“Sod off,” she said.
He blinked. His smile turned to a scowl. As she strode away, stuffing Linda’s money into her pocket, she heard him shout something after her, but she neither knew nor cared what it had been. A vast unfocused rage rose in her, against men who considered displays of emotion a delicious open door; men who ogled your breasts under the pretense of scanning the wine shelves; men for whom your mere physical presence constituted a lubricious invitation.
Her fury billowed to encompass Strike, who had sent her home to Matthew because he now considered her a liability; who would rather endanger the business that she had helped build up, soldiering on single-handedly, than let her do what she was good at, what she sometimes outshone him at, because of the permanent handicap she had in his eyes acquired by being in the wrong stairwell at the wrong time, seven years previously.
So yes, she would ring his bloody lap-dancing clubs and his strip joints in search of the bastard who had called her “little girl,” but there was something else she would do too. She had been looking forward to telling Strike about it, but there had been no time with Linda’s train due, and she had felt no inclination after he told her to stay at home.
Robin tightened her belt and marched on, frowning, feeling fully justified in continuing to follow one lead, unbeknownst to Strike, alone.
37
This ain’t the garden of Eden.
Blue ?yster Cult, “This Ain’t the Summer of Love”
If she had to be at home, she supposed she would watch the wedding. Robin staked out a position on the sitting-room sofa early next morning, her laptop open on her knees, her mobile beside her, the TV on in the background. Matthew, too, had the day off work, but he was in the kitchen, keeping out of her way. There had been no solicitous offers of tea today, no questions about her work, no obsequious attentiveness. Robin sensed a change in him since her mother had left. He seemed anxious, wary, more serious. Somehow, during their quiet conversations, Linda appeared to have convinced Matthew that what had happened might never be reparable.
Robin knew perfectly well that she needed to deliver the coup de grace. Linda’s parting words had increased her sense of urgency. She had not yet found another place to live, but she must nevertheless tell Matthew that she was moving out and agree a form of words to issue to their friends and family. Yet here she sat on the sofa, working rather than dealing with the subject that seemed to fill the small flat, pressing against the walls, keeping the atmosphere perpetually stiff with tension.
Commentators wearing buttonholes and corsages were babbling on screen about the decorations in Westminster Abbey. Famous guests snaked towards the entrance and Robin half listened as she noted down the telephone numbers for lap-dancing clubs, strip joints and massage parlors in and around Shoreditch. Every now and then she scrolled down a page to look through the client reviews on the remote chance that somebody might have mentioned a bouncer called Noel, but no individual was named except the women who worked there. Punters often recommended them on the basis of their reported enthusiasm for their jobs. Mandy from one massage parlor “gives full thirty minutes” with “never any sense of being rushed”; the gorgeous Sherry of Beltway Strippers was always “willing, accommodating and up for a laugh.” “I can thoroughly recommend Zoe,” said one punter, “gorgeous figure and a very ‘happy ending’!!!”
In a different mood—or, perhaps, in a different life—Robin might have found the way they talked about the women funny. So many of the men handing over cash for sex needed to believe that the women’s enthusiasm was real, that they took their time for pleasure, that they were really laughing at punters’ jokes, genuinely enjoying the body-to-body massages and the hand jobs. One reviewer had posted a poem about his favorite girl.
Even as she diligently compiled her list of numbers, Robin thought it unlikely that Brockbank, with his insalubrious record, would have been hired by any of the more upmarket places, whose websites featured artistically lit, airbrushed naked girls and invitations for couples to attend together.