‘The man or the Scottish woman?’
‘Man,’ said Strike. ‘Apparently he said, “Stop, or you’ll be refined like silver in the furnace of affliction.” Pat took it down in shorthand, so it’s accurate. I’ve looked it up, and it’s a rough approximation of a quote from the Bible, about Elijah.’
‘Right,’ said Robin.
Strike now clicked on the link to a second-hand Land Rover she’d sent him with her email.
‘The Defender 90 looks good,’ he said. ‘Want to go and see it?’
‘Yes, OK,’ said Robin. ‘I could go on Sunday afternoon. Is that everything?’
‘Yeah, I think so.’
Robin hung up without saying goodbye. Strike set down his mobile, feeling slightly more depressed than he had before phoning her.
He’d barely settled back to work when his phone rang. Wardle was calling to say that their planned curry in town that night would have to be postponed, because Wardle’s ex-wife had unexpectedly required him to look after their eighteen-month-old son. The policeman intimated that the few bits of information he had for Strike could just as easily be told by phone, but Strike chose not to take the hint, announcing that he’d bring a takeaway curry round at seven that night, to discuss Wardle’s findings in person.
Friends though they were, this would be the first time Strike had ever visited Wardle at home. Their mutual liking, which had been fostered in spite of initial mutual suspicion, had grown through the years, but they’d rarely had a conversation that could be called truly personal; indeed, Strike couldn’t offhand think of any men with whom he had deeply personal conversations. However, he was well-enough acquainted with Wardle to know that things must be bad indeed for him to admit to being off work with depression, and knew, too, that the man’s recent misfortunes – the death of his brother, the departure of his wife, the move into a bachelor flat, shared custody of his small son, all on top of a highly demanding job – had given him ample cause. The memories of two suicides he’d investigated in the military hovered in the back of Strike’s mind. Both the men had seemed to be coping until suddenly they were dead, and so he made the trip into Brixton that evening, sore as his leg was, and in spite of his own troubles.
As he left the curry house at six with his takeaway in his hand his mobile rang and, with strong misgivings, he saw Bijou’s number.
‘Oh, thank God,’ she said when he answered, a tinge of hysteria in her voice. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but you’ve got to take a DNA test. You’ve got to.’
‘Have I, now?’
‘Andrew’s daring me to take him to court, but he says, if I do’ – Bijou started sobbing again – ‘he’ll go straight to some journalist called Colin Pepper and say he’s sure she’s yours!’
‘So he’ll break his own super-injunction?’ said Strike, who was having the not unfamiliar sensation that a hot wire was tightening around his head.
‘He’s being awful, he’s convinced Ottolie’s yours – if I can just show him proof – PLEASE!’ she wailed. ‘This is for you as much as for me!’
Strike, who had the horrible feeling she was right, watched an oncoming double decker speeding towards him and, for a fraction of a second, imagined stepping out in front of it, and erasing himself and every problem along with him, of being lost in black nothingness, in a state of blissful non-being, but the bus passed, and Strike limped on, and he couldn’t even muster anger as he said,
‘All right. D’you want me to get a kit?’
‘No, I’ll buy them, but we’ll have to meet so I can get the sample from you, and I’ll take mine and Ottolie’s at the same time.’
‘You’re being watched,’ Strike reminded her.
‘I haven’t seen anyone—’
‘Because they’re good at what they do, not because they’re not bloody there,’ said Strike. ‘This needs thinking about. I’ll call you back when I’ve got a plan.’
He hung up and walked on, trying to shove aside his own multitude of problems, the better to concentrate on Wardle’s.
The policeman’s flat was in a modern block on Brixton Water Lane. Strike buzzed the intercom and climbed two flights of stairs, which did his aching stump little good, and found Wardle waiting in the doorway with his sleepy, pyjama-ed eighteen-month-old son in his arms. This sight gave Strike an extremely unwelcome vision of himself trying to entertain a daughter in his attic flat, so as to enable Bijou to go out on the town, in pursuit of another wealthy potential husband.
‘He’ll go down soon,’ said Wardle and, slightly to Strike’s surprise – his experience of small children was that their bedtimes were haphazard and often involved a lot of protests and grizzling – Wardle’s son did indeed settle quickly in the spare bedroom, while Strike was in the kitchen, prising lids off plastic tubs of curry. The jingling music of a cartoon was issuing from the sitting room.
The kitchen was as clean and tidy as Strike would have expected, but Wardle had made no effort to make the place homely or to change what Strike guessed was pre-existing décor, because he doubted the policeman would have chosen tiles patterned with root vegetables.
‘Cheers for this,’ said Wardle, sitting down at the table. ‘How much do I owe you?’
‘It’s on me,’ said Strike. ‘Payment for information soon to be received.’
‘Well, you’ve pissed the murder investigation team off, big time.’
‘How’ve I done that?’ said Strike, helping himself to naan bread.
‘Those witnesses, Wright’s neighbours. Daz and someone.’
‘Mandy, yeah. What about them?’
‘They’re denying they told you anything.’
‘Ah,’ said Strike.
He wasn’t surprised. Daz and Mandy’s immediate, reflexive reaction to being called on by police a second time would, he was certain, be to deny everything, without pausing to consider that they could be storing up far more serious trouble for themselves in continuing to deny that they’d hidden evidence from the police.
‘And one of them let it slip that you’d given them money.’
‘Which they took, in exchange for the information. Does the Met think I shower banknotes on people with nothing to tell me?’
‘I’m just warning you,’ said Wardle, ‘that’s the line the team’s taking, that you’re trying to build up your rep by pretending to have found stuff they didn’t.’
‘So nobody’s following up Oz and Sofia Medina?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ said Wardle. ‘One of the women on the team – name’s Iverson – thinks Daz and Mandy told you the truth and that it’s worth looking into the Oz bloke. Murphy knows Iverson,’ he added. ‘Knows her bloody well, actually.’
Strike felt a flicker of interest unrelated to the case.
‘Yeah?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ said Wardle. ‘They had a good grope in the pub a while back.’
‘How long ago was this?’ asked Strike, trying to sound casual.
‘Back when he was splitting up with his wife,’ said Wardle, and the tiny shoot of – not exactly hope, but something resembling it – withered and died inside Strike. ‘I told you before, he was a proper arsehole when he was drinking, nothing in a skirt was safe. He’s been in a bloody bad mood lately, apparently. Iverson says, if she didn’t know better, she’d think he was drinking again. Mind, he’d have good reason.’
Much as Strike would have liked to believe Murphy had fallen off the wagon he thought that was too much to hope for.
‘Why’d he have good reason?’ he asked.
‘He was on that gangland shooting, with the kids.’
‘So I heard.’