Her hands fumbled with the catch on her bag and pulled out a small wad of photographs.
“My husband always says, ‘Why are you keeping them? Burn them.’ But I always thought we might need pictures of him one day. There,” she said, thrusting them into Strike’s eager hands. “You have them, you keep them. Gateshead. That’s where he went next.”
Later, after she had left with renewed tears and thanks, after he had paid the bill, Strike walked to Millers of Melrose, a family butcher he had noticed on his stroll around the town. There he treated himself to some venison pies that he suspected would be far tastier than anything he would be able to purchase at the station before boarding the sleeper back to London.
Returning to the car park via a short street where golden roses bloomed, Strike thought again about the tattoo on that powerful forearm.
Once, years ago, it had meant something to Donnie Laing to belong to this lovely town, surrounded by farmland and overlooked by the triple peaks of Eildon Hill. Yet he had been no straightforward worker of the soil, no team player, no asset to a place that seemed to pride itself on discipline and honest endeavor. Melrose had spat out the burner of barns, the strangler of cats, the carver-up of rugby fields, so Laing had taken refuge in a place where many men had found either their salvation or their inevitable comeuppance: the British Army. When that had led to jail, and jail disgorged him, he had tried to come home, but nobody had wanted him.
Had Donald Laing found a warmer welcome in Gateshead? Had he moved from there to Corby? Or, Strike wondered, as he folded himself back into Hardacre’s Mini, had these been mere stopping posts on his way to London and Strike?
17
The Girl That Love Made Blind
Tuesday morning. It was asleep after what It said had been a long, hard night. Like he fucking cared, although he had to act like he did. He had persuaded It to go and lie down, and when It began to breathe deeply and evenly he watched It for a while, imagining choking the fucking life out of It, seeing Its eyes open and Its struggle for breath, Its face slowly turning purple…
When he had been sure that he would not wake It, he had left the bedroom quietly, pulled on a jacket and slipped out into the early morning air to find The Secretary. This was his first chance of following her in days and he was too late to pick up the trail at her home station. The best he could do was to lurk around the mouth of Denmark Street.
He spotted her from a distance: that bright, wavy strawberry-blonde head was unmistakable. The vain bitch must like standing out in the crowd or she’d cover it or cut it or dye it. They all wanted attention, he knew that for a fact: all of them.
As she moved closer, his infallible instinct for other people’s moods told him something had changed. She was looking down as she walked, hunch-shouldered, oblivious to the other workers swarming around her, clutching bags, coffees and phones.
He passed right by her in the opposite direction, drawing so close that he could have smelled her perfume if they had not been in that bustling street full of car fumes and dust. He might have been a traffic bollard. That annoyed him a little, even though it had been his intention to pass by her unnoticed. He had singled her out, but she treated him with indifference.
On the other hand, he had made a discovery: she had been crying for hours. He knew what it looked like when women did that; he had seen it plenty of times. Puffy and reddened and flabby-faced, leaking and whining: they all did it. They liked playing the victim. You’d kill them just to make them shut up.
He turned and followed her the short distance to Denmark Street. When women were in her state, they were often malleable in ways they would not be when less distressed or frightened. They forgot to do all the things that bitches did routinely to keep the likes of him at bay: keys between their knuckles, phones in their hands, rape alarms in their pockets, walking in packs. They became needy, grateful for a kind word, a friendly ear. That was how he had landed It.
His pace quickened as she turned into Denmark Street, which the press had at last given up as a bad job after eight days. She opened the black door of the office and went inside.
Would she come out again, or was she going to spend the day with Strike? He really hoped they were screwing each other. They probably were. Just the two of them in the office all the time—bound to be.
He withdrew into a doorway and pulled out his phone, keeping one eye on the second-floor window of number twenty-four.
18
I’ve been stripped, the insulation’s gone.
Blue ?yster Cult, “Lips in the Hills”