Strike said nothing at all, but stood looking blank, a mug in each hand.
“You’ve—what? How?”
Robin turned on her computer, beckoned Strike over and began typing. He moved around to look over her shoulder.
“First,” she said, “I had to find out how to spell psoriatic arthritis. Then… look at this.”
She had brought up a JustGiving charity page. A man glared out of the small picture at the top.
“Bloody hell, that’s him!” said Strike, so loudly that Robin jumped. He set the mugs down and dragged his chair around the desk to look at the monitor. In doing so, he knocked over Robin’s roses.
“Shit—sorry—”
“I don’t care,” said Robin. “Sit here, I’ll clear them up.”
She moved out of the way and Strike took her place on the swivel chair.
It was a small photograph, which Strike enlarged by clicking on it. The Scot was standing on what seemed to be a cramped balcony with a balustrade of thick, greenish glass, unsmiling, with a crutch under his right arm. The short, bristly hair still grew low on his forehead, but it seemed to have darkened over the years, no longer red as a fox’s pelt. Clean-shaven, his skin looked pockmarked. He was less swollen in the face than he had been in Lorraine’s picture, but he had put on weight since the days when he had been muscled like a marble Atlas and had bitten Strike on the face in the boxing ring. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt and on his right forearm was the rose tattoo, which had undergone a modification: a dagger now ran through it, and drops of blood fell out of the flower towards the wrist. Behind Laing on his balcony was what looked like a blurry, jagged pattern of windows in black and silver.
He had used his real name:
Donald Laing Charity Appeal
I am a British veteran now suffering from psoriatic arthritis. I am raising money for Arthritis Research. Please give what you can.
The page had been created three months previously. He had raised 0 percent of the one thousand pounds he was hoping to meet.
“No rubbish about doing anything for the money,” Strike noted. “Just ‘gimme.’”
“Not give me,” Robin corrected him from the floor, where she was mopping up spilled flower water with bits of kitchen roll. “He’s giving it to the charity.”
“So he says.”
Strike was squinting at the jagged pattern behind Laing on the balcony.
“Does that remind you of anything? Those windows behind him?”
“I thought of the Gherkin at first,” said Robin, throwing the sodden towels in the bin and getting to her feet, “but the pattern’s different.”
“Nothing about where he’s living,” said Strike, clicking everywhere he could on the page to see what further information he might uncover. “JustGiving must have his details somewhere.”
“You somehow never expect evil people to get ill,” said Robin.
She checked her watch.
“I’m supposed to be on Platinum in fifteen. I’d better get going.”
“Yeah,” said Strike, still staring at Laing’s picture. “Keep in touch and—oh yeah: I need you to do something.”
He pulled his mobile out of his pocket.
“Brockbank.”
“So you do still think it might be him?” Robin said, pausing in the act of putting on her jacket.
“Maybe. I want you to call him, keep the Venetia Hall, personal injury lawyer thing going.”
“Oh. OK,” she said, pulling out her own mobile and keying in the number that he had shown her, but beneath her matter-of-fact manner she was quietly elated. Venetia had been her own idea, her creation, and now Strike was turning the whole line of inquiry over to her.
She was halfway up Denmark Street in the sunshine before Robin remembered that there had been a card with the now-battered roses, and that she had left it behind, unread.
32
What’s that in the corner?
It’s too dark to see.
Blue ?yster Cult, “After Dark”
Surrounded all day long by the sounds of traffic and loud voices, Robin did not have a good opportunity to call Noel Brockbank until five o’clock that afternoon. Having seen Platinum to work as usual, she turned into the Japanese restaurant beside the lap-dancing club and took her green tea to a quiet corner table. There, she waited for five minutes to satisfy herself that any background noises Brockbank might hear could plausibly belong to a busy office situated on a main road, and keyed in the number, her heart hammering.
It was still in service. Robin listened to it ringing for twenty seconds and then, just when she had guessed that nobody was going to pick up, somebody did.
Very heavy breathing roared down the line. Robin sat still, the mobile tight against her ear. Then she jumped, as a shrill toddler’s voice said: “HELLO!”
“Hello?” said Robin cautiously.
In the background a woman’s muffled voice said: “What’ve you got, Zahara?”
A scraping noise and then, much louder: