Career of Evil

Strike offered his pack to Shanker before lighting up.

“The Geordie accent was a bit overdone, now I think about it. You’ll have picked that up in Gateshead, did you? He’s always been a good mimic, our Do

Shanker was staring from Strike to Laing, apparently fascinated. Strike continued to smoke, looking down at Laing. His nose was stinging and throbbing so badly it was making his own eyes water. He wanted to hear the killer speak, once, before he rang the police.

“Beat up and robbed a demented old lady in Corby, didn’t you, Do

Laing lay silent on the dirty floor, but Strike could almost feel the frantic workings of his filthy, desperate mind.

“I found Accutane in the house,” Strike told Shanker. “It’s a drug for acne, but it’s for psoriatic arthritis too. I should’ve known then. He kept it hidden in Kelsey’s room. Ray Williams didn’t have arthritis.

“I bet you had lots of little secrets together, didn’t you, Do

“You sick bastard,” said the disgusted Shanker. He leaned over Laing with his cigarette tip close to Laing’s face, clearly yearning to hurt him.

“You’re not burning him either, Shanker,” said Strike, pulling out his mobile. “You’d better get out of here, I’m going to call the cops.”

He rang 999 and gave the address. His story would be that he had followed Laing to the club and back to his flat, that there had been an argument and that Laing had attacked him. Nobody needed to know that Shanker had been involved, nor that Strike had picked Laing’s locks. Of course, the stoned neighbor might talk, but Strike thought it likely that the young man might prefer to stay well out of it rather than have his sobriety and drug history assessed in a court of law.

“Take all this and get rid of it,” Strike told Shanker, peeling off the fluorescent jacket and handing it to him. “And the gas canister through there.”

“Right y’are, Bunsen. Sure you’re go

“Yeah, ’course I will,” said Strike, vaguely touched.

He heard Shanker picking up the metal canister in the next room and, shortly afterwards, saw him passing the kitchen window on the balcony outside.

“SHANKER!”

His old friend was back in the kitchen so fast that Strike knew he must have sprinted; the heavy gas canister was raised, but Laing still lay handcuffed and quiescent on the floor, and Strike stood smoking beside the cooker.

“Fuckin’ ’ell, Bunsen, I fort ’e’d jumped you!”

“Shanker, could you get hold of a car and drive me somewhere tomorrow morning? I’ll give you—”

Strike looked down at his bare wrist. He had sold his watch yesterday for the cash that had paid for Shanker’s help tonight. What else did he have to flog?

“Listen, Shanker, you know I’m going to make money out of this one. Give me a few months and I’ll have clients queuing up.”

“’S’all right, Bunsen,” said Shanker, after brief consideration. “You can owe me.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah,” said Shanker, turning to go. “Gimme a bell when you’re ready to leave. I’ll go get us a car.”

“Don’t nick one!” Strike called after him.

Mere seconds after Shanker had passed the window for the second time, Strike heard the distant sound of a police siren.

“Here they come, Do

It was then that Donald Laing spoke in his true voice to Strike, for the first and last time.

“Your mother,” he said, in a deep Borders accent, “was a fucking whore.”

Strike laughed.

“Maybe so,” he said, bleeding and smoking in the darkness as the sirens grew louder, “but she loved me, Do

Laing began to thrash around, trying fruitlessly to free himself, but he merely spun on his side, arms still pi

62

A redcap, a redcap, before the kiss…

Blue Öyster Cult, “Before the Kiss”

Strike did not meet Carver that night. He suspected the man would have shot off his own kneecaps rather than face Strike now. A pair of CID officers he had never met interrogated him in a side room in Accident and Emergency, between the various medical procedures his injuries warranted. His ear had been stitched back together, his slashed palm bandaged, a dressing had been applied to his back, which the falling machete had nicked, and for the third time in his life his nose had been painfully manipulated back into approximate symmetry. At convenient intervals, Strike had given the police a lucid exposition of the line of reasoning that had led him to Laing. He was careful to tell them that he had phoned that information through to a subordinate of Carver’s two weeks previously and had also tried to tell Carver directly the last time they had spoken.

“Why aren’t you writing that down?” he asked the officers who sat in silence, staring at him. The younger man made a cursory note.

“I also,” Strike continued, “wrote a letter and sent it to DI Carver, recorded delivery. He should have got it yesterday.”

“You sent it recorded delivery?” repeated the older of the two officers, a sad-eyed man with a mustache.

“That’s right,” said Strike. “Thought I’d make sure it was good and hard to lose.”

The policeman made a far more detailed note.

Strike’s story was that, suspecting the police weren’t convinced by his suspicions about Laing, he had never stopped watching him. He had followed Laing to the nightclub, worried about whether he was going to try to pick up a woman, then tailed him to his flat where he had decided to confront him. About Alyssa, who had played the part of his temp with such aplomb, and Shanker, whose enthusiastic intervention had certainly spared Strike several more stab wounds, he said nothing.

“The clincher,” Strike told the officers, “is going to be finding this guy Ritchie, sometimes known as Dickie, whose motorbike Laing’s been borrowing. Hazel will be able to tell you all about him. He’s been giving Laing alibis all over the shop. I reckon he’s a petty criminal himself and probably thought he was just helping Laing cheat on Hazel or do a bit of benefit fraud. He doesn’t sound like a smart guy. I think he’ll crack pretty quickly once he realizes it was murder.”

The doctors and police finally decided that they needed nothing more from Strike at five o’clock in the morning. He refused the policemen’s offer of a lift, which he suspected was made partly to keep tabs on him as long as they could.

“We wouldn’t want this to get out before we’ve had a chance to speak to the families,” said the younger officer, whose white-blond hair stood out in the drab dawn on the forecourt where the three men were taking leave of one another.

“I’m not going to the press,” said Strike, yawning widely as he felt in his pockets for his remaining cigarettes. “I’ve got other stuff to do today.”

He had begun to walk away when a thought occurred to him.

“What was the church co