Harley Street, where Strike was due to spend Friday running surveillance on a cosmetic surgeon, remained untouched by Olympic fever. The grand Victorian fa?ades presented their usual implacable faces to the world, unsullied by garish logos or flags.
Strike, who was wearing his best Italian suit for the job, took up a position near the doorway of a building opposite and pretended to be talking on his mobile, actually keeping watch over the entrance of the expensive consulting rooms of two partners, one of whom was Strike’s client.
“Dodgy Doc,” as Strike had nicknamed his quarry, was taking his time living up to his name. Possibly he had been scared out of his unethical behavior by his partner, who had confronted him after realizing that Dodgy had recently performed two breast augmentations that had not been run through the business’s books. Suspecting the worst, the senior partner had come to Strike for help.
“His justification was feeble, full of holes. He is,” said the white-haired surgeon, stiff-lipped but full of foreboding, “and always has been a… ah… womanizer. I checked his internet history before confronting him and found a website where young women solicit cash contributions for their cosmetic enhancements, in return for explicit pictures. I fear… I hardly know what… but it might be that he has made an arrangement with these women that is not… monetary. Two of the younger women had been asked to call a number I did not recognize, but which suggested surgery might be arranged free in return for an ‘exclusive arrangement.’”
Strike had not so far witnessed Dodgy meeting any women outside his regular hours. He spent Mondays and Fridays in his Harley Street consulting rooms and the mid-week at the private hospital where he operated. Whenever Strike had tailed him outside his places of work, he had merely taken short walks to purchase chocolate, to which he seemed addicted. Every night, he drove his Bentley home to his wife and children in Gerrards Cross, tailed by Strike in his old blue BMW.
Tonight, both surgeons would be attending a Royal College of Surgeons dinner with their wives, so Strike had left his BMW in its expensive garage. The hours rolled by in tedium, Strike mostly concerned with shifting the weight off his prosthesis at regular intervals as he leaned up against railings, parking meters and doorways. A steady trickle of clients pressed the bell at Dodgy’s door and were admitted, one by one. All were female and most were sleek and well-groomed. At five o’clock, Strike’s mobile vibrated in his breast pocket and he saw a text from his client.
Safe to clock off, about to leave with him for the Dorchester.
Perversely, Strike hung around, watching as the partners left the building some fifteen minutes later. His client was tall and white-haired; Dodgy, a sleek, dapper olive-skinned man with shiny black hair, who wore three-piece suits. Strike watched them get into a taxi and leave, then yawned, stretched and contemplated heading home, possibly with a takeaway.
Almost against his will, he pulled out his wallet and extracted the piece of crumpled paper on which he had managed to reveal Billy’s street name.
All day, at the back of his mind, he had thought he might go and seek out Billy in Charlemont Road if Dodgy Doc left work early, but he was tired and his leg sore. If Lorelei knew that he had the evening off, she would expect Strike to call. On the other hand, they were going to Robin’s house-warming together tomorrow night and if he spent tonight at Lorelei’s, it would be hard to extricate himself tomorrow, after the party. He never spent two nights in a row at Lorelei’s flat, even when the opportunity had occurred. He liked to set limits on her rights to his time.
As though hoping to be dissuaded by the weather, he glanced up at the clear June sky and sighed. The evening was clear and perfect, the agency so busy that he did not know when he would next have a few hours to spare. If he wanted to visit Charlemont Road, it would have to be tonight.
5
I can quite understand your having a horror of public meetings and… of the rabble that frequents them.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
His journey coinciding with rush hour, it took Strike over an hour to travel from Harley Street to East Ham. By the time he had located Charlemont Road his stump was aching and the sight of the long residential street made him regret that he was not the kind of man who could simply write off Billy as a mental case.
The terraced houses had a motley appearance: some were bare brick, others painted or pebble-dashed. Union Jacks hung at windows: further evidence of Olympics fever or relics of the Royal Jubilee. The small plots in front of the houses had been made into pocket gardens or dumps for debris, according to preference. Halfway along the road lay a dirty old mattress, abandoned to whoever wanted to deal with it.
His first glimpse of James Farraday’s residence did not encourage Strike to hope that he had reached journey’s end, because it was one of the best-maintained houses in the street. A tiny porch with colored glass had been added around the front door, ruched net curtains hung at each window and the brass letterbox gleamed in the sunshine. Strike pressed the plastic doorbell and waited.
After a short wait, a harried woman opened the door, releasing a silver tabby, which appeared to have been waiting, coiled behind the door, for the first chance to escape. The woman’s cross expression sat awkwardly above an apron printed with a “Love Is…” cartoon. A strong odor of cooking meat wafted out of the house.
“Hi,” said Strike, salivating at the smell. “Don’t know whether you can help me. I’m trying to find Billy.”
“You’ve got the wrong address. There’s no Billy here.”
She made to close the door.
“He said he was staying with Jimmy,” said Strike, as the gap narrowed.
“There’s no Jimmy here, either.”
“Sorry, I thought somebody called James—”
“Nobody calls him Jimmy. You’ve got the wrong house.”
She closed the door.
Strike and the silver tabby eyed each other; in the cat’s case, superciliously, before it sat down on the mat and began to groom itself with an air of dismissing Strike from its thoughts.
Strike returned to the pavement, where he lit a cigarette and looked up and down the street. By his estimate there were two hundred houses on Charlemont Road. How long would it take to knock on every household’s door? More time than he had this evening, was the unfortunate answer, and more time than he was likely to have anytime soon. He walked on, frustrated and increasingly sore, glancing in through windows and scrutinizing passersby for a resemblance to the man he had met the previous day. Twice, he asked people entering or leaving their houses whether they knew “Jimmy and Billy,” whose address he claimed to have lost. Both said no.
Strike trudged on, trying not to limp.
At last he reached a section of houses that had been bought up and converted into flats. Pairs of front doors stood crammed side by side and the front plots had been concreted over.
Strike slowed down. A torn sheet of A4 had been pinned to one of the shabbiest doors, from which the white paint was peeling. A faint but familiar prickle of interest that he would never have dignified with the name “hunch” led Strike to the door.
The scribbled message read:
7.30 Meeting moved from pub to Well Community Centre in Vicarage Lane—end of street turn left Jimmy Knight
Strike lifted the sheet of paper with a finger, saw a house number ending in 5, let the note fall again and moved to peer through the dusty downstairs window.
An old bed sheet had been pinned up to block out sunlight, but a corner had fallen down. Tall enough to squint through the uncovered portion of glass, Strike saw a slice of empty room containing an open sofa bed with a stained duvet on it, a pile of clothes in the corner and a portable TV standing on a cardboard box. The carpet was obscured by a multitude of empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. This seemed promising. He returned to the peeling front door, raised a large fist and knocked.