Robin had just met the agency’s newest client, a professional cricketer, at his Chelsea flat. She’d expected the interview to last an hour, but it had gone on for two.
‘Will do. What’s he like, then, the new bloke?’ asked Pat, e-cigarette between her teeth. The man in question was tall, blond and good looking, and Pat had evinced a certain disappointment that he wasn’t going to have his preliminary interview at the office, but at home.
‘Er,’ said Robin who, in addition to not gossiping about Strike behind his back, also tried not to criticise clients in front of Pat. ‘Well, he didn’t like McCabes. That’s why he’s come back to us.’
In fact, she’d found the South African cricketer, who Strike had called an ‘arsehole’ after one phone conversation, an unpleasant combination of arrogant and inappropriately flirtatious, especially as his girlfriend had been lurking in the kitchen all through the interview. He’d given the impression he took it for granted that he was the best-looking man Robin had seen in a long while, and had made it clear he didn’t consider her entirely unworthy of notice. Robin had to assume the stunning brunette who’d seen her out of the flat at the end of the interview either took him at his own valuation, or enjoyed the gorgeous flat and the Bugatti too much to complain.
‘Is he as handsome in person?’ asked Pat, watching as Robin placed her notes inside the file, then scribbled the cricketer’s name on the front.
‘If you like that sort of thing,’ said Robin, as the glass door opened.
‘Sort of thing’s that?’ asked Strike, entering in his suit, his tie loosened and his vape pen in his hand.
‘Blond cricketers,’ said Robin, looking round. Her partner looked tired and downtrodden.
‘Ah,’ grunted Strike, hanging up his jacket. ‘Was he as much of an arsehole in person as he was on the phone?’
Seeing as the not-bitching-about-clients-in-front-of-Pat ship had now set sail full speed out of the harbour, Robin asked,
‘How bad was he on the phone?’
‘A good eight point five out of ten,’ said Strike.
‘Then he’s the same in person.’
‘Fancy updating me before you leave?’ said Strike, checking his watch. He knew Robin was due to take some long-overdue leave today. ‘Unless you need to get going?’
‘No, I’m waiting for Ryan,’ said Robin. ‘I’ve got time.’
They entered the inner office and Strike closed the door. The board on the wall that so recently had been covered in the UHC pictures and notes was empty again. The Polaroids were with the police, and the rest had been added to the case file, which was locked in the safe, pending its use in the forthcoming court case. Jacob’s body had now been identified, and the accusation of child abuse against Robin had at long last been dropped; the weekend away with Murphy was at least partly in celebration of this fact. Even Robin could see how much happier and healthier she looked in the mirror, now that this weight had been lifted off her.
‘So,’ said Robin, sitting down, ‘he thinks his estranged wife is having an affair with a married Mail journalist, hence the stream of scurrilous stories the Mail have had on him lately.’
‘Which journalist?’
‘Dominic Culpepper,’ said Robin.
‘Married now, then, is he?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘to a Lady Violet somebody. Well, Lady Violet Culpepper, now.’
‘Should be juicy, when it breaks,’ said Strike, unsmiling. Depression was radiating from him as the smell of cigarette smoke had, before he’d embarked on his health kick.
‘Are you all right?’ Robin asked.
‘What?’ said Strike, though he’d heard her. ‘Yeah. I’m fine.’
But in reality, he’d called her into the inner office because he wanted her company as long as he could get it. Robin wondered whether she dared ask, and decided she did.
‘Pat told me you were meeting Charlotte’s sister.’
‘Did she?’ said Strike, though without rancour.
‘Did she ask to see you, or—?’
‘Yeah, she asked to see me,’ said Strike.
There was a short silence.
‘She wanted to meet me right after Charlotte died, but I couldn’t,’ said Strike. ‘Then she closed up shop and went off to the country with her kids for a month.’
‘I’m sorry, Cormoran,’ said Robin quietly.
‘Yeah, well,’ said Strike, with a slight shrug. ‘I gave her what she was after, I think.’
‘What was that?’
‘Dunno,’ said Strike, examining his vape pen. ‘Reassurance nobody could’ve stopped it happening? Except me,’ he added. ‘I could’ve.’
Robin felt desperately sorry for him, and knew it must have shown on her face, because when he glanced up at her he said,
‘I wouldn’t change anything.’
‘Right,’ said Robin, unsure of what else to say.
‘She called here,’ said Strike, dropping his gaze back to the vape pen in his hand, which he was turning over and over. ‘Three times, on the night she did it. I knew who it was and I didn’t answer. Then I listened to the messages and deleted them.’
‘You couldn’t have known—’
‘Yeah, I could,’ said Strike calmly, still turning the vape pen over in his hand, ‘she was a walking suicide even when I met her. She’d already tried a couple of times.’
Robin knew this from her conversations with Ilsa, who scathingly categorised Charlotte’s various suicide attempts into two categories: those meant to manipulate, and those that were genuine. However, Robin could no longer take Ilsa’s estimation at face value. Charlotte’s final attempt had been no empty gesture. She’d been determined to live no longer – unless, it seemed, Strike had answered the phone. The suicide of Carrie Curtis Woods, no matter that Robin now knew she’d been a collaborator in infanticide, would be a scar Robin bore forever. How it felt to know you might have prevented the death of somebody you’d loved for sixteen years, she had no idea.
‘Cormoran, I’m sorry,’ she said again.
‘Feel sorry for Amelia and her kids, not me,’ he said. ‘I was done. There’s nothing deader than dead love.’
For six years now, Robin had longed to know what Strike really felt for Charlotte Campbell, the woman he’d left for good on the very day Robin had arrived at the agency as a temp. Charlotte had been the most intimidating woman Robin had ever met: beautiful, clever, charming and also – Robin had seen evidence of it herself – devious and occasionally callous. Robin had felt guilty about hoarding every crumb of information about Strike and Charlotte’s relationship Ilsa had ever let fall, feeling she was betraying Strike in listening, in remembering. He’d always been so cagey about the relationship, even after some of the barriers between them had come down, even after Strike had openly called Robin his best friend.
Strike, meanwhile, was aware he was breaking a vow he’d made himself six years previously, when, fresh from the rupture with a woman he still loved, he’d noticed how sexy his temp was, almost at the same moment he’d noticed the engagement ring on her finger. He’d resolved then, knowing his own susceptibility, that there would be no easy slide into intimacy with a woman who, but for the engagement ring, he might willingly have rebounded onto. He’d been strict about not letting himself trawl for her sympathy. Even after his love for Charlotte had shrivelled into non-existence, leaving behind it a ghostly husk of pity and exasperation, Strike had maintained this reserve, because, against his will, his feelings for Robin were growing deeper and more complex, and her third finger was bare now, and he’d feared ruining the most important friendship of his life, and trashing the business for which both had sacrificed so much.