There were about a dozen of them. Lurking behind a group of chattering youths, Strike readjusted the slipping plastic mask, which had not been constructed for a man whose nose had been broken, and spotted Jimmy Knight, who was talking to two young women, both of whom had just thrown back their heads, laughing delightedly at something Knight had just said. Clamping the mask to his face to make sure the slits aligned with his eyes, Strike scanned the rest of the CORE members and concluded that the absence of tomato-red hair was not because Flick had dyed it another color, but because she wasn’t there.
Stewards now started herding the crowd into something resembling a line. Strike moved into the mass of protestors, a silent, lumbering figure, acting a little obtusely so that the youthful organizers, intimidated by his size, treated him like a rock around which the current must be channeled as he took up a position right behind CORE. A skinny boy who was also wearing an Anonymous mask gave Strike a double thumbs up as he was shunted towards the rear of the line. Strike returned it.
Now smoking a roll-up, Jimmy continued to joke with the two young girls beside him, who were vying for his attention. The darker of the two, who was particularly attractive, was holding a double-sided banner carrying a highly detailed painting of David Cameron as Hitler overlooking the 1936 Olympic Stadium. It was quite an impressive piece of art, and Strike had time to admire it as the procession finally set off at a steady pace, flanked by police and stewards in high visibility jackets, moving gradually out of the park and onto the long, straight Roman Road.
The smooth tarmac was slightly easier on Strike’s prosthesis, but his stump was still throbbing. After a few minutes a chant was got up: “Missiles OUT! Missiles OUT!”
A couple of press photographers were walking backwards in the road ahead, taking pictures of the front of the march.
“Hey, Libby,” said Jimmy, to the girl with the hand-painted Hitler banner. “Wanna get on my shoulders?”
Strike noted her friend’s poorly concealed envy as Jimmy crouched down so that Libby could straddle his neck and be lifted up above the crowd, her banner raised high enough for the photographers in front to see.
“Show ’em your tits, we’ll be front page!” Jimmy called up to her.
“Jimmy!” she squealed, in mock outrage. Her friend’s smile was forced. The cameras clicked, and Strike, grimacing with pain behind the plastic mask, tried not to limp too obviously.
“Guy with the biggest camera was focused on you the whole time,” said Jimmy, when he finally lowered the girl back to the ground.
“Fuck, if I’m in the papers my mum’ll go apeshit,” said the girl excitedly, and she fell into step on Jimmy’s other side, taking any opportunity to nudge or slap him as he teased her about being scared of what her parents would say. She was, Strike judged, at least fifteen years younger than he was.
“Enjoying yourself, Jimmy?”
The mask restricted Strike’s peripheral vision, so that it was only when the uncombed, tomato-red hair appeared immediately in front of him that Strike realized Flick had joined the march. Her sudden appearance had taken Jimmy by surprise, too.
“There you are!” he said, with a feeble show of pleasure.
Flick glared at the girl called Libby, who sped up, intimidated. Jimmy tried to put his arm around Flick, but she shrugged it off.
“Oi,” he said, feigning innocent indignation. “What’s up?”
“Three fucking guesses,” snarled Flick.
Strike could tell that Jimmy was debating which tack to take with her. His thuggishly handsome face showed irritation but also, Strike thought, a certain wariness. For a second time, he tried to put his arm around her. This time, she slapped it away.
“Oi,” he said again, this time aggressively. “The fuck was that for?”
“I’m off doing your dirty work and you’re fucking around with her? What kind of fucking idiot do you think I am, Jimmy?”
“Missiles OUT!” bellowed a steward with a megaphone, and the crowd took up the chant once more. The cries made by the Mohicaned woman beside Strike were as shrill and raucous as a peacock’s. The one bonus of the renewed shouting was that it left Strike at liberty to grunt with pain every time he set his prosthetic foot on the road, which was a kind of release and made the plastic mask reverberate in a ticklish fashion against his sweating face. Squinting through the eyeholes he watched Jimmy and Flick argue, but he couldn’t hear a word over the din of the crowd. Only when the chant subsided at last could he make out a little of what they were saying to each other.
“I’m fucking sick of this,” Jimmy was saying. “I’m not the one who picks up students in bars when—”
“You’d ditched me!” said Flick, in a kind of whispered scream. “You’d fucking ditched me! You told me you didn’t want anything exclusive—”
“Heat of the moment, wasn’t it?” said Jimmy roughly. “I was stressed. Billy was doing my fucking head in. I didn’t expect you to go straight to a bar and pick up some fucking—”
“You told me you were sick of—”
“Fuck’s sake, I lost my temper and said a bunch of shit I didn’t mean. If I went and shagged another woman every time you give me grief—”
“Yeah, well I sometimes think the only reason you even keep me around is Chis—”
“Keep your fucking voice down!”
“—and today, you think it was fun at that creep’s house—”
“I said I was grateful, fuck’s sake, we discussed this, didn’t we? I had to get those leaflets printed or I’d’ve come with you—”
“And I do that cleaning,” she said, with a sudden sob, “and it’s disgusting and then today you send me—it was horrible, Jimmy, he should be in hospital, he’s in a right state—”
Jimmy glanced around. Coming briefly within Jimmy’s eye-line, Strike attempted to walk naturally, though every time he asked his stump to bear his full weight, he felt as though he was pressing it down on a thousand fire ants.
“We’ll get him to hospital after,” said Jimmy. “We will, but he’ll screw it all up if we let him loose now, you know what he’s like… once Winn’s got those photos… hey,” said Jimmy gently, putting his arm around her for a third time. “Listen. I’m so fucking grateful to you.”
“Yeah,” choked Flick, wiping her nose on the back of her hand, “because of the money. Because you wouldn’t even know what Chiswell had done if—”
Jimmy pulled her roughly towards him and kissed her. For a second she resisted, then opened her mouth. The kiss went on and on as they walked. Strike could see their tongues working in each other’s mouths. They staggered slightly as they walked, locked together, while other CORE members grinned, and the girl whom Jimmy had lifted into the air looked crestfallen.
“Jimmy,” murmured Flick at last, when the kiss had ended, but his arm was still around her. She was doe-eyed with lust now, and soft-spoken. “I think you should come and talk to him, seriously. He keeps talking about that bloody detective.”
“What?” said Jimmy, though Strike could tell he’d heard.
“Strike. That bastard soldier with the one leg. Billy’s fixated on him. Thinks he’s going to rescue him.”
The end point of the march came into sight at last: Bow Quarter in Fairfield Road, where the square brick tower of an old match factory, proposed site of some of the planned missiles, punctured the skyline.
“‘Rescue him’?” repeated Jimmy scornfully. “Fuck’s sake. It’s not like he’s being fucking tortured.”
The marchers were breaking ranks now, dissolving back into a formless crowd that milled around a dark green pond in front of the proposed missile site. Strike would have given much to sit down on a bench or lean up against a tree, as many of the protestors were doing, so as to take the weight off his stump. Both the end, where skin that was never meant to bear his weight was irritated and inflamed, and the tendons in his knee were begging for ice and rest. Instead, he limped on after Jimmy and Flick as they walked around the edge of the crowd, away from their CORE colleagues.
“He wanted to see you and I told him you were busy,” he heard Flick say, “and he cried. It was horrible, Jimmy.”
Pretending to be watching the young black man with a microphone, who was ascending a stage at the front of the crowd, Strike edged closer to Jimmy and Flick.