While Strike and Hutchins talked shop on the other side of the pub table, Robin talked to their newest hire, Michelle Greenstreet, known to her new colleagues, at her own request, as Midge. She was a Mancunian ex-policewoman, tall, lean and very fit, a gym fanatic with short, slicked-back dark hair and clear grey eyes. Robin had already been made to feel slightly inadequate by the sight of Midge’s six-pack as she stretched to reach the topmost file balanced on a cabinet, but she liked her directness, and the fact that she didn’t seem to hold herself superior to Robin, who alone at the agency wasn’t ex-police or military. Tonight, Midge confided in Robin for the first time that a major reason for wishing to relocate to London had been a bad break-up.
‘Was your ex police as well?’ asked Robin.
‘Nope. She never held a job for more than a coupla months,’ said Midge, with more than a trace of bitterness. ‘She’s an undiscovered genius who’s either gonna write a bestselling novel, or paint a picture that’ll win the Turner Prize. I was out all day making money to pay the bills, and she was at home pissing around online. I ended it when I found her dating profile on Zoosk.’
‘God, I’m sorry,’ said Robin. ‘My marriage ended when I found a diamond earring in our bed.’
‘Yeah, Vanessa told me,’ said Midge, who’d been recommended to the agency by Robin’s policewoman friend. ‘She said you didn’t keep it, either, you fookin’ mug.’
‘I’d’ve flogged it,’ rasped Pat Chauncey, the office manager, breaking unexpectedly into the conversation. Pat was a gravel-voiced fifty-seven-year-old with boot-black hair and teeth the colour of old ivory, who chain-smoked outside the office and sucked constantly on an e-cigarette inside it. ‘I had a woman send me my first husband’s Y-fronts in the post, cheeky cow.’
‘Seriously?’ asked Midge.
‘Oh yeah,’ growled Pat.
‘What did you do?’ Robin asked.
‘Pinned ’em to the front door so they were the first thing he’d see when he come home from work,’ said Pat. She took a deep pull on her e-cigarette and said, ‘And I sent her somefing back she wouldn’t forget.’
‘What?’ said Robin and Midge in unison.
‘Never you mind,’ said Pat. ‘But let’s just say it wouldn’t spread easy on toast.’
The three women’s shouts of laughter drew Strike and Hutchins’s attention: Strike caught Robin’s eye and she held it, grinning. He looked away feeling slightly more cheerful than he’d done in a while.
The departure of Andy placed a not-unfamiliar strain on the agency, because it currently had several time-consuming jobs on its books. The first and longest-running of these involved trying to dig up dirt on the ex-boyfriend of a client nicknamed Miss Jones, who was locked into a bitter custody battle over her baby daughter. Miss Jones was a good-looking brunette who had an almost embarrassing yen for Strike. He might have derived a much needed ego-boost from her unabashed pursuit of him, were it not for the fact that he found her combination of entitlement and neediness thoroughly unattractive.
Their second client was also the wealthiest: a Russian-American billionaire who lived between Moscow, New York and London. A couple of extremely valuable objects had recently disappeared from his house on South Audley Street, though the security alarm hadn’t been tripped. The client suspected his London-based stepson and wished to catch the young man in the act without alerting either the police or his wife, who was disposed to consider her hard-partying and jobless offspring a misunderstood paragon. Hidden spy cameras, monitored by the agency, were now concealed in every corner of the house. The stepson, who was known at the agency as Fingers, was likewise under surveillance in case he tried to sell the missing Fabergé casket or the Hellenistic head of Alexander the Great.
The agency’s last case, codenamed Groomer, was in Robin’s view a particularly nasty one. A well-known international correspondent for an American news channel had recently broken up with her boyfriend of three years, who was an equally successful TV producer. Shortly after their acrimonious split, the journalist had found out that her ex-partner was still in contact with her seventeen-year-old daughter, whom Midge had dubbed Legs. The seventeen-year-old, who was tall and slender, with long blonde hair, was already featuring in gossip columns, partly because of her famous surname and partly because she’d already done some modelling. Though the agency hadn’t yet witnessed sexual contact between Legs and Groomer, their body language was far from parental-filial during their secret meet-ups. The situation had plunged Legs’ mother into a state of fury, fear and suspicion that was poisoning her relationship with her daughter.
To everyone’s relief, because they’d been so stretched after Andy’s departure, at the start of December Strike succeeded in poaching an ex-Met officer by the name of Dev Shah from a rival detective agency. There was bad blood between Strike and Mitch Patterson, the boss of the agency in question, which dated back to the time Patterson had put Strike himself under surveillance. When Shah answered the question ‘Why d’you want to leave Patterson Inc?’ with the words ‘I’m tired of working for cunts,’ Strike hired him on the spot.
Like Barclay, Shah was married with a young child. He was shorter than both of his new male colleagues, with eyelashes so thick that Robin thought they looked fake. Everyone at the agency took to Dev: Strike, because he was quick on the uptake and methodical in his record-keeping; Robin, because she liked his dry sense of humour and what she inwardly termed a lack of dickishness; Barclay and Midge, because Shah demonstrated early on that he was a team player without any noticeable need to outshine the other subcontractors; and Pat, as she admitted in her gravelly voice to Robin while the latter was handing in her receipts one Friday, because he ‘could give Imran Khan a run for his money, couldn’t he? Those eyes!’
‘Mm, very handsome,’ said Robin indifferently, tallying her receipts. Pat had spent much of the previous twelve months openly hoping that Robin might fall for the charms of a previous subcontractor whose good looks had been equalled by his creepiness. Robin could only be grateful that Dev was married.
She’d been forced to temporarily shelve her flat-hunting plans because of the long hours she was working, but still volunteered to stake out the billionaire’s house over Christmas. It suited her to have an excuse not to return to her parents in Masham, because she was certain Matthew and Sarah would be parading their new-born child, sex so far unknown, around the familiar streets where once, as teenagers, he and Robin had strolled hand in hand. Robin’s parents were disappointed, and Strike was clearly uncomfortable about taking her up on the offer.
‘It’s fine,’ said Robin, disinclined to go into her reasons. ‘I’d rather stay in London. You missed Christmas last year.’
She was starting to feel mentally and physically exhausted. She’d worked almost non-stop for the past two years, years that had included separation and divorce. The recent increase of reserve between her and Strike was playing on her mind, and little as she’d wanted to go back to Masham, the prospect of working through the festive season was undeniably depressing.
Then, in mid-December, Robin’s favourite cousin, Katie, issued a last-minute invitation for her to join a skiing party over New Year. A couple had dropped out on finding out that the wife was pregnant; the chalet was already paid for, so Robin only needed to buy flights. She’d never skied in her life, but as Katie and her husband would be taking it in turns to look after their three-year-old son while the other was on the slopes, there’d always be somebody around to talk to, should she not wish to spend most of her time falling over on the nursery slopes. Robin thought the trip might give her the sense of perspective and serenity that was eluding her in London. Only after she’d accepted did she learn that in addition to Katie and her husband, and a couple of mutual friends from Masham, Hugh ‘Axeman’ Jacks would be of the party.