“We’d met,” said Aamir. “Della offered me a job. I took it.”
It happened, very occasionally, that Strike felt scruples about what he was driven to ask during an interview.
“I couldn’t help noticing,” he said, holding up the wad of printed material, “that you seemed to drop out of sight of your family for quite a long time after you left the Foreign Office. No more appearances in group shots, not even on your mother’s seventieth birthday. Your sister stopped mentioning you, for a long time.”
Aamir said nothing.
“It was as if you’d been disowned,” said Strike.
“You can get out, now,” said Aamir, but Strike didn’t move.
“When your sister posted this picture of the pair of you in the pizza place,” Strike continued, unfolding the last sheet again, “the responses were—”
“I want you to leave,” repeated Aamir, more loudly.
“‘What you doing with that scumbag?’ ‘Your dad know you still seeing him?’” Strike read aloud from the messages beneath the picture of Aamir and his sister. “‘If my brother permitted liwat—’”
Aamir charged at him, sending a wild right-handed punch to the side of Strike’s head that the detective parried. But the studious-looking Aamir was full of the kind of blind rage that could make a dangerous opponent of almost any man. Tearing a nearby lamp from its socket he swung it so violently that had Strike not ducked in time, the lamp base could have shattered, not on the wall that half-divided the sitting room, but on his face.
“Enough!” bellowed Strike, as Aamir dropped the remnants of the lamp and came at him again. Strike fended off the windmilling fists, hooked his prosthetic leg around the back of Aamir’s leg, and threw him to the floor. Swearing under his breath, because this action had done his aching stump no good at all, Strike straightened up, panting, and said:
“Any more and I’ll fucking deck you.”
Aamir rolled out of Strike’s reach and got to his feet. His glasses were hanging from one ear. Hands shaking, he took them off and examined the broken hinge. His eyes were suddenly huge.
“Aamir, I’m not interested in your private life,” panted Strike, “I’m interested in who you’re covering up for—”
“Get out,” whispered Aamir.
“—because if the police decide it’s murder, everything you’re trying to hide will come out. Murder inquiries respect no one’s privacy.”
“Get out!”
“All right. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
At the front door, Strike turned one last time to face Aamir, who had followed him into the hall, and braced himself as Strike came to a halt.
“Who carved that mark on the inside of your bathroom door, Aamir?”
“Out!”
Strike knew there was no point persisting. As soon as he had crossed the threshold, the front door slammed behind him.
Several houses away, the wincing Strike leaned up against a tree to take the weight off his prosthesis, and texted Robin the picture he had just taken, along with the message:
Remind you of anything?
He lit a cigarette and waited for Robin’s response, glad of an excuse to remain stationary, because quite apart from the pain in his stump, the side of his head was throbbing. In dodging the lamp he had hit it against the wall, and his back was aching because of the effort it had taken to throw the younger man to the floor.
Strike glanced back at the turquoise door. If he was honest, something else was hurting: his conscience. He had entered Mallik’s house with the intention of shocking or intimidating him into the truth about his relationship with Chiswell and the Winns. While a private detective could not afford the doctor’s dictum “first, do no harm,” Strike generally attempted to extract truth without causing unnecessary damage to the host. Reading out the comments at the bottom of that Facebook post had been a low blow. Brilliant, unhappy, undoubtedly tied to the Winns by something other than choice, Aamir Mallik’s eruption into violence had been the reaction of a desperate man. Strike didn’t need to consult the papers in his pocket to recall the picture of Mallik standing proudly in the Foreign Office, about to embark on a stellar career with his first-class degree with his mentor, Sir Christopher Barrowclough-Burns, by his side.
His mobile rang.
“Where on earth did you find that carving?” said Robin.
“The back of Aamir’s bathroom door, hidden under a dressing gown.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. What does it look like to you?”
“The white horse on the hill over Woolstone,” said Robin.
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Strike, elbowing himself off the supporting tree and limping off along the street again. “I was worried I’d started hallucinating the bloody things.”
47
… I want to try and play my humble part in the struggles of life.
Robin emerged from Camden Town station at half past eight on Friday morning and set off for the jewelry shop where she was to have her day’s trial, furtively checking her appearance in every window that she passed.
In the months following the trial of the Shacklewell Ripper, she had become adept at makeup techniques such as altering the shape of her eyebrows or over-painting her lips in vermillion, which made a significant difference to her appearance when coupled with wigs and colored contact lenses, but she had never before worn as much makeup as today. Her eyes, in which she was wearing dark brown contact lenses, were heavily rimmed with black kohl, her lips painted pale pink, her nails a metallic gray. Having only one conventional hole in each earlobe, she had bought a couple of cheap ear cuffs to simulate a more adventurous approach to piercing. The short black second-hand dress she had bought at the local Oxfam shop in Deptford still smelled slightly fusty, even though she had run it through the washing machine the previous day, and she wore it with thick black tights and a pair of flat black lace-up boots in spite of the warmth of the morning. Thus attired, she hoped that she resembled the other goth and emo girls who frequented Camden, an area of London that Robin had rarely visited and which she associated mainly with Lorelei and her vintage clothes store.
She had named her new alter ego Bobbi Cunliffe. When undercover, it was best to assume names with a personal association, to which you responded instinctively. Bobbi sounded like Robin, and indeed people had sometimes tried to abbreviate her name that way, most notably her long-ago flirt in a temporary office, and her brother, Martin, when he wished to annoy her. Cunliffe was Matthew’s surname.
To her relief, he had left for work early that day, because he was auditing an office out in Barnet, leaving Robin free to complete her physical transformation without undermining remarks and displeasure that she was, again, going undercover. Indeed, she thought she might derive a certain pleasure from using her married name—the first time she had ever offered it as her own—while embodying a girl whom Matthew would instinctively dislike. The older he got, the more Matthew was aggravated by and contemptuous of people who did not dress, think or live as he did.
The Wiccan’s jewelry shop, Triquetra, was tucked away in Camden Market. Arriving outside at a quarter to nine, Robin found the stallholders of Camden Lock Place already busy, but the store locked up and empty. After a five-minute wait, her employer arrived, puffing slightly. A large woman whom Robin guessed to be in her late fifties, she had straggly dyed black hair that showed half an inch of silver root, had the same savage approach to eyeliner as Bobbi Cunliffe and wore a long green velvet dress.