“If it can’t wait until Friday, you’ll have to find someone else, I’m afraid.”
“My feet is my only carriage,” sang the busker.
Chiswell said nothing for a few seconds; then, finally:
“It’s got to be you. I’ll explain when we meet, but—all right, if it has to be Friday, meet me at Pratt’s Club. Park Place. Come at twelve, I’ll give you lunch.”
“All right,” Strike agreed, now thoroughly intrigued. “See you at Pratt’s.”
He hung up and returned to the office where Robin was opening and sorting mail. When he told her the upshot of the conversation, she Googled Pratt’s for him.
“I didn’t think places like this still existed,” she said in disbelief, after a minute’s reading off the monitor.
“Places like what?”
“It’s a gentleman’s club… very Tory… no women allowed, except as guests of club members at lunchtime… and ‘to avoid confusion,’” Robin read from the Wikipedia page, “‘all male staff members are called George.’”
“What if they hire a woman?”
“Apparently they did in the eighties,” said Robin, her expression midway between amusement and disapproval. “They called her Georgina.”
9
It is best for you not to know. Best for us both.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
At half past eleven the following Friday, a suited and freshly shaven Strike emerged from Green Park Tube station and proceeded along Piccadilly. Double-deckers rolled past the windows of luxury shops, which were capitalizing on Olympics fever to push an eclectic mix of goods: gold-wrapped chocolate medals, Union Jack brogues, antique sporting posters and, over and again, the jagged logo that Jimmy Knight had compared to a broken swastika.
Strike had allowed a generous margin of time to reach Pratt’s, because his leg was again aching after two days in which he had rarely been able to take the weight off his prosthesis. He had hoped that the tech conference in Epping Forest, where he had spent the previous day, might have offered intervals of rest, but he had been disappointed. His target, the recently fired partner of a start-up, was suspected of trying to sell key features of their new app to competitors. For hours, Strike had tailed the young man from booth to booth, documenting all his movements and his interactions, hoping at some point that he would tire and sit. However, between the coffee bar where customers stood at high tables, to the sandwich bar where everyone stood and ate sushi with their fingers out of plastic boxes, the target had spent eight hours walking or standing. Coming after long hours of lurking in Harley Street the day before, it was hardly surprising that the removal of his prosthesis the previous evening had been an uncomfortable affair, the gel pad that separated stump from artificial shin difficult to prize off. As he passed the cool off-white arches of the Ritz, Strike hoped Pratt’s contained at least one comfortable chair of generous proportions.
He turned right into St. James’s Street, which led him in a gentle slope straight down to the sixteenth-century St. James’s Palace. This was not an area of London that Strike usually visited on his own account, given that he had neither the means nor the inclination to buy from gentlemen’s outfitters, long-established gun shops or centuries-old wine dealers. As he drew nearer to Park Place, though, he was visited by a personal memory. He had walked this street more than ten years previously, with Charlotte.
They had walked up the slope, not down it, heading for a lunch date with her father, who was now dead. Strike had been on leave from the army and they had recently resumed what was, to everyone who knew them, an incomprehensible and obviously doomed affair. On neither side of their relationship had there ever been a single supporter. His friends and family had viewed Charlotte with everything from mistrust to loathing, while hers had always considered Strike, the illegitimate son of an infamous rock star, as one more manifestation of Charlotte’s need to shock and rebel. Strike’s military career had been nothing to her family, or rather, it had been just another sign of his plebeian unfitness to aspire to the well-bred beauty’s hand, because gentlemen of Charlotte’s class did not enter the Military Police, but Cavalry or Guards regiments.
She had clutched his hand very tightly as they entered an Italian restaurant somewhere nearby. Its precise location escaped Strike now. All he remembered was the expression of rage and disapproval on Sir Anthony Campbell’s face as they had approached the table. Strike had known before a word was spoken that Charlotte had not told her father that she and Strike had resumed their affair, or that she would be bringing him with her. It had been a thoroughly Charlottian omission, prompting the usual Charlottian scene. Strike had long since come to believe that she engineered situations out of an apparently insatiable need for conflict. Prone to outbursts of lacerating honesty amid her general mythomania, she had told Strike towards the end of their relationship that at least, while fighting, she knew she was alive.
As Strike drew level with Park Place, a line of cream-painted townhouses leading off St. James’s Street, he noted that the sudden memory of Charlotte clinging to his hand no longer hurt, and felt like an alcoholic who, for the first time, catches a whiff of beer without breaking into a sweat or having to grapple with his desperate craving. Perhaps this is it, he thought, as he approached the black door of Pratt’s, with its wrought iron balustrade above. Perhaps, two years after she had told him the unforgivable lie and he had left for good, he was healed, clear of what he sometimes, even though not superstitious, saw as a kind of Bermuda triangle, a danger zone in which he feared being pulled back under, dragged to the depths of anguish and pain by the mysterious allure Charlotte had held for him.
With a faint sense of celebration, Strike knocked on the door of Pratt’s.
A petite, motherly woman opened up. Her prominent bust and alert, bright-eyed mien put him in mind of a robin or a wren. When she spoke, he caught a trace of the West Country.
“You’ll be Mr. Strike. The minister’s not here yet. Come along in.”
He followed her across the threshold into a hall through which could be glimpsed an enormous billiard table. Rich crimsons, greens and dark wood predominated. The stewardess, who he assumed was Georgina, led him down a set of steep stairs, which Strike took carefully, maintaining a firm grip on the banister.
The stairs led to a cozy basement. The ceiling had sunk so low that it appeared partially supported by a large dresser on which sundry porcelain platters were displayed, the topmost ones half embedded into the plaster.
“We aren’t very big,” she said, stating the obvious. “Six hundred members, but we can only serve fourteen a meal at a time. Would you like a drink, Mr. Strike?”
He declined, but accepted an invitation to sit down in one of the leather chairs grouped around an aged cribbage board.