Staring out across the expanse of velvety grass, Strike remembered Whittaker, stinking and smoking in the corner of the squat while Leda lay beside him, listening open-mouthed to the tales of his hard life—credulous and greedy as a baby bird, as Strike now saw it, for the yarns Whittaker spun her. From Leda’s point of view, Gordonstoun might as well have been Alcatraz: it was nothing short of outrageous that her slender poet had been forced out into the harsh Scottish winter to be pummeled and knocked about in the mud and the rain.
“Not rugby, darling. Oh, poor baby… you playing rugby!”
And when the seventeen-year-old Strike (sporting a fat lip from the boxing club at the time) had laughed, softly, into his homework, Whittaker had staggered to his feet, shouting in his obnoxious mockney:
“What are you facking laughing about, meathead?”
Whittaker could not stand laughter at his expense. He needed, craved adulation; in its absence, he would take fear or even loathing as evidence of his power, but ridicule was evidence of another’s assumed superiority and consequently unbearable.
“You’d facking love it, wouldn’t you, you stupid little tit? Think you’re facking officer class already, dontcha, out with the rugger buggers. Get his rich daddy to send him to facking Gordonstoun!” Whittaker had yelled at Leda.
“Calm down, darling!” she had said, and then, in slightly more peremptory terms: “No, Corm!”
Strike had stood up, braced, ready and eager to hit Whittaker. That had been the closest he had ever come to doing it, but his mother had staggered between them, a thin, beringed hand on each heaving chest.
Strike blinked and the bright sunlit pitch, a place of innocent endeavor and excitement, seemed to come back into focus. He could smell leaves, grass and the warm rubber from the road beside him. Slowly he turned and headed back towards the Ship Inn, craving a drink, but his treacherous subconscious was not done with him yet.
The sight of that smooth rugby pitch had unleashed another memory: black-haired, dark-eyed Noel Brockbank, running at him with the broken beer bottle in his hand. Brockbank had been massive, powerful and fast: a flanker. Strike remembered his own fist rising around the side of that broken bottle, connecting just as the glass touched his own neck—
A basal skull fracture, that’s what they had called it. Bleeding from the ear. A massive brain injury.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” mumbled Strike under his breath, in time with his own footsteps.
Laing, that’s what you’re here for. Laing.
He passed under the metal galleon with bright yellow sails that hung over the Ship Inn’s door. A sign just inside read MELROSE’S ONLY PUB.
He found the place instantly calming: a glow of warm color, shining glass and brass; a carpet that resembled a patchwork of faded browns, reds and greens; walls of warm peach and exposed stone. Everywhere were more indications of Melrose’s sporting obsession: blackboards announcing upcoming matches, several enormous plasma screens and, above the urinal (it had been hours since Strike had last peed), a small wall-mounted television, just in case a try was pending at the point a full bladder could no longer be ignored.
Mindful of the journey back to Edinburgh in Hardacre’s car, he bought himself half a pint of John Smith’s and sat down on a leather-covered sofa facing the bar, perusing the laminated menu and hoping that Margaret Bunyan would be punctual, because he had just realized that he was hungry.
She appeared a mere five minutes later. Although he could barely remember what her daughter looked like and had never met Mrs. Bunyan before, her expression of mingled apprehension and anticipation gave her away as she paused, staring at him, on the doormat.
Strike got up and she stumbled forwards, both hands gripping the strap of a large black handbag.
“It is you,” she said breathlessly.
She was around sixty, small and fragile-looking, wearing metal-framed glasses, her expression anxious beneath tightly permed fair hair.
Strike held out a large hand and shook hers, which trembled slightly, cold and fine-boned.
“Her dad’s over in Hawick today, he can’t come, I rang him, he said to tell you we’ll never forget what you did for Rhona,” she said on a single breath. She sank down beside Strike on the sofa, continuing to observe him with mingled awe and nerves. “We’ve never forgot. We read about you in the papers. We were so sorry about your leg. What you did for Rhona! What you did—”
Her eyes were suddenly brimful of tears.
“—we were so…”
“I’m glad I was able to—”
Find her child tied naked and bloodstained on a bed? Talking to relatives about what the people they loved had endured was one of the worst parts of the job.
“—able to help her.”
Mrs. Bunyan blew her nose on a handkerchief retrieved from the bottom of her black handbag. He could tell that she was of the generation of women who would never usually enter a pub alone and certainly not buy drinks at a bar if a man were there to undertake the ordeal for them.
“Let me get you something.”
“Just an orange juice,” she said breathlessly, dabbing at her eyes.
“And something to eat,” Strike urged, keen to order the beer-battered haddock and chips for himself.
When he had placed their order at the bar and returned to her, she asked what he was doing in Melrose and the source of her nervousness became apparent at once.