“I haven’t ruled him out,” said Strike. “Why are you so keen to do Brockbank?”
“Well,” said Robin bravely, “I feel like I’ve done a lot of the running on him. I got the Market Harborough address out of Holly and I got Blondin Street out of the nursery—”
“And you’re worried about the kids who’re living with him,” said Strike.
Robin remembered the little black girl with the stiff pigtails who had tripped over, staring at her, in Catford Broadway.
“So what if I am?”
“I’d rather you stuck to Stephanie,” said Strike.
She had been annoyed; so annoyed that she had promptly asked for two weeks off rather more bluntly than she might otherwise have done.
“Two weeks off?” he said, looking up in surprise. He was far more used to her begging to stay at work than asking to leave it.
“It’s for my honeymoon.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right. Yeah. I suppose that’ll be soon, will it?”
“Obviously. The wedding’s on the second.”
“Christ, that’s only—what—three weeks or something?”
She had been annoyed that he had not realized that it was so close.
“Yes,” she had said, getting to her feet and reaching for her jacket. “And would you mind RSVP’ing if you’re coming?”
So she returned to Catford and the busy market stalls, to the smell of incense and raw fish, to pointless hours of standing beneath the crouching stone bears over the stage door of the Broadway Theatre.
Robin had hidden her hair under a straw hat today and was wearing sunglasses, but she still wondered whether she did not see a hint of recognition in the eyes of stallholders as she settled once more to lurk opposite the triple windows of Whittaker and Stephanie’s flat. She had only had a couple of glimpses of the girl since she had resumed her surveillance on her, and on neither occasion had there been the slightest chance of speaking to her. Of Whittaker, there had been no hint at all. Robin settled back against the cool gray stone of the theater wall, prepared for another long day of tedium, and yawned.
By late afternoon she was hot, tired and trying not to resent her mother, who had texted repeatedly throughout the day with questions about the wedding. The last, telling her to ring the florist, who had yet another finicky question for her, arrived just as Robin had decided she needed something to drink. Wondering how Linda would react if she texted back and said she’d decided to have plastic flowers everywhere—on her head, in her bouquet, all over the church—anything to stop having to make decisions—she crossed to the chip shop, which sold chilled fizzy drinks.
She had barely touched the door handle when somebody collided with her, also aiming for the chip-shop door.
“Sorry,” said Robin automatically, and then, “oh my God.”
Stephanie’s face was swollen and purple, one eye almost entirely closed.
The impact had not been hard, but the smaller girl had been bounced off her. Robin reached out to stop her stumbling.
“Jesus—what happened?”
She spoke as though she knew Stephanie. In a sense, she felt she did. Observing the girl’s little routines, becoming familiar with her body language, her clothing and her liking for Coke had fostered a one-sided sense of kinship. Now she found it natural and easy to ask a question hardly any British stranger would ask of another: “Are you all right?”
How she managed it, Robin hardly knew, but two minutes later she was settling Stephanie into a chair in the welcome shade of the Stage Door Café, a few doors along from the chip shop. Stephanie was obviously in pain and ashamed of her appearance, but at the same time she had become too hungry and thirsty to remain upstairs in the flat. Now she had simply bowed to a stronger will, thrown off balance by the older woman’s solicitude, by the offer of a free meal. Robin gabbled nonsensically as she ushered Stephanie down the street, maintaining the fiction that her quixotic offer of sandwiches was due to her guilt at having almost knocked Stephanie over.
Stephanie accepted a cold Fanta and a tuna sandwich with mumbled thanks, but after a few mouthfuls she put her hand to her cheek as though in pain and set the sandwich down.
“Tooth?” asked Robin solicitously.
The girl nodded. A tear trickled out of her unclosed eye.
“Who did this?” Robin said urgently, reaching across the table for Stephanie’s hand.
She was playing a character, growing into the role as she improvised. The straw hat and the long sundress she was wearing had unconsciously suggested a hippyish girl full of altruism who thought that she could save Stephanie. Robin felt a tiny reciprocal squeeze of her fingers even as Stephanie shook her head to indicate that she was not going to give away her attacker.
“Somebody you know?” Robin whispered.
More tears rolled down Stephanie’s face. She withdrew her hand from Robin’s and sipped her Fanta, wincing again as the cold liquid made contact with what Robin thought was probably a cracked tooth.