A whisper spoke into her ear, each word carefully enunciated.
‘I… am… going… to… kill… you.’
The line went dead.
93
My clothes are wet, and my teeth are set,
And the way was hard and long…
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!
Strike’s leg was now hurting him so badly he stopped to rest for fifty minutes on a bench at Victoria Station. Telling himself his leg felt a lot better, and that joining the queue for a taxi would be just as onerous as continuing the journey by Tube, he limped back into the Underground, then let two trains pass, because he needed to give his stump a rest before asking it to bear his weight again. By the time he emerged from Tottenham Court Station, night was falling and he was barely restraining himself from saying ‘fuck’ aloud on alternate steps. He now felt as though splinters of glass were digging into his stump and he could no longer distinguish whether they were due to his cramping muscles or his white-hot hamstring. Bitterly regretting the decision not to bring a walking stick with him, and sweating with the effort of keeping himself moving forwards, he found himself mentally offering bargains to a God he wasn’t at all sure he believed in. I’ll lose weight. I’ll stop smoking. Just let me get home. I swear I’ll take better care of myself. Just don’t let me collapse in the fucking street.
He was afraid his stump was about to give way again and that he’d have to endure the humiliation of collapsing into a heap in public. It had happened once before, and he knew perfectly well what the sequel would be, because he wasn’t a frail old lady to whom instinctive aid was offered by strangers: surly-looking, bulky, forty-year-old men of six foot three didn’t automatically engender trust in the breasts of the public; they were assumed to be drunk or dangerous, and even passing taxi drivers tended to turn a blind eye to large men gesturing frantically from the gutter.
To his relief, he made it out of Tottenham Court Road station, still upright. Now he leaned back against the wall, taking deep breaths of night air, and keeping all his weight on his healthy left foot while his heart rate slowed, and a procession of lucky bastards with two fully functioning legs walked glibly past him. He was tempted to hobble to The Tottenham, but that would merely provide a temporary respite: what he needed was to get back to Denmark Street, and if he managed to crawl up the three flights of stairs, there’d be ice-packs in the fridge and painkillers in the cupboard, and he’d be able to take off the prosthesis, sit comfortably in his pants and swear as loudly as he liked.
Purely to justify standing still a few minutes longer, and determined not to smoke, he pulled his mobile out of his pocket, glanced at it and saw, to his slight surprise, a text from Robin.
Got good news. Call me when you can.
He couldn’t have explained why, but it seemed to him that he might be able to walk more comfortably if he were talking to Robin at the same time, so he pressed her number, then pushed himself off the friendly supporting wall and began to limp off down Charing Cross Road, phone pressed to his ear.
‘Hi,’ she said, answering on the second ring.
‘What’s the good news?’ he asked, trying not to grit his teeth.
‘I’ve identified Paperwhite.’
‘What?’ said Strike, and for a few steps the pain in his leg did indeed seem to lessen. ‘How?’
Robin explained, and Strike forced himself to concentrate, and when she’d finished speaking he said, with as much enthusiasm as he could muster while in this degree of pain:
‘Pure fucking brilliance, Ellacott.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, and he didn’t notice how flat she sounded, because he was concentrating on not breathing too heavily.
‘We could send Barclay up to talk to her,’ said Strike. ‘His neck of the woods, Glasgow.’
‘Yes, I thought that too,’ said Robin, who, like her partner, was trying hard to sound natural. ‘Er – something else just happened.’
‘Sorry?’ said Strike, because a double-decker bus was thundering past.
‘Something else just happened,’ repeated Robin loudly. ‘I just got a call, diverted from the office. It was somebody who said they’re going to kill me.’
‘What?’
Strike stumbled to the side of the pavement, away from the traffic and the passers-by, and stood still, a finger in his free ear, listening.
‘They were whispering. I think it was a man, but I can’t be a hundred per cent. They said “I am going to kill you”, and hung up.’
‘Right,’ said Strike, and colleagues in the military would have recognised the peremptory tone that brooked no argument. ‘Pack up now. You need to get back to the Z Hotel.’
‘No,’ said Robin, who was now pacing her small sitting room, which satisfied her need to work off her adrenalin. ‘I’m better off here. The alarm’s on, the door’s double—’
‘The Halvening know where you fucking live!’ said Strike furiously. Why the fuck couldn’t she just do as she was told?
‘And if they’re outside right now,’ said Robin, who’d been resisting the urge to peer through the curtains, ‘the stupidest thing I could do is walk out on my own.’
‘Not if there’s a taxi waiting for you,’ Strike contradicted her. ‘Tell them you want a male driver. Ask him to come upstairs to help you with bags, say you’ll pay a cash tip for his help and take your rape alarm with you in case anyone rushes you.’
‘Whoever it was, they were just trying to scare—’
‘They’re fucking terrorists – everything they do is supposed to scare the shit out of people!’
‘You know what?’ Robin said, her voice rising in pitch, ‘I don’t need you shouting at me right now, OK?’
He now heard her panic, and with an effort similar to that which had got him up the last broken escalator, repressed the deeply ingrained instinct to shout orders in the face of danger.
‘Sorry. OK, well – if you don’t want to come back into town, I’ll come to you.’
Climbing three flights of stairs to pack a bag, then making it all the way back down and journeying out to Walthamstow was the last thing he wanted to do, but the sound of the outer office exploding was still fresh in his memory.
‘You’re just trying to guilt me into—’
‘I’m not trying to guilt you into anything,’ said Strike harshly, now setting off again, limping more heavily than ever. ‘I’m taking seriously the possibility that one of those fuckers is still at large and hoping to take down one more uppity woman before the whole organisation goes up in smoke.’
‘Strike—’
‘Don’t bloody – shit,’ he snarled, because his trembling leg had buckled. He staggered, succeeded in remaining upright, and limped on.
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s your leg,’ said Robin, who could hear his ragged breathing.
‘It’s fine,’ said Strike, cold sweat breaking out over his face, chest and back. He was trying to ignore the waves of nausea now threatening to engulf him.
‘Strike—’
‘I’ll see you in about—’
‘You won’t,’ she said, sounding defeated. ‘I’ll – OK, I’ll go back to the hotel. I’ll ring for a cab now.’
‘Will you?’
It came out more aggressively than he’d intended, but his stump was now shaking so badly every time he put weight on it he knew he’d be lucky to reach the door of the office on both feet.