‘I’m happy where I am, Mum.’
‘Robin,’ said Linda, now audibly crying, ‘how long before one of these near misses—?’
Robin felt tears start in her eyes too. She was exhausted, stressed and scared. She understood her mother’s panic and pain, but she was a grown woman of thirty and she was going to make her own decisions now, no matter who it upset, after long years of doing what other people – her parents, Matthew – wanted her to do: the safe, dull and expected thing.
‘Mum,’ she said again, as the cashier began scanning her purchases and she tried to open a plastic bag one-handed, ‘please don’t worry, I—’
‘How d’you expect me not to worry? Your dad’s just out of hospital and we turn on the news—’
Fifteen more minutes passed before Robin was able to terminate the call, by which time she felt still more exhausted and miserable. The prospect of Strike arriving was the only thing that cheered her up as she made her way back up the road, laden with heavy bags of food and drink.
Once back at her flat she busied herself putting away her shopping, sorting out clean bedclothes for the sofa-bed and, in a spirit of defiance against her mother, logging onto Drek’s Game on her iPad, which she left running while she did her various household tasks, checking periodically to see whether Anomie had appeared. She also put the printouts she’d made in the early hours of the morning onto the small table behind the sofa, which had room for three chairs at a pinch.
Atypically for Strike, he arrived exactly when he’d said he would. Robin had barely put the chicken in the oven when the doorbell rang. Robin buzzed him in through the main entrance, and waited for him at the open door of her flat.
‘Evening,’ he said, panting slightly as he reached the top of the stairs.
He handed her a bottle of red wine as he entered the flat.
‘Thanks for letting me stay. Appreciate it.’
‘No trouble at all,’ said Robin, closing the door behind him. Strike took off his coat and hung it on a set of hooks that hadn’t been there on moving day. He had the characteristic drawn expression that meant he was in pain, and as she followed him upstairs, Robin saw that he was using the banister to haul himself upwards.
Strike, who hadn’t seen the flat since Robin had fully finished unpacking, glanced around the sitting room. There were framed photographs on the mantelpiece that hadn’t been there on moving day, and a Raoul Dufy print hanging above them, showing a seascape viewed through two open windows.
‘So,’ said Strike, turning to look at Robin. ‘Ormond.’
‘I know… I bought lager, d’you want some?’
‘Hang on,’ said Strike as Robin turned automatically towards the kitchen, taking his ‘yes’ for granted, ‘which has got more calories, beer or wine?’
She froze in the doorway, astonished.
‘Calories? You?’
‘I’ve got to get some of this weight off,’ said Strike. ‘My leg’s not coping.’
He so rarely mentioned his stump that Robin decided not to exploit the opportunity for humour.
‘Wine,’ she said. ‘Wine’s got fewer calories.’
‘I was afraid you were going to say that,’ said Strike gloomily. ‘D’you mind giving me a glass of that, then?’ he said, nodding at the bottle in her hands, and then, ‘Can I do anything?’
‘No, sit down,’ said Robin. ‘There isn’t anything to do. I’ve just bunged a chicken and some baked potatoes on.’
‘You didn’t need to cook,’ said Strike. ‘We could’ve got a takeaway.’
‘What about the calories?’
‘There is that,’ conceded Strike, lowering himself onto the sofa.
When Robin returned, she handed him a glass of wine, then sat down in an armchair opposite him, positioned her iPad where she could watch the game, from which Anomie was still absent, and said,
‘So, yes. Ormond.’
‘Well,’ said Strike, who’d taken a welcome sip of wine, ‘I can see why they’ve arrested him. He had the phone.’
‘But you don’t think it’s him,’ said Robin.
‘It could be him,’ said Strike, ‘but I’ve got a few queries. I’m sure they’ve occurred to the Met too.’
‘Murphy said the phone might’ve had a tracker on it. Put there by Ormond.’
‘If he’s saying that, I’ll lay you odds he knows it’s on there. Well, if Ormond put a tracker on her phone without her knowing about it, it looks pretty bloody bad for him, doesn’t it? He had the means of locating her and a strong motive for stealing the mobile after killing her, to remove the tracking app.’
Strike set down his wine on the table beside the sofa, opened his rucksack and, to Robin’s surprise, took out a pack she recognised, after combing Boots for them that morning, as an e-cigarette.
‘You’re not trying to give up smoking?’ she asked incredulously. She’d assumed Strike would die with a Benson & Hedges clamped between his teeth.
‘Thinking about it,’ he said, ripping off the cellophane as he spoke. ‘Never had one of these…
‘So,’ said Strike returning to the main point as he began to put the e-cigarette together, ‘let’s say, for the sake of argument, Ormond’s taking his detention at school, checks the tracking app and sees Edie’s heading for the cemetery. He’s suspicious. He’s sure she’s meeting Blay. He tells the kid who’s in detention that he’s got to go, and he threatens the kid with a week’s worth of detentions to stop her telling anyone he left early… Well, that’s a hell of a shaky alibi, for a start. I wouldn’t want to pin my hopes of getting away with murder on a schoolgirl I’d put in detention.’
‘Maybe he wasn’t planning to kill Edie when he set out.’
‘But he slipped a machete into his briefcase, just in case?’
‘OK, good point,’ said Robin, suppressing a yawn. ‘Where’s Ormond’s school, in relation to the cemetery?’
‘Close to The Flask, where I interviewed him. Very short walk. If he took the Fiesta, he could’ve got to the cemetery within minutes.’
Both sat in silence, thinking, while Strike filled the e-cigarette with nicotine fluid and Robin checked the game: still no Anomie. At last, she said:
‘Is it possible the man Blay passed in the cemetery – the big bald guy we think was in disguise – was Ormond?’
‘Theoretically possible,’ said Strike, as he screwed the top onto his e-cigarette, ‘but there are logistical issues. Did he take the disguise to work, on the off chance he was going to commit murder? And where did he put it on? Be bloody risky to do it at school. If he was taking a detention, there were probably other staff members around.’
‘Does he live in Highgate?’
‘No. Finchley.’
‘So the phone moving onto Hampstead Heath needs explaining too,’ said Robin. ‘Surely, if he’d just stabbed Edie and Josh he’d get back in his car and get out of there as fast as possible, not take a detour to Number One Pond?
‘It’s funny, though, isn’t it?’ she went on, ‘because the police initially thought whoever had the phone went to Number One Pond to throw it away, and Ormond did end up throwing the phone in a pond – just a different one.’
‘Which is interesting, I agree,’ said Strike. ‘What made him decide to dispose of the phone in a pond? Maybe it was finding it beside a pond in the first place. Maybe that planted a subliminal idea.’
‘You think he tracked the phone onto the Heath and found it lying in the grass?’
‘That’s one possibility. The other is that he found himself face to face with whoever had taken it.’
‘Why wouldn’t he tell the police that?’