The road along which Strike was trudging curved to the right. A tall, thin, hunched figure was walking behind him, its head bowed so that only the top of a black hood was visible.
Of course, the sensible thing to do would be to go home, now, and rest his knee. It was Sunday. There was no need for him to go marching all over London in the rain.
He won’t be there, said Leonora in his head.
But the alternative was returning to Denmark Street, listening to the rain hammering against the badly fitting window beside his bed under the eaves, with photo albums full of Charlotte too close, in the boxes on the landing…
Better to move, to work, to think about other people’s problems…
Blinking in the rain, he glanced up at the houses he was passing and glimpsed in his peripheral vision the figure following twenty yards behind him. Though the dark coat was shapeless, Strike had the impression from the short, quick steps, that the figure was female.
Now Strike noticed something curious about the way she was walking, something unnatural. There was none of the self-preoccupation of the lone stroller on a cold wet day. Her head was not bowed in protection against the elements, nor was she maintaining a steady pace with the simple view of achieving a destination. She kept adjusting her speed in tiny but, to Strike, noticeable increments, and every few steps the hidden face beneath the hood presented itself to the chilly onslaught of the driving rain, then vanished again into shadow. She was keeping him in her sights.
What had Leonora said at their first meeting?
I think I’ve been followed. Tall, dark girl with round shoulders.
Strike experimented by speeding up and slowing down infinitesimally. The space between them remained constant; her hidden face flickered up and down more frequently, a pale pink blur, to check his position.
She was not experienced at following people. Strike, who was an expert, would have taken the opposite pavement, pretended to be talking on a mobile phone; concealed his focused and singular interest in the subject…
For his own amusement, he faked a sudden hesitation, as though he had been caught by a doubt as to the right direction. Caught off guard, the dark figure stopped dead, paralysed. Strike strolled on again and after a few seconds heard her footsteps echoing on the wet pavement behind him. She was too foolish even to realise that she had been rumbled.
Westbourne Park station came into sight a little way ahead: a long, low building of golden brick. He would confront her there, ask her the time, get a good look at her face.
Turning into the station, he drew quickly to the far side of the entrance, waiting for her, out of sight.
Some thirty seconds later he glimpsed the tall, dark figure jogging towards the entrance through the glittering rain, hands still in her pockets; she was frightened that she might have missed him, that he was already on a train.
He took a swift, confident step out into the doorway to face her – the false foot slipped on the wet tiled floor and skidded.
‘Fuck!’
With an undignified descent into half-splits, he lost his footing and fell; in the long, slow-motion seconds before he reached the dirty wet floor, landing painfully on the bottle of whisky in his carrier bag, he saw her freeze in silhouette in the entrance, then vanish like a startled deer.
‘Bollocks,’ he gasped, lying on the sopping tiles while people at the ticket machines stared. He had twisted his leg again as he fell; it felt as though he might have torn a ligament; the knee that had been merely sore was now screaming in protest. Inwardly cursing imperfectly mopped floors and prosthetic ankles of rigid construction, Strike tried to get up. Nobody wanted to approach him. No doubt they thought he was drunk – Nick and Ilsa’s whisky had now escaped the carrier bag and was rolling clunkily across the floor.
Finally a London Underground employee helped him to his feet, muttering about there being a sign warning of the wet floor; hadn’t the gentleman seen it, wasn’t it prominent enough? He handed Strike his whisky. Humiliated, Strike muttered a thank you and limped over to the ticket barriers, wanting only to escape the countless staring eyes.
Safely on a southbound train he stretched out his throbbing leg and probed his knee as best he could through his suit trousers. It felt tender and sore, exactly as it had after he had fallen down those stairs last spring. Furious, now, with the girl who had been following him, he tried to make sense of what had happened.
When had she joined him? Had she been watching the Quine place, seen him go inside? Might she (an unflattering possibility) have mistaken Strike for Owen Quine? Kathryn Kent had certainly done so, briefly, in the dark…
Strike got to his feet some minutes before changing at Hammersmith to better prepare himself for what might be a perilous descent. By the time he reached his destination of Barons Court, he was limping heavily and wishing that he had a stick. He made his way out of a ticket hall tiled in Victorian pea green, placing his feet with care on the floor covered in grimy wet prints. Too soon he had left the dry shelter of the small jewel of a station, with its art nouveau lettering and stone pediments, and proceeded in the relentless rain towards the rumbling dual carriageway that lay close by.
To his relief and gratitude, he realised that he had emerged on that very stretch of Talgarth Road where the house he sought stood.
Though London was full of these kinds of architectural anomalies, he had never seen buildings that jarred so obviously with their surroundings. The old houses sat in a distinctive row, dark red brick relics of a more confident and imaginative time, while traffic rumbled unforgivingly past them in both directions, for this was the main artery into London from the west.
They were ornate late-Victorian artists’ studios, their lower windows leaded and latticed and oversized arched north-facing windows on their upper floors, like fragments of the vanished Crystal Palace. Wet, cold and sore though he was, Strike paused for a few seconds to look up at number 179, marvelling at its distinctive architecture and wondering how much the Quines would stand to make if Fancourt ever changed his mind and agreed to sell.
He heaved himself up the white front steps. The front door was sheltered from the rain by a brick canopy richly ornamented with carved stone swags, scrolls and badges. Strike brought out the keys one by one with cold, numb fingers.
The fourth one he tried slid home without protest and turned as though it had been doing so for years. One gentle click and the front door slid open. He crossed the threshold and closed the door behind him.
A shock, like a slap in the face, like a falling bucket of water. Strike fumbled with his coat collar, dragging it up over his mouth and nose to protect them. Where he should have smelled only dust and old wood, something sharp and chemical was overwhelming him, catching in his nose and throat.
He reached automatically for a switch on the wall beside him, producing a flood of light from two bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The hallway, which was narrow and empty, was panelled in honey-coloured wood. Twisted columns of the same material supported an arch halfway along its length. At first glance it was serene, gracious, well-proportioned.
But with eyes narrowed Strike slowly took in the wide, burn-like stains on the original woodwork. A corrosive, acrid fluid – which was making the still, dusty air burn – had been splashed everywhere in what seemed to have been an act of wanton vandalism; it had stripped varnish from the aged floorboards, blasted the patina off the bare wood stairs ahead, even been thrown over the walls so that large patches of painted plaster were bleached and discoloured.
After a few seconds of breathing through his thick serge collar, it occurred to Strike that the place was too warm for an uninhabited house. The heating had been cranked up high, which made the fierce chemical smell waft more pungently than if it had been left to disperse in the chill of a winter’s day.
Paper rustled under his feet. Looking down, he saw a smattering of takeaway menus and an envelope addressed TO THE OCCUPIER/CARETAKER. He stooped and picked it up. It was a brief, angry handwritten note from the next-door neighbour, complaining about the smell.
Strike let the note fall back onto the doormat and moved forwards into the hall, observing the scars left on every surface where the chemical substance had been thrown. To his left was a door; he opened it. The room beyond was dark and empty; it had not been tarnished with the bleach-like substance. A dilapidated kitchen, also devoid of furnishings, was the only other room on the lower floor. The deluge of chemicals had not spared it; even a stale half loaf of bread on the sideboard had been doused.
Strike headed up the stairs. Somebody had climbed or descended them, pouring the vicious, corrosive substance from a capacious container; it had spattered everywhere, even onto the landing windowsill, where the paint had bubbled and split apart.
On the first floor, Strike came to a halt. Even through the thick wool of his overcoat he could smell something else, something that the pungent industrial chemical could not mask. Sweet, putrid, rancid: the stench of decaying flesh.
He did not try either of the closed doors on the first floor. Instead, with his birthday whisky swaying stupidly in its plastic bag, he followed slowly in the footsteps of the pourer of acid, up a second flight of stained stairs from which the varnish had been burned away, the carved banisters scorched bare of their waxy shine.
The stench of decay grew stronger with every step Strike took. It reminded him of the time they stuck long sticks into the ground in Bosnia and pulled them out to sniff the ends, the one fail-safe way of finding the mass graves. He pressed his collar more tightly to his mouth as he reached the top floor, to the studio where a Victorian artist had once worked in the unchanging northern light.
Strike did not hesitate on the threshold except for the seconds it took to tug his shirt sleeve down to cover his bare hand, so that he would make no mark on the wooden door as he pushed it open. Silence but for a faint squeak of hinges, and then the desultory buzzing of flies.
He had expected death, but not this.
A carcass: trussed, stinking and rotting, empty and gutted, lying on the floor instead of hanging from a metal hook where surely it belonged. But what looked like a slaughtered pig wore human clothing.
It lay beneath the high arched beams, bathed in light from that gigantic Romanesque window, and though it was a private house and the traffic sloshed still beyond the glass, Strike felt that he stood retching in a temple, witness to sacrificial slaughter, to an act of unholy desecration.
Seven plates and seven sets of cutlery had been set around the decomposing body as though it were a gigantic joint of meat. The torso had been slit from throat to pelvis and Strike was tall enough to see, even from the threshold, the gaping black cavity that had been left behind. The intestines were gone, as though they had been eaten. Fabric and flesh had been burned away all over the corpse, heightening the vile impression that it had been cooked and feasted upon. In places the burned, decomposing cadaver was shining, almost liquid in appearance. Four hissing radiators were hastening the decay.
The rotted face lay furthest away from him, near the window. Strike squinted at it without moving, trying not to breathe. A wisp of yellowing beard clung still to the chin and a single burned-out eye socket was just visible.
And now, with all his experience of death and mutilation, Strike had to fight down the urge to vomit in the almost suffocating mingled stenches of chemical and corpse. He shifted his carrier bag up his thick forearm, drew his mobile phone out of his pocket and took photographs of the scene from as many angles as he could manage without moving further into the room. Then he backed out of the studio, allowing the door to swing shut, which did nothing to mitigate the almost solid stink, and called 999.
Slowly and carefully, determined not to slip and fall even though he was desperate to regain fresh, clean, rain-washed air, Strike proceeded back down the tarnished stairs to wait for the police in the street.