“Yeah.”
“You said — when we were in the Feathers — you said you didn’t see how Kelsey could have been his first murder. You said you were sure he’d worked up to — what he did to her.”
Strike nodded.
“Do you know whether the police have looked for any other killings where a bit of the woman was cut off?”
“Bound to have,” said Strike, hoping he was right and making a mental note to ask Wardle. “Anyway,” he said, “after this one, they will.”
“And she doesn’t think she’d recognize him again?”
“Like I said, he’d obscured his face. Big white guy, black jacket.”
“Did they get any DNA evidence from her?” asked Robin.
Simultaneously, both of them thought of what Robin herself had been subjected to in hospital after her attack. Strike, who had investigated rapes, knew the form. Robin had a sudden miserable memory of having to pee into a sample bottle, one eye completely closed from where he had punched her, aching all over, her throat swollen from the strangulation, then having to lie down on the examination couch, and the female doctor’s gentleness as she parted Robin’s knees...
“No,” said Strike. “He didn’t — no penetration. Anyway, I’d better get going. You can forget about tailing Mad Dad today: he’ll know he’s blotted his copybook, I doubt he’ll show up at school. If you can keep an eye on Wollaston—”
“Wait! I mean, if you’ve got time,” she added.
“Couple more minutes,” he said, checking his watch again. “What’s up? You’re haven’t spotted Laing?”
“No,” she said, “but I think — just possibly — we might have a lead on Brockbank.”
“You’re kidding!”
“It’s a strip club off Commercial Road; I’ve had a look at it on Google Street View. Looks pretty grotty. I called and asked for Noel Brockbank and a woman said ‘Who?’ and then, ‘Nile, you mean?’ And she put her hand over the mouthpiece and had a bit of discussion with another woman about what the new bouncer was called. He’s obviously only just arrived. So I described him physically and she said, ‘Yeah, that’s Nile.’ Of course,” said Robin self-deprecatingly, “it might not be him at all, it could be a dark man who really is called Nile, but when I described the long jaw, she said immediately—”
“You’ve played your usual blinder,” said Strike, checking his watch. “Gotta go. Text me the details of this strip club, will you?”
“I thought I might—”
“No, I want you to stick to Wollaston Close,” said Strike. “Keep in touch.”
As the glass door closed behind him and he clanged away down the metal stairs, she tried to feel pleased that he had said she’d played a blinder. Nevertheless, she had hoped for a chance to do something other than stare pointlessly at the flats of Wollaston Close for hours. She was starting to suspect that Laing was not there and, worse still, that Strike knew it.
The visit to the lawyers was brief but productive. The solicitor was delighted with the copious evidence that Strike had laid in front of him, which vividly documented Mad Dad’s constant violations of the custody agreements.
“Oh, excellent,” he beamed over an enlarged picture of the youngest son cowering tearfully behind his nanny as his father snarled and pointed, almost nose to nose with the defiant woman. “Excellent, excellent...”
And then, catching sight of his client’s expression, he had hurried to conceal his glee at this vision of her child’s distress and offered tea.
An hour later Strike, still in his suit but with his tie now stuffed in his pocket, was following Stephanie into Catford shopping center. This meant passing under a gigantic fiberglass sculpture of a grinning black cat, which sat on top of the girder that spanned the alley leading into the mall. Two stories high from its dangling paw to the tip of its jaunty tail, which pointed skywards, it seemed poised to pounce upon or scoop up shoppers as they passed beneath.
Strike had decided to follow Stephanie on a whim, never having tracked her before, and intended to return to keep watch over the flat once he had satisfied himself as to where she was going and whom she might be meeting. She walked, as she almost always did, with her arms wrapped tightly around her torso, as though holding herself together, wearing the familiar gray hoodie on top of a black miniskirt and leggings. The slenderness of her twig-like legs was emphasized by her clumpy trainers. She visited a pharmacy and Strike watched through the window as she sat huddled in a chair waiting for a prescription, making eye contact with nobody, staring at her feet. Once she had collected her white paper bag she left the way she had come, passing back beneath the giant cat with its dangling paw, apparently returning to the flat. However, she walked straight past the chippy in Catford Broadway and shortly afterwards took a right at the Afro Caribbean Food Centre and disappeared into a small pub called the Catford Ram, which was built into the rear of the shopping center. The pub, which appeared to have only one window, had a wood-clad exterior that would have given it the look of a large Victorian kiosk had it not been plastered with signs advertising fast food, Sky Sports and a Wi-Fi connection.
The entire area was paved for pedestrians, but a battered gray transit van had been parked a short distance from the pub entrance, giving Strike useful cover as he lurked, debating his options. No purpose would be served at this juncture by coming face to face with Whittaker and the pub looked too small to avoid being seen by his ex-stepfather, if that was whom Stephanie was meeting. All he really wanted was a chance to measure Whittaker’s current appearance against that of the figure in the beanie hat and, perhaps, the man in the camouflage jacket who had been watching the Court.
Strike leaned up against the van and lit a cigarette. He had just resolved to find a vantage point that was a little further away, so that he might observe whom Stephanie left the pub with, when the rear doors of the van behind which he was lurking suddenly opened.
Strike took several hasty steps backwards as four men clambered out of the back, along with a smoky haze that gave out a powerful, acrid smell of burned plastic that the ex-SIB man recognized immediately as crack.
All four were unkempt, their jeans and T-shirts filthy, their age hard to gauge because each of them was sunken-faced and prematurely wrinkled. The mouths of two of them had collapsed inwards onto gums that had lost teeth. Momentarily taken aback to find the clean-suited stranger at such close quarters, they seemed to understand from his startled expression that he had not known what was happening inside and slammed the van doors.
Three of them swaggered off towards the pub, but the fourth man did not leave. He was staring at Strike, and Strike was staring right back at him. It was Whittaker.
He was bigger than Strike remembered. Although he had known that Whittaker was almost as tall as he was, he had forgotten the scale of him, the breadth of his shoulders, the heft of the bones beneath his heavily tattooed skin. His thin T-shirt, emblazoned with the logo of the band Slayer, which was both militaristic and occult, blew back against him as they stood facing each other, revealing the outline of ribs.
His yellow face looked freeze-dried like an old apple, the flesh wasted, the skin shrunken against the bone, with cavities beneath the high cheekbones. His matted hair was thinning at the temples: it hung in rats’ tails around his stretched earlobes, each of which was adorned with a silver flesh tunnel. There they stood, Strike in his Italian suit, abnormally well groomed, and Whittaker, stinking of crack fumes, his heretic priest’s golden eyes now set beneath wrinkled, sagging lids.
Strike could not have said how long they stared at each other, but a stream of perfectly coherent thoughts passed through his mind while they did...