“Yeah,” choked Flick, wiping her nose on the back of her hand, “because of the money. Because you wouldn’t even know what Chiswell had done if—”
Jimmy pulled her roughly towards him and kissed her. For a second she resisted, then opened her mouth. The kiss went on and on as they walked. Strike could see their tongues working in each other’s mouths. They staggered slightly as they walked, locked together, while other CORE members grinned, and the girl whom Jimmy had lifted into the air looked crestfallen.
“Jimmy,” murmured Flick at last, when the kiss had ended, but his arm was still around her. She was doe-eyed with lust now, and soft-spoken. “I think you should come and talk to him, seriously. He keeps talking about that bloody detective.”
“What?” said Jimmy, though Strike could tell he’d heard.
“Strike. That bastard soldier with the one leg. Billy’s fixated on him. Thinks he’s going to rescue him.”
The end point of the march came into sight at last: Bow Quarter in Fairfield Road, where the square brick tower of an old match factory, proposed site of some of the planned missiles, punctured the skyline.
“‘Rescue him’?” repeated Jimmy scornfully. “Fuck’s sake. It’s not like he’s being fucking tortured.”
The marchers were breaking ranks now, dissolving back into a formless crowd that milled around a dark green pond in front of the proposed missile site. Strike would have given much to sit down on a bench or lean up against a tree, as many of the protestors were doing, so as to take the weight off his stump. Both the end, where skin that was never meant to bear his weight was irritated and inflamed, and the tendons in his knee were begging for ice and rest. Instead, he limped on after Jimmy and Flick as they walked around the edge of the crowd, away from their CORE colleagues.
“He wanted to see you and I told him you were busy,” he heard Flick say, “and he cried. It was horrible, Jimmy.”
Pretending to be watching the young black man with a microphone, who was ascending a stage at the front of the crowd, Strike edged closer to Jimmy and Flick.
“I’ll look after Billy when I get the money,” Jimmy was telling Flick. He seemed guilty and conflicted now. “Obviously I’ll look after him… and you. I won’t forget what you’ve done.”
She liked hearing that. Out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw her grubby face flush with excitement. Jimmy took a pack of tobacco and some Rizlas from his jeans pocket and began to roll himself another cigarette.
“Still talking about that fucking detective, is he?”
“Yeah.”
Jimmy lit up and smoked in silence for a while, his eyes roving abstractedly over the crowd.
“Tell you what,” he said suddenly, “I’ll go see him now. Calm him down a bit. We just need him to stay put a bit longer. Coming?”
He held out his hand and Flick took it, smiling. They walked away.
Strike let them get a short head start, then stripped off the mask and the old gray hoodie, replaced the former with the sunglasses he had pocketed for this eventuality and set off after them, dumping the mask and hoodie on top of their banners.
The pace Jimmy now set was completely different to the leisurely march. Every few strides, Flick had to jog to keep up, and Strike was soon gritting his teeth as the nerve endings at the inflamed skin at the end of his stump rubbed against the prosthesis, his overworked thigh muscles groaning in protest.
He was perspiring hard, his gait becoming more and more unnatural. Passersby were starting to stare. He could feel their curiosity and pity as he dragged his prosthetic leg along. He knew he should have been doing his bloody physio exercises, that he ought to have kept to the no chips rule, that in an ideal world he’d have taken the day off today, and rested up, the prosthesis off, an ice pack on his stump. On he limped, refusing to listen to the body pleading with him to stop, the distance between himself, Jimmy and Flick growing ever wider, the compensating movement of his upper body and arms becoming grotesque. He could only pray that neither Jimmy nor Flick would turn and look behind them, because there was no way Strike could remain incognito if they saw him hobbling along like this. They were already disappearing into the neat little brick box that was Bow station, while Strike was panting and swearing on the opposite side of the road.
As he stepped off the curb, an excruciating pain shot through the back of his right thigh, as though a knife had sliced through the muscle. The leg buckled and he fell, his outstretched hand skidding along asphalt, hitting hip, shoulder and head on the open road. Somewhere in the vicinity a woman yelped in shock. Onlookers would think he was drunk. It had happened before when he had fallen. Humiliated, furious, groaning in agony, Strike crawled back onto the pavement, dragging his right leg out of the way of oncoming traffic. A young woman approached nervously to see whether he needed help, he barked at her, then felt guilty.
“Sorry,” he croaked, but she was gone, hurrying away with two friends.
He dragged himself to the railings bordering the pavement and sat there, back against metal, sweating and bleeding. He doubted whether he would be able to stand again without assistance. Running his hands over the back of his stump, he felt an egg-shaped swelling and, with a groan, guessed that he had torn a hamstring. The pain was so sharp that it was making him feel sick.
He tugged his mobile out of his pocket. The screen was cracked where he had fallen on it.
“Fuck. It. All,” he muttered, closing his eyes and leaning his head back against the cold metal.
He sat motionless for several minutes, dismissed as a tramp or a drunk by the people navigating around him, while he silently assessed his limited options. At last, with a sense of being utterly cornered, he opened his eyes, wiped his face with his forearm, and punched in Lorelei’s number.
23
… ailing and languishing in the gloom of such a marriage…
In retrospect, Robin knew that her anniversary weekend had been doomed before it had even begun, down in the House of Commons crypt where she had turned down Strike’s request to tail Jimmy.
Trying to throw off her sense of guilt, she had confided Strike’s request to Matthew when he picked her up after work. Already tense due to the demands of navigating the Friday night traffic in the Land Rover, which he disliked, Matthew went on the offensive, demanding to know why she felt bad after all the slave labor Strike had had out of her over the past two years and proceeding to badmouth Strike so viciously that Robin had felt compelled to defend him. They were still arguing about her job an hour later, when Matthew suddenly noticed that there was neither wedding nor engagement ring on Robin’s gesticulating left hand. She never wore these when playing the unmarried Venetia Hall, and had entirely forgotten that she would not be able to retrieve them from Albury Street before leaving for the hotel.
“It’s our bloody anniversary and you can’t even remember to put your rings back on?” Matthew had shouted.
They drew up outside the soft golden brick hotel an hour and a half later. A beaming man in uniform opened the door for Robin. Her “thank you” was almost inaudible due to the hard, angry lump in her throat.
They barely spoke over their Michelin-starred dinner. Robin, who might as well have been eating polystyrene and dust, looked around at the surrounding tables. She and Matthew were by far the youngest couple there, and she wondered whether any of these husbands and wives had been through this kind of trough in their marriages, and survived it.