‘Which is why I’m taking Al,’ said Strike. ‘He knows every waiter in every smart restaurant in London. All my father’s kids do.’
When he had finished lunch he took a coffee into his office and closed the door. Sleet was again spattering his window. He could not resist glancing down into the frozen street, half-expecting (hoping?) to see her there, long black hair whipping around her perfect, pale face, staring up at him, imploring him with her flecked green-hazel eyes… but there was nobody in the street except strangers swaddled against the relentless weather.
He was crazy on every count. She was in Scotland and it was much, much better so.
Later, when Robin had gone home, he put on the Italian suit that Charlotte had bought him over a year ago, when they had dined at this very restaurant to celebrate his thirty-fifth birthday. After pulling on his overcoat he locked his flat door and set out for the Tube in the sub-zero cold, still leaning on his stick.
Christmas assailed him from every window he passed; spangled lights, mounds of new objects, of toys and gadgets, fake snow on glass and sundry pre-Christmas sale signs adding a mournful note in the depths of the recession. More pre-Christmas revellers on the Friday-night Tube: girls in ludicrously tiny glittering dresses risking hypothermia for a fumble with the boy from Packaging. Strike felt weary and low.
The walk from Hammersmith was longer than he had remembered. As he proceeded down Fulham Palace Road he realised how close he was to Elizabeth Tassel’s house. Presumably she had suggested the restaurant, a long way from the Quines’ place in Ladbroke Grove, precisely because of its convenience to her.
After ten minutes Strike turned right and headed through the darkness towards Thames Wharf, through empty echoing streets, his breath rising in a smoky cloud. The riverside garden that in summer would be full of diners at white table-clothed chairs was buried under thick snow. The Thames glinted darkly beyond the pale carpet, iron-cold and menacing. Strike turned into the converted brick storage facility and was at once subsumed in light, warmth and noise.
There, just inside the door, leaning against the bar with his elbow on its shiny steel surface, was Al, deep in friendly conversation with the barman.
He was barely five foot ten, which was short for one of Rokeby’s children, and carrying a little too much weight. His mouse-brown hair was slicked back; he had his mother’s narrow jaw but he had inherited the weak divergent squint that added an attractive strangeness to Rokeby’s handsome face and marked Al inescapably as his father’s son.
Catching sight of Strike, Al let out a roar of welcome, bounced forwards and hugged him. Strike barely responded, being hampered by his stick and the coat he was trying to remove. Al fell back, looking sheepish.
‘How are you, bruv?’
In spite of the comic Anglicism, his accent was a strange mid-Atlantic hybrid that testified to years spent between Europe and America.
‘Not bad,’ said Strike, ‘you?’
‘Yeah, not bad,’ echoed Al. ‘Not bad. Could be worse.’
He gave a kind of exaggerated Gallic shrug. Al had been educated at Le Rosey, the international boarding school in Switzerland, and his body language still bore traces of the Continental manners he had met there. Something else underlay the response, however, something that Strike felt every time they met: Al’s guilt, his defensiveness, a preparedness to meet accusations of having had a soft and easy life compared to his older brother.
‘What’re you having?’ Al asked. ‘Beer? Fancy a Peroni?’
They sat side by side at the crammed bar, facing glass shelves of bottles, waiting for their table. Looking down the long, packed restaurant, with its industrial steel ceiling in stylised waves, its cerulean carpet and the wood-burning oven at the end like a giant beehive, Strike spotted a celebrated sculptor, a famous female architect and at least one well-known actor.
‘Heard about you and Charlotte,’ Al said. ‘Shame.’
Strike wondered whether Al knew somebody who knew her. He ran with a jet-set crowd that might well stretch to the future Viscount of Croy.
‘Yeah, well,’ said Strike with a shrug. ‘For the best.’
(He and Charlotte had sat here, in this wonderful restaurant by the river, and enjoyed their very last happy evening together. It had taken four months for the relationship to unravel and implode, four months of exhausting aggression and misery… it was yours.)
A good-looking young woman whom Al greeted by name showed them to their table; an equally attractive young man handed them menus. Strike waited for Al to order wine and for the staff to depart before explaining why they were there.
‘Four weeks ago tonight,’ he told Al, ‘a writer called Owen Quine had a row with his agent in here. By all accounts the whole restaurant saw it. He stormed out and shortly afterwards – probably within days and maybe even that night—’
‘—he was murdered,’ said Al, who had listened to Strike with his mouth open. ‘I saw it in the paper. You found the body.’
His tone conveyed a yearning for details that Strike chose to ignore.
‘There might be nothing to find out here, but I—’
‘His wife did it, though,’ said Al, puzzled. ‘They’ve got her.’
‘His wife didn’t do it,’ said Strike, turning his attention to the paper menu. He had noticed before now that Al, who had grown up surrounded by innumerable inaccurate press stories about his father and his family, never seemed to extend his healthy mistrust of British journalism to any other topic.
(It had had two campuses, Al’s school: lessons by Lake Geneva in the summer months and then up to Gstaad for the winter; afternoons spent skiing and skating. Al had grown up breathing exorbitantly priced mountain air, cushioned by the companionship of other celebrity children. The distant snarling of the tabloids had been a mere background murmur in his life… this, at least, was how Strike interpreted the little that Al had told him of his youth.)
‘The wife didn’t do it?’ said Al when Strike looked up again.
‘No.’
‘Whoa. You gonna pull another Lula Landry?’ asked Al, with a wide grin that added charm to his off-kilter stare.
‘That’s the idea,’ said Strike.
‘You want me to sound out the staff?’ asked Al.
‘Exactly,’ said Strike.
He was amused and touched by how delighted Al seemed to be at being given the chance to render him service.
‘No problem. No problem. Try and get someone decent for you. Where’s Loulou gone? She’s a smart cookie.’
After they had ordered, Al strolled to the bathroom to see whether he could spot the smart Loulou. Strike sat alone, drinking Tignanello ordered by Al, watching the white-coated chefs working in the open kitchen. They were young, skilled and efficient. Flames darted, knives flickered, heavy iron pans moved hither and thither.
He’s not stupid, Strike thought of his brother, watching Al meander back towards the table, leading a dark girl in a white apron. He’s just…
‘This is Loulou,’ said Al, sitting back down. ‘She was here that night.’
‘You remember the argument?’ Strike asked her, focusing at once on the girl who was too busy to sit but stood smiling vaguely at him.
‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘It was really loud. Brought the place to a standstill.’
‘Can you remember what the man looked like?’ Strike said, keen to establish that she had witnessed the right row.
‘Fat bloke wearing a hat, yeah,’ she said. ‘Yelling at a woman with grey hair. Yeah, they had a real bust-up. Sorry, I’m going to have to—’
And she was gone, to take another table’s order.