomfortable places. He was pleased to find that the bed could just accommodate his six foot three and after all, a small space was always easier to navigate once his prosthesis had been removed. Strike’s only gripe was that the compartment was overheated: he kept his attic flat at a temperature every woman he knew would have deplored as icy, not that any woman had ever slept in his attic flat. Elin had never even seen the place; Lucy, his sister, had never been invited over lest it shatter her delusion that he was making plenty of money these days. In fact, now he came to think about it, Robin was the only woman who had ever been in there.
The train jolted into motion. Benches and pillars flickered past the window. Strike sank down on the bunk, unwrapped the first of his bacon baguettes and took a large mouthful, remembering as he did so Robin sitting at his kitchen table, white-faced and shaken. He was glad to think of her at home in Masham, safely out of the way of possible harm: at least he could stow one nagging worry.