“Robin? Don’t you mean Venetia?” said a Welsh voice.
“Is that Mr. Winn?” said Robin, eyes on the road, while Strike held the mobile steady for her.
“Yes, you nasty little bitch, it is.”
Robin and Strike glanced at each other, startled. Gone was the unctuous, lascivious Winn, keen to charm and impress.
“Got what you were after, haven’t you, eh? Wriggling up and down that corridor, sticking your tits in where they weren’t wanted, ‘oh, Mr. Winn—’” he imitated her the same way Matthew did, high-pitched and imbecilic, “‘—oh, help me, Mr. Winn, should I do charity or should I do politics, let me bend a bit lower over the desk, Mr. Winn.’ How many men have you trapped that way, how far do you go—?”
“Have you got something to tell me, Mr. Winn?” asked Robin loudly, talking over him. “Because if you’ve just called to insult me—”
“Oh, I’ve got plenty to bloody tell you, plenty to bloody tell you,” shouted Winn. “You are going to pay, Miss Ellacott, for what you’ve done to me, pay for the damage you’ve done to me and my wife, you don’t get off that easily, you broke the law in this office and I’m going to see you in court, do you understand me?” He was becoming almost hysterical. “We’ll see how well your wiles work on a judge, shall we? Low-cut top and ‘oh, I think I’m overheating—’”
A white light seemed to be encroaching on the edges of Robin’s vision, so that the road ahead turned tunnel-like.
“NO!” she shouted, taking both hands off the wheel before slamming them back down again, her arms shaking. It was the “no” she had given Matthew, a “no” of such vehemence and force that it brought Geraint Winn up short in exactly the same way.
“Nobody made you stroke my hair and pat my back and ogle my chest, Mr. Winn, that wasn’t what I wanted, though I’m sure it gives you a bit of a kick to think it was—”
“Robin!” said Strike, but he might as well have been one more creak of the car’s ancient chassis, and she ignored, too, Geraint’s sudden interjection, “Who else is there? Was that Strike?”
“—you’re a creep, Mr. Winn, a thieving creep who stole from a charity and I’m not only happy I got the goods on you, I’ll be delighted to tell the world you’re flicking out pictures of your dead daughter while you’re trying to peer down young women’s shirts—”
“How dare you!” gasped Winn, “are there no depths—you dare mention Rhiannon—it’s all going to come out, Samuel Murape’s family—”
“Screw you and screw your bloody grudges!” shouted Robin. “You’re a pervy, thieving—”
“If you’ve got anything else to say, I suggest you put it in writing, Mr. Winn,” Strike shouted into the mobile, while Robin, hardly knowing what she was doing, continued to yell insults at Winn from a distance. Ending the call with a jab of the finger, Strike grabbed the wheel as Robin again removed both hands from it to gesticulate.
“Fuck’s sake!” said Strike, “pull over—pull over, now!”
She did as he told her automatically, the adrenaline disorientating her like alcohol, and when the Land Rover lurched to a halt she threw off her seatbelt and got out on the hard shoulder, cars whizzing past her. Hardly knowing what she was doing she began to stumble away from the Land Rover, tears of rage sliding down her face, trying to outpace the panic now lapping at her, because she had just irrevocably alienated a man they might need to talk to again, a man who had already been talking about revenge, who might even be the one paying Patterson…
“Robin!”
Now, she thought, Strike, too, would think her a flake, a damaged fool who should never have taken on this line of work, the one who ran when things got tough. It was that which made her wheel around to face him as he hobbled along the hard shoulder after her, and she wiped her face roughly on her sleeve and said, before he could tell her off, “I know I shouldn’t have lost it, I know I’ve fucked up, I’m sorry.” But his answer was lost in the pounding in her ears and, as though it had been waiting for her to stop running, the panic now engulfed her. Dizzy, unable to order her thoughts, she collapsed on the verge, dry bristles of grass prickling through her jeans as, eyes shut and head in hands, she tried to breathe herself back to normality as the traffic zoomed past.
She wasn’t quite sure whether one minute or ten had elapsed, but finally her pulse slowed, her thoughts became ordered and the panic ebbed away, to be replaced by mortification. After all her careful pretense that she was coping, she had blown it.
A whiff of cigarette smoke reached her. Opening her eyes, she saw Strike’s legs sticking out on the ground to her right. He, too, had sat down on the verge.
“How long have you been having panic attacks?” he asked conversationally.
There seemed no point dissembling any more.
“About a year,” she muttered.
“Been getting help with them?”
“Yes. I was in therapy for a bit. Now I do CBT exercises.”
“Do you, though?” Strike asked mildly. “Because I bought vegetarian bacon a week ago, but it’s not making me any healthier, just sitting there in the fridge.”
Robin began to laugh and found that she couldn’t stop. More tears leaked from her eyes. Strike watched her, not unkindly, smoking his cigarette.
“I could have been doing them a bit more regularly,” Robin admitted at last, mopping her face again.
“Anything else you fancy telling me, now we’re getting into things?” asked Strike.
He felt he ought to know the worst now, before he gave her any advice on her mental condition, but Robin seemed confused.
“Any other health matters that might affect your ability to work?” he prompted her.
“Like what?”
Strike wondered whether a direct inquiry constituted some kind of infringement of her employment rights.
“I wondered,” he said, “whether you might be, ah, pregnant.”
Robin began to laugh again.
“Oh God, that’s funny.”
“Is it?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, “I’m not pregnant.”
Strike now noticed that her wedding and engagement rings were missing. He had become so used to seeing her without them as she impersonated Venetia Hall and Bobbi Cunliffe that it had not occurred to him that their absence today might be significant, yet he didn’t want to pose a direct question, for reasons that had nothing at all to do with employment rights.
“Matthew and I have split up,” Robin said, frowning at the passing traffic in an effort not to cry again. “A week ago.”
“Oh,” said Strike. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
But his concerned expression was at total odds with his actual feelings. His dark mood had lightened so abruptly that it was akin to having moved from sober to three pints down. The smell of rubber and dust and burned grass recalled the car park where he had accidentally kissed her, and he drew on his cigarette again and tried hard not to let his feelings show in his face.
“I know I shouldn’t have spoken to Geraint Winn like that,” said Robin, tears now falling again. “I shouldn’t have mentioned Rhiannon, I lost control and—it’s just, men, bloody men, judging everyone by their bloody selves!”
“What happened with Matt—?”
“He’s been sleeping with Sarah Shadlock,” said Robin savagely. “His best friend’s fiancée. She left an earring in our bed and I—oh bugger.”
It was no use: she buried her face in her hands and, with a sense of having nothing to lose now, cried in earnest, because she had thoroughly disgraced herself in Strike’s eyes, and the one remaining piece of her life that she had been seeking to preserve had been tainted. How delighted Matthew would be to see her falling apart on a motorway verge, proving his point, that she was unfit to do the job she loved, forever limited by her past, by having, twice, been in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong men.