Career of Evil

“When was this?” asked Strike.

“When he walked out. Took all my jewelry. Mum’s wedding ring, everything. He knew what that meant to me. She’d not been dead a year. Yeah, one day he just walks out of the house and never comes back. I called the police, I thought he’d had an accident. Then I realized my purse was empty and my jewelry was gone.”

The humiliation had not left her. Her sunken cheeks flushed as she said it.

Strike felt in the inside pocket of his jacket.

“I want to make sure we’re talking about the same man. Does this picture look familiar?”

He handed her one of the photographs Laing’s ex-mother-in-law had given him in Melrose. Big and broad in his blue and yellow kilt, with his dark ferret-like eyes and that low-sprouting crop of fox-red hair, Laing was standing outside a registry office. Rhona clung to his arm, less than half his width in what looked like a poorly fitting, possibly secondhand wedding gown.

Lorraine examined the photograph for what seemed like a very long time. At last she said:

“I think it’s him. It could be.”

“You can’t see it, but he had a big tattoo of a yellow rose on his left forearm,” said Strike.

“Yeah,” said Lorraine heavily. “That’s right. He did.”

She smoked, staring at the picture.

“He’d been married, had he?” she asked, with a slight quaver in her voice.

“Didn’t he tell you?” asked Robin.

“No. Told me he’d never been.”

“How did you meet him?” asked Robin.

“Pub,” said Lorraine. “He didn’t look much like that when I knew him.”

She turned in the direction of the sideboard behind her and made a vague attempt to get up.

“Can I help?” Robin offered.

“In that middle drawer. There might be a picture.”

The Jack Russell began barking again as Robin opened a drawer containing an assortment of napkin rings, crocheted doilies, souvenir teaspoons, toothpicks and loose photographs. Robin extracted as many of the latter as she could and brought them back to Lorraine.

“That’s him,” said Lorraine, after sorting through many pictures that mostly featured a very elderly woman whom Robin assumed to be Lorraine’s mother. Lorraine passed the picture straight to Strike.

He would not have recognized Laing if he had passed him in the street. The former boxer was massively swollen, especially around the face. His neck was no longer visible; his skin seemed tight, his features distorted. One arm was around a smiling Lorraine’s shoulders, the other hung loose at his side. He was not smiling. Strike peered closer. The yellow rose tattoo was visible, but partially obscured by angry red skin plaques that mottled the whole expanse of his forearm.

“Is there something wrong with his skin?”

“Psoriatic arthritis,” said Lorraine. “He was bad with it. That’s why he was on the sick benefit. Had to stop work.”

“Yeah?” said Strike. “What had he been working as before?”

“He come down here as a manager for one of the big construction firms,” she said, “but then he got ill and couldn’t work. He’d had his own building company up in Melrose. He was the managing director.”

“Really?” said Strike.

“Yeah, family business,” said Lorraine, searching her stack of photographs. “He inherited it from his dad. There he is again, look.”

They were holding hands in this picture, which looked as though it had been taken in a beer garden. Lorraine beamed and Laing looked blank, his moon face shrinking his dark eyes to slits. He had the characteristic look of a man on medically prescribed steroids. The hair like a fox’s pelt was the same, but otherwise Strike was hard pressed to make out the features of the fit young boxer who had once bitten his face.

“How long were you together?”

“Ten months. I met him right after Mum died. She was ninety-two—she lived here with me. I was helping with Mrs. Williams next door and all; she was eighty-seven. Senile. Her son’s in America. Donnie was good to her. He mowed her lawn and got shopping.”

Bastard knew which side his bread was buttered, thought Strike. Ill, unemployed and broke as Laing had been at the time, a lonely middle-aged woman without dependents who could cook, who had her own house, who had just inherited money from her mother, must have been a godsend. It would have been worth faking a bit of compassion to get his feet under the table. Laing had had charm when he chose to use it.

Robert Galbraith & J. K. Rowling's books