2
CHARLOTTE’S ACCEPTANCE OF STRIKE’S SILENCE was unprecedented. There had been no further calls or texts; she was maintaining the pretense that their last, filthy, volcanic row had changed her irrevocably, stripped away her love and purged her of fury. Strike, however, knew Charlotte as intimately as a germ that had lingered in his blood for fifteen years; knew that her only response to pain was to wound the offender as deeply as possible, no matter what the cost to herself. What would happen if he refused her an audience, and kept refusing? It was the only strategy he had never tried, and all he had left.
Every now and then, when Strike’s resistance was low (late at night, alone on his camp bed) the infection would erupt again: regret and longing would spike, and he saw her at close quarters, beautiful, naked, breathing words of love; or weeping quietly, telling him that she knew she was rotten, ruined, impossible, but that he was the best and truest thing she had ever known. Then, the fact that he was a few pressed buttons away from speaking to her seemed too fragile a barricade against temptation, and he sometimes pulled himself back out of his sleeping bag and hopped in the darkness to Robin’s abandoned desk, switching on the lamp and poring, even for hours, over the case report. Once or twice he placed early-morning calls to Rochelle Onifade’s mobile, but she never answered.
On Thursday morning, Strike returned to the wall outside St. Thomas’s, and waited for three hours in the hope of seeing Rochelle again, but she did not turn up. He had Robin call the hospital, but this time they refused to comment on Rochelle’s non-attendance, and resisted all attempts at getting an address for her.
On Friday morning, Strike returned from an outing to Starbucks to find Spanner sitting not on the sofa beside Robin’s desk, but on the desk itself. He had an unlit roll-up in his mouth, and was leaning over her, apparently being more amusing than Strike had ever found him, because Robin was laughing in the slightly grudging manner of a woman who is entertained, but who wishes, nevertheless, to make it clear that the goal is well defended.
“Morning, Spanner,” said Strike, but the faintly repressive quality of his greeting did nothing to moderate either the computer specialist’s ardent body language or his broad smile.
“All right, Fed? Brought your Dell back for you.”
“Great. Double decaff latte,” Strike told Robin, setting the drink down beside her. “No charge,” he added, as she reached for her purse.
She was touchingly averse to charging minor luxuries to petty cash. Robin made no objection in front of their guest, but thanked Strike, and turned again to her work, which involved a small clockwise swivel of her desk chair, away from the two men.
The flare of a match turned Strike’s attention from his own double espresso to his guest.
“This is a non-smoking office, Spanner.”
“What? You smoke like a fucking chimney.”
“Not in here I don’t. Follow me.”
Strike led Spanner into his own office and closed the door firmly behind him.
“She’s engaged,” he said, taking his usual seat.
“Wasting my powder, am I? Ah well. Put in a word for me if the engagement goes down the pan; she’s just my type.”
“I don’t think you’re hers.”
Spanner grinned knowingly.
“Already queuing, are you?”
“No,” said Strike. “I just know her fiancé’s a rugby-playing accountant. Clean-cut, square-jawed Yorkshireman.”
He had formed a surprisingly clear mental image of Matthew, though he had never seen a photograph.
“You never know; she might fancy rebounding on to something a bit edgier,” said Spanner, swinging Lula Landry’s laptop on to the desk and sitting down opposite Strike. He was wearing a slightly tatty sweatshirt and Jesus sandals on bare feet; it was the warmest day of the year so far. “I’ve had a good look at this piece of crap. How much technical detail do you want?”
“None; but I need to know that you could explain it clearly in court.”
Spanner looked, for the first time, truly intrigued.
“You serious?”
“Very. Would you be able to prove to a defending counsel that you know your stuff?”
“ ’Course I could.”
“Then just give me the important bits.”
Spanner hesitated for a moment, trying to read Strike’s expression. Finally he began:
“Password’s Agyeman, and it was reset five days before she died.”
“Spell it?”
Spanner did so, adding, to Strike’s surprise: “It’s a surname. Ghanaian. She bookmarked the homepage of SOAS—School of Oriental and African Studies—and it was on there. Look here.”
As he spoke, Spanner’s nimble fingers were clacking keyboard keys; he had brought up the home page he described, bordered with bright green, with sections on the school, news, staff, students, library and so on.
“When she died, though, it looked like this.”
And with another outburst of clicking, he retrieved an almost identical page, featuring, as the rapidly darting cursor soon revealed, a link to the obituary of one Professor J. P. Agyeman, Emeritus Professor of African Politics.
“She saved this version of the page,” said Spanner. “And her internet history shows she’d browsed Amazon for his books in the month before she died. She was looking at a lot of books on African history and politics round then.”
“Any evidence she applied to SOAS?”
“Not on here.”
“Anything else of interest?”
“Well, the only other thing I noticed was that a big photo file was deleted off it on the seventeenth of March.”
“How d’you know that?”
“There’s software that’ll help you recover even stuff people think’s gone from the hard drive,” said Spanner. “How d’you think they keep catching all those pedos?”
“Did you get it back?”
“Yeah. I’ve put it on here.” He handed Strike a memory stick. “I didn’t think you’d want me to put it back on.”
“No—so the photographs were…?”
“Nothing fancy. Just deleted. Like I say, your average punter doesn’t realize you’ve got to work a damn sight harder than pressing ‘delete’ if you really want to hide something.”
“Seventeenth of March,” said Strike.
“Yeah. St. Patrick’s Day.”
“Ten weeks after she died.”
“Could’ve been the police,” suggested Spanner.
“It wasn’t the police,” said Strike.
After Spanner had left, he hurried into the outer office and displaced Robin, so that he could view the photographs that had been removed from the laptop. He could feel Robin’s anticipation as he explained to her what Spanner had done and opened up the file on the memory stick.
Robin was afraid, for a fraction of a second, as the first photograph bloomed onscreen, that they were about to see something horrible; evidence of criminality or perversion. She had only heard about the concealment of pictures online in the context of dreadful abuse cases. After several minutes, however, Strike voiced her own feelings.
“Just social snaps.”
He did not sound as disappointed as Robin felt, and she was a little ashamed of herself; had she wanted to see something awful? Strike scrolled down, through pictures of groups of giggling girls, fellow models, the occasional celebrity. There were several pictures of Lula with Evan Duffield, a few of them clearly taken by one or other of the pair themselves, holding the camera at arm’s length, both of them apparently stoned or drunk. Somé made several appearances; Lula looked more formal, more subdued, by his side. There were many of Ciara Porter and Lula hugging in bars, dancing in clubs and giggling on a sofa in somebody’s crowded flat.
“That’s Rochelle,” said Strike suddenly, pointing to a sullen little face glimpsed under Ciara’s armpit in a group shot. Kieran Kolovas-Jones had been roped into this picture; he stood at the end, beaming.
“Do me a favor,” said Strike, when he had finished trawling through all two hundred and twelve pictures. “Go through these for me, and try and at least identify the famous people, so we can make a start on finding out who might have wanted the photos off her laptop.”
“But there’s nothing incriminating here at all,” said Robin.
“There must be,” said Strike.
He returned to his inner office, where he placed calls to John Bristow (in a meeting, and not to be disturbed; “Please get him to call me as soon as you can”), to Eric Wardle (voicemail: “I’ve got a question about Lula Landry’s laptop”) and to Rochelle Onifade (on the off-chance; no answer; no chance of leaving a message: “Voicemail full.”)
“I’m still having no luck with Mr. Bestigui,” Robin told Strike, when he emerged from his inner office to find her performing searches related to an unidentified brunette posing with Lula on a beach. “I phoned again this morning, but he just won’t call me back. I’ve tried everything; I’ve pretended to be all sorts of people, I’ve said it’s urgent—what’s funny?”
“I was just wondering why none of these people who keep interviewing you have offered you a job,” said Strike.
“Oh,” said Robin, blushing faintly. “They have. All of them. I’ve accepted the human resources one.”
“Oh. Right,” said Strike. “You didn’t say. Congratulations.”
“Sorry, I thought I’d told you,” lied Robin.
“So you’ll be leaving…when?”
“Two weeks.”
“Ah. I expect Matthew’s pleased, is he?”
“Yes,” she said, slightly taken aback, “he is.”
It was almost as if Strike knew how little Matthew liked her working for him; but that was impossible; she had been careful not to give the slightest hint of the tensions at home.
The telephone rang, and Robin answered it.
“Cormoran Strike’s office?…Yes, who’s speaking, please?…It’s Derrick Wilson,” she told him, passing over the receiver.
“Derrick, hi.”
“Mister Bestigui’s gone away for a coupla days,” said Wilson’s voice. “If you wanna come an’ look at the building…”
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” said Strike.
He was on his feet, checking his pockets for wallet and keys, when he became aware of Robin’s slight air of dejection, though she was continuing to pore over the unincriminating photographs.
“D’you want to come?”
“Yes!” she said gleefully, seizing her handbag and closing down her computer.