“I knew you’d fucking defend him!” Matthew bellowed, all control gone. “I knew if you spoke to him you’d go scurrying back like some fucking lapdog!”
“You don’t get to make those decisions for me!” she yelled. “Nobody’s got the right to intercept my fucking calls and delete my messages, Matthew!”
Restraint and pretense were gone. They heard each other only by accident, in brief pauses for breath, each of them howling their resentment and pain across the room like flaming spears that burned into dust before touching their target. Robin gesticulated wildly, then screeched with pain as her arm protested sharply, and Matthew pointed with self-righteous rage at the scar she would carry forever because of her reckless stupidity in working with Strike. Nothing was achieved, nothing was excused, nothing was apologized for: the arguments that had defaced their last twelve months had all led to this conflagration, the border skirmishes that presage war. Beyond the window, afternoon dissolved rapidly into evening. Robin’s head throbbed, her stomach churned, her sense of being stifled threatened to overcome her.
“You hated me working those hours—you didn’t give a damn that I was happy in my job for the first time in my life, so you lied! You knew what it meant to me, and you lied! How could you delete my call history, how could you delete my voicemail—?”
She sat down suddenly in a deep, fringed chair, her head in her hands, dizzy with the force of her anger and shock on an empty stomach.
Somewhere, distantly in the carpeted hush of the hotel corridors, a door closed, a woman giggled.
“Robin,” said Matthew hoarsely.
She heard him approaching her, but she put out a hand, holding him away.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Robin, I shouldn’t have done it, I know that. I didn’t want you hurt again.”
She barely heard him. Her anger was not only for Matthew, but also for Strike. He should have called back. He should have tried and kept trying. If he had, I might not be here now.
The thought scared her.
If I’d known Strike wanted me back, would I have married Matthew?
She heard the rustle of Matthew’s jacket and guessed that he was checking his watch. Perhaps the guests waiting downstairs would think that they had disappeared to consummate the marriage. She could imagine Geoffrey making ribald jokes in their absence. The band must have been in place for an hour. Again she remembered how much this was all costing her parents. Again, she remembered that they had lost deposits on the wedding that had been postponed.
“All right,” she said, in a colorless voice. “Let’s go back down and dance.”
She stood up, automatically smoothing her skirt. Matthew looked suspicious.
“You’re sure?”
“We’ve got to get through today,” she said. “People have come a long way. Mum and Dad have paid a lot of money.”
Hoisting her skirt up again, she set off for the suite door.
“Robin!”
She turned back, expecting him to say “I love you,” expecting him to smile, to beg, to urge a truer reconciliation.
“You’d better wear this,” he said, holding out the wedding ring she had removed, his expression as cold as hers.
Strike had not been able to think of a better course of action, given that he intended to stay until he had spoken to Robin again, than continuing to drink. He had removed himself from Stephen and Jenny’s willing protection, feeling that they ought to be free to enjoy the company of friends and family, and fallen back on the methods by which he usually repelled strangers’ curiosity: his own intimidating size and habitually surly expression. For a while he lurked at the end of the bar, nursing a pint on his own, and then repaired to the terrace, where he had stood apart from the other smokers and contemplated the dappled evening, breathing in the sweet meadow smell beneath a coral sky. Even Martin and his friends, now full of drink themselves and smoking in a circle like teenagers, failed to muster sufficient nerve to badger him.
After a while, the guests were skillfully rounded up and ushered en masse back into the wood-paneled room, which had been transformed in their absence into a dance floor. Half the tables had been removed, the others shifted to the sides. A band stood ready behind amplifiers, but the bride and groom remained absent. A man whom Strike understood to be Matthew’s father, sweaty, rotund and red-faced, had already made several jokes about what they might be getting up to when Strike found himself addressed by a woman in a tight turquoise dress whose feathery hair adornment tickled his nose as she closed in for a handshake.
“It’s Cormoran Strike, isn’t it?” she said. “What an honor! Sarah Shadlock.”
Strike knew all about Sarah Shadlock. She had slept with Matthew at university, while he was in a long-distance relationship with Robin. Once again, Strike indicated his bandage to show why he could not shake her hand.
“Oh, you poor thing!”
A drunk, balding man who was probably younger than he looked loomed up behind Sarah.
“Tom Turvey,” he said, fixing Strike with unfocused eyes. “Bloody good job. Well done, mate. Bloody good job.”
“We’ve wanted to meet you for ages,” said Sarah. “We’re old friends of Matt and Robin’s.”
“Shacklewell Rip—Ripper,” said Tom, on a slight hiccup. “Bloody good job.”
“Look at you, you poor thing,” said Sarah again, touching Strike on the bicep as she smiled up into his bruised face. “He didn’t do that to you, did he?”
“Ev’ryone wants to know,” said Tom, grinning blearily. “Can hardly contain their bloody selves. You should’ve made a speech instead of Henry.”
“Ha ha,” said Sarah. “Last thing you’d want to do, I expect. You must have come here straight from catching—well, I don’t know—did you?”
“Sorry,” said Strike, unsmiling, “police have asked me not to talk about it.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the harried MC, who had been caught unawares by Matthew and Robin’s unobtrusive entrance into the room, “please welcome Mr. and Mrs. Cunliffe!”
As the newlyweds moved unsmilingly into the middle of the dance floor, everybody but Strike began to applaud. The lead singer of the band took the microphone from the MC.
“This is a song from their past that means a lot to Matthew and Robin,” the singer announced, as Matthew slid his hand around Robin’s waist and grasped her other hand.
The wedding photographer moved out of the shadows and began clicking away again, frowning a little at the reappearance of the ugly rubber brace on the bride’s arm.
The first acoustic bars of “Wherever You Will Go” by The Calling struck up. Robin and Matthew began to revolve on the spot, their faces averted from each other.
So lately, been wondering,
Who will be there to take my place
When I’m gone, you’ll need love
To light the shadows on your face…
Strange choice for an “our song,” Strike thought… but as he watched he saw Matthew move closer to Robin, saw his hand tighten on her narrow waist as he bent his handsome face to whisper something in her ear.
A jolt somewhere around the solar plexus pierced the fug of exhaustion, relief and alcohol that had cushioned Strike all day long from the reality of what this wedding meant. Now, as Strike watched the newlyweds turn on the dance floor, Robin in her long white dress, with a circlet of roses in her hair, Matthew in his dark suit, his face close to his bride’s cheek, Strike was forced to recognize how long, and how deeply, he had hoped that Robin would not marry. He had wanted her free, free to be what they had been together. Free, so that if circumstances changed… so the possibility was there… free, so that one day, they might find out what else they could be to each other.
Fuck this.
If she wanted to talk, she would have to call him. Setting down his empty glass on a windowsill, he turned and made his way through the other guests, who shuffled aside to let him pass, so dark was his expression.
As she turned, staring into space, Robin saw Strike leaving. The door opened. He was gone.
“Let go of me.”