Career of Evil

“I want to talk to you,” Carver told Strike. “Ekwensi, you take her statement.”

Before anyone could speak or move, a sweet-faced young nurse stepped obliviously between the two men, smiling at Robin.

“Ready to take you to X-ray, Miss Ellacott,” she said.

Robin got stiffly off the bed and walked away, looking back over her shoulder at Strike, trying to convey warning and restraint with her expression.

“Out here,” Carver growled at Strike.

The detective followed the policeman back through A&E. Carver had commandeered a small visitors’ room where, Strike assumed, news of imminent or actual death was conveyed to relatives. It contained several padded chairs, a box of tissues on a small table and an abstract print in shades of orange.

“I told you to stay out of it,” Carver said, taking up a position in the middle of the room, arms folded, feet wide apart.

With the door closed, Carver’s body odor filled the room. He did not stink in the same way as Whittaker: not of ingrained filth and drugs, but of sweat that he could not contain through the working day. His blotchy complexion was not improved by the overhead strip lighting. The dandruff, the wet shirt, the mottled skin: he seemed to be visibly falling to pieces. Strike had undoubtedly helped him on his way, humiliating him in the press over the murder of Lula Landry.

“Sent her to stake out Whittaker, didn’t you?” asked Carver, his face growing slowly redder, as though he were being boiled. “You did this to her.”

“Fuck you,” said Strike.

Only now, with his nose full of Carver’s sweat, did he admit to himself that he had known it for a while: Whittaker was not the killer. Strike had sent Robin after Stephanie because, in his soul, he had thought it the safest place to put her, but he had kept her on the streets, and he had known for weeks that the killer was tailing her.

Carver knew that he had hit a nerve. He was gri

“You’ve been using murdered women to pay off your fucking grudge against your stepdaddy,” he said, taking pleasure in Strike’s rising color, gri

He took a step closer to Strike. Though a head shorter, he projected the power of a furious, embittered but powerful man, a man with much to prove, and with the full might of the force behind him. Pointing at Strike’s chest, he said:

“Stay out of it. You’re fucking lucky you haven’t got your partner’s blood on your hands. If I find you anywhere near our investigation again, I’ll fucking run you in. Understand me?”

He poked his stubby fingertip into Strike’s sternum. Strike resisted the urge to knock it away, but a muscle in his jaw twitched. For a few seconds they eyeballed each other. Carver gri

He was walking slowly back through A&E when tall, handsome Matthew came ru

“Matthew,” he said.

Matthew looked at Strike as though he did not recognize him.

“She went for an X-ray,” said Strike. “She might be back by now. That way,” he pointed.

“Why’s she need—?”

“Ribs,” said Strike.

Matthew elbowed him aside. Strike did not protest. He felt he deserved it. He watched as Robin’s fiancé tore off in her direction, then, after hesitating, turned to the double doors and walked out into the night.

The clear sky was now dusted with stars. Once he reached the street he paused to light a cigarette, dragging on it as Wardle had done, as though the nicotine were the stuff of life. He began to walk, feeling the pain in his knee now. With every step, he liked himself less.

“RICKY!” bawled a woman down the street, imploring an escaping toddler to return to her as she struggled with the weight of a large bag. “RICKY, COME BACK!”

The little boy was giggling manically. Without really thinking what he was doing, Strike bent down automatically and caught him as he sped towards the road.

“Thank you!” said the mother, almost sobbing her relief as she jogged towards Strike. Flowers toppled off the bag in her arms. “We’re visiting his dad—oh God—”

The boy in Strike’s arms struggled frantically. Strike put him down beside his mother, who was picking up a bunch of daffodils off the pavement.

“Hold them,” she told the boy sternly, who obeyed. “You can give them to Daddy. Don’t drop them! Thanks,” she said again to Strike and marched away, keeping a tight grip on the toddler’s free hand. The little boy walked meekly beside his mother now, proud to have a job to do, the stiff yellow flowers upright in his hand like a scepter.

Strike walked on a few paces and then, quite suddenly, stopped dead in the middle of the pavement, staring as though transfixed by something invisible hanging in the cold air in front of him. A chilly breeze tickled his face as he stood there, completely indifferent to his surroundings, his focus entirely inward.

Daffodils… lily of the valley… flowers out of season.

Then the sound of the mother’s voice echoed through the night again—“Ricky, no!”—and caused a sudden explosive chain reaction in Strike’s brain, lighting a landing strip for a theory that he knew, with the certainty of a prophet, would lead to the killer. As the steel joists of a building are revealed as it burns, so Strike saw in this flash of inspiration the skeleton of the killer’s plan, recognizing those crucial flaws that he had missed—that everyone had missed—but which might, at last, be the means by which the murderer and his macabre schemes could be brought down.

53

You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars…

Blue Öyster Cult, “Veteran of the Psychic Wars”

It had been easy to feign insouciance in the brightly lit hospital. Robin had drawn strength, not merely from Strike’s amazement and admiration at her escape, but from listening to her own account of fighting off the killer. She had been the calmest of them all in the immediate aftermath of the attack, consoling and reassuring Matthew when he began to cry at the sight of her ink-stained face and the long wound in her arm. She had drawn strength from everyone else’s weakness, hoping that her adrenaline-fueled bravery would carry her safely back to normality, where she would find a sure footing and move on unscathed, without having to pass through the dark mire where she had lived so long after the rape…

However, during the week that followed she found it almost impossible to sleep, and not only because of the throbbing of her injured forearm, which was now in a protective half-cast. In the short dozes she managed at night or by day, she felt her attacker’s thick arms around her again and heard him breathing in her ear. Sometimes the eyes she had not seen became the eyes of the rapist when she was nineteen: pale, one pupil fixed. Behind their black balaclava and gorilla mask, the nightmare figures merged, mutated and grew, filling her mind day and night.

In the worst dreams, she watched him doing it to somebody else and was waiting her turn, powerless to help or escape. Once, the victim was Stephanie with her pulverized face. On another unbearable occasion, a little black girl screamed for her mother. Robin woke from that one shouting in the dark, and Matthew became so worried about her that he called in sick to work the following day so that he could stay with her. Robin did not know whether she was grateful or resentful.