“So you’ve hired a dope-smoking painter and decorator?”
“Vaping, dope vaping,” Strike corrected her, and Robin could tell that he was grinning, too. “He’s on a health kick. New baby.”
“Well, he sounds… interesting.”
She waited, but Strike did not speak.
“I’ll see you Saturday night, then,” she said.
Robin had felt obliged to invite Strike to her and Matthew’s house-warming party, because she had given their most regular and reliable subcontractor, Andy Hutchins, an invitation, and felt it would be odd to leave out Strike. She had been surprised when he had accepted.
“Yeah, see you then.”
“Is Lorelei coming?” Robin asked, striving for casualness, but not sure she had succeeded.
Back in central London, Strike thought he detected a sardonic note in the question, as though challenging him to admit that his girlfriend had a ludicrous moniker. He would once have pulled her up on it, asked what her problem was with the name “Lorelei,” enjoyed sparring with her, but this was dangerous territory.
“Yeah, she’s coming. The invitation was to both—”
“Yes, of course it was,” said Robin hastily. “All right, I’ll see you—”
“Hang on,” said Strike.
He was alone in the office, because he had sent Denise home early. The temp had not wanted to leave: she was paid by the hour, after all, and only after Strike had assured her that he would pay for a full day had she gathered up all her possessions, talking nonstop all the while.
“Funny thing happened this afternoon,” said Strike.
Robin listened intently, without interrupting, to Strike’s vivid account of the brief visit of Billy. By the end of it, she had forgotten to worry about Strike’s coolness. Indeed, he now sounded like the Strike of a year ago.
“He was definitely mentally ill,” said Strike, his eyes on the clear sky beyond the window. “Possibly psychotic.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I know,” said Strike. He picked up the pad from which Billy had ripped his half-written address and turned it absently in his free hand. “Is he mentally ill, so he thinks he saw a kid strangled? Or is he mentally ill and he saw a kid strangled?”
Neither spoke for a while, during which time both turned over Billy’s story in their minds, knowing that the other was doing the same. This brief, companionable spell of reflection ended abruptly when a cocker spaniel, which Robin had not noticed as it came snuffling through the roses, laid its cold nose without warning on her bare knee and she shrieked.
“What the fuck?”
“Nothing—a dog—”
“Where are you?”
“In a graveyard.”
“What? Why?”
“Just exploring the area. I’d better go,” she said, getting to her feet. “There’s another flat-pack waiting for me at home.”
“Right you are,” said Strike, with a return to his usual briskness. “See you Saturday.”
“I’m so sorry,” said the cocker spaniel’s elderly owner, as Robin slid her mobile back into her bag. “Are you frightened of dogs?”
“Not at all,” said Robin, smiling and patting the dog’s soft golden head. “He surprised me, that’s all.”
As she headed back past the giant skulls towards her new home, Robin thought about Billy, whom Strike had described with such vividness that Robin felt as though she had met him, too.
So deeply absorbed in her thoughts was she, that for the first time all week, Robin forgot to glance up at the White Swan pub as she passed it. High above the street, on the corner of the building, was a single carved swan, which reminded Robin, every time she passed it, of her calamitous wedding day.
4
But what do you propose to do in the town, then?
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Six and a half miles away, Strike set his mobile down on his desk and lit a cigarette. Robin’s interest in his story had been soothing after the interview he had endured half an hour after Billy had fled. The two policemen who had answered Denise’s call had seemed to relish their opportunity to make the famous Cormoran Strike admit his fallibility, taking their time as they ascertained that he had succeeded in finding out neither full name nor address of the probably psychotic Billy.
The late afternoon sun hit the notebook on his desk at an angle, revealing faint indentations. Strike dropped his cigarette into an ashtray he had stolen long ago from a German bar, picked up the notepad and tilted it this way and that, trying to make out the letters formed by the impressions, then reached for a pencil and lightly shaded over them. Untidy capital letters were soon revealed, clearly spelling the words “Charlemont Road.” Billy had pressed less hard on the house or flat number than the street name. One of the faint indents looked like either a 5 or an incomplete 8, but the spacing suggested more than one figure, or possibly a letter.
Strike’s incurable predilection for getting to the root of puzzling incidents tended to inconvenience him quite as much as other people. Hungry and tired though he was, and despite the fact that he had sent his temp away so he could shut up the office, he tore the paper carrying the revealed street name off the pad and headed into the outer room, where he switched the computer back on.
There were several Charlemont Roads in the UK, but on the assumption that Billy was unlikely to have the means to travel very far, he suspected that the one in East Ham had to be the right one. Online records showed two Williams living there, but both were over sixty. Remembering that Billy had been scared that Strike might turn up at “Jimmy’s place,” he had searched for Jimmy and then James, which turned up the details of James Farraday, 49.
Strike made a note of Farraday’s address beneath Billy’s indented scribbles, though not at all confident that Farraday was the man he sought. For one thing, his house number contained no fives or eights and, for another, Billy’s extreme unkemptness suggested that whomever he lived with must take a fairly relaxed attitude to his personal hygiene. Farraday lived with a wife and what appeared to be two daughters.
Strike turned off the computer, but continued to stare abstractedly at the dark screen, thinking about Billy’s story. It was the detail of the pink blanket that kept nagging at him. It seemed such a specific, unglamorous detail for a psychotic delusion.
Remembering that he needed to be up early in the morning for a paying job, he pulled himself to his feet. Before leaving the office, he inserted the piece of paper bearing both the impressions of Billy’s handwriting and Farraday’s address into his wallet.
London, which had recently been at the epicenter of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, was preparing to host the Olympics. Union Jacks and the London 2012 logo were everywhere—on signs, banners, bunting, keyrings, mugs and umbrellas—while jumbles of Olympic merchandise cluttered virtually every shop window. In Strike’s opinion, the logo resembled shards of fluorescent glass randomly thrown together and he was equally unenamored of the official mascots, which looked to him like a pair of cycloptic molars.
There was a tinge of excitement and nervousness about the capital, born, no doubt, of the perennially British dread that the nation might make a fool of itself. Complaints about non-availability of Olympics tickets were a dominant theme in conversation, unsuccessful applicants decrying the lottery that was supposed to have given everybody a fair and equal chance of watching events live. Strike, who had hoped to see some boxing, had not managed to get tickets, but laughed out loud at his old school friend Nick’s offer to take his place at the dressage, which Nick’s wife Ilsa was overjoyed to have bagged.