‘I’ll let you know,’ she told the estate agent. ‘Has there been a lot of interest?’
‘Quite a bit,’ said the young man in the kipper tie, whose relentless banter Robin could gladly have done without. He’d asked her twice whether she’d be living alone. Robin wondered what he’d have said if she’d asked him tearfully to move in with her, so she didn’t have to endure the agony of singledom any longer.
After bidding the estate agent goodbye, she walked to the Tube station, timing the journey as she went. She’d have a longer commute than from her present flat, but not as lengthy as from some of the properties she’d seen. All things considered, she really thought the flat would do. Travelling home, she wondered who she’d be bidding against: she had a decent deposit, which she’d managed to wrest with difficulty from the marital joint account as part of her divorce settlement, and she was earning a far better salary than she’d started on, but you never knew in London.
Robin’s mood had been low all through the cold, wet weekend, and once she left Earl’s Court station into the rain, the lightening of spirits she’d experienced imagining herself living in that neat, bright little flat began to subside.
Max was spending the weekend in the country, along with Wolfgang the dachshund. Once home, Robin stripped off her coat and gloves, fetched her laptop from her bedroom and carried it upstairs into the living area, where her eye fell on the unwelcome Valentine’s card she’d received the previous day from Hugh ‘Axeman’ Jacks, which she’d left lying on the kitchen side. The front featured a St Bernard with a heart-shaped cask on its collar and the words ‘You Make Me Drool’. Inside the card Hugh had written ‘if you’re ever at a loose end’ and his phone number. Robin supposed the St Bernard was meant to evoke happy memories of Switzerland, but as Hugh had been her least favourite part of the holiday, the only emotion was irritation that Katie had given Hugh her address. Still fighting a feeling of depression, she binned the card before making herself coffee, then sat down to peruse news sites for any fresh information about the stabbings in Highgate Cemetery.
Josh Blay was still alive, though he remained in a critical condition, and the police had released a new detaiclass="underline" both animators had been tasered before being stabbed. The public were still being encouraged to call the information hotline if they’d seen anybody acting suspiciously in the cemetery between 4 and 6 p.m. on 12 February.
The possession and use of tasers by civilians was illegal, so Robin wondered where and how the killer had got their hands on one. Had it been smuggled in from the Continent? Stolen? Surely its use suggested that this had been a premeditated crime, not a killing born of impulse? She wished Strike were here, to talk it all over.
A fresh news alert from the BBC popped up on her laptop. There’d been two separate terrorist shootings in Copenhagen: the first at an exhibition called Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression, the second at a synagogue. The hard lump of misery in Robin’s chest seemed to grow heavier. Human beings slaughtered for writing words, for making drawings: Edie Ledwell couldn’t, surely, be one of them? What was there in that peculiar little cartoon that could so offend and enrage that the creators would be deemed worthy of assassination?
Articles about The Ink Black Heart had proliferated in the last twenty-four hours. Robin skimmed through recapitulations of its journey to unexpected success, analysis of its cultural significance and meaning, assessments of its appeal and flaws, and speculation as to its likely future. Nearly every one of these articles began by noting the strange irony of Ledwell meeting her death in the cemetery where she and Blay had set the cartoon: ‘a grotesque symmetry’, ‘an almost unbelievable coincidence’, ‘a horrible end that had all the gothic strangeness of her creation’.
Thousands of words had also been expended on the cartoon’s fandom, ‘who call themselves Inkhearts and are notorious for their internecine wars’. These rows were evidently continuing to flourish in the wake of the attacks on the creators; hating herself for clicking on the link, Robin read a short piece entitled ‘The Inkheart Murder Theory That’s Causing Outrage’ and learned that there was speculation on social media that Josh Blay had stabbed Edie Ledwell then attempted to kill himself, a charge that was being vehemently denied and refuted by Blay’s fans, who, Robin noticed, appeared to greatly outnumber those of Ledwell.
Robin moved to YouTube, intending to watch a full episode of The Ink Black Heart. However, her attention was immediately caught by a video called ‘Josh Blay and Edie Ledwell First Ever Interview’. It was dated June 2010 and was currently getting a lot of views.
Robin clicked on the video and pressed play.
Edie Ledwell and Josh Blay appeared sitting side by side on a single bed, backs against a wall on which were pinned a mass of line drawings, clippings from magazines and postcard-sized reproductions of paintings. Edie’s hair was longer than it had been when Robin met her, shiny and well-brushed. She was wearing a pair of jeans and what looked like a man’s blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
Josh, who was wearing a similar shirt to Edie’s, was extraordinarily handsome. With his long dark hair, very square jaw, high cheekbones and large blue eyes, he could have been a rock star. Robin knew from news reports that he was five years younger than Edie, so back in 2010 he’d been twenty.
‘Yeah, awight?’ Josh said in a cockney accent. He gave a sheepish wave, then he and Edie looked at each other and laughed. The person holding the camera laughed too.
‘Er…’ said Josh, looking back to camera, ‘so, yeah, we’ve ’ad a lotta nice feedback abou’ the firs’ two episodes of The Ink Black ’Eart, so we, er, fort we’d say ’ow much we appreciate it. An’ our friend Katya fort it’d be good if we answered some of the, um, questions you guys ’ave been postin’ under the animations, so, yeah, tha’s what we’re gonna do.’
He said it diffidently, as though worried people might think the video had been the creators’ own egotistical idea.
‘F’rinstance,’ Josh continued, ‘we’ve been asked “Are you stoned?” a lot.’
He laughed, as did the person holding the camera, which wobbled slightly. Josh and Edie were sitting so close that their arms were touching from shoulder to elbow.
‘Short answer—’ said Edie.
‘We were, yeah,’ said Josh. ‘To be honest, we totally were. Tim is, right now.’
His eyes flicked upwards to the person holding the camera. The unseen Tim said in a Home Counties accent, ‘I’m not, that’s a filthy lie.’
Josh now looked sideways at Edie and they smiled at each other, the unmistakeable smiles of two people who are completely smitten.
‘So, er – do we introduce ourselves, or wha’?’
‘Well, there’s nobody else here to do it,’ said Edie, ‘unless Tim wants to – actually, let’s introduce Tim.’
The camera swung upwards: a dizzying shot of the ceiling was succeeded by a blurry close-up of a young man with red hair.
‘Hi,’ he said.
The camera moved back to Edie and Josh.
‘That was Tim,’ said Edie. ‘He does the voice of The Worm. So, I’m Edie—’
‘Yeah, an’ I’m Josh, and we, er, got the idea for The Ink Black ’eart when we was in ’Ighgate Cemetery one afternoon—’