Telling himself Interpol had enough experts trying to track down forgers and paedophiles without his assistance, he now searched for Daesh execution videos, thinking of the secret mission that had cost Niall Semple his best friend.
Each of the films Strike began methodically opening carried the black and white flag of Islamic State in the corner, bearing a white circle containing, in Arabic, ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohamed is his messenger’. Strike was reminded of the captured Daesh flag he’d seen at the SAS headquarters in Hereford, which was framed, and facing a captured WW2 swastika on the opposite wall. In Strike’s view, there was nothing to choose between the two groups. The Nazis had visited unspeakable atrocities on their own people, as well as non-Germans; Daesh murdered many more Muslims than Westerners, and both groups were sadistic beyond the imagination of most human beings. Death was insufficient punishment in their eyes: opponents must also suffer extreme indignity, humiliation, terror and pain before the job was considered done.
He watched, blank faced, as men were burned, shot, beheaded and drowned. The filming was expert: Daesh wanted the world to know precisely how terrifyingly devoid of human empathy they were. Corpses were thrown by jeering masked men into a deep natural abyss in north Syria called al-Hota. Strike’s Arabic was too rudimentary to understand what they were saying, but they appeared to be making a game of it, trying to dislodge a corpse stuck on a ledge with a second man’s body. He’d seen al-Hota once, many years before. Local legends were told of the monster that lived in its depths.
Feeling vaguely sickened, he closed down his laptop at exactly the moment his mobile rang. Wardle was calling him.
‘Heads-up,’ said the ex-policeman, who sounded rather perplexed. ‘She’s about to ring the office doorbell.’
‘Who is?’ said Strike, confused.
The bell rang in the outer office.
98
Lovers’ ills are all to buy:
The wan look, the hollow tone,
The hung head, the sunken eye,
You can have them for your own.
‘I’m sure she hasn’t clocked me,’ said Wardle, who sounded worried.
Strike turned off Tom Waits, headed out of the inner office, closing the dividing door behind him so as to conceal the whisky, the books and the plans of Wild Court.
‘How did she get here?’ he asked.
‘Cab,’ said Wardle. ‘Got out on Charing Cross Road – I thought it might be coincidence, but—’
The doorbell rang a second time.
‘I might need you to follow her after she’s left,’ said Strike, ‘so hang around.’
He ended the call, then pressed the button on the intercom.
‘Strike,’ he said.
‘I know,’ said a female voice. ‘I want to talk to you.’
‘All right,’ he said, ‘buzzing you in now.’
He turned on the light in the outer office. While waiting for his unexpected guest to appear, Strike saw movement out of the corner of his eye: the ugly black goldfish with the knobbly growth on its head was floating at the water’s surface, flapping its fins helplessly, belly upwards.
The silhouette of Mrs Two-Times appeared on the landing. Strike opened the glass door.
‘Have a seat,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ she said in a tight voice, walking past him and sitting down on the sofa.
As might have been expected from a woman who spent most of her days shopping for clothes, having manicures and blow dries, she was immaculately dressed and groomed, wearing a coat made of what looked like satin, a form-fitting cream dress and high, strappy black heels. Yet she wasn’t quite as good-looking up close as she appeared at a distance. Her features were small and undistinguished, but she was living testimony to what money, skill and good taste can do for a woman’s appearance: her figure disciplined through diet, her expensively streaked, caramel-coloured hair flattering her skin, her eyes expertly made up to appear twice their natural size.
‘I found out this morning he’s paying you to follow me,’ she said, still in a tight little voice. ‘I recognised the bank account number.’
‘Really?’ said Strike, who could tell denials would be pointless. ‘How?’
‘I used to be his PA. He made me check the standing order to you, once. I made a note of the bank account number. That was when he was with that foreign girl.’
‘The Russian,’ said Strike. ‘Yes.’
‘I wondered whether he’d do it to me, too. Does he really think I’m playing around?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Strike, which was true, as far as it went. He wasn’t about to mention his theory about her husband’s sexual peculiarities. ‘I’ve assured him you haven’t given any sign of infidelity.’
‘Hm,’ she said, her eyes travelling over the office before coming back to rest on Strike, her gaze calculating. ‘OK, well, I’ve been trying to think what to do.’
Strike, who detected a threatening undertone in these words, moved behind Pat’s desk and sat down in her computer chair.
‘I know he’s playing around on me,’ said Mrs Two-Times.
‘Ah,’ said Strike.
‘Escorts,’ she said. ‘I recognise that bank account, too. There’s a place he’s always liked; he’s been using it for years. That’s why he’s always happy for me to go out with my friends.’
The question of why she’d married such a man had barely surfaced in Strike’s mind before he answered it himself. The designer clothes, the immaculate hair, the long lunches, the giggling exchanges with handsome waiters: presumably these sweetened the strange deal she’d made.
‘He’s kind of well known in his field,’ she said, now examining her perfectly manicured nails. ‘I could cause a lot of trouble for him, if I dragged you into it. It’d mean loads of publicity and he wouldn’t be able to use you to spy on his girlfriends any more, would he?’
Strike’s feeling of foreboding intensified.
‘Or,’ she said, looking up, ‘you could start watching him for me, instead. Get proof of the escorts. I wouldn’t tell him I’d used you and I quite like the idea of him footing the bills for me to get evidence for a nice fat divorce settlement.’
‘That’d certainly be a neat solution,’ said Strike.
‘You agree, then?’ she said.
‘Yeah, I think we could shake on that.’
She got up, took a pen out of the pot on Pat’s desk and wrote her mobile number on a Post-it note.
‘I’d like weekly updates,’ she said, tearing it off and handing it to him.
‘Fine,’ said Strike.
They shook hands. Hers was cold.
‘I didn’t think it’d last,’ she said. ‘Men don’t change, do they?’
‘Well… not often,’ said Strike.
She glanced over at the aquarium.
‘I think your fish is dying.’
Strike waited on the landing until he heard the street door open and close, then called Wardle.
‘Let her go,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t your fault. She’s smarter than him, that’s all. Come up and have a drink if you want one, I’ve got whisky open.’
Five minutes later, Wardle arrived in the outer office, to which Strike had already brought his bottle of Arran Single Malt.
‘Does that happen often?’ Wardle asked, when Strike had told him what Mrs Two-Times had said.