“That’s good of you, thanks.”
“It isn’t good of me,” said Somé quietly. “I want to know what happened. When are you speaking to Duffield?”
“As soon as I can get hold of him.”
“He thinks he’s got away with it, the little shit. She must’ve changed because she knew he was coming, mustn’t she? Even though they’d rowed, she knew he’d follow her. But he’ll never talk to you.”
“He’ll talk to me,” said Strike easily, as he put away his notebook and checked his watch. “I’ve taken up a lot of your time. Thanks again.”
As Somé led Strike back down the spiral stairs and along the white-walled corridor, some of his swagger returned to him. By the time they shook hands in the cool tiled lobby, no trace of distress remained on show.
“Lose some weight,” he told Strike, as a parting shot, “and I’ll send you something XXL.”
As the warehouse door swung closed behind Strike, he heard Somé call to the tomato-haired girl at the desk: “I know what you’re thinking, Trudie. You’re imagining him taking you roughly from behind, aren’t you? Aren’t you, darling? Big rough soldier boy,” and Trudie’s squeal of shocked laughter.
2
CHARLOTTE’S ACCEPTANCE OF STRIKE’S SILENCE was unprecedented. There had been no further calls or texts; she was maintaining the pretense that their last, filthy, volcanic row had changed her irrevocably, stripped away her love and purged her of fury. Strike, however, knew Charlotte as intimately as a germ that had lingered in his blood for fifteen years; knew that her only response to pain was to wound the offender as deeply as possible, no matter what the cost to herself. What would happen if he refused her an audience, and kept refusing? It was the only strategy he had never tried, and all he had left.
Every now and then, when Strike’s resistance was low (late at night, alone on his camp bed) the infection would erupt again: regret and longing would spike, and he saw her at close quarters, beautiful, naked, breathing words of love; or weeping quietly, telling him that she knew she was rotten, ruined, impossible, but that he was the best and truest thing she had ever known. Then, the fact that he was a few pressed buttons away from speaking to her seemed too fragile a barricade against temptation, and he sometimes pulled himself back out of his sleeping bag and hopped in the darkness to Robin’s abandoned desk, switching on the lamp and poring, even for hours, over the case report. Once or twice he placed early-morning calls to Rochelle Onifade’s mobile, but she never answered.
On Thursday morning, Strike returned to the wall outside St. Thomas’s, and waited for three hours in the hope of seeing Rochelle again, but she did not turn up. He had Robin call the hospital, but this time they refused to comment on Rochelle’s non-attendance, and resisted all attempts at getting an address for her.
On Friday morning, Strike returned from an outing to Starbucks to find Spanner sitting not on the sofa beside Robin’s desk, but on the desk itself. He had an unlit roll-up in his mouth, and was leaning over her, apparently being more amusing than Strike had ever found him, because Robin was laughing in the slightly grudging manner of a woman who is entertained, but who wishes, nevertheless, to make it clear that the goal is well defended.
“Morning, Spanner,” said Strike, but the faintly repressive quality of his greeting did nothing to moderate either the computer specialist’s ardent body language or his broad smile.
“All right, Fed? Brought your Dell back for you.”
“Great. Double decaff latte,” Strike told Robin, setting the drink down beside her. “No charge,” he added, as she reached for her purse.
She was touchingly averse to charging minor luxuries to petty cash. Robin made no objection in front of their guest, but thanked Strike, and turned again to her work, which involved a small clockwise swivel of her desk chair, away from the two men.
The flare of a match turned Strike’s attention from his own double espresso to his guest.
“This is a non-smoking office, Spanner.”
“What? You smoke like a fucking chimney.”
“Not in here I don’t. Follow me.”
Strike led Spanner into his own office and closed the door firmly behind him.
“She’s engaged,” he said, taking his usual seat.
“Wasting my powder, am I? Ah well. Put in a word for me if the engagement goes down the pan; she’s just my type.”
“I don’t think you’re hers.”
Spanner grinned knowingly.
“Already queuing, are you?”
“No,” said Strike. “I just know her fiancé’s a rugby-playing accountant. Clean-cut, square-jawed Yorkshireman.”
He had formed a surprisingly clear mental image of Matthew, though he had never seen a photograph.
“You never know; she might fancy rebounding on to something a bit edgier,” said Spanner, swinging Lula Landry’s laptop on to the desk and sitting down opposite Strike. He was wearing a slightly tatty sweatshirt and Jesus sandals on bare feet; it was the warmest day of the year so far. “I’ve had a good look at this piece of crap. How much technical detail do you want?”
“None; but I need to know that you could explain it clearly in court.”
Spanner looked, for the first time, truly intrigued.
“You serious?”
“Very. Would you be able to prove to a defending counsel that you know your stuff?”
“ ’Course I could.”
“Then just give me the important bits.”
Spanner hesitated for a moment, trying to read Strike’s expression. Finally he began:
“Password’s Agyeman, and it was reset five days before she died.”
“Spell it?”
Spanner did so, adding, to Strike’s surprise: “It’s a surname. Ghanaian. She bookmarked the homepage of SOAS—School of Oriental and African Studies—and it was on there. Look here.”
As he spoke, Spanner’s nimble fingers were clacking keyboard keys; he had brought up the home page he described, bordered with bright green, with sections on the school, news, staff, students, library and so on.
“When she died, though, it looked like this.”
And with another outburst of clicking, he retrieved an almost identical page, featuring, as the rapidly darting cursor soon revealed, a link to the obituary of one Professor J. P. Agyeman, Emeritus Professor of African Politics.
“She saved this version of the page,” said Spanner. “And her internet history shows she’d browsed Amazon for his books in the month before she died. She was looking at a lot of books on African history and politics round then.”
“Any evidence she applied to SOAS?”
“Not on here.”
“Anything else of interest?”
“Well, the only other thing I noticed was that a big photo file was deleted off it on the seventeenth of March.”
“How d’you know that?”
“There’s software that’ll help you recover even stuff people think’s gone from the hard drive,” said Spanner. “How d’you think they keep catching all those pedos?”
“Did you get it back?”
“Yeah. I’ve put it on here.” He handed Strike a memory stick. “I didn’t think you’d want me to put it back on.”
“No—so the photographs were…?”
“Nothing fancy. Just deleted. Like I say, your average punter doesn’t realize you’ve got to work a damn sight harder than pressing ‘delete’ if you really want to hide something.”
“Seventeenth of March,” said Strike.
“Yeah. St. Patrick’s Day.”
“Ten weeks after she died.”
“Could’ve been the police,” suggested Spanner.