‘Thanks,’ said Robin, taking the glass. ‘Thought you didn’t like champagne?’
‘Couldn’t find any lager. Did you get my email?’
‘About Sir Colin Edensor?’ said Robin, dropping her voice. In unspoken agreement, the pair edged away from the fray into a corner. ‘Yes. Funnily enough, I was reading an article about the Universal Humanitarian Church the other day. You realise their headquarters are about ten minutes from our office?’
‘Rupert Court, yeah,’ said Strike. ‘There were girls out with collecting tins in Wardour Street last time I was there. How d’you fancy meeting Edensor with me on Tuesday?’
‘Definitely,’ said Robin, who’d been hoping Strike would suggest this. ‘Where’s he want to meet?’
‘The Reform Club, he’s a member. Murphy have to leave?’ Strike asked casually.
‘No,’ said Robin, looking around, ‘but he had to make a work call. Maybe he’s outside.’
Robin resented feeling self-conscious as she said this. She ought to be able to talk naturally about her boyfriend with her best friend, but given Strike’s lack of warmth on the rare occasions Murphy called for her at the office, she found it difficult.
‘How was Littlejohn yesterday?’ asked Strike.
‘All right,’ said Robin, ‘but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as quiet.’
‘Makes a nice change after Morris and Nutley, doesn’t it?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Robin uncertainly, ‘but it’s a bit unnerving to sit next to someone in a car for three hours in total silence. And if you say anything to him, you get a grunt or a monosyllable.’
A month previously, Strike had succeeded in finding a new subcontractor for the detective agency. Slightly older than Strike, Clive Littlejohn, too, was ex-Special Investigation Branch, and had only recently left the army. He was large and square, with heavy-lidded eyes that gave an impression of perennial weariness, and salt-and-pepper hair that he continued to wear military short. At interview, he’d explained that he and his wife wanted a more stable life for their teenage children, after the constant upheavals and absences of army life. On the evidence of the past four weeks, he was conscientious and reliable, but Strike had to admit his taciturnity was taken to an unusual extreme, and he couldn’t remember so far seeing Littlejohn crack a smile.
‘Pat doesn’t like him,’ said Robin.
Pat was the agency’s office manager, an implausibly black-haired, chain-smoking woman of fifty-eight who looked at least a decade older.
‘I don’t go to Pat for character judgement,’ said Strike.
He’d noticed the officer manager’s warmth towards Ryan Murphy whenever the CID man turned up to pick Robin up from the office and didn’t appreciate it. Irrationally, he felt everyone at the agency should feel as hostile to Murphy as he did.
‘Sounds as though Patterson really messed up the Edensor case,’ said Robin.
‘Yeah,’ said Strike, with an unconcealed satisfaction that stemmed from the fact that he and the head of the rival detective agency, Mitch Patterson, detested each other. ‘They were bloody careless. I’ve been reading up on that church since I got Edensor’s email and I’d say it’d be a big mistake to underestimate them. If we take the job, it might mean one of us going in under deep cover. I can’t do it, the leg’s too distinctive. Probably have to be Midge. She’s not married.’
‘Nor am I,’ said Robin quickly.
‘This wouldn’t be like you pretending to be Venetia Hall or Jessica Robins, though,’ said Strike, referring to undercover personas Robin had adopted during previous cases. ‘It wouldn’t be nine-to-five. Might mean you couldn’t have contact with the outside world for a while.’
‘So?’ said Robin. ‘I’d be up for that.’
She had a strong feeling that she was being tested.
‘Well,’ said Strike, who had indeed found out what he wanted to know, ‘we haven’t got the job yet. If we do, we’ll have to decide who fits the bill best.’
At this moment, Ryan Murphy reappeared in the kitchen. Robin automatically stepped away from Strike, to whom she’d been standing close, so as to keep their conversation private.
‘What’re you two plotting?’ asked Murphy, smiling, though his eyes were alert.
‘No plot,’ said Robin. ‘Just work stuff.’
Ilsa now reappeared in the kitchen, holding her finally sated, sleeping son.
‘Cake!’ shouted Nick. ‘Godparents and grandparents here for pictures, please.’
Robin moved into the heart of the party as people crowded into the kitchen from the marquee. For a moment or two, she’d been reminded of the tensions of her former marriage: she hadn’t liked Murphy’s question, nor had she appreciated Strike pushing to find out whether she was committed to the job as much as the single Midge.
‘You hold Benjy,’ said Ilsa, when Robin reached her. ‘Then I can stand behind you. I’ll look thinner.’
‘You’re being silly, you look great,’ murmured Robin, but she accepted her sleeping godson and turned to face the camera, which was being held by Ilsa’s red-faced uncle. There was much jostling and repositioning behind the island on which the christening cake stood: camera phones were held high. Ilsa’s tipsy mother trod painfully on Robin’s foot and apologised to Strike instead. The sleeping baby was surprisingly heavy.
‘Cheese!’ bellowed Ilsa’s uncle.
‘It suits you!’ called Murphy, toasting Robin.
Out of the corner of her eye, Robin saw a blaze of shocking pink: Bijou Watkins had found her way to Strike’s other side. The flash went off several times, the baby in Robin’s arms stirred but slept on, and the moment was captured for posterity: the proud grandmother’s bleary smile, Ilsa’s anxious expression, the light reflected on Nick’s glasses so that he looked vaguely sinister, and the slightly forced smiles on the faces of both godparents, who were pressed together behind the blue icing teddy bear, Strike ruminating on what Murphy had just said, Robin noticing how Bijou leaned into her detective partner, determined to feature in the picture.
3
To be circumspect and not to forget one’s armour is the right way to security.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Strike arrived back in his attic flat in Denmark Street at eight that evening, with the gassy sensation champagne always gave him, feeling vaguely depressed. Usually he’d have grabbed a takeaway on the way home, but on leaving hospital after a three-week stay the previous year he’d been given strict instructions about weight loss, physiotherapy and giving up smoking. For the first time since his leg had been blown off in Afghanistan, he’d done as the doctors ordered.
Now, without much enthusiasm, he put vegetables in a newly purchased steamer, took a salmon fillet out of the fridge and measured out some wholegrain rice, all the time trying not to think about Robin Ellacott, and succeeding only in so far as he remained aware of how difficult it was not to think about her. He might have left hospital with many good resolutions, but he’d also been burdened with an intractable problem that couldn’t be solved by lifestyle changes: a problem that, in truth, he’d had far longer than he cared to admit, but which he’d finally faced only when lying in his hospital bed, watching Robin leave for her first date with Murphy.
For several years now, he’d told himself that an affair with his detective partner wasn’t worth risking his most important friendship for, or jeopardising the business they’d built together. If there were hardships and privations attached to a life lived resolutely alone in a small attic flat above his office, Strike had considered them a price well worth paying for independence and peace after the endless storms and heartache of his long, on-off relationship with Charlotte. Yet the shock of hearing that Robin was heading off for a date with Ryan Murphy had forced Strike to admit that the attraction he’d felt towards Robin from the moment she’d first taken off her coat in his office had slowly mutated against his will into something else, something he’d finally been forced to name. Love had arrived in a form he didn’t recognise, which was doubtless why he’d become aware of the danger too late to head it off.