‘Don’t you want to put Dilys’s mind at rest?’ asked Robin.
‘That old cow badmouths me, I don’t give a shit whether ’er mind’s at rest or not,’ said Jones. ‘Tell you what—’
Jones’ friend had started laughing harder than ever, although the punchline hadn’t yet been delivered. Robin thought she knew what was coming; it had become ever more likely since that first drooling emoji. Jones either didn’t know Powell’s whereabouts, or had promised his friend he would keep his secrets. He was boorish and childish, and a woman he was unlikely ever to meet was good only for amusing himself and his mates with.
‘—show us your tits and I’ll give ya—’
Robin ended the call.
She slumped back in her chair and rubbed her tired eyes. She couldn’t help thinking that Powell’s friendship with the crudely offensive Jones tended to add weight to the portrait of him given by Chloe and Zeta, rather than the one offered by Dilys and Griffiths. Opening her eyes again, Robin looked back down at her notebook.
For some reason, she was experiencing a tiny, nagging doubt, but she didn’t know why. Had she just missed something, failed to make an important connection? She read back over her notes, but couldn’t see anything obvious, so she tried to remember everything Jones had said, aside from the bits she’d thought important enough to transcribe. Dilys thinks Jones pretending to be Tyler. Bracelet for Chloe. Zeta, Rita, who’s next, Peter? Apeton. Wesley Road.
Robin heard the door of the flat open and close; Murphy had returned. He entered the room seconds later, rummaging in his gym bag.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake – I’ve left my phone at the fucking gym.’
‘Here,’ said Robin, holding out her own.
Murphy called his own phone and, after a brief conversation, hung up.
‘They’ve got it at the front desk. Shall I pick up a curry on my way back?’
‘That’d be great,’ said Robin, yawning.
Murphy departed again. Robin sat thinking about Tyler Powell, for whom she’d never found any social media. Turning back to her laptop, she opened both Twitter and Instagram and began searching for variations on the names ‘Lugs’ and ‘Powell’.
After twenty minutes, she found an Instagram account she thought might, possibly, have been Tyler’s: LugzCarz. It featured nothing but pictures of vintage motors interspersed with photos of engines on which the person posting was working. The account had few followers, but two things made Robin suspect it was Powell’s: there had been no additions since May of the previous year, when Powell had left Ironbridge under a cloud of suspicion, and beneath a picture of a 1965 Austin-Healey Mark III somebody had replied: fuck off posting cars like we don’t know what you did. However, as far as clues to Powell’s current whereabouts went, the account was useless.
Robin closed down the website, stretched and got to her feet.
Murphy had left his gym bag behind. It had leaked a puddle of clear fluid. Evidently he hadn’t put the lid of his water bottle on securely enough.
Robin opened the bag, to find a tangle of damp gym clothes. Sure enough, the bottle contained only dregs, and the top wasn’t properly screwed back on.
A faint smell made her sniff her fingers. Unable to believe the evidence of her nose, Robin put her index finger into her mouth.
Still crouched, tasting pure spirit, she felt again that icy wave of shock she’d felt on finding the diamond stud that had flown from the bedclothes in that house in Deptford, the day she’d left Matthew for good. She thought of the upswing in gym sessions and runs that she’d imagined were doing Murphy so much good. She recalled Christmas Eve, when she’d thought, if she hadn’t known better, he’d been drinking, like her brothers. She remembered the night of their worst row.
Blank-faced, she fetched kitchen roll and mopped up the spilled excess on the floor, then set the water bottle, with its incriminating dregs, on the coffee table. She stood for another minute, staring at it, then headed into the kitchen, where she made a methodical search of the cupboards that turned up no spirits whatsoever.
The sky outside was dark; she hadn’t noticed night falling. She headed into the bedroom and opened Murphy’s wardrobe. Presumably her boyfriend had searched other people’s cupboards and drawers in a professional capacity, but private detectives rarely if ever got to rifle through the personal belongings of suspects.
Robin had to stand on tiptoe to access the top shelf. Behind a pile of T-shirts and a small box of foreign currency and old charging leads was a hessian bag that clinked when she touched it. She tugged it down, already certain of what she was about to see.
There were six bottles of vodka inside, one of them almost empty.
90
Yet something seemed to prick
And tingle in his blood; a sleight—a trick—
And much would be explained.
Strike was, yet again, back in Carnival Street in Haringey, watching the house where Plug’s friends were keeping the gigantic black dog. He was starting to feel a lot of sympathy for the client’s view that it was outrageous Plug hadn’t been arrested yet. Strike wasn’t overly sentimental about animals; with the sole exception of a snake he’d once succeeded in catching as a boy, he’d never felt the urge for a pet. Nevertheless, what he’d witnessed at the dog fight, and seen of Plug since, had convinced him the sadistic bastard deserved a prison sentence, as soon as possible, thereby freeing both his mother and his son from his bullying and coercion.
Strike was currently standing in a patch of deep shadow beneath a non-functioning street lamp, vaping and waiting for the reappearance of his target. Stars appeared gradually above him, a little more visible than they might have been in a better lit street, though by no means as bright as they’d been when viewed from Sark. Preferring not to brood about the night at the Old Forge, Strike crossed the road and found himself another patch of shadow on the pavement outside the junkyard. A large sign proclaimed that the place was called Brian Judge Scrap and its border fence ran the length of the road. Strike could see the tops of heaps of compacted metal. He wondered whether Robin’s old Land Rover had been consigned to such a metal cemetery.
A rusted van passed and pulled up at the entrance of the yard. The driver killed the lights, got out and went to speak into the intercom beside the gate.
As the man’s face was illuminated by the security light over the gate, Strike had the strange feeling he’d seen him somewhere before. He was smaller than average, hairy, fortyish, very dark and not particularly good-looking. Strike had the idea he’d once seen the man wearing a suit and tie rather than the grubby sweatshirt and jeans he was currently sporting, and that he’d been walking along with a group of similarly smartly attired others, but when or where this might have happened, he couldn’t think.
Chains clinked from within the yard. The gates began to open. The driver got back into the van, leaving the lights off, and drove inside. The gates closed again.
Where the hell had he seen that man before? At a wedding? A funeral? He associated him vaguely with church, but Strike hadn’t set foot in a church more than a handful of times in the past ten years. The dark man most certainly hadn’t attended either Ted’s or Joan’s funerals, nor had he been present in the empty church Strike had spent part of the morning he’d learned that Charlotte was dead.