30
… as an earnest of friendship and confidence, I’ll acquaint you with a design that I have. To tell truth, and speak openly one to another…
William Congreve, Love for Love
At Strike’s insistence, they stopped for lunch at the Burger King at Tiverton Services.
‘You need to eat something before we go up the road.’
Robin accompanied him inside with barely a word, making no reference even to Manny’s recent, startling assertion. Her cold and slightly martyred air did not entirely surprise Strike, but he was impatient with it. She queued for their burgers, because he could not manage both tray and crutches, and when she had set down the loaded tray at the small Formica table he said, trying to defuse the tension:
‘Look, I know you expected me to tell Chard off for treating you like staff.’
‘I didn’t,’ Robin contradicted him automatically. (Hearing him say it aloud made her feel petulant, childish.)
‘Have it your own way,’ said Strike with an irritable shrug, taking a large bite of his first burger.
They ate in disgruntled silence for a minute or two, until Robin’s innate honesty reasserted itself.
‘All right, I did, a bit,’ she said.
Mellowed by greasy food and touched by her admission, Strike said:
‘I was getting good stuff out of him, Robin. You don’t start picking arguments with interviewees when they’re in full flow.’
‘Sorry for my amateurishness,’ she said, stung all over again.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘Who’s calling you—?’
‘What were you intending, when you took me on?’ she demanded suddenly, letting her unwrapped burger fall back onto the tray.
The latent resentment of weeks had suddenly burst its bounds. She did not care what she heard; she wanted the truth. Was she a typist and a receptionist, or was she something more? Had she stayed with Strike, and helped him climb out of penury, merely to be shunted aside like domestic staff?
‘Intending?’ repeated Strike, staring at her. ‘What d’you mean, intend—?’
‘I thought you meant me to be – I thought I was going to get some – some training,’ said Robin, pink-cheeked and unnaturally bright-eyed. ‘You’ve mentioned it a couple of times, but then lately you’ve been talking about getting someone else in. I took a pay cut,’ she said tremulously. ‘I turned down better-paid jobs. I thought you meant me to be—’
Her anger, so long suppressed, was bringing her to the verge of tears, but she was determined not to give in to them. The fictional partner whom she had been imagining for Strike would never cry; not that no-nonsense ex-policewoman, tough and unemotional through every crisis…
‘I thought you meant me to be – I didn’t think I was just going to answer the phone.’
‘You don’t just answer the phone,’ said Strike, who had just finished his first burger and was watching her struggle with her anger from beneath his heavy brows. ‘You’ve been casing murder suspects’ houses with me this week. You just saved both our lives on the motorway.’
But Robin was not to be deflected.
‘What were you expecting me to do when you kept me on?’
‘I don’t know that I had any particular plan,’ Strike said slowly and untruthfully. ‘I didn’t know you were this serious about the job – looking for training—’
‘How could I not be serious?’ demanded Robin loudly.
A family of four in the corner of the tiny restaurant was staring at them. Robin paid them no attention. She was suddenly livid. The long cold journey, Strike eating all the food, his surprise that she could drive properly, her relegation to the kitchen with Chard’s servants and now this—
‘You give me half – half – what that human resources job would have paid! Why do you think I stayed? I helped you. I helped you solve the Lula Landry—’
‘OK,’ said Strike, holding up a large, hairy-backed hand. ‘OK, here it is. But don’t blame me if you don’t like what you’re about to hear.’
She stared at him, flushed, straight-backed on her plastic chair, her food untouched.
‘I did take you on thinking I could train you up. I didn’t have any money for courses, but I thought you could learn on the job until I could afford it.’
Refusing to feel mollified until she heard what was coming next, Robin said nothing.
‘You’ve got a lot of aptitude for the job,’ said Strike, ‘but you’re getting married to someone who hates you doing it.’
Robin opened her mouth and closed it again. A sensation of having been unexpectedly winded had robbed her of the power of speech.
‘You leave on the dot every day—’
‘I do not!’ said Robin, furious. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, I turned down a day off to be here now, driving you all the way to Devon—’
‘Because he’s away,’ said Strike. ‘Because he won’t know.’
The feeling of having been winded intensified. How could Strike know that she had lied to Matthew, if not in fact, then by omission?
‘Even if that – whether that’s true or not,’ she said unsteadily, ‘it’s up to me what I do with my – it’s not up to Matthew what career I have.’
‘I was with Charlotte sixteen years, on and off,’ said Strike, picking up his second burger. ‘Mostly off. She hated my job. It’s what kept breaking us up – one of the things that kept breaking us up,’ he corrected himself, scrupulously honest. ‘She couldn’t understand a vocation. Some people can’t; at best, work’s about status and pay cheques for them, it hasn’t got value in itself.’
He began unwrapping the burger while Robin glared at him.
‘I need a partner who can share the long hours,’ said Strike. ‘Someone who’s OK with weekend work. I don’t blame Matthew for worrying about you—’
‘He doesn’t.’
The words were out of her mouth before Robin could consider them. In her blanket desire to refute everything that Strike was saying she had let an unpalatable truth escape her. The fact was that Matthew had very little imagination. He had not seen Strike covered in blood after the killer of Lula Landry had stabbed him. Even her description of Owen Quine lying trussed and disembowelled seemed to have been blurred for him by the thick miasma of jealousy through which he heard everything connected to Strike. His antipathy for her job owed nothing to protectiveness and she had never admitted as much to herself before.
‘It can be dangerous, what I do,’ said Strike through another huge bite of burger, as though he had not heard her.
‘I’ve been useful to you,’ said Robin, her voice thicker than his, though her mouth was empty.
‘I know you have. I wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t had you,’ said Strike. ‘Nobody was ever more grateful than me for a temping agency’s mistake. You’ve been incredible, I couldn’t have – don’t bloody cry, that family’s gawping enough already.’
‘I don’t give a monkey’s,’ said Robin into a handful of paper napkins and Strike laughed.
‘If it’s what you want,’ he told the top of her red-gold head, ‘you can go on a surveillance course when I’ve got the money. But if you’re my partner-in-training, there’ll be times that I’m going to have to ask you to do stuff that Matthew might not like. That’s all I’m saying. You’re the one who’s going to have to work it out.’
‘And I will,’ said Robin, fighting to contain the urge to bawl. ‘That’s what I want. That’s why I stayed.’
‘Then cheer the fuck up and eat your burger.’