He raised himself a little on the pillows, incredibly handsome in the half-light. (Who’s the Paul Newman lookalike?)
‘Robin, I’m sorry,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Come here.’
‘Not now,’ she said, fighting tears. ‘I need to wash and clean my teeth, I’m disgusting.’
‘You’re never disgusting.’
‘Let me get clean,’ she said, and then she ducked down to her almost empty holdall, groped for Strike’s present, which lay hidden beneath her slippers, stood up with the box concealed by her robe, and left the room.
The house was silent. Robin shut herself in the bathroom and locked the door. She’d have liked to shower, but she feared waking Annabel, so she stripped off and washed, put on her pyjamas and cleaned her teeth for twice as long as usual, until no taste of whisky remained. Her head had begun to throb, but at least the floor remained steady beneath her feet, and the walls stationary.
Having pulled on her robe, she sat down on the edge of the bath and picked up Strike’s present, which was covered in blue paper patterned with small gold stars. She could tell he’d wrapped it himself, because it was lumpy. He’d used too much Sellotape. He was awful at wrapping presents.
But when she tore off the paper, she saw what was unmistakeably a jeweller’s box, made of thick pale blue card. Slowly, as though the contents might explode, she took off the lid.
A thick silver chain bracelet, from which hung seven charms, lay on a bed of black foam, and Robin recognised the middle charm immediately: it was the masonic orb she’d admired in Ramsay Silver. She stared, transfixed, unaware that her mouth was open. Then she lifted the bracelet out of its box, and amazed as she was, she could follow Strike’s thought process perfectly. He’d gone back for the orb, and someone, maybe Kenneth Ramsay, had tried to sell him more charms – make it a bracelet! – and that had given him the idea, but he hadn’t been content to buy a job lot from Ramsay; instead, he’d painstakingly built this, and it was like Strike, in that it was a bit clunky and inelegant, the charms mis-matched, but there was so much thought in every one of them: private jokes and shared memories, incommunicable to anyone but the two of them.
A silver Land Rover, representing the car which perhaps only Strike would miss as much as she did; the Houses of Parliament, where she’d worked undercover and planted a bug every bit as legally suspect as the one for which Mitch Patterson had been arrested (she’d never told Murphy that); a miniature enamelled shield bearing the coat of arms for Skegness, where they’d once eaten chips together, and joked about donkey rides, and interviewed the key witness in a thirty-year-old murder case; a silver sheep (‘What does your dad do for a living? You’ve never told me.’ ‘He’s a professor of sheep medicine, production and reproduction… why’s that funny?’); a tiny pair of silver scales (‘That’s Libra, it’s my sign, I used to have a keyring with that on it.’ ‘Yeah, well, I’m team rational.’); a silver and enamel robin, the newest and brightest charm of them all, for her name, and, perhaps, for Christmas; and in the middle of them all, what she didn’t doubt had been the most expensive of the lot, barring the chain itself: the little silver orb, with its ornate catch which, when released, unfurled into the jointed masonic cross, and she’d raised it close to her eyes to examine the symbols inscribed inside before she realised she couldn’t see, because of the tears now pouring down her cheeks.
What did you do that for? she thought, and she slid off the side of the bath onto the floor and sobbed quietly into her knees, two patches of tears spreading on her pyjama bottoms, the bracelet clutched in her hand.
It took Robin several long minutes to regain control of herself, and then she examined each charm again, twice over, thinking that nothing else anyone gave her today (because it must now be Christmas Day) could possibly mean as much to her; not diamonds, not a new Land Rover: nothing. She knew how much hard work Cormoran Strike would have put into this, he who found present-giving an onerous chore, who found it inexplicable that anyone would remember what anyone liked, or wore, but he’d remembered all of this, and he wanted her to know he remembered it, and oh God, I love him, thought Robin, and then another voice in her head said sternly,
No, you don’t.
I do, I do…
You’re still drunk.
Wiping her eyes on the hem of her robe, Robin reached out for her phone. She didn’t care if she woke him, didn’t care if he wondered what she was doing awake and texting him, in the early hours of Christmas Day, when she ought to be in bed with her boyfriend.
Thank you. I love it so much xxxxx
And two hundred and fifty miles away in his sister’s spare room in Bromley, sleepless, suffering heartburn and gas after too much lager, and grumpy after what was probably the worst party he’d ever attended, Cormoran Strike heard his mobile vibrate and reached for it in the dark. Looking down at Robin’s text, Christmas, and the unusual opportunities it afforded you, if you were prepared, at last, to put in the work, suddenly seemed a wonderful thing.
I’m glad, he typed, and then, slowly, painstakingly, he added a kiss for every one of hers.
PART FOUR
And all putting in and getting nothing out results in stressful times, in business ventures as in the case of individuals. The great shafts sank deeper and deeper, the galleries branched out far under the sea, and there was a constant call for more and more money, lest that already sunk should be lost.
42
In every man’s career are certain points
Whereon he dares not be indifferent;
The world detects him clearly, if he dare,
As baffled at the game, and losing life…
Thus, he should wed the woman he loves most
Or needs most, whatsoe’er the love or need…
Strike spent New Year’s Eve on surveillance in the Stapleton Tavern in Haringey, watching Plug drink in the new year with a group of equally rough-looking friends. He used the time productively. He and Jade Semple had been in intermittent text contact ever since Lucy’s party, and they continued to text backwards and forwards tonight. She was very obviously drunk again. Although she continued to insist that she no longer believed her husband had been the body in the vault, her readiness to keep communicating with Strike suggested a lurking doubt. Strike hoped he might, through sheer persistence, be on the verge of securing a face-to-face interview with her.
He was determined not to pass up the chance of securing an evening alone with Robin in a decent restaurant, hundreds of miles away from Murphy or any other fucker who wanted to interrupt. Of course, if he declared himself and Robin shot him down, the rest of the round trip would be singularly uncomfortable, but there’d always be reasons not to risk it. If the worst happened, he’d simply have to deal with it. He’d accommodated the loss of half a leg, after all.