Strike strolled back towards the Tube, craving a kebab and inwardly deliberating the problem that Wardle had just put to him. How could any of his suspects have got close enough to Kelsey Platt to know her movements or gain her trust?
He thought about Laing, living alone in his grim Wollaston Close flat, claiming his disability benefit, overweight and infirm, looking far older than his real age of thirty-four. He had been a funny man, once. Did he still have it in him to charm a young girl to the point that she would have ridden on motorbikes with him or taken him trustingly to a flat in Shepherd’s Bush, about which her family knew nothing?
What about Whittaker, stinking of crack, with his blackened teeth and his thinning, matted hair? True, Whittaker had once had mesmeric charm, and emaciated, drug-addicted Stephanie seemed to find him appealing, but Kelsey’s only known passion had been for a clean-cut blond boy just a few years older than herself.
Then there was Brockbank. To Strike, the massive, swarthy ex-flanker was downright repulsive, as unlike pretty Niall as it was possible to be. Brockbank had been living and working miles from Kelsey’s home and work, and while both had attended churches, their places of worship were on opposite banks of the Thames. The police would surely have unearthed any contact between the two congregations by now.
Did the absence of any known connection between Kelsey and Strike’s three suspects rule each of them out as the killer? While logic seemed to urge the answer yes, something stubborn inside Strike continued to whisper no.
50
I’m out of my place, I’m out of my mind…
Blue ?yster Cult, “Celestial the Queen”
Robin’s trip home was tinged throughout with the strangest sense of unreality. She felt out of step with everybody, even her mother, who was preoccupied with the wedding arrangements and, while sympathetic to Robin’s constant checking of her phone for any development on the Shacklewell Ripper, a little harassed.
Back in the familiar kitchen where Rowntree snoozed at her feet, the seating plan for the reception spread out on the scrubbed wooden table between them, Robin began to appreciate how fully she had abnegated responsibility for her wedding. Linda was constantly firing questions at her about favors, speeches, the bridesmaids’ shoes, her headdress, when it would be convenient to speak to the vicar, where she and Matt wanted the presents sent, whether Matthew’s Auntie Sue ought to be on the top table or not. Robin had imagined that being at home would be restful. Instead she was required to deal, on the one hand, with a tidal wave of trivial queries from her mother; on the other, a series of questions from her brother Martin, who pored over accounts of the discovery of Heather Smart’s body until Robin lost her temper with what she saw as his ghoulishness, whereupon an overwrought Linda banned all mention of the killer from their house.
Matthew, meanwhile, was angry, though trying not to show it, that Robin had not yet asked Strike for two weeks off for the honeymoon.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said Robin at dinner. “We’ve got hardly any work on and Cormoran says the police have taken over all our leads.”
“He still hasn’t confirmed,” said Linda, who had been beadily watching how little Robin was eating.
“Who hasn’t?” asked Robin.
“Strike. No RSVP.”
“I’ll remind him,” said Robin, taking a large slug of wine.
She had not told any of them, not even Matthew, that she kept having nightmares that woke her gasping in the darkness, back in the bed where she had slept in the months following her rape. A massive man kept coming for her in these dreams. Sometimes he burst into the office where she worked with Strike. More frequently he loomed out of the darkness in the backstreets of London, knives shining. That morning he had been on the point of gouging out her eyes when she woke, gasping, to the sound of Matthew drowsily asking her what she had said.
“Nothing,” she had said, pushing sweaty hair off her forehead. “Nothing.”
Matthew had to return to work on Monday. He seemed pleased to leave her behind in Masham, helping Linda with preparations for the wedding. Mother and daughter met the vicar at St. Mary the Virgin for a final discussion about the form of the service on Monday afternoon.
Robin tried hard to concentrate on the minister’s cheerful suggestions, his ecclesiastical pep talk, but all the time he was talking her eyes kept drifting to the large stone crab that appeared to be clinging to the church wall on the right of the aisle.
This crab had fascinated her in her childhood. She had not been able to understand why there was a big carved crab crawling up the stones of their church, and her curiosity on the point had ended up infecting Linda, who had gone to the local library, looked up the records and triumphantly informed her daughter that the crab had been the emblem of the ancient Scrope family, whose memorial sat above it.
Nine-year-old Robin had been disappointed by the answer. In a way, an explanation had never been the point. She had simply liked being the only one who wanted to find out the truth.