He had called what he felt for Charlotte love and it remained the most profound feeling he had had for any woman. In the pain it had caused him and its lasting after-effects it had more resembled a virus that, even now, he was not sure he had overcome. Not seeing her, never calling her, never using the new email address she had set up to show him her distraught face on the day of her wedding to an old boyfriend: this was his self-prescribed treatment, which was keeping the symptoms at bay. Yet he knew he had been left impaired, that he no longer had the capacity to feel in the way that he had once felt. Elin’s distress of the previous evening had not touched him at his core in the way Charlotte’s had once done. He felt as though his capacity for loving had been blunted, the nerve endings severed. He had not intended to wound Elin; he did not enjoy seeing her cry; yet the ability to feel empathetic pain seemed to have closed down. A small part of him, in truth, had been mentally planning his route home as she sobbed.
Strike dressed in the bathroom then moved quietly back into the dimly lit hall, where he stowed his shaving things in the holdall he had packed for Barrow-in-Furness. A door stood ajar to his right. On a whim, he pushed it wider.
The little girl whom he had never met slept here when not at her father’s. The pink and white room was immaculate, with a ceiling mural of fairies around the cornice. Barbies sat in a neat line on a shelf, their smiles vacant, their pointy breasts covered in a rainbow of gaudy dresses. A fake-fur rug with a polar bear’s head lay on the floor beside a tiny white four-poster.
Strike knew hardly any little girls. He had two godsons, neither of whom he had particularly wanted, and three nephews. His oldest friend back in Cornwall had daughters, but Strike had virtually nothing to do with them; they rushed past him in a blur of ponytails and casual waves: “Hi Uncle Corm, bye Uncle Corm.” He had grown up, of course, with a sister, although Lucy had never been indulged with sugar-pink-canopied four-posters, much as she might have wanted them.
Brittany Brockbank had had a cuddly lion. It came back to him suddenly, out of nowhere, looking at the polar bear on the floor: a cuddly lion with a comical face. She had dressed it in a pink tutu and it had been lying on the sofa when her stepfather came running at Strike, a broken beer bottle in his hand.
Strike turned back to the hall, feeling in his pocket. He always carried a notebook and pen on him. He scribbled a brief note to Elin, alluding to the best part of the previous night, and left it on the hall table so as not to risk waking her. Then, as quietly as he had done everything else, he hoisted his holdall onto his shoulder and let himself out of the flat. He was meeting Robin at West Ealing station at eight.
The last traces of mist were lifting from Hastings Road when Robin left her house, flustered and heavy-eyed, a carrier bag of food in one hand and a holdall full of clean clothes in the other. She unlocked the rear of the old gray Land Rover, swung the clothes into it and hurried around to the driver’s seat with the food.
Matthew had just tried to hug her in the hall and she had forcibly resisted, two hands on his smooth warm chest, pushing him away, shouting at him to get off. He had been wearing only boxer shorts. Now she was afraid that he might be struggling into some clothes, ready to give chase. She slammed the car door and dragged on her seatbelt, eager to be gone, but as she turned the key in the ignition Matthew burst out of the house, barefoot, in T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. She had never seen his expression so naked, so vulnerable.
“Robin,” he called as she stepped on the accelerator and pulled away from the curb. “I love you. I love you!”
She spun the wheel and moved precariously out of the parking space, missing their neighbor’s Honda by inches. She could see Matthew shrinking in the rearview mirror; he, whose self-possession was usually total, was proclaiming his love at the top of his voice, risking the neighbors’ curiosity, their scorn and their laughter.
Robin’s heart thumped painfully in her chest. A quarter past seven; Strike would not be at the station yet. She turned left at the end of the road, intent only on putting distance between herself and Matthew.
He had risen at dawn, while she was trying to pack without waking him.
“Where are you going?”
“To help Strike with the investigation.”
“You’re going away overnight?”
“I expect so.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
She was afraid to tell him their destination in case he came after them. Matthew’s behavior when she had arrived home the previous evening had left her shaken. He had cried and begged. She had never seen him like that, not even after his mother’s death.
“Robin, we’ve got to talk.”
“We’ve talked enough.”
“Does your mother know where you’re going?”
“Yes.”
She was lying. Robin had not told her mother about the ruptured engagement yet, nor that she was heading off north with Strike. After all, she was twenty-six; it was none of her mother’s business. She knew, though, that Matthew was really asking whether she had told her mother that the wedding was off, because they were both aware that she would not have been getting in the Land Rover to drive off to an undisclosed location with Strike if their engagement had still been intact. The sapphire ring was lying exactly where she had left it, on a bookshelf loaded with his old accountancy textbooks.
“Oh shit,” Robin whispered, blinking away tears as she turned at random through the quiet streets, trying not to focus on her naked finger, or on the memory of Matthew’s anguished face.