He had now notched up nearly twelve hours in Catford, trying to glimpse Whittaker entering or leaving his flat over the chip shop, which stood on a busy pedestrian street running along the rear of the Catford Theatre. Fishmongers, wig shops, cafés and bakeries curved around the perimeter of the theater, and each had a flat above it boasting three arched windows in triangular formation. The thin curtains of the flat where Shanker believed Whittaker to be living were constantly closed. Market stalls filled the street by day, providing Strike with useful cover. The mingled smells of incense from the dream-catcher stall and the slabs of raw fish lying on ice nearby filled his nostrils until he barely noticed them.
For three evenings Strike had watched from the stage door of the theater, opposite the flat, seeing nothing but shadowy forms moving behind the flat’s curtains. Then, on Wednesday evening, the door beside the chip shop had opened to reveal an emaciated teenage girl.
Her dark, dirty hair was pulled back off a sunken, rabbity face, which had the violet-shadowed pallor of a consumptive. She wore a crop top, a zip-up gray hoodie and leggings that gave her thin legs the look of pipe cleaners. Arms crossed tightly across her thin torso, she entered the chip shop by leaning on the door until it gave, then half falling into it. Strike hurried across the road so fast that he caught the door as it swung closed and took a place immediately behind her in the queue.
When she reached the counter the man serving addressed her by name.
“All right, Stephanie?”
“Yeah,” she said in a low voice. “Two Cokes, please.”
She had multiple piercings in her ears, nose and lip. After counting out payment in coins she left, head bowed, without looking at Strike.
He returned to his darkened doorway across the road where he ate the chips he had just bought, his eyes never moving from the lit windows above the chippy. Her purchase of two Cokes suggested that Whittaker was up there, perhaps sprawled naked on a mattress, as Strike had so often seen him in his teens. Strike had thought himself detached, but the awareness as he had stood in the chip-shop queue that he might be mere feet from the bastard, separated only by a flimsy wood and plaster ceiling, had made his pulse race. Stubbornly he watched the flat until the lights in the windows went off around one in the morning, but there had been no sign of Whittaker.
He had been no luckier with Laing. Careful perusal of Google Street View suggested that the balcony on which the fox-haired Laing had posed for his JustGiving photograph belonged to a flat in Wollaston Close, a squat, shabby block of flats that stood a short distance from the Strata. Neither phone nor voter registration records for the property revealed any trace of Laing, but Strike still held out hope that he might be living there as the guest of another, or renting and living without a landline. He had spent hours on Tuesday evening keeping watch over the flats, bringing with him a pair of night-vision goggles that enabled him to peer through uncurtained windows once darkness fell, but saw no hint of the Scot entering, leaving or moving around inside any of the flats. Having no wish to tip Laing off that he was after him, Strike had decided against door-to-door inquiries, but had lurked by day near the brick arches of a railway bridge nearby, which had been filled in to create tunnel-like spaces. Small businesses lived here: an Ecuadorian café, a hairdresser’s. Eating and drinking silently among cheerful South Americans, Strike had been conspicuous by his silence and moroseness.
Strike’s fresh yawn turned into another groan of tiredness as he stretched in Robin’s computer chair, so that he did not hear the first clanging footsteps on the stairs in the hallway. By the time he had realized that somebody was approaching and checked his watch—it was surely too early for Robin, who had told him her mother’s train would leave at eleven—a shadow was climbing the wall outside the frosted glass. A knock on the door, and to Strike’s astonishment, Two-Times entered the office.
A paunchy middle-aged businessman, he was considerably wealthier than his crumpled, nondescript appearance would suggest. His face, which was entirely forgettable, neither handsome nor homely, was today screwed up in consternation.
“She’s dumped me,” he told Strike without preamble.
He dropped onto the mock-leather sofa in an eruption of fake flatulence that took him by surprise; for the second time, Strike assumed, that day. It must have been a shock to the man to be dumped, when his usual procedure was to collect evidence of infidelity and present it to the blonde in question, thus severing the connection. The better Strike had got to know his client, the more he had understood that, for Two-Times, this constituted some kind of satisfying sexual climax. The man appeared to be a peculiar mixture of masochist, voyeur and control freak.
“Really?” said Strike, getting to his feet and heading towards the kettle; he needed caffeine. “We’ve been keeping a very close eye on her and there hasn’t been a hint of another man.”
In fact, he had done nothing about Platinum all week except to take Raven’s calls, a few of which he had allowed to go to voicemail while he had been tailing Mad Dad. He now wondered whether he had listened to all of them. He hoped to Christ that Raven had not been warning him that another rich man had shown up, ready to defray some of Platinum’s student expenses in return for exclusive privileges, or he would have to say good-bye to Two-Times’s cash for good.
“Why’s she dumped me then?” demanded Two-Times.