It had slipped out before she could stop herself. Increasingly heavy traffic was rolling past, and when Strike did not answer, Robin hoped that he hadn’t heard her.
“Did Chiswell mention his son who died in Iraq?” she asked, rather like a person hastily coughing to hide a laugh that has already escaped them.
“Yeah,” said Strike. “Freddie was clearly his favorite child, which doesn’t say much for his judgment.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Freddie Chiswell was a prize shit. I investigated a lot of Killed in Actions, and I never had so many people ask me whether the dead officer had been shot in the back by his own men.”
Robin looked shocked.
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum?” asked Strike.
Robin had learned quite a lot of Latin, working with Strike.
“Well,” she said quietly, for the first time finding some pity in her heart for Jasper Chiswell, “you can’t expect his father to speak ill of him.”
They parted at the top of the street, Robin to shop for colored contact lenses, Strike heading for the Tube.
He felt unusually cheerful after the conversation with Robin: as they contemplated this challenging job, the familiar contours of their friendship had suddenly resurfaced. He had liked her excitement at the prospect of entering the House of Commons; liked being the one who had offered the chance. He had even enjoyed the way she stress-tested his assumptions about Chiswell’s story.
On the point of entering the station, Strike turned suddenly aside, infuriating the irate businessman who had been walking six inches in his wake. Tutting furiously, the man barely avoided a collision and strode off huffily into the Underground while the indifferent Strike leaned up against the sun-soaked wall, enjoying the sensation of heat permeating his suit jacket as he phoned Detective Inspector Eric Wardle.
Strike had told Robin the truth. He didn’t believe that Chiswell had ever strangled a child, yet there had been something undeniably odd about his reaction to Billy’s story. Thanks to the minister’s revelation that the Knight family had lived in proximity to his family home, Strike now knew that Billy had been a “little kid” in Oxfordshire. The first logical step in assuaging his continued unease about that pink blanket was to find out whether any children in the area had disappeared a couple of decades ago, and never been found.
11
… let us stifle all memories in our sense of freedom, in joy, in passion.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Lorelei Bevan lived in an eclectically furnished flat over her thriving vintage clothes store in Camden. Strike arrived that night at half past seven, a bottle of Pinot Noir in one hand and his mobile clamped to his ear with the other. Lorelei opened the door, smiled good-naturedly at the familiar sight of him on the phone, kissed him on the mouth, relieved him of his wine and returned to the kitchen, from which a welcome smell of Pad Thai was issuing.
“… or try and get into CORE itself,” Strike told Barclay, closing the door behind him and proceeding to Lorelei’s sitting room, which was dominated by a large print of Warhol’s Elizabeth Taylors. “I’ll send you everything I’ve got on Jimmy. He’s involved with a couple of different groups. No idea whether he’s working. His local’s the White Horse in East Ham. Think he’s a Hammers fan.”
“Could be worse,” said Barclay, who was speaking quietly, as he had just got the teething baby to sleep. “Could be Chelsea.”
“You’ll have to admit to being ex-army,” said Strike, sinking into an armchair and hoisting his leg up onto a conveniently positioned square pouf. “You look like a squaddie.”
“Nae problem,” said Barclay. “I’ll be the poor wee laddie who didnae know whut he was gettin’ himself intae. Hard lefties love that shit. Let ’em patronize me.”
Grinning, Strike took out his cigarettes. For all his initial doubts, he was starting to think that Barclay might have been a good hire.
“All right, hang fire till you hear from me again. Should be sometime Sunday.”
As Strike rang off, Lorelei appeared with a glass of red for him.
“Want some help in the kitchen?” Strike asked, though without moving.
“No, stay there. I won’t be long,” she replied, smiling. He liked her fifties-style apron.
As she returned to the kitchen, he lit up. Although Lorelei did not smoke, she had no objection to Strike’s Benson & Hedges as long as he used the kitsch ashtray, decorated with cavorting poodles, that she had provided for the purpose.
Smoking, he admitted to himself that he envied Barclay infiltrating Knight and his band of hard-left colleagues. It was the kind of job Strike had relished in the Military Police. He remembered the four soldiers in Germany who had become enamored of a local far-right group. Strike had managed to persuade them that he shared their belief in a white ethno-nationalist super-state, infiltrated a meeting and secured four arrests and prosecutions that had given him particular satisfaction.
Turning on the TV, he watched Channel 4 News for a while, drinking his wine, smoking in pleasurable anticipation of Pad Thai and other sensual delights, and for once enjoying what so many of his fellow workers took for granted, but which he had rarely experienced: the relief and release of a Friday night.
Strike and Lorelei had met at Eric Wardle’s birthday party. It had been an awkward evening in some ways, because Strike had seen Coco there for the first time since telling her by phone that he had no interest in another date. Coco had got very drunk; at one in the morning, while he was sitting on a sofa deep in conversation with Lorelei, she had marched across the room, thrown a glass of wine over both of them and stormed off into the night. Strike had not been aware that Coco and Lorelei were old friends until the morning after he woke up in Lorelei’s bed. He considered that this was really more Lorelei’s problem than his. She seemed to think the exchange, for Coco wanted nothing more to do with her, more than fair.
“How d’you do it?” Wardle had asked, the next time they met, genuinely puzzled. “Blimey, I’d like to know your—”
Strike raised his heavy eyebrows and Wardle appeared to gag on what had come perilously close to a compliment.
“There’s no secret,” said Strike. “Some women just like fat one-legged pube-headed men with broken noses.”
“Well, it’s a sad indictment of our mental health services that they’re loose on the streets,” Wardle had said, and Strike had laughed.
Lorelei was her real name, taken not from the mythical siren of the Rhine, but from Marilyn Monroe’s character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, her mother’s favorite film. Men’s eyes swiveled when she passed them in the street, but she evoked neither the profound longing nor the searing pain that Charlotte had caused Strike. Whether this was because Charlotte had stunted his capacity to feel so intensely, or because Lorelei lacked some essential magic, he did not know. Neither Strike nor Lorelei had said “I love you.” In Strike’s case this was because, desirable and amusing though he found her, he could not have said it honestly. It was convenient to him to assume that Lorelei felt the same way.