10
ROBIN HAD FALLEN INTO THE habit of buying Strike a pack of sandwiches with her own, if he happened to be in the office over lunchtime, and reimbursing herself from petty cash.
Today, however, she did not hurry back. She had noticed, though Lucy had seemed oblivious, how unhappy Strike had been to find them in conversation. His expression, when he had entered the office, had been every bit as grim as the first time they had met.
Robin hoped that she had not said anything to Lucy that Strike would not like. Lucy had not exactly pried, but she had asked questions to which it was difficult to know the answer.
“Have you met Charlotte yet?”
Robin guessed that this was the stunning ex-wife or girlfriend whose exit she had witnessed on her first morning. Near-collision hardly constituted a meeting, however, so she answered:
“No, I haven’t.”
“Funny.” Lucy had given a disingenuous little smile. “I’d have thought she’d have wanted to meet you.”
For some reason, Robin had felt prompted to reply:
“I’m only temporary.”
“Still,” said Lucy, who seemed to understand the answer better than Robin did herself.
It was only now, wandering up and down the aisle of crisps without really concentrating on them, that the implications of what Lucy had said slid into place. Robin supposed that Lucy might have meant to flatter her, except that the mere possibility of Strike making any kind of pass was extremely distasteful to her.
(“Matt, honestly, if you saw him…he’s enormous and he’s got a face like some beaten-up boxer. He is not remotely attractive, I’m sure he’s over forty, and…” she had cast around for more aspersions to cast upon Strike’s appearance, “he’s got that sort of pubey hair.”
Matthew had only really become reconciled to her continuing employment with Strike now that Robin had accepted the media consultancy job.)
Robin selected two bags of salt and vinegar crisps at random, and headed towards the cash desk. She had not yet told Strike that she would be leaving in two and a half weeks’ time.
Lucy had moved from the subject of Charlotte only to interrogate Robin on the amount of business coming through the shabby little office. Robin had been as vague as she dared, intuiting that if Lucy did not know how bad Strike’s finances were, it was because he did not want her to know. Hoping that he would be pleased for his sister to think that business was good, she mentioned that his latest client was wealthy.
“Divorce case, is it?” asked Lucy.
“No,” said Robin, “it’s a…well, I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement…he’s been asked to reinvestigate a suicide.”
“Oh God, that won’t be fun for Cormoran,” said Lucy, with a strange note in her voice.
Robin looked confused.
“Hasn’t he told you? Mind you, people usually know without telling. Our mother was a famous—groupie, they call it, don’t they?” Lucy’s smile was suddenly forced, and her tone, though she was striving for detachment and unconcern, had become brittle. “It’s all on the internet. Everything is these days, isn’t it? She died of an overdose and they said it was suicide, but Stick always thought her ex-husband did it. Nothing was ever proven. Stick was furious. It was all very sordid and horrible, anyway. Perhaps that’s why the client chose Stick—I take it the suicide was an overdose?”
Robin did not reply, but it did not matter; Lucy went on without pausing for an answer:
“That’s when Stick dropped out of university and joined the military police. The family was very disappointed. He’s really bright, you know; nobody in our family had ever been to Oxford; but he just packed up and left and joined the army. And it seemed to suit him; he did really well there. I think it’s a shame he left, to be honest. He could have stayed, even with, you know, his leg…”
Robin did not betray, by so much as a flicker of her eyelid, that she did not know.
Lucy sipped her tea.
“So whereabouts in Yorkshire are you from?”
The conversation had flowed pleasantly after that, right up until the moment that Strike had walked in on them laughing at Robin’s description of Matthew’s last excursion into DIY.
But Robin, heading back to the office with sandwiches and crisps, felt even sorrier for Strike than she had done before. His marriage—or, if they had not been married, his live-in relationship—had failed; he was sleeping in his office; he had been injured in the war, and now she discovered that his mother had died in dubious and squalid circumstances.
She did not pretend to herself that this compassion was untinged with curiosity. She already knew that she would certainly, at some point in the near future, try and find the online particulars of Leda Strike’s death. At the same time, she felt guilty that she had been given another glimpse of a part of Strike she had not been meant to see, like that patch of virtually furry belly he had accidentally exposed that morning. She knew him to be a proud and self-sufficient man; these were the things she liked and admired about him, even if the way these qualities expressed themselves—the camp bed, the boxed possessions on the landing, the empty Pot Noodle tubs in the bin—aroused the derision of such as Matthew, who assumed that anyone living in uncomfortable circumstances must have been profligate or feckless.
Robin was not sure whether or not she imagined the slightly charged atmosphere in the office when she returned. Strike was sitting in front of her computer monitor, tapping away at the keyboard, and while he thanked her for the sandwiches, he did not (as was usual) turn away from work for ten minutes for a chat about the Landry case.
“I need this for a couple of minutes; will you be OK on the sofa?” he asked her, continuing to type.
Robin wondered whether Lucy had told Strike what they had discussed. She hoped not. Then she felt resentful for feeling guilty; after all, she had done nothing wrong. Her aggravation put a temporary stop on her great desire to know whether he had found Rochelle Onifade.
“Aha,” said Strike.
He had found, on the Italian designer’s website, the magenta fake-fur coat that Rochelle had been wearing that morning. It had become available for purchase only within the last two weeks, and it cost fifteen hundred pounds.
Robin waited for Strike to explain the exclamation, but he did not.
“Did you find her?” she asked, at last, when finally Strike turned from the computer to unwrap the sandwiches.
He told her about their encounter, but all the enthusiasm and gratitude of that morning, when he had called her “genius” over and again, was absent. Robin’s tone, as she gave him the results of her own telephone inquiries, was, therefore, similarly cool.
“I called the Law Society about the conference in Oxford on January the seventh,” she said. “Tony Landry attended. I pretended to be somebody he’d met there, who’d mislaid his card.”
He did not seem particularly interested in the information he had requested, nor did he compliment her on her initiative. The conversation petered out in mutual dissatisfaction.
The confrontation with Lucy had exhausted Strike; he wanted to be alone. He also suspected that Lucy might have told Robin about Leda. His sister deplored the fact that their mother had lived and died in conditions of mild notoriety, yet in certain moods she seemed to be seized with a paradoxical desire to discuss it all, especially with strangers. Perhaps it was a kind of safety valve, because of the tight lid she kept on her past with her suburban friends, or perhaps she was trying to carry the fight into the enemy’s territory, so anxious about what they might already know about her that she tried to forestall prurient interest before it could start. But he had never wanted Robin to know about his mother, or about his leg, or about Charlotte, or any of the other painful subjects which Lucy insisted on probing whenever she came close enough.
In his tiredness, and his bad mood, Strike extended to Robin, unfairly, his blanket irritation at women, who did not seem able just to leave a man in peace. He thought he might take his notes to the Tottenham this afternoon, where he would be able to sit and think without interruptions, and without being badgered for explanations.
Robin felt the atmospheric change keenly. Taking her cue from the silently munching Strike, she brushed herself free of crumbs, then gave him the morning’s messages in a brisk and impersonal tone.
“John Bristow called with a mobile number for Marlene Higson. He’s also got through to Guy Somé, who could meet you at ten o’clock on Thursday morning at his studio in Blunkett Street, if that suits. It’s out in Chiswick, near Strand-on-the-Green.”
“Great. Thanks.”
They said very little else to each other that day. Strike spent the greater part of the afternoon at the pub, returning only at ten to five. The awkwardness between them persisted, and for the first time, he was quite pleased to see Robin leave.