Before Lucy had gone to live permanently with their aunt and uncle in Cornwall, at the age of fourteen, their mother had hauled her and Strike from squat to commune to rented flat to friend’s floor, rarely remaining in the same place more than six months, exposing her children to a parade of eccentric, damaged and addicted human beings along the way. Right hand on the wheel, left hand now groping around for biscuits, Strike recalled some of the nightmarish spectacles that he and Lucy had witnessed as children: the psychotic youth fighting an invisible devil in a basement flat in Shoreditch, the teenager literally being whipped at a quasi-mystical commune in Norfolk (still, for Strike’s money, the worst place that Leda had ever taken them) and Shayla, one of the most fragile of Leda’s friends and a part-time prostitute, sobbing about the brain damage inflicted on her toddler son by a violent boyfriend.
That unpredictable and sometimes terrifying childhood had left Lucy with a craving for stability and conformity. Married to a quantity surveyor whom Strike disliked, with three sons he barely knew, she would probably dismiss Billy’s story of the strangled boy-girl as the product of a broken mind, sweeping it swiftly away into the corner with all the other things she could not bear to think about. Lucy needed to pretend that violence and strangeness had vanished into a past as dead as their mother; that with Leda gone, life was unshakably secure.
Strike understood. Profoundly different though they were, often though she exasperated him, he loved Lucy. Nevertheless, he could not help comparing her with Robin as he bowled towards Manchester. Robin had grown up in what seemed to Strike the very epitome of middle-class stability, but she was courageous in a way that Lucy was not. Both women had been touched by violence and sadism. Lucy had reacted by burying herself where she hoped it would never reach her again; Robin, by facing it almost daily, investigating and resolving other crimes and traumas, driven to do so by the same impulse to actively disentangle complications and disinter truths that Strike recognized in himself.
As the sun climbed higher, still dappling the grubby windscreen, he experienced a powerful regret that she wasn’t here with him now. She was the best person he had ever met to run a theory past. She’d unscrew the thermos for him and pour him tea. We’d have a laugh.
They had slipped back into their old bantering ways a couple of times lately, since Billy had entered the office with a story troubling enough to break down the reserve that had, over a year, hardened into a permanent impediment to their friendship… or whatever it was, thought Strike, and for a moment or two he felt her again in his arms on the stairs, breathed in the scent of white roses and of the perfume that hung around the office when Robin was at her desk…
With a kind of mental grimace, he reached for another cigarette, lit up and forced his mind towards Manchester, and the line of questioning he intended to take with Dawn Clancy, who, for five years, had been Mrs. Jimmy Knight.
15
Yes, she is a queer one, she is. She has always been very much on the high horse…
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
While Strike was speeding northwards, Robin was summoned without explanation to a personal meeting with the Minister for Culture himself.
Walking in the sunshine towards the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which stood in a large white Edwardian building a few minutes away from the Palace of Westminster, Robin found herself almost wishing that she were one of the tourists cluttering the pavement, because Chiswell had sounded bad tempered on the phone.
Robin would have given a great deal to have something useful to tell the minister about his blackmailer, but as she had only been on the job a day and a half, all she could say with any certainty was that her first impressions of Geraint Winn had now been confirmed: he was lazy, lecherous, self-important and indiscreet. The door of his office stood open more often than not, and his sing-song voice rang down the corridor as he talked with injudicious levity about his constituents’ petty concerns, name-dropped celebrities and senior politicians and generally sought to give the impression of a man for whom running a mere constituency office was an unimportant sideshow.
He hailed Robin jovially from his desk whenever she passed his open door, showing a pronounced eagerness for further contact. However, whether by chance or design, Aamir Mallik kept thwarting Robin’s attempts to turn these greetings into conversations, either interrupting with questions for Winn or, as he had done just an hour previously, simply closing the door in Robin’s face.
The exterior of the great block that housed the DCMS, with its stone swags, its columns and its neoclassical fa?ade, was not reassuring. The interior had been modernized and hung with contemporary art, including an abstract glass sculpture that hung from the cupola over the central staircase, up which Robin was led by an efficient-seeming young woman. Believing her to be the minister’s goddaughter, her companion was at pains to show her points of interest.
“The Churchill Room,” she said, pointing left as they turned right. “That’s the balcony he gave his speech from, on VE Day. The minister’s just along here…”
She led Robin down a wide, curving corridor that doubled as an open-plan workspace. Smart young people sat at an array of desks in front of lengthy windows to the right, which looked out onto a quadrangle, which, in size and scale, bore the appearance of a colosseum, with its high white windowed walls. It was all very different from the cramped office where Izzy made their instant coffee from a kettle. Indeed, a large, expensive machine complete with pods sat on one desk for that purpose.
The offices to the left were separated from this curving space by glass walls and doors. Robin spotted the Minister for Culture from a distance, sitting at his desk beneath a contemporary painting of the Queen, talking on the telephone. He indicated by a brusque gesture that her escort should show Robin inside the office and continued talking on the telephone as Robin waited, somewhat awkwardly, for him to finish his call. A woman’s voice was issuing from the earpiece, high-pitched and to Robin, even eight feet away, hysterical.
“I’ve got to go, Kinvara!” barked Chiswell into the mouthpiece. “Yes… we’ll talk about this later. I’ve got to go.”
Setting down the receiver harder than was necessary, he pointed Robin to a chair opposite him. His coarse, straight gray hair stood out around his head in a wiry halo, his fat lower lip giving him an air of angry petulance.
“The newspapers are sniffing around,” he growled. “That was m’wife. The Sun rang her this morning, asking whether the rumors are true. She said ‘what rumors?’ but the fella didn’t specify. Fishing, obviously. Trying to surprise something out of her.”
He frowned at Robin, whose appearance he seemed to find wanting.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven,” she said.
“You look younger.”
It didn’t sound like a compliment.
“Managed to plant the surveillance device yet?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Robin.
“Where’s Strike?”
“In Manchester, interviewing Jimmy Knight’s ex-wife,” said Robin.
Chiswell made the angry, subterranean noise usually rendered as “harrumph,” then got to his feet. Robin jumped up, too.
“Well, you’d better get back and get on with it,” said Chiswell. “The National Health Service,” he added, with no change of tone, as he headed towards the door. “People are going to think we’re bloody mad.”
“Sorry?” said Robin, entirely thrown.
Chiswell pulled open the glass door and indicated that Robin should pass through it ahead of him, out into the open-plan area where all the smart young people sat working beside their sleek coffee machine.
“Olympics opening ceremony,” he explained, following her. “Lefty bloody crap. We won two bloody world wars, but we’re not supposed to celebrate that.”