“I think so. She was just answering that when Whittaker turned up and—hang on.”
Robin stopped and looked around. Busy talking, she had taken a wrong turning somewhere on the way back to the station. The sun was setting now. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw a shadow move behind a wall.
“Cormoran?”
“Still here.”
Perhaps she had imagined the shadow. She was on a stretch of unfamiliar residential road, but there were lit windows and a couple walking along in the distance. She was safe, she told herself. It was all right. She just needed to retrace her steps.
“Everything OK?” asked Strike sharply.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ve taken a wrong turn, that’s all.”
“Where are you exactly?”
“Near Catford Bridge station,” she said. “I don’t know how I’ve ended up here.”
She did not want to mention the shadow. Carefully she crossed the darkening road, so that she would not have to walk past the wall where she thought she had seen it, and after transferring her mobile into her left hand she took a tighter hold of the rape alarm in her right pocket.
“I’m going back the way I came,” she told Strike, wanting him to know where she was.
“Have you seen something?” he demanded.
“I don’t kn—maybe,” she admitted.
Yet when she drew level with the gap between houses where she had thought she had seen the figure, there was nobody there.
“I’m jumpy,” she said, speeding up. “Meeting Whittaker wasn’t fun. There’s definitely something—nasty—about him.”
“Where are you now?”
“About twenty feet away from where I was the last time you asked me. Hang on, I can see a street name. I’m crossing back over, I can see where I’ve gone wrong, I should’ve turned—”
She heard the footsteps only when they were right behind her. Two massive black-clad arms closed around her, pinning hers to her sides, squeezing the air from her lungs. Her mobile slipped out of her hand and fell with a crack onto the pavement.
52
Do not envy the man with the x-ray eyes.
Blue ?yster Cult, “X-Ray Eyes”
Strike, who had been standing in the shadow of a warehouse in Bow, keeping watch on Blondin Street, heard Robin’s sudden gasp, the thud of the mobile on the pavement and then the scuffling and skidding of feet on asphalt.
He began to run. The phone connection to Robin was still open, but he could hear nothing. Panic sharpened his mental processes and obliterated all perception of pain as he sprinted down a darkening street in the direction of the nearest station. He needed a second phone.
“Need to borrow that, mate!” he bellowed at a pair of skinny black youths walking towards him, one of whom was chuckling into a mobile. “Crime’s being committed, need to borrow that phone!”
Strike’s size and his aura of authority as he pelted towards them made the teenager surrender the phone with a look of fear and bewilderment.
“Come with me!” Strike bellowed at the two boys, running on past them towards busier streets where he might be able to find a cab, his own mobile still pressed to his other ear. “Police!” Strike yelled into the boy’s phone as the stunned teenagers ran alongside him like bodyguards. “There’s a woman being attacked near Catford Bridge station, I was on the line to her when it happened! It’s happening right—no, I don’t know the street but it’s one or two away from the station—right now, I was on the line to her when he grabbed her, I heard it happen—yeah—and fucking hurry!
“Cheers, mate,” Strike panted, throwing the mobile back into the hands of its owner, who continued to run alongside him for several yards without realizing that he no longer needed to.
Strike hurtled around a corner; Bow was a totally unfamiliar area of London to him. On he ran past the Bow Bells pub, ignoring the red-hot jabs of the ligaments in his knee, moving awkwardly with only one free arm to balance himself, his silent phone still clamped to his ear. Then he heard a rape alarm going off at the other end of the line.
“TAXI!” he bellowed at a distant glowing light. “ROBIN!” he yelled into the phone, sure she could not hear him over the screeching alarm. “ROBIN, I’VE CALLED THE POLICE! THE POLICE ARE ON THEIR WAY. ARE YOU LISTENING, YOU FUCKER?”
The taxi had driven off without him. Drinkers outside the Bow Bells stared at the lunatic hobbling past at high speed, yelling and swearing into his phone. A second taxi appeared.
“TAXI! TAXI!” Strike bellowed and it turned, heading towards him, just as Robin’s voice spoke in his ear, gasping.
“Are… you there?”
“JESUS CHRIST! WHAT’S HAPPENED?”
“Stop… shouting…”
With enormous difficulty he modulated his volume.
“What’s happened?”
“I can’t see,” she said. “I can’t… see anything…”
Strike wrenched open the back door of the cab and threw himself inside.