‘Can you hear me?’ said Robin, raising her voice over the rumble of a passing double-decker.
‘What happened,’ said Strike, ‘to me being a chippy, brutal bastard who needs to back right off Brewster, and let her keep drawing pictures for Pinterest?’
‘What happened,’ said Robin, ‘is that I heard Will saying he’s convinced the Drowned Prophet’s going to come and get him. And I can’t get Jacob out of my head. We’ve got to find witnesses who’ll testify against the church. I suppose I’ve come round to your way of thinking. This is the job.’
She was almost at the station. When Strike didn’t speak, she drew aside and leaned up against the wall, phone still pressed to her ear.
‘You’re pissed off I went to Prudence behind your back, aren’t you? I just thought it was easier if she ended up hating me instead of you. I did tell her I was there on my own account. She knows you didn’t ask me to do it.’
‘I’m not pissed off,’ said Strike. ‘If you get results, bloody hell, that’ll be the first ray of light we’ve had in a long time. With Brewster as a witness to what happened to Deirdre Doherty, we might have enough to get police in there, even if Will’s still determined to let the Drowned Prophet get him. Where are you?’
‘Kensington,’ said Robin, who was immensely relieved Strike wasn’t angry.
‘Any red Corsas about?’
‘None,’ she said. ‘I did think a big guy was following me earl—’
‘What?’
‘Calm down, he wasn’t, it was just my imagination. I moved aside and he walked right past me, muttering.’
Now scowling, Strike got to his feet and peered down into Denmark Street again. The green-eyed man was still there, now talking on his phone.
‘Might’ve realised you were wise to him. There’s been a bloke with dreadlocks hanging around outside for about – oh, hang on, he’s off,’ said Strike, watching as the man ended his call and walked away towards Charing Cross Road.
‘You think he was watching the office?’
‘I did, yeah, but he was doing it bloody badly if the aim was to keep undercover. Mind you,’ said Strike, once again letting the Venetian blinds fall, ‘the aim might be to let us know we’re being watched. Little bit of intimidation. What did this large bloke following you look like?’
‘Balding, fifties – I honestly don’t think he was following me, not really. I’m just jumpy. But listen: something weird happened just now, while I was having coffee with Prudence. I got a call from Rufus Fernsby, Walter’s son. The one who slammed the phone down on me, two days ago.’
‘What did he want?’
‘For me to go and visit him at his office tomorrow.’
‘Why?’
‘No idea. He sounded quite tense, and just said, if I wanted to talk to him about his father, I could meet him at the office at a quarter to one and he’d speak to me… why aren’t you saying anything?’
‘It’s just odd,’ said Strike. ‘What’s happened to make him change his mind?’
‘No idea.’
There was another pause, in which Robin had time to reflect upon how tired she felt, and the fact that she still had an hour-long journey home. Since leaving Chapman Farm, she’d both craved and dreaded sleep, because it came punctuated with nightmares.
‘I thought you’d be angry about Prudence and pleased about Rufus,’ she told Strike.
‘I might yet be pleased about both of them,’ said Strike. ‘I just find the volte face strange. OK, I’ll rejig the rota so you can go and interview him at lunchtime. You heading home now?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin.
‘Well, keep your eyes peeled for muttering men, or for a tall black guy with green eyes.’
Robin promised to do so, and rang off.
Strike pulled out his vape pen, inhaled deeply, then picked up Kim Cochran’s CV again. Like Midge, Cochran was ex-police, and had only worked for Patterson for six months before the bugging scandal had sunk the business. Strike was just thinking that she might be worth an interview, when the landline rang in the outer office.
Charlotte, he thought at once – and then, with a strange chill, he remembered that Charlotte was dead.
Getting to his feet, he walked through to Pat’s desk, and answered.
‘Cormoran Strike.’
‘Oh,’ said a female voice. ‘I was going to leave a message, I didn’t expect anyone to—’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Amelia Crichton,’ said Charlotte’s sister.
‘Ah,’ said Strike, bitterly regretting that he hadn’t let the call go to voicemail. ‘Amelia.’
He was momentarily stymied for appropriate words. They hadn’t seen each other in years, and hadn’t liked each other, then.
‘Very sorry about… I’m sorry,’ said Strike.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I was just calling to say, I’m back in town next week and I’d like to see you, if that’s possible.’
Possible, he thought, just not desirable.
‘To tell you the truth, I’m very busy at the moment. Would it be all right if I call you when I know I’ve got a couple of free hours?’
‘Yes,’ she said coldly, ‘all right.’
She gave him her mobile number and rang off, leaving Strike irked and unsettled. If he knew Charlotte, she’d left some kind of dirty bomb behind her, which her sister felt honour bound to pass on: a message, or a note, or some legacy in her will designed to haunt and oppress him, to be one last, and lasting, ‘fuck you’.
Strike returned to the inner office only to pick up the UHC file and Kim Cochran’s CV, then left through the glass door, which he locked. He felt as though Amelia’s call had temporarily polluted his workspace, leaving a wraith of Charlotte peering at him vengefully from the shadows, defying him to return callously to work when he’d just (as she’d undoubtedly see it) turned his back on her, one more time.
108
… one must move warily, like an old fox walking over ice… deliberation and caution are the prerequisites of success.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
When she arrived at 1 Great George Street the following day at half past twelve, Robin discovered that she’d been quite wrong in vaguely imagining the Institute of Civil Engineers would be based in a brutalist building where function had been prioritised over elegance. Rufus Fernsby’s place of work was a gigantic Edwardian building of considerable grandeur.
When she gave the name of the man she’d come to see, Robin was sent up a crimson-carpeted staircase which, coupled with the white walls, reminded her faintly of the farmhouse at Chapman Farm. She passed oil paintings of eminent engineers, and a stained-glass window with a coat of arms supported by a crane and a beaver bearing the motto Scientia et Ingenio, and finally reached a long open-plan room with rows of desks, where two men stood having what looked like a heated discussion while the other workers kept their heads down.
With one of those strange intuitions that admit of no explanation, Robin guessed immediately that the taller, angrier and odder looking of the two men was Rufus Fernsby. Perhaps he looked like the kind of man who’d slam down a phone on someone who mentioned his unsatisfactory father. His argument with the shorter man seemed to centre on whether somebody called Bannerman should, or shouldn’t, have forwarded an email.
‘Nobody’s claiming Grierson shouldn’t have been copied in,’ he was saying heatedly, ‘that’s not the point. What I’m raising here is a pattern of persistent—’