During the cursory interview that had led to today’s trial, the shop owner had asked very few questions, instead speaking at length about the husband of thirty years who had just left her to live in Thailand, the neighbor who was suing her over a boundary dispute and the stream of unsatisfactory and ungrateful employees who had walked out on Triquetra to take other jobs. Her undisguised desire to extract the maximum amount of work for the minimum amount of pay, coupled with her outpourings of self-pity, made Robin wonder why anybody had ever wanted to work for her in the first place.
“You’re punctual,” she observed, when within earshot. “Good. Where’s the other one?”
“I don’t know,” said Robin.
“I don’t need this,” said the owner, with a slight note of hysteria. “Not on the day I’ve got to meet Brian’s lawyer!”
She unlocked the door and showed Robin into the shop, which was the size of a large kiosk, and as she raised her arms to start pulling up blinds, the smell of body odor and patchouli mingled with the dusty, incense-scented air. Daylight fell into the shop like a solid thing, rendering everything there more insubstantial and shabby by comparison. Dull silver necklaces and earrings hung in racks on the dark purple walls, many of them featuring pentagrams, peace symbols and marijuana leaves, while glass hookahs mingled with tarot cards, black candles, essential oils and ceremonial daggers on black shelves behind the counter.
“We’ve got millions of extra tourists coming through Camden right now,” said the owner, bustling around the back of the counter, “and if she doesn’t turn—there you are,” she said, as Flick, who looked sulky, sloped inside. Flick was wearing a yellow and green Hezbollah T-shirt and ripped jeans, and carrying a large leather messenger bag.
“Tube was late,” she said.
“Well, I managed to get here all right, and so did Bibi!”
“Bobbi,” Robin corrected her, deliberately broadening her Yorkshire accent.
She didn’t want to pretend to be a Londoner this time. It was best not to have to talk about schools and locales that Flick might know.
“—well, I need you two to be on top of things all—the—time,” said the owner, beating out the last three words with one hand against the other. “All right, Bibi—”
“—Bobbi—”
“—yes, come here and see how the till works.”
Robin had no difficulty grasping how the till worked, because she had had a Saturday job in her teens at a clothes shop in Harrogate. It was just as well that she did not need longer instruction, because a steady stream of shoppers began to arrive about ten minutes after they opened. To Robin’s slight surprise, because there was nothing in the shop that she would have cared to buy, many visitors to Camden seemed to feel that their trip would be incomplete without a pair of pewter earrings, or a pentagram-embossed candle, or one of the small hessian bags that lay in a basket beside the till, each of which purported to contain a magic charm.
“All right, I need to be off,” the owner announced at eleven, while Flick was serving a tall German woman who was dithering between two packs of tarot cards. “Don’t forget: one of you needs to be focused on stock all the time, in case of pilfering. My friend Eddie will be keeping an eye out,” she said, pointing at the stall selling old LPs just outside. “Twenty minutes each for lunch, taken separately. Don’t forget,” she repeated ominously, “Eddie’s watching.”
She left in a whirl of velvet and body odor. The German customer departed with her tarot cards and Flick slammed the till drawer shut, the noise echoing in the temporarily empty shop.
“Old Steady Eddie,” she said venomously. “He doesn’t give a shit. He could rob her blind and he wouldn’t care. Cow,” added Flick for good measure.
Robin laughed and Flick seemed gratified.
“What’s tha name?” asked Robin, in broad Yorkshire. “She never said.”
“Flick,” said Flick. “You’re Bobbi, yeah?”
“Yeah,” said Robin.
Flick took out her mobile from her messenger bag, which she had stowed beneath the counter, checked it, appeared not to see what she had hoped to see, then stuffed it out of sight again.
“You must’ve been hard up for work, were you?” she asked Robin.
“Had to take what I could,” Robin said. “I were sacked.”
“Yeah?”
“Fookin’ Amazon,” said Robin.
“Those tax-dodging bastards,” said Flick, slightly more interested. “What happened?”
“Didn’t make my daily rate.”
Robin had lifted her story directly from a recent news report about working conditions in one of the retail company’s warehouses: the relentless pressure to make targets, packing and scanning thousands of products a day under unforgiving pressure from supervisors. Flick’s expression wavered between sympathy and anger as Robin talked.
“That’s outrageous!” she said, when Robin had finished.
“Yeah,” said Robin, “and no union or nothing, obviously. Me dad were a big trade union man back in Yorkshire.”
“Bet he was furious.”
“He’s dead,” said Robin, unblushingly. “Lungs. Ex-miner.”
“Oh, shit,” said Flick. “Sorry.”
She was looking upon Robin with respect and interest now.
“See, you’ll have been a worker, not an employee. That’s how the bastards get away with it.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Fewer statutory rights,” said Flick. “You might have a case against them if they deducted from your wages, though.”
“Dunno if I could prove that,” said Robin. “How come you know all this?”
“I’m pretty active in the labor movement,” said Flick, with a shrug. She hesitated, “And my mother’s an employment lawyer.”
“Yeah?” said Robin, allowing herself to sound politely surprised.
“Yeah,” said Flick, picking her nails, “but we don’t get on. I don’t see any of my family, actually. They don’t like my partner. Or my politics.”
She smoothed out the Hezbollah T-shirt and showed Robin.
“What, are they Tories?” asked Robin.
“Might as well be,” said Flick. “They loved bloody Blair.”
Robin felt her phone vibrate in the pocket of her second-hand dress.
“Is there a bog anywhere here?”
“Through here,” said Flick, pointing to a well-hidden purple painted door with more racks of jewelry nailed to it.
Beyond the purple door Robin found a small cubbyhole with a cracked, dirty window. A safe sat beside a dilapidated kitchen unit with a kettle, a couple of cleaning products and a stiff J-cloth on top. There was no room to sit down and barely room to stand, because a grubby toilet had been plumbed into the corner.
Robin shut herself inside the chipboard cubicle, put down the toilet lid and sat down to read the lengthy text that Barclay had just sent to both her and Strike.
Billy’s been found. He was picked up off street 2 weeks ago. Psychotic episode, sectioned, hospital in north London, don’t know which yet. Wouldn’t tell docs his next of kin till yesterday. Social worker contacted Jimmy this morning. Jimmy wants me to go with him to persuade Billy to discharge himself. Scared what Billy’s going to tell the doctors, says he talks too much. Also, Jimmy’s lost bit of paper with Billy’s name on & he’s shitting himself about it. Asked me if I’d seen it. He says it’s handwritten, no other details, I don’t know why so important. Jimmy thinks Flick’s nicked it. Things bad between them again.