As Robin had anticipated, she was definitely unsteady on her high heels as she crossed the bar, and it took her far longer than it should have done to locate the token for her coat in the bottom of her handbag.
‘Could you hold this, please?’ she asked Strike, handing him the bag containing her perfume while she rummaged.
Having retrieved her coat, Strike had to help her put it on.
‘I am definitely quite drunk,’ Robin muttered, taking back the little purple bag, and seconds later she proved it by turning her heel on the edge of the circular scarlet rug that covered the lobby’s marble floor and slipping sideways. Strike caught her, and kept his arm around her waist as he steered her out of one of the side entrances flanking the revolving door, because he didn’t trust her in it.
‘Sorry,’ said Robin as they walked carefully down the steep stone steps at the front of the Ritz, Strike’s arm still around her waist. She liked the feel of him, bulky and warm beside her: it had more often been she who had supported him, on those occasions when the stump of his right leg had refused to continue to bear his weight after some ill-advised piece of overexertion. He was holding her so tightly that her head was almost resting on his chest and she could smell the aftershave he’d put on for this special occasion, even over the usual smell of old cigarettes.
‘Taxi,’ said Strike, pointing, as a black cab came gliding smoothly towards them.
‘Strike,’ said Robin, leaning back into him so as to look into his face.
She’d intended to thank him, to tell him what a wonderful evening she’d had, but when their eyes connected no words came. For a minute sliver of time everything around them blurred, as though they stood in the eye of some slow-motion tornado of purring cars and passing lights, of pedestrians and cloud-dappled sky, and only the feel and smell of each other was real, and Strike, looking down into her upturned face, forgot in that second every stern resolution that had restrained him for nearly five years and made an almost infinitesimal dip of his head, his mouth heading for hers.
And unwittingly, Robin’s expression moved from happiness to fear. He saw it and straightened up again, and before either of them could quite process what had just happened the mundane roar of a motorbike courier heralded the return of the world to its regular course; the tornado had passed and Strike was guiding Robin towards the taxi’s open door, and she was falling back onto its solid seat.
‘’Night,’ he called in after her. The door had slammed and the taxi had pulled away before Robin, dazed, could decide whether she felt more shock, elation or regret.
2
Come let me talk with thee, allotted part
Of immortality – my own deep heart!
The days following their night at the Ritz were, for Robin, full of agitation and suspense. She was well aware that Strike had posed a wordless question and that she’d silently returned a ‘no’, far more forcefully than if she hadn’t been full of bourbon and vermouth, and caught off guard. Now there was an increase of reserve in Strike’s manner, a slightly forced briskness and a determined avoidance of all personal subjects. Barriers that had come down over their five years working together seemed to have been re-erected. Robin was afraid she’d hurt Strike, and she didn’t underestimate what it took to hurt a man as quietly confident and resilient as her partner.
Meanwhile, Strike was full of self-recrimination. He shouldn’t have made that foolish, unconsummated move: hadn’t he concluded months previously that a relationship with his partner was impossible? They spent too much time together, they were legally bound to each other by the business, the friendship was too valuable to him to jeopardise, so why, in the golden glow of those exorbitantly priced cocktails, had he jettisoned every good resolution and yielded to powerful impulse?
Self-reproach mingled with feelings still less pleasant. The fact was that Strike had very rarely suffered rebuffs from women, because he was unusually good at reading people. Never before had he made a move without being certain that his advance would be welcome, and he’d certainly never had any woman react the way Robin had: with alarm that, in his worst moments, Strike thought could have been disgust. He might be broken-nosed, overweight and one-legged, with dense, dark curly hair that schoolfriends had dubbed pube-like, but that hadn’t ever stopped him pulling gorgeous women before. Indeed, male friends, to whose eyes the detective’s sexual appeal was largely invisible, had often expressed resentment and amazement that he had such a successful sex life. But perhaps it was insufferable vanity to think that the attraction he’d held for previous girlfriends lingered, even as his morning cough worsened and grey hairs started to appear among the dark brown?
Worse still was the idea that he’d totally misinterpreted Robin’s feelings over a period of years. He’d assumed her slight awkwardness at times when they were forced into physical or emotional proximity had the same root as his own: a determination not to succumb to temptation. In the days following her silent rejection of his kiss, he kept going over incidents he’d thought proved the attraction was mutual, returning again and again to the fact that she’d broken off her first dance at her wedding to follow him, leaving Matthew abandoned on the dance floor. She and Strike had hugged at the top of the hotel stairs, and as he’d held her in her wedding dress he could have sworn he’d heard the same dangerous thought in her mind as filled his: let’s run away, and to hell with the consequences. Had he imagined it all?
Perhaps he had. Perhaps Robin had wanted to run, but merely back to London and the job. Maybe she saw him as a mentor and a friend, but nothing more.
It was in this unsettled and depressed mood that Strike greeted his fortieth birthday, which was marked by a restaurant dinner organised, as Robin’s had been, by their mutual friends Nick and Ilsa.
Here, for the first time, Robin met Strike’s oldest friend from Cornwall, Dave Polworth, who, as Strike had once predicted, Robin didn’t much like. Polworth was small and garrulous, commented negatively on every aspect of London life and referred to women, including the waitress who served them, as ‘tarts’. Robin, who was at the opposite end of the table from Strike, spent much of the evening making laboured small talk with Polworth’s wife, Penny, whose main topics of conversation were her two children, how expensive everything in London was, and what a twat her husband was.
Robin had bought Strike a rare test pressing of Tom Waits’s first album, Closing Time, for his birthday. She knew Waits was his favourite artist, and her best memory of the evening was the look of unfeigned surprise and pleasure on Strike’s face when he unwrapped it. She thought she sensed some return of his usual warmth when he thanked her, and she hoped the gift would convey the message that a woman who found him repugnant wouldn’t have gone to so much effort to buy him something she knew he’d really want. She wasn’t to know that Strike was asking himself whether Robin considered him and the sixty-five-year-old Waits contemporaries.
A week after Strike’s birthday, the agency’s longest-serving subcontractor, Andy Hutchins, handed in his notice. It wasn’t entirely a surprise: although his MS was in remission, the job was taking its toll. They gave Andy a farewell drinks party, which everyone except the other subcontractor, Sam Barclay, attended, because he’d drawn the short straw and was currently following a target through the West End.