“Look,” he said, “I get why you want—”
“Speak later,” she said and hung up.
There’s no “we” just now.
It had happened all over again. A man had come at her out of the darkness and had ripped from her not only her sense of safety, but her status. She had been a partner in a detective agency…
Or had she? There had never been a new contract. There had never been a pay rise. They had been so busy, so broke, that it had never occurred to her to ask for either. She had simply been delighted to think that that was how Strike saw her. Now even that was gone, perhaps temporarily, perhaps forever. There’s no “we” anymore.
Robin sat in thought for a few minutes, then got off the bed, the newspapers rustling. She approached the dressing table where the white shoebox sat, engraved with the silver words Jimmy Choo, reached out a hand and stroked the pristine surface of the cardboard.
The plan did not come to her like Strike’s epiphany outside the hospital, with the exhilarating force of flame. Instead it rose slowly, dark and dangerous, born of the hateful enforced passivity of the past week and out of ice-cold anger at Strike’s stubborn refusal to act. Strike, who was her friend, had joined the enemy’s ranks. He was a six-foot-three ex-boxer. He would never know what it was like to feel yourself small, weak and powerless. He would never understand what rape did to your feelings about your own body: to find yourself reduced to a thing, an object, a piece of fuckable meat.
Zahara had sounded three at most on the telephone.
Robin remained quite still in front of her dressing table, staring down at the box containing her wedding shoes, thinking. She saw the risks plainly spread beneath her, like the rocks and raging waters beneath a tightrope walker’s feet.
No, she could not save everyone. It was too late for Martina, for Sadie, for Kelsey and for Heather. Lila would spend the rest of her days with two fingers on her left hand and a grisly scar across her psyche that Robin understood only too well. However, there were also two young girls who faced God knows how much more suffering if nobody acted.
Robin turned away from the new shoes, reached for her mobile and dialed a number she had been given voluntarily, but which she had never imagined she would use.
54
And if it’s true it can’t be you,
It might as well be me.
Blue ?yster Cult, “Spy in the House of the Night”
She had three days in which to plan, because she had to wait for her accomplice to get hold of a car and find a gap in his busy schedule. Meanwhile she told Linda that her Jimmy Choos were too tight for her, the style too flashy, and allowed her mother to accompany her as she exchanged them for cash. Then she had to decide what lie she was going to tell Linda and Matthew, to buy sufficient time away from them to put her plan into action.
She ended up telling them that she was to have another police interview. Insisting that Shanker remain in the car when he picked her up was key to maintaining that illusion, as was getting Shanker to pull up alongside the plainclothes policeman still patrolling their street and telling him that she was off to get her stitches out, which in reality would not happen for another two days.
It was now seven o’clock on a cloudless evening and apart from Robin, who was leaning up against the warm brick wall of the Eastway Business Centre, the scene was deserted. The sun was making its slow progress towards the west and on the distant, misty horizon, at the far end of Blondin Street, the Orbit sculpture was rising into existence. Robin had seen plans in the papers: it would soon look like a gigantic candlestick telephone wrapped in its own twisted cord. Beyond it, Robin could just make out the growing outline of the Olympic stadium. The distant view of the gigantic structures was impressive and somehow inhuman, worlds and worlds away from the secrets she suspected were hidden behind the newly painted front door she knew to be Alyssa’s.
Perhaps because of what she had come to do, the silent stretch of houses she was watching unnerved her. They were new, modern and somehow soulless. Barring the grandiose edifices being constructed in the distance, the place lacked character and was devoid of any sense of community. There were no trees to soften the outlines of the low, square houses, many of them sporting “To Let” signs, no corner shop, neither pub nor church. The warehouse against which she was leaning, with its upper windows hung with shroud-like white curtains and its metal garage doors heavily graffitied, offered no cover. Robin’s heart was thudding as though she had been running. Nothing would turn her back now, yet she was afraid.
Footsteps echoed nearby and Robin whipped around, her sweaty fingers tight on her spare rape alarm. Tall, loose-limbed and scarred, Shanker was loping towards her carrying a Mars bar in one hand and a cigarette in the other.