Strike drank the last of his lager and contemplated the final four words of this sentence. He had never been able to understand the assumption of intimacy fans felt with those they had never met. People had sometimes referred to his father as “Old Jonny” in his presence, beaming, as if they were talking about a mutual friend, repeating well-worn press stories and anecdotes as though they had been personally involved. A man in a pub in Trescothick had once said to Strike: “Fuck, I know your old man better than you do!” because he was able to name the session musician who had played on the Deadbeats’ biggest album, and whose tooth Rokeby had famously broken when he slapped the end of his saxophone in anger.
It was one in the morning. Strike had become almost deaf to the constant muffled thuds of the bass guitar from two floors below, and to the occasional creaks and hisses from the attic flat above, where the bar manager enjoyed luxuries like showers and home-cooked food. Tired, but not yet ready to climb into his sleeping bag, he managed to discover Guy Somé’s approximate address by further perusal of the internet, and noted the close proximity of Charles Street to Kentigern Gardens. Then he typed in the web address www.arrse.co.uk, like a man turning automatically into his local after a long shift at work.
He had not visited the Army Rumor Service site since Charlotte had found him, months previously, browsing it on his computer, and had reacted the way other women might had they found their partners viewing online porn. There had been a row, generated by what she took to be his hankering for his old life and his dissatisfaction with the new.
Here was the army mindset in its every particular, written in the language he too could speak fluently. Here were the acronyms he had known by heart; the jokes impenetrable to outsiders; every concern of service life, from the father whose son was being bullied at his school in Cyprus, to retrospective abuse of the Prime Minister’s performance at the Chilcot Inquiry. Strike wandered from post to post, occasionally snorting in amusement, yet aware all the time that he was lowering his resistance to the specter he could feel, now, breathing on the back of his neck.
This had been his world and he had been happy there. For all the inconveniences and hardships of military life, for all that he had emerged from the army minus half his leg, he did not regret a day of the time he had spent serving. And yet, he had not been of these people, even while among them. He had been a monkey, and then a suit, feared and disliked about equally by the average squaddie.
If ever the SIB talk to you, you should say “No comment, I want a lawyer.” Alternatively, a simple “Thank you for noticing me” will suffice.
Strike gave a final grunt of laughter, and then, abruptly, shut down the site and turned off the computer. He was so tired that the removal of his prosthesis took twice the time it usually did.
9
ON SUNDAY MORNING, WHICH WAS fine, Strike headed back to the ULU to shower. Once again, by consciously filling out his own bulk and allowing his features to slide, as they did naturally, into a scowl, he made himself sufficiently intimidating to repel challenges as he marched, eyes down, past the desk. He hung around the changing rooms, waiting for a quiet moment so that he would not have to shower in full view of any of the changing students, for the sight of his false leg was a distinguishing feature he did not want to impress on anybody’s memory.
Clean and shaven, he caught the Tube to Hammersmith Broadway, enjoying the tentative sunshine gleaming through the glass-covered shopping precinct through which he emerged on to the street. The distant shops on King Street were heaving with people; it might have been a Saturday. This was a bustling and essentially soulless commercial center, and yet Strike knew it to be a bare ten minutes’ walk to a sleepy, countrified stretch of the Thames embankment.
While he walked, traffic rumbling past him, he remembered Sundays in Cornwall in his childhood, when everything closed down except the church and the beach. Sunday had had a particular flavor in those days; an echoing, whispering quiet, the gentle chink of china and the smell of gravy, the TV as dull as the empty high street, and the relentless rush of the waves on the beach when he and Lucy had run down on to the shingle, forced back on to primitive resources.
His mother had once said to him: “If Joan’s right, and I end up in hell, it’ll be eternal Sunday in bloody St. Mawes.”
Strike, who was heading away from the commercial center towards the Thames, phoned his client as he walked.
“John Bristow?”
“Yeah, sorry to disturb you at the weekend, John…”
“Cormoran?” said Bristow, immediately friendly. “Not a problem, not a problem at all! How did it go with Wilson?”
“Very good, very useful, thanks. I wanted to know whether you can help me find a friend of Lula’s. It’s a girl she met in therapy. Her Christian name begins with an R—something like Rachel or Raquelle—and she was living at the St. Elmo hostel in Hammersmith when Lula died. Does that ring any bells?”
There was a moment’s silence. When Bristow spoke again, the disappointment in his voice verged on annoyance.
“What do you want to speak to her for? Tansy’s quite clear that the voice she heard from upstairs was male.”
“I’m not interested in this girl as a suspect, but as a witness. Lula had an appointment to meet her at a shop, Vashti, right after she saw you at your mother’s flat.”
“Yeah, I know; that came out at the inquest. I mean—well, of course, you know your job, but—I don’t really see how she would know anything about what happened that night. Listen—wait a moment, Cormoran…I’m at my mother’s and there are other people here…need to find a quieter spot…”
Strike heard the sounds of movement, a murmured “Excuse me,” and Bristow came back on the line.
“Sorry, I didn’t want to say all this in front of the nurse. Actually, I thought, when you rang, you might be someone else calling up to talk to me about Duffield. Everybody I know has rung to tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“You obviously don’t read the News of the World. It’s all there, complete with pictures: Duffield turned up to visit my mother yesterday, out of the blue. Photographers outside the house; it caused a lot of inconvenience and upset with the neighbors. I was out with Alison, or I’d never have let him in.”
“What did he want?”
“Good question. Tony, my uncle, thinks it was money—but Tony usually thinks people are after money; anyway, I’ve got power of attorney, so there was nothing doing there. God knows why he came. The one small mercy is that Mum doesn’t seem to have realized who he is. She’s on immensely strong painkillers.”
“How did the press find out he was coming?”
“That,” said Bristow, “is an excellent question. Tony thinks he phoned them himself.”
“How is your mother?”
“Poorly, very poorly. They say she could hang on for weeks, or—or it could happen at any moment.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Strike. He raised his voice as he passed underneath a flyover, across which traffic was moving noisily. “Well, if you do happen to remember the name of Lula’s Vashti friend…”
“I’m afraid I still don’t really understand why you’re so interested in her.”
“Lula made this girl travel all the way from Hammersmith to Notting Hill, spent fifteen minutes with her and then walked out. Why didn’t she stay? Why meet for such a short space of time? Did they argue? Anything out of the ordinary that happens around a sudden death could be relevant.”