Strike lowered the mobile. Feeling a sudden heat in the fingers of the hand not holding his phone, he realized his cigarette had burned to the filter. Stubbing it out on the hot paving stone, he flicked it over the wall into the garden of a neighbor whom Nick and Ilsa disliked, and immediately lit another, thinking about Robin.
He was concerned about her. It was to be expected, of course, that she was experiencing anxiety and stress after finding a body and being interviewed by the security services, but he had noticed lapses in concentration over the phone, where she asked him the same thing two or three times. There was also what he considered her unhealthy eagerness to get back to the office, or out on the street.
Convinced that she ought to be taking some time out, Strike hadn’t told Robin about a line of investigation he was currently pursuing, because he was sure she would insist on being allowed to help.
The fact was that, for Strike, the Chiswell case had begun, not with the dead man’s story of blackmail, but with Billy Knight’s tale of a strangled child wrapped in a pink blanket in the ground. Ever since Billy’s last plea for help, Strike had been phoning the telephone number from which it had been made. Finally, on the previous morning, he had got an answer from a curious passerby, who had confirmed the phone box’s position on the edge of Trafalgar Square.
Strike. That bastard soldier with the one leg. Billy’s fixated on him. Thinks he’s going to rescue him.
Surely there was a chance, however tiny, that Billy might gravitate back to the place where he had last sought help? Strike had spent a few hours wandering Trafalgar Square on the previous afternoon, knowing how remote was the possibility that Billy would show up, yet feeling compelled to do something, however pointless.
Strike’s other decision, which was even harder to justify, because it cost money the agency could currently ill afford, was to keep Barclay embedded with Jimmy and Flick.
“It’s your money,” the Glaswegian said, when the detective gave him this instruction, “but what’m I looking for?”
“Billy,” said Strike, “and in the absence of Billy, anything strange.”
Of course, the next lot of accounts would show Robin exactly what Barclay was up to.
Strike had a sudden feeling that he was being watched. Ossie, the bolder of Nick and Ilsa’s kittens, was sitting at the kitchen window, beside the kitchen taps, staring through the window with eyes of pale jade. His gaze felt judgmental.
37
I shall never conquer this completely. There will always be a doubt confronting me—a question.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Wary of breaching the conditions of the super-injunction, photographers stayed away from Chiswell’s funeral in Woolstone. News organizations restricted themselves to brief, factual announcements that the service had taken place. Strike, who had considered sending flowers, had decided against it on the basis that the gesture might be taken as a tasteless reminder that his bill remained unpaid. Meanwhile the inquest into Chiswell’s death was opened and adjourned, pending further investigations.
And then, quite suddenly, nobody was very interested in Jasper Chiswell. It was as though the corpse that had been borne aloft for a week upon a swell of newsprint, gossip and rumor, now sank beneath stories of sportsmen and women, of Olympic preparations and predictions, the country in the grip of an almost universal preoccupation, for whether they approved or disapproved of the event, it was impossible to ignore or avoid.
Robin was still phoning Strike daily, pressuring him to let her come back to work, but Strike continued to refuse. Not only had Mitch Patterson twice more appeared in her street, but an unfamiliar young busker had spent the whole week playing on the pavement opposite Strike’s office, missing chord changes every time he saw the detective and regularly breaking off halfway through songs to answer his mobile. The press, it seemed, had not forgotten that the Olympics would eventually end, and that there was still a juicy story to be run on the reason Jasper Chiswell had hired private detectives.
None of Strike’s police contacts knew anything about the progress of their colleagues’ investigation into the case. Usually able to fall asleep under even the most unpropitious conditions, Strike found himself unusually restless and wakeful by night, listening to the increased noise from the London now heaving with Olympics visitors. The last time he had endured such a long stretch of sleeplessness had been his first week of consciousness after his leg had been borne off by the IED in Afghanistan. Then he had been kept awake by a tormenting itch impossible to scratch, because he felt it on his missing foot.
Strike hadn’t seen Lorelei since the night of the Paralympic reception. After leaving Charlotte in the street, he had set off for Trafalgar Square to try and locate Billy, with the result that he had been even later to dinner with Lorelei than he had expected. Tired, sore, frustrated at his failure to find Billy and jarred by the unexpected meeting with his ex, he had arrived at the curry house in the expectation, and perhaps the hope, that Lorelei would have already left.
However, she had not only been waiting patiently at the table, she had immediately wrong-footed him with what he mentally characterized as a strategic retreat. Far from forcing a discussion about the future of their relationship, she had apologized for what she claimed to have been a foolish and precipitate declaration of love in bed, which she knew had embarrassed him and which she sincerely regretted.
Strike, who had drunk most of a pint on sitting down, bolstering himself, as he had imagined, for the unpleasant task of explaining that he did not want their relationship to become either more serious or permanent, was stymied. Her claim that she had said “I love you” as a kind of cri de joie rendered his prepared speech useless, and given that she had looked very lovely in the lamp-lit restaurant, it had been easier and pleasanter to accept her explanation at face value rather than force a rupture that, clearly, neither of them wanted. They had texted and spoken a few times during the subsequent week apart, though nowhere near as often as he had talked to Robin. Lorelei had been perfectly understanding about his need to keep a low profile for a while once he explained that his late client had been the government minister who had suffocated in a plastic bag.
Lorelei had even been unfazed when he refused her invitation to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics with her, because he’d already agreed to spend the evening at Lucy and Greg’s. Strike’s sister was as yet unwilling to let Jack out of her sight, and had therefore declined Strike’s offer to take him to the Imperial War Museum over the weekend, offering dinner instead. When he explained to Lorelei how matters stood, Strike could tell that she was hoping that he would ask her to come with him to meet some of his family for the first time. He said, truthfully, that his motive for going alone was to spend time with the nephew whom he felt he had neglected, and Lorelei accepted this explanation good-naturedly, merely asking whether he was free the following night.
As the taxi bore him from Bromley South station towards Lucy and Greg’s, Strike found himself mulling the situation with Lorelei, because Lucy usually demanded a bulletin on his love life. This was one of the reasons he avoided these kinds of get-togethers. It troubled Lucy that her brother was still, at the age of nearly thirty-eight, unmarried. She had gone so far, on one embarrassing occasion, as to invite to dinner a woman whom she imagined he might fancy, which had taught him only that his sister grossly misjudged his taste and needs.