Strike’s destination that afternoon was a shop that sold electronic accessories in Crouch End. Stolen mobile phones and laptops were unlocked in a back room, the personal information therein extracted, and the purged devices and the information were then sold separately to those who could use them.
The owner of this thriving business was causing Mr Gunfrey, Strike’s client, considerable inconvenience. Mr Gunfrey, who was every bit as crooked as the man whom Strike had tracked to his business headquarters, but on a larger and more flamboyant scale, had made a mistake in treading on the wrong toes. It was Strike’s view that Gunfrey needed to clear out while he was ahead. He knew of what this adversary was capable; they had an acquaintance in common.
The target greeted Strike in an upstairs office that smelled as bad as Elizabeth Tassel’s, while two shell-suited youths lolled around in the background picking their nails. Strike, who was impersonating a thug for hire recommended by their mutual acquaintance, listened as his would-be employer confided that he was intending to target Mr Gunfrey’s teenage son, about whose movements he was frighteningly well informed. He went so far as to offer Strike the job: five hundred pounds to cut the boy. (‘I don’t want no murder, jussa message to his father, you get me?’)
It was gone six before Strike managed to extricate himself from the premises. His first call, once he had made sure he had not been followed, was to Mr Gunfrey himself, whose appalled silence told Strike that he had at last realised what he was up against.
Strike then phoned Robin.
‘Going to be late, sorry,’ he said.
‘Where are you?’ she asked, sounding strained. He could hear the sounds of the pub behind her: conversation and laughter.
‘Crouch End.’
‘Oh God,’ he heard her say under her breath. ‘It’ll take you ages—’
‘I’ll get a cab,’ he assured her. ‘Be as quick as I can.’
Why, Strike wondered, as he sat in the taxi rumbling along Upper Street, had Matthew chosen a pub in Waterloo? To make sure that Strike had to travel a long way? Payback for Strike having chosen pubs convenient to him on their previous attempts to meet? Strike hoped the King’s Arms served food. He was suddenly very hungry.
It took forty minutes to reach his destination, partly because the row of nineteenth-century workers’ cottages where the pub stood was blocked to traffic. Strike chose to get out and end the curmudgeonly taxi driver’s attempt to make sense of the street numbering, which appeared not to follow a logical sequence, and proceeded on foot, wondering whether the difficulty of finding the place had influenced Matthew’s choice.
The King’s Arms turned out to be a picturesque Victorian corner pub the entrances of which were surrounded by a mixture of professional young men in suits and what looked like students, all smoking and drinking. The small crowd parted easily as he approached, giving him a wider berth than was strictly necessary even for a man of his height and breadth. As he crossed the threshold into the small bar Strike wondered, not without a faint hope that it might happen, whether he might be asked to leave on account of his filthy clothes.
Meanwhile, in the noisy back room, which was a glass-ceilinged courtyard self-consciously crammed with bric-a-brac, Matthew was looking at his watch.
‘It’s nearly a quarter past,’ he told Robin.
Clean cut in his suit and tie, he was – as usual – the handsomest man in the room. Robin was used to seeing women’s eyes swivel as he walked past them; she had never quite managed to make up her mind how aware Matthew was of their swift, burning glances. Sitting at the long wooden bench that they had been forced to share with a party of cackling students, six foot one, with a firm cleft chin and bright blue eyes, he looked like a thoroughbred kept in a paddock of Highland ponies.
‘That’s him,’ said Robin, with a surge of relief and apprehension.
Strike seemed to have become larger and rougher-looking since he had left the office. He moved easily towards them through the packed room, his eyes on Robin’s bright gold head, one large hand grasping a pint of Hophead. Matthew stood up. It looked as though he braced himself.
‘Cormoran – hi – you found it.’
‘You’re Matthew,’ said Strike, holding out a hand. ‘Sorry I’m so late, I tried to get away earlier but I was with the sort of bloke you wouldn’t want to turn your back on without permission.’
Matthew returned an empty smile. He had expected Strike to be full of those kinds of comments: self-dramatising, trying to make a mystery of what he did. By the look of him, he’d been changing a tyre.
‘Sit down,’ Robin told Strike nervously, moving along the bench so far that she was almost falling off the end. ‘Are you hungry? We were just talking about ordering something.’
‘They do reasonably decent food,’ said Matthew. ‘Thai. It’s not the Mango Tree, but it’s all right.’
Strike smiled without warmth. He had expected Matthew to be like this: name-dropping restaurants in Belgravia to prove, after a single year in London, that he was a seasoned metropolitan.
‘How did it go this afternoon?’ Robin asked Strike. She thought that if Matthew only heard about the sort of things that Strike did, he would become as fascinated as she was by the process of detection and his every prejudice would fall away.
But Strike’s brief description of his afternoon, omitting all identifying details of those involved, met barely concealed indifference on the part of Matthew. Strike then offered them both a drink, as they were holding empty glasses.
‘You could show a bit of interest,’ Robin hissed at Matthew once Strike was out of earshot at the bar.
‘Robin, he met a man in a shop,’ said Matthew. ‘I doubt they’ll be optioning the film rights any time soon.’
Pleased with his own wit, he turned his attention to the blackboard menu on the opposite wall.
When Strike had returned with drinks, Robin insisted on battling her way up to the bar with their food order. She dreaded leaving the two men alone together, but felt that they might, somehow, find their own level without her.
Matthew’s brief increase in self-satisfaction ebbed away in Robin’s absence.
‘You’re ex-army,’ he found himself telling Strike, even though he had been determined not to permit Strike’s life experience to dominate the conversation.
‘That’s right,’ said Strike. ‘SIB.’
Matthew was not sure what that was.
‘My father’s ex-RAF,’ he said. ‘Yeah, he was in same time as Jeff Young.’
‘Who?’