7
THE FRICTION BETWEEN THE END of Strike’s amputated leg and the prosthesis was becoming more painful with every step as he headed towards Kensington Gore. Sweating a little in his heavy overcoat, while a weak sun made the park shimmer in the distance, Strike asked himself whether the strange suspicion that had him in its grip was anything more than a shadow moving in the depths of a muddy pool: a trick of the light, an illusory effect of the wind-ruffled surface. Had these minute flurries of black silt been flicked up by a slimy tail, or were they nothing but meaningless gusts of algae-fed gas? Could there be something lurking, disguised, buried in the mud, for which other nets had trawled in vain?
Heading for Kensington Tube station, he passed the Queen’s Gate into Hyde Park; ornate, rust-red and embellished with royal insignia. Incurably observant, he noted the sculpture of the doe and fawn on one pillar and the stag on the other. Humans often assumed symmetry and equality where none existed. The same, yet profoundly different…Lula Landry’s laptop banged harder and harder into his leg as his limp worsened.
In his sore, stymied and frustrated state, there was a dull inevitability about Robin’s announcement, when he finally reached the office at ten to five, that she was still unable to penetrate past the telephone receptionist of Freddie Bestigui’s production company; and that she had had no success in finding anyone of the name Onifade with a British Telecom number in the Kilburn area.
“Of course, if she’s Rochelle’s aunt, she could have a different surname, couldn’t she?” Robin pointed out, as she buttoned her coat and prepared to leave.
Strike agreed to it wearily. He had dropped on to the sagging sofa the moment he had come through the office door, something that Robin had never seen him do before. His face was pinched.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine. Any sign of Temporary Solutions this afternoon?”
“No,” said Robin, pulling her belt tight. “Perhaps they believed me when I said I was Annabel? I did try and sound Australian.”
He grinned. Robin closed the interim report she had been reading while she waited for Strike to return, set it neatly back on its shelf, bade Strike goodnight and left him sitting there, the laptop lying beside him on the threadbare cushions.
When the sound of Robin’s footsteps was no longer audible, Strike stretched a long arm sideways to lock the glass door; then broke his own weekday ban on smoking in the office. Jamming the lit cigarette between his teeth, he pulled up his trouser leg and unlaced the strap holding the prosthesis to his thigh. Then he unrolled the gel liner from the stump of his leg and examined the end of his amputated tibia.
He was supposed to examine the skin surface for irritation every day. Now he saw that the scar tissue was inflamed and over-warm. There had been various creams and powders back in the bathroom cabinet at Charlotte’s dedicated to the care of this patch of skin, subject as it was these days to forces for which it had not been designed. Perhaps she had thrown the corn powder and Oilatum into one of the still unpacked boxes? But he could not muster the energy to go and find out, nor did he want to refit the prosthesis just yet; and so he sat smoking on the sofa with the lower trouser leg hanging empty towards the floor, lost in thought.
His mind drifted. He thought about families, and names, and about the ways in which his and John Bristow’s childhoods, outwardly so different, had been similar. There were ghostly figures in Strike’s family history, too: his mother’s first husband, for instance, of whom she had rarely spoken, except to say that she had hated being married from the first. Aunt Joan, whose memory had always been sharpest where Leda’s had been most vague, said that the eighteen-year-old Leda had run out on her husband after only two weeks; that her sole motivation in marrying Strike Snr (who, according to Aunt Joan, had arrived in St. Mawes with the fair) had been a new dress, and a change of name. Certainly, Leda had remained more faithful to her unusual married moniker than to any man. She had passed it to her son, who had never met its original owner, long gone before his unconnected birth.
Strike smoked, lost in thought, until the daylight in his office began to soften and dim. Then, at last, he struggled up on his one foot and, using the doorknob and the dado rail on the wall beyond the glass door to steady himself, hopped out to examine the boxes still stacked on the landing outside his office. At the bottom of one of them he found those dermatological products designed to assuage the burning and prickling in the end of his stump, and set to work to try and repair the damage first done by the long walk across London with his kitbag over his shoulder.
It was lighter now than it had been at eight o’clock two weeks ago; still daylight when Strike was seated, for the second time in ten days, in Wong Kei, the tall, white-fronted Chinese restaurant with a window view of an arcade center called Play to Win. It had been extremely painful to reattach the prosthetic leg, and still more to walk down Charing Cross Road on it, but he had disdained the use of the gray metal sticks he had also found in the box, relics of his release from Selly Oak Hospital.
While Strike ate Singapore noodles one-handed, he examined Lula Landry’s laptop, which lay open on the table, beside his beer. The dark pink computer casing was patterned with cherry blossom. It did not occur to Strike that he presented an incongruous appearance to the world as he hunched, large and hairy, over the prettified, pink and palpably feminine device, but the sight had drawn smirks from two of the black-T-shirted waiters.
“How’s tricks, Federico?” asked a pallid, straggly-haired young man at half past eight. The newcomer, who dropped into the seat opposite Strike, wore jeans, a psychedelic T-shirt, Converse sneakers, and a leather bag slung diagonally across his chest.
“Been worse,” grunted Strike. “How’re you? Want a drink?”
“Yeah, I’ll have a lager.”
Strike ordered the drink for his guest, whom he was accustomed, for long-forgotten reasons, to call Spanner. Spanner had a first-class degree in computer science, and was much better paid than his clothing suggested.
“I’m not that hungry, I had a burger after work,” Spanner said, looking down the menu. “I could do a soup. Wonton soup, please,” he added to the waiter. “Interesting choice of laptop, Fed.”
“It’s not mine,” said Strike.
“It’s the job, is it?”
“Yeah.”
Strike slid the computer around to face Spanner, who surveyed the device with the mixture of interest and disparagement characteristic of those to whom technology is no necessary evil, but the stuff of life.
“Junk,” said Spanner cheerfully. “Where’ve you been hiding yourself, Fed? People’ve been worried.”
“Nice of them,” said Strike, through a mouthful of noodles. “No need, though.”
“I was round Nick and Ilsa’s coupla nights ago and you were the only topic of conversation. They were saying you’ve gone underground. Oh, cheers,” he said, as his soup arrived. “Yeah, they’ve been ringing your flat and they keep getting the answering machine. Ilsa reckons it’s woman trouble.”
It now occurred to Strike that the best way to inform his friends of his ruptured engagement might be through the medium of the unconcerned Spanner. The younger brother of one of Strike’s old friends, Spanner was largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, the long and tortured history of Strike and Charlotte. Given that it was face-to-face sympathy and postmortems that Strike wanted to avoid, and that he had no intention of pretending forever that he and Charlotte had not split up, he agreed that Ilsa had correctly divined his main trouble, and that it would be better if his friends avoided calling Charlotte’s flat henceforth.
“Bummer,” said Spanner, and then, with the incuriosity towards human pain versus technological challenges that was characteristic of him, he pointed a spatulate fingertip at the Dell and asked: “What d’you want doing with this, then?”
“The police have already had a look at it,” said Strike, lowering his voice even though he and Spanner were the only people nearby not speaking Cantonese, “but I want a second opinion.”
“Police’ve got good techie people. I doubt I’m gonna find anything they haven’t.”
“They might not have been looking for the right stuff,” said Strike, “and they might not’ve realized what it meant even if they found it. They seemed mostly interested in her recent emails, and I’ve already seen them.”
“What am I looking for, then?”
“All activity on or leading up to the eighth of January. The most recent internet searches, stuff like that. I haven’t got the password, and I’d rather not go back to the police and ask unless I have to.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” said Spanner. He was not writing these instructions down, but typing them on to his mobile phone; Spanner was ten years younger than Strike, and he rarely wielded a pen by choice. “Who’s it belong to, anyway?”
When Strike told him, Spanner said:
“The model? Whoa.”
But Spanner’s interest in human beings, even when dead or famous, was still secondary to his fondness for rare comics, technological innovation and bands of which Strike had never heard. After eating several spoonfuls of soup, Spanner broke the silence to inquire brightly how much Strike was planning to pay him for the work.
When Spanner had left with the pink laptop under his arm, Strike limped back to his office. He washed the end of his right leg carefully that night and then applied cream to the irritated and inflamed scar tissue. For the first time in many months, he took painkillers before easing himself into his sleeping bag. Lying there waiting for the raw ache to deaden, he wondered whether he ought to make an appointment to see the consultant in rehabilitation medicine under whose care he was supposed to fall. The symptoms of choke syndrome, the nemesis of amputees, had been described to him repeatedly: suppurating skin and swelling. He was wondering whether he might be showing the early signs, but he dreaded the prospect of returning to corridors stinking of disinfectant; of doctors with their detached interest in this one small mutilated portion of his body; of further minute adjustments to the prosthesis necessitating still more visits to that white-coated, confined world he had hoped he had left forever. He feared advice to rest the leg, to desist from normal ambulation; a forced return to crutches, the stares of passersby at his pinned-up trouser leg and the shrill inquiries of small children.
His mobile, charging as usual on the floor beside the camp bed, made the buzzing noise that announced the arrival of a text. Glad for any minor distraction from his throbbing leg, Strike groped in the dark and picked up the telephone from the floor.
Please could you give me a quick call when convenient? Charlotte
Strike did not believe in clairvoyance or psychic ability, yet his immediate irrational thought was that Charlotte had somehow sensed what he had just told Spanner; that he had twitched the taut, invisible rope still binding them, by placing their breakup on an official footing.
He stared at the message as though it was her face, as though he could read her expression on the tiny gray screen.
Please. (I know you don’t have to: I’m asking you to, nicely.) A quick call. (I have a legitimate reason for desiring speech with you, so we can do it swiftly and easily; no rows.) When convenient. (I do you the courtesy of assuming that you have a busy life without me.)
Or, perhaps: Please. (To refuse is to be a bastard, Strike, and you’ve hurt me enough.) A quick call. (I know you’re expecting a scene; well, don’t worry, that last one, when you were such an unbelievable shit, has finished me with you forever.) When convenient. (Because, let’s be honest, I always had to slot in around the army and every other damn thing that came first.)
Was it convenient now? he asked himself, lying in pain that the pills had yet to touch. He glanced at the time: ten past eleven. She was clearly still awake.
He put the mobile back on the floor beside him, where it lay silently charging, and raised a large hairy arm over his eyes, blotting out even the strips of light on the ceiling cast by the street lamps through the window slats. Against his will, he saw Charlotte the way that he had laid eyes on her for the first time in his life, as she sat alone on a windowsill at a student party in Oxford. He had never seen anything so beautiful in his life, and nor, judging by the sideways flickering of countless male eyes, the overloud laughter and voices, the angling of extravagant gestures towards her silent figure, had any of the rest of them.
Gazing across the room, the nineteen-year-old Strike had been visited by precisely the same urge that had come over him as a child whenever snow had fallen overnight in Aunt Joan and Uncle Ted’s garden. He wanted his footsteps to be the first to make deep, dark holes in that tantalizingly smooth surface: he wanted to disturb and disrupt it.
“You’re pissed,” warned his friend, when Strike announced his intention to go and talk to her.
Strike agreed, downed the dregs of his seventh pint and strode purposefully over to the window ledge where she sat. He was vaguely aware of people nearby watching, primed, perhaps, for laughter, because he was massive, and looked like a boxing Beethoven, and had curry sauce all down his T-shirt.
She looked up at him when he reached her, with big eyes, and long dark hair, and soft, pale cleavage revealed by the gaping shirt.
Strike’s strange, nomadic childhood, with its constant uprootings and graftings on to motley groups of children and teenagers, had forged in him an advanced set of social skills; he knew how to fit in, to make people laugh, to render himself acceptable to almost anyone. That night, his tongue had become numb and rubbery. He seemed to remember swaying slightly.
“Did you want something?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. He pulled his T-shirt away from his torso and showed her the curry sauce. “What d’you reckon’s the best way to get this out?”
Against her will (he saw her trying to fight it), she giggled.
Sometime later, an Adonis called the Honorable Jago Ross, known to Strike by sight and reputation, swung into the room with a posse of equally well-bred friends, and discovered Strike and Charlotte sitting side by side on the windowsill, deep in conversation.
“You’re in the wrong fucking room, Char, darling,” Ross had said, staking out his rights by the caressing arrogance of his tone. “Ritchie’s party’s upstairs.”
“I’m not coming,” she said, turning a smiling face upon him. “I’ve got to go and help Cormoran soak his T-shirt.”
Thus had she publicly dumped her Old Harrovian boyfriend for Cormoran Strike. It had been the most glorious moment of Strike’s nineteen years: he had publicly carried off Helen of Troy right under Menelaus’s nose, and in his shock and delight he had not questioned the miracle, but simply accepted it.
Only later had he realized that what had seemed like chance, or fate, had been entirely engineered by her. She had admitted it to him months later: that she had, to punish Ross for some transgression, deliberately entered the wrong room, and waited for a man, any man, to approach her; that he, Strike, had been a mere instrument to torture Ross; that she had slept with him in the early hours of the following morning in a spirit of vengefulness and rage that he had mistaken for passion.
There, in that first night, had been everything that had subsequently broken them apart and pulled them back together: her self-destructiveness, her recklessness, her determination to hurt; her unwilling but genuine attraction to Strike, and her secure place of retreat in the cloistered world in which she had grown up, whose values she simultaneously despised and espoused. Thus had begun the relationship that had led to Strike lying here on his camp bed fifteen years later, racked with more than physical pain, and wishing that he could rid himself of her memory.