Dismissing the call from her mind, Robin switched on her computer. She needed to find something she could use to get out of the trip to Scotland on Monday night…
Forty minutes later, she had two sound reasons, which had come so easily she felt as though some kindly fate had reached out through the screen to pat her on the head. Here. You deserve a break.
Robin picked up her phone, then set it down again. She didn’t want to text Strike, because he might call back. Instead she opened email. After considering what salutation she should use, she decided to dispense with one entirely, because he wasn’t her ‘dear’ anything, tonight.
I’ve found out why Todd’s so keen on riding the Circle Line all afternoon. He’s upskirting young girls. He was spotted while I was watching him and was literally chased off the train. In the commotion I lost him.
Robin stopped to think, then typed on.
I’ve been thinking about next week’s trip and it seems pointless for both of us to do Jade Semple when you’re the one who’s persuaded her to talk. I’ve just identified the school Sapphire Neagle was attending before she disappeared and I want to try and talk to a friend of hers on her way in/out of school, and find out what she knows about Oz, if anything.
I’ve also been looking at Valentine Longcaster’s Instagram. He’s been recceing a place called God’s Own Junkyard for a fashion shoot on Tuesday and I know the place. It’s in Walthamstow, not far from me. I think I should go along in person and try and interview him. He might be more likely to talk to me than you.
I’ll drive up to Ironbridge on Wednesday to do Dilys Powell, because I’m the one who’s talked to her previously.
Robin stopped typing again. Her eyes strayed to the noticeboard and she noticed that Strike had taken down the paragraph about Reata Lindvall. Robin knew perfectly well that none of their suspected Wrights had any known connection to Reata Lindvall, or to Belgium, but she was glad to have another reason to be angry at Strike, who’d cavalierly removed the thing she’d stumbled across on Christmas Eve, with her ex-husband standing beside her, and her angry boyfriend in the pub behind her, and Robin’s mind focused, as ever, on the job.
I noticed you’ve taken down the paragraph about Reata Lindvall but as we haven’t got any other leads on who ‘Rita Linda’ might be, could you please ask Jade whether Niall or anyone in the family has either heard of her, or has any connection with Liège?
Robin paused yet again, staring at the screen with stinging eyes, then typed on.
I won’t be able to hang around long in Ironbridge, because Ryan and I are looking at houses together and have got a couple lined up to view next week.
See you Tuesday.
PART FIVE
It was still a case of faith and hope – a case of continual putting in of work and money, and, so far, of getting little out – except the dross which intervened between them and their highest hopes.
57
When the bells justle in the tower
The hollow night amid,
Then on my tongue the taste is sour
Of all I ever did.
Cormoran Strike had been called many things by the women in his life, but ‘stupid’ had never been one of them. Robin’s bald announcement that she and Murphy were setting up home together, the icy tone of her email and the terse work-related texts they exchanged over the following forty-eight hours all told him as plainly as if she’d shouted it in his face that he’d now been issued the unvarnished rebuff he’d been alert for all these months, but which, until now, had never materialised.
Something had changed, but he didn’t know what. Had her anger at his refusal to put surveillance on Albie Simpson-White mounted to white-hot rage since their coffee at Bar Italia? Had Murphy raised objections to their trip north, asking (with some justification) why two of them needed to travel to Scotland to interview a lone woman? Had Strike been oblivious to an accumulation of smaller grievances, symbolised by Robin’s angry reference to his removal of Reata Lindvall from the noticeboard?
He’d called Robin after arriving at the office and hearing the new threatening message, left by the unknown man with the rasping voice, but the call had gone to voicemail. Robin had responded with a brief text, telling him that she was taking all possible precautions. The tone of this message made him wonder whether to try and force a conversation, to send a facile ‘is everything all right?’ text, but long experience of women who were angry at him made him suspect the most he’d get in return was a passive-aggressive ‘fine’. The sordid Bijou business was weighing on his conscience, but Robin couldn’t know anything about that, could she? Ilsa had promised not to tell her, and if Kim had blabbed, Robin would surely have asked him about it? He certainly wasn’t going to tell her about it unforced: he didn’t want to look any more of a feckless, philandering bastard than he already did.
He cancelled his booking at the Lake District hotel, because he was damned if he was going to stare out at Windermere on his own, and at half past eleven on Monday evening, in spite of the self-discipline that usually prevented him drinking alone, Strike clambered aboard the Caledonian Sleeper with two pints of Doom Bar already inside him, and a bottle of Scotch nestling in the holdall he’d packed for his overnight journey to Glasgow.
His cabin was small and overheated. Without taking off his coat, Strike sat down on the lower bunk and downed a plastic cup of neat whisky. The Scotsmen next door were talking so loudly Strike could make out some of the words, mainly ‘ya cunt’ and ‘ya bastard’. It was impossible to tell whether they were bantering or arguing.
Self-disgust and a bleak fatalism had Strike in their grip tonight. It seemed far more likely than it had three days previously that he was, in fact, the father of Bijou’s child. The insurmountable distance between himself and the only woman he wanted was going to be counterbalanced by a tightening of the unwanted bond with a woman he’d never even liked. Wouldn’t that be a fucking funny cosmic joke? He, with his lifelong resentment of a father who’d begotten him accidentally, who’d had to be forced into the most perfunctory parental obligations by a DNA test, now shackled to his own unwanted kid?
Seven years of missed opportunities with Robin; he’d be tallying them up for ever, as a miser counts his pennies. He’d fucked it all up, and it was over: she was going to move in with Murphy, and marry him, and have his kids, and leave the agency, and he, like the gigantic prick that he was, would have to live with it, because he’d been too late to act, too late to recognise what was bloody obvious, and he deserved this misery, deserved the hopelessness engulfing him, because he’d been an arrogant fuckwit who thought she was there for the taking if he chose…