‘Do you love me?’
‘Yes,’ she said automatically.
‘The house—’
‘We need to withdraw the offer,’ said Robin. She’d thought that through as well, while he’d been picking up his phone from whichever pub or bar he’d been in, unless he really had gone to the gym and sat in the café, drinking neat vodka, pretending to be rehydrating after exercise.
‘No,’ said Murphy. ‘Robin, please—’
‘You need to focus on getting sober,’ said Robin. ‘We’re not adding moving house to everything else that’s going on. I’ll call you when I’ve—’
‘Decided how to break it to me gently that it’s over?’ said Murphy, starting to sob again. ‘Robin, don’t go. Please don’t leave. I swear, I’m going to clean up—’
‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow,’ said Robin. She shouldered her holdall and headed out of the front door.
92
My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore…
Strike assumed Robin was having too good an evening with Murphy to bother picking up his call, which somewhat blunted his sense of triumph about his unexpected Barnaby’s epiphany. Tired, but with no desire to go home and be depressed in his attic, he had decided to head for Harlesden and the last known address of Jim Todd’s mother, Nancy Jameson, née Philpott.
Forty minutes after leaving Carnival Road, he pulled up in a car park flanked on three sides by low-rise blocks of flats. Even in semi-darkness, Magdalen Court looked a dismal place; Strike would have chosen Carnival Street and a view of the scrapyard before this. Litter was strewn everywhere. A small patch of dead grass beside Strike’s parking space was covered in cigarette ends. Graffiti covered several grey walls. The buildings were of concrete and in their diluted brutalism looked like cheap homages to the National Theatre. Long grey balconies stretched across each floor, doors set at regular intervals. Squinting upwards, Strike saw Nancy Jameson’s flat, number 39, illuminated on the second floor of the middle block. A light was on in her window.
A group of five youths stood vaping a short distance away from where Strike had parked, all eyeing the BMW speculatively. Two of the youths were white, two brown and the last black. Strike headed straight for them, entering a fug of cannabis vapour.
‘There’s a fiver in it for each of you if that car’s in the same state I left it in when I get back downstairs.’
‘Wha’?’ said one of the white boys blearily; he had long, dry peroxided hair and was wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the words WACKEN OPEN AIR.
‘Yeah, all right,’ said the black youth, who was tall, wiry, and wore no jacket over his Snoop Dogg T-shirt, in spite of the chilliness of the evening.
Strike headed for the stairwell visible on the corner of the middle building. The interior walls were graffitied, too, and someone had recently either thrown a takeaway curry over the banisters, or vomited. Strike, who’d lived in places like this with his mother, offered up an inner prayer of gratitude that he no longer had to.
He reached the second-floor balcony and knocked on the door of flat 39. Nobody answered.
Glancing down into the forecourt he saw the five youths staring up at him.
‘D’you know Nancy Jameson?’ he called down at them.
One of the two South Asian boys, who had a patchy beard, called back,
‘She’ll be pissed.’
His companions laughed. Strike knocked again. Nobody answered.
He moved to look through the window, but the very dirty net curtains made it almost impossible to make out more than the fact that a lamp was switched on. Nevertheless, after watching for a few seconds, he thought he saw a movement in the corner of the room.
He returned to the front door and knocked a third time. There was no response. He returned to the car park.
‘You know Nancy, do you?’ he asked the bearded youth, as he approached the group.
‘Yeah, she’s a right old bitch,’ said the teenager, to mutters of agreement and laughs from his friends.
‘Seen her lately?’
The boy shook his head.
‘Any of you?’ said Strike, looking around the group.
‘I seen her,’ said the second white boy, who was wearing a Millwall football strip. ‘Wiv a fat bloke.’
‘Younger than herself?’
The boy shrugged. Strike remembered being that age himself; everyone over forty looked decrepit.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I have reason to believe Nancy might’ve done herself an injury and is unable to open the front door.’
It was a flimsy excuse, but as the youths would be witnesses to what he was doing in any case, Strike thought he might as well lay the foundation of a defence now. He returned to his car and extracted his bunch of skeleton keys from the glove compartment.
‘You gonna break in?’ said the bearded youth, in interest.
‘It’s not breaking in,’ lied Strike.
‘Can we come?’ said the youth in the Millwall top.
‘Worried about Nancy too, are you?’ said Strike.
‘Yeah,’ said the second of the South Asian boys, who alone was wearing a coat, and whose acne looked painful. ‘We’ve been dead worried.’
‘And you think I ought to get in there and check on her, do you?’ said Strike, still thinking of what he might have to tell a lawyer.
The boy with acne laughed.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Def’nitely.’
Strike supposed it was the skeleton keys that interested them, or perhaps they wanted to witness the old woman’s drunken outrage at a stranger entering her flat. He doubted there was much else to do in Magdalen Court on a Sunday night in February.
‘I need at least one of you to keep an eye on my car,’ he said.
‘Does the one minding the car get the whole twenny-five quid?’ asked the black youth.
‘No, but he gets an extra fiver,’ said Strike.
‘Awright then, I’ll stay,’ said the boy.
So Strike traipsed back upstairs, the two white boys and the two South Asian boys following in his wake.
‘That was Baggy,’ he heard one of the boys saying to another, pointing at the curry or vomit splattered at the foot of the stairs, and they all chuckled.
Strike knocked a fourth time on Nancy’s flat door without result, so he inserted the key in the lock and turned it. No inside chain had been put up, so he wasn’t obliged to shoulder the door or break any part of it.
‘What’s that fucking smell?’ said the bearded youth, pushing forwards, but finding himself impeded by the arm Strike had just thrown up.
‘Stay here,’ said the detective firmly. ‘Do not come in.’
The unmistakeable, sickly sweet smell of decaying flesh had just assaulted his nostrils. He could hear the buzzing of flies.
‘Stay,’ he said firmly to the youths, and he proceeded down the narrow hall to look through the open door to his right, where the lamp was still switched on and where an incredibly emaciated cat let out a piteous miaow, trotted past him and escaped onto the balcony.
The bodies of Jim Todd and a woman Strike assumed to be his mother, Nancy, were lying on the dirty carpet in a foul miasma encouraged by the gas fire that continued to blaze. Todd, who was fully dressed, had been stabbed multiple times. His now black blood had soaked his shirt and the floor beneath him. There was evidence that the starving cat had chewed off part of his face. Nancy, a small, slight woman in a nightdress, had been killed with a single knife wound to the chest. The tache noire, a horizontal stripe, was visible in her dull, staring eyes, in one of which a maggot was wriggling.