11
“NO,” SAID STRIKE FORCEFULLY, ON the telephone that evening. “This is getting dangerous. Surveillance doesn’t fall within the scope of secretarial duties.”
“Nor did visiting the Malmaison Hotel in Oxford, or SOAS,” Robin pointed out, “but you were happy enough that I did both of them.”
“You’re not following anyone, Robin. I doubt Matthew would be very happy about it, either.”
It was funny, Robin thought, sitting in her dressing gown on her bed, with the phone pressed to her ear, how Strike had retained the name of her fiancé, without ever having met him. In her experience, men did not usually bother to log that kind of information. Matthew frequently forgot people’s names, even that of his newborn niece; but she supposed that Strike must have been trained to recall such details.
“I don’t need Matthew’s permission,” she said. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be dangerous; you don’t think Ursula May’s killed anyone…”
(There was an inaudible “do you?” at the end of the sentence.)
“No, but I don’t want anyone to hear I’m taking an interest in her movements. It might make the killer nervous, and I don’t want anyone else thrown from a height.”
Robin could hear her own heart thumping through the thin material of her dressing gown. She knew that he would not tell her who he thought the killer was; she was even a little frightened of knowing, notwithstanding the fact that she could think of nothing else.
It was she who had called Strike. Hours had passed since she had received a text saying that he had been compelled to go with the police to Scotland Yard, and asking her to lock up the office behind her at five. Robin had been worried.
“Call him, then, if it’s going to keep you awake,” Matthew had said; not quite snapping, not quite indicating that he was, without knowing any of the details, firmly on the side of the police.
“Listen, I want you to do something for me,” said Strike. “Call John Bristow first thing tomorrow and tell him about Rochelle.”
“All right,” said Robin, with her eyes on the large stuffed elephant Matthew had given her on their first Valentine’s Day together, eight years previously. The present-giver himself was watching Newsnight in the sitting room. “What are you going to be doing?”
“I’m going to be on my way to Pinewood Studios for a few words with Freddie Bestigui.”
“How?” said Robin. “They won’t let you near him.”
“Yeah, they will,” said Strike.
After Robin had hung up, Strike sat motionless for a while in his dark office. The thought of the semi-digested McDonald’s meal lying inside Rochelle’s bloated corpse had not prevented him consuming two Big Macs, a large box of fries and a McFlurry on the way back from Scotland Yard. Gassy noises from his stomach were now mingling with the muffled thuds of the bass from the 12 Bar Café, which Strike barely noticed these days; the sound might have been his own pulse.
Ciara Porter’s messy, girlish flat, her wide, groaning mouth, the long white legs wrapped tightly around his back, belonged to a life lived long ago. All his thoughts, now, were for squat and graceless Rochelle Onifade. He remembered her talking fast into her phone, not five minutes after she had left him, dressed in exactly the same clothes she had been wearing when they pulled her out of the river.
He was sure he knew what had happened. Rochelle had called the killer to say that she had just lunched with a private detective; a meeting had been arranged over her glittering pink phone; that night, after a meal or a drink, they had sauntered through the dark towards the river. He thought of Hammersmith Bridge, sage green and gold, in the area where she claimed to have a new flat: a famous suicide spot, with its low sides, and the fast-flowing Thames below. She could not swim. Nighttime: two lovers play-fighting, a car sweeps by, a scream and a splash. Would anyone have seen?
Not if the killer had iron-clad nerves and a liberal dash of luck; and this was a murderer who had already demonstrated plenty of the former, and an unnerving, reckless reliance on the latter. Defending counsel would undoubtedly argue diminished responsibility, because of the vainglorious overreaching that made Strike’s quarry unique in his experience; and perhaps, he thought, there was some pathology there, some categorizable madness, but he was not much interested in the psychology. Like John Bristow, he wanted justice.
In the darkness of his office, his thoughts veered suddenly and unhelpfully back in time, to the most personal death of all; the one that Lucy assumed, quite wrongly, haunted Strike’s every investigation, colored every case; the killing that had fractured his and Lucy’s lives into two epochs, so that everything in their memory was cleaved clearly into that which had happened before their mother died, and that which had happened afterwards. Lucy thought he had run away to join the RMP because of Leda’s death; that he had been driven to it by his unsatisfied belief in his stepfather’s guilt; that every corpse he saw in the course of his professional life must recall their mother to his mind; that every killer he met must seem to be an echo of their stepfather; that he was driven to investigate other deaths in an eternal act of personal exculpation.
But Strike had aspired to this career long before the last needle had entered Leda’s body; long before he had understood that his mother (and every other human) was mortal, and that killings were more than puzzles to be solved. It was Lucy who never forgot, who lived in a swarm of memories like coffin flies; who projected on to any and all unnatural deaths the conflicting emotions aroused in her by their mother’s untimely demise.
Tonight, however, he found himself doing the very thing that Lucy was sure must be habitual: he was remembering Leda and connecting her to this case. Leda Strike, supergroupie. It was how they always captioned her in the most famous photograph of all, and the only one that featured his parents together. There she was, in black and white, with her heart-shaped face, her shining dark hair and her marmoset eyes; and there, separated from each other by an art dealer, an aristocratic playboy (one since dead by his own hand, the other of AIDS) and Carla Astolfi, his father’s second wife, was Jonny Rokeby himself, androgynous and wild: hair nearly as long as Leda’s. Martini glasses and cigarettes, smoke curling out of the model’s mouth, but his mother more stylish than any of them.
Everyone but Strike had seemed to view Leda’s death as the deplorable but unsurprising result of a life lived perilously, beyond societal norms. Even those who had known her best and longest were satisfied that she herself had administered the overdose they found in her body. His mother, by almost unanimous consent, had walked too close to the unsavory edges of life, and it was only to be expected that she would one day topple out of sight and fall to her death, stiff and cold, on a filthy-sheeted bed.
Why she had done it, nobody could quite explain, not even Uncle Ted (silent and shattered, leaning against the kitchen sink) or Aunt Joan (red-eyed but angry at her little kitchen table, with her arms around nineteen-year-old Lucy, who was sobbing into Joan’s shoulder). An overdose had simply seemed consistent with the trend of Leda’s life; with the squats and the musicians and the wild parties; with the squalor of her final relationship and home; with the constant presence of drugs in her vicinity; with her reckless quest for thrills and highs. Strike alone had asked whether anyone had known his mother had taken to shooting up; he alone had seen a distinction between her predilection for cannabis and a sudden liking for heroin; he alone had unanswered questions and saw suspicious circumstances. But he had been a student of twenty, and nobody had listened.
After the trial and the conviction, Strike had packed up and left everything behind: the short-lived burst of press, Aunt Joan’s desperate disappointment at the end of his Oxford career, Charlotte, bereft and incensed by his disappearance and already sleeping with someone new, Lucy’s screams and scenes. With the sole support of Uncle Ted, he had vanished into the army, and refound there the life he had been taught by Leda: constant uprootings, self-reliance and the endless appeal of the new.
Tonight, though, he could not help seeing his mother as a spiritual sister to the beautiful, needy and depressive girl who had broken apart on a frozen road, and to the plain, homeless outsider now lying in the chilly morgue. Leda, Lula and Rochelle had not been women like Lucy, or his Aunt Joan; they had not taken every reasonable precaution against violence or chance; they had not tethered themselves to life with mortgages and voluntary work, safe husbands and clean-faced dependants: their deaths, therefore, were not classed as “tragic,” in the same way as those of staid and respectable housewives.
How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.
Nearly all the physical evidence of Lula’s murder had long since been wiped away, trodden underfoot or covered by thickly falling snow; the most persuasive clue Strike had was, after all, that grainy black-and-white footage of two men running away from the scene: a piece of evidence given a cursory check and tossed aside by the police, who were convinced that nobody could have entered the building, that Landry had committed suicide, and that the film showed nothing more than a pair of larcenous loiterers with intent.
Strike roused himself and looked at his watch. It was half past ten, but he was sure the man to whom he wished to speak would be awake. He flicked on his desk lamp, took up his mobile and dialed, this time, a number in Germany.
“Oggy,” bellowed the tinny voice on the other end of the phone. “How the fuck are you?”
“Need a favor, mate.”
And Strike asked Lieutenant Graham Hardacre to give him all the information he could find on one Agyeman of the Royal Engineers, Christian name and rank unknown, but with particular reference to the dates of his tours of duty in Afghanistan.