‘Funny,’ said Charlotte, considering Robin with her head to one side, ‘you look a bit like Madeline.’
‘Like who, sorry?’ said Robin.
‘Corm’s girlfriend,’ said Charlotte, glancing back at Strike, her smile angelic. ‘Haven’t you met her? Madeline Courson-Miles. She’s absolutely lovely. Jewellery designer. I’ve just done a bit of modelling for her new campaign. Well, bye, Corm. Take care.’
The shock slithered down from Robin’s brain, freezing her innards. She turned away from Strike, pretending to check the printer, although she knew perfectly well that everything she’d wanted to print was already in her hand. The door closed behind Charlotte.
‘Thinks a lot of herself, that one,’ said Pat with a sniff, returning to her typing.
‘She isn’t mentally unstable, though, Pat,’ said Robin, trying to sound casual, even amused. She could hear Strike moving back into the inner office. ‘Not a Gateshead.’
‘She is,’ said the office manager in the low croak that passed for her whisper. ‘I’ve read the papers.’
‘Are we going to have a catch-up on Anomie, then?’ Strike called from the partners’ desk, where he’d finally sat down.
‘It’ll have to be a quick one,’ Robin said, trying to sound purely businesslike. ‘I’m meeting Ilsa for a drink and dinner later.’
There was more than enough time to reach Bob Bob Ricard, but Robin was suddenly aware of a desire to get out of Strike’s vicinity as soon as possible. The cold, clammy inward sensation persisted, along with small aftershocks that she was afraid presaged a state in which she wasn’t going to be able to pretend to be indifferent to the news she’d just heard.
‘I printed this off for you,’ she said, moving into the office. ‘You wanted some information on the Pen of Justice blog. This is all I’ve got so far.’
Strike’s jaw was set and he looked livid. Robin drew courage from the fact that he wasn’t pretending to be unaffected by Charlotte’s visit.
‘You didn’t tell me you were seeing someone,’ she said, and she heard the artificially casual note in her own voice. But weren’t they supposed to be friends? Best friends?
Strike gave Robin a fleeting look, then turned his attention to the document she’d just handed him.
‘Er – yeah, I am. So this is… yeah, the Pen of Justice thing?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin. ‘Oh, and I’ve also found a girl online who claims Edie Ledwell stole all her ideas for The Ink Black Heart.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, still standing in front of him in the blue dress Strike recognised from the Ritz. ‘Her name’s Kea Niven. I called Allan Yeoman about her, but he says she can’t be Anomie because Edie ruled her out.’
‘How did she rule her out?’ Strike asked, still preferring to glance through the Pen of Justice notes than look at Robin.
‘He said Anomie was active in the game at a time Kea didn’t have access to a computer or phone. Anyway,’ said Robin, whose urge to get away from Strike was becoming overwhelming, ‘as I say, I’m meeting Ilsa for an early drink. You don’t mind if I clock off now, do you?’
‘No, not at all,’ said Strike, who was as eager to be alone with his thoughts as Robin was to be gone.
‘See you Thursday, then,’ said Robin, because the rota didn’t demand that they meet until then, and she carried her shock back into the outer office, where she took down her coat and bag, bade Pat a smiling farewell and left.
Strike remained where she’d left him, heart pounding as though he’d just stepped out of the boxing ring, and tried to force himself to read the document Robin had just handed him.
Note on the Pen of Justice Blog
The anonymous Pen of Justice blog was started in January 2012. Whoever’s behind it is on Twitter as @penjustwrites. Their location is hidden. The focus of the blog—
But he couldn’t concentrate. Throwing the papers down onto the desk, he gave way to the full force of his own fury at Charlotte, which was worse for the rage he also felt at himself. He’d ignored a looming danger. He had known that Jago had found that bloody nude, and done nothing about it because it suited him to believe the coked-up Valentine was scaremongering. Strike felt he’d been catastrophically complacent, both on a very serious threat to his business and – time to look facts in the face – in his belief that Robin need never know about Madeline.
Charlotte had an uncanny ability to read other people’s emotional states, a skill honed by necessity in navigating a family full of addiction and mental illness. Her preternatural ability to intuit hopes and insecurities that others thought well-hidden made her equally adept at charming people and at wounding them. Some might assume she’d just acted out of the pure will to destruction that was one of her most unnerving qualities, but Strike knew better. The last text he’d had from Charlotte, six months previously, had read: I don’t think I’ve ever felt so envious in my life as I am of that girl Robin. He ’d bet everything in his bank account that Charlotte sensed he was trying to displace the attraction he felt towards Robin onto Madeline, because she could read Strike just as well as he could read her.
‘That’s me off,’ croaked Pat from the outer office.
‘Have a good weekend,’ Strike said automatically.
He heard her go and immediately reached for a cigarette and the ashtray he kept in a drawer in his desk. Drawing deeply on a freshly lit Benson & Hedges, he asked himself how he was going to solve the problem of Jago Ross and that bloody nude, but his unruly thoughts careered back towards Robin and he found himself doing the very thing he’d been avoiding doing for months: reliving that foolish, dangerous moment outside the Ritz, and, for the first time, facing certain unpleasant truths.
He hadn’t wanted Robin to know about Madeline, because some small part of him continued to hope that he’d been wrong about that silent ‘no’ Robin had given him. There was trauma in her past that might have made her flinch automatically from an unexpected advance. What if the ‘no’ he’d seen had been a mere reflex, or conditional, or temporary? Lately he’d thought she was trying to show him that she wasn’t worried that his clumsy, drunken move would be repeated. In his experience, women found ways of letting a man know that further advances would be unwelcome. She hadn’t grown colder, hadn’t avoided one-on-one meetings, hadn’t mentioned a new boyfriend to signal her unavailability; she’d been enthusiastic about the idea of drinks with him, and hugged him spontaneously in the pub. None of that added up to a feeling of repulsion, or of wanting to push him away.
But if he hadn’t blown his chance, what then? No easy answer came. The same old objections remained to his trying to push the relationship beyond the bounds of friendship: they were business partners, they spent too much time together, and if – when – a relationship with Robin went wrong, it would take everything with it, the whole edifice they’d built together, which was the one stable thing in Strike’s life.
But he was having great difficulty in stifling the feeling for Robin he never gave a name. The truth was that he wanted her to stay single, while he disentangled what he felt and what he wanted. Now, thanks to Charlotte, Robin might just consider herself at liberty to find another Matthew, who’d offer her a ring – she was the kind of woman men wanted to marry, Strike had no doubt about that – and then everything would fall apart just as surely as if they’d fallen into bed and regretted it, because she’d end up leaving the agency, if not immediately then eventually. He was living proof of how hard it was to do this job and have a permanent relationship.