Career of Evil

Fuck, fuck, fuck…

Lighting a second cigarette from the tip of the first, he walked briskly out onto Whitechapel Road, where market stalls stood: more cheap clothing, a multitude of gaudy plastic goods. Strike sped up, walking he was not sure where, and some of what he passed triggered more memories: that snooker hall had been there seventeen years ago… so had the Bell Foundry… and now the memories were rising to bite him as though he had trodden on a nest of sleeping snakes…

As she neared forty, his mother had begun to go for younger men, but Whittaker had been the youngest of the lot: twenty-one when she had started sleeping with him. Her son had been sixteen when she first brought Whittaker home. The musician had looked ravaged even then, with sallow hollows under his wide-apart eyes, which were a striking golden hazel. His dark hair fell in dreadlocks to his shoulders; he lived in the same T-shirt and jeans and consequently stank.

A well-worn phrase kept echoing in Strike’s head, keeping pace with his footsteps as he trudged down Whitechapel Road.

Hiding in plain sight. Hiding in plain sight.

Of course people would think he was obsessed, biased, unable to let go. They would say his thoughts had jumped to Whittaker when he saw the leg in the box because he had never got over the fact that Whittaker had walked free on the charge of killing Strike’s mother. Even if Strike explained his reasons for suspecting Whittaker, they would probably laugh at the notion that such an ostentatious lover of the perverse and the sadistic could have cut off a woman’s leg. Strike knew how deeply ingrained was the belief that the evil conceal their dangerous predilections for violence and domination. When they wear them like bangles for all to see, the gullible populace laughs, calls it a pose, or finds it strangely attractive.

Leda had met Whittaker at the record company where she worked as a receptionist, a minor, living piece of rock history employed as a kind of totem on the front desk. Whittaker, who played the guitar and wrote lyrics for a succession of thrash metal bands that, one by one, threw him out because of his histrionics, substance abuse and aggression, claimed to have met Leda while pursuing a record deal. However, Leda had confided to Strike that their first encounter had happened while she was trying to persuade security not to be so rough with the young man they were throwing out. She had brought him home, and Whittaker had never left.

The sixteen-year-old Strike had not been sure whether or not Whittaker’s gloating, open pleasure in everything that was sadistic and demonic was genuine or a pose. All he had known was that he hated Whittaker with a visceral loathing that had transcended anything he had felt for any of the other lovers whom Leda had taken up, then left behind. He had been forced to breathe in the man’s stench as he did his homework of an evening in the squat; he had almost been able to taste him. Whittaker tried patronizing the teenager—sudden explosions and waspish put-downs revealed an articulacy he was careful to hide when he wished to ingratiate himself with Leda’s less educated friends—but Strike had been ready with put-downs and comebacks of his own and he had the advantage of being less stoned than Whittaker, or, at least, only as stoned as a person could be living in a constant fug of ca

Whittaker had driven Strike’s half-sister Lucy away for good with his bullying, his sexual taunts and sneers. He had strutted around the squat naked, scratching his tattooed torso, laughing at the fourteen-year-old girl’s mortification. One night she had run to the telephone box at the corner of the street and begged their aunt and uncle in Cornwall to come and fetch her. They had arrived at the squat at dawn next day, having driven overnight from St. Mawes. Lucy was ready with her meager possessions in a small suitcase. She had never lived with her mother again.

Ted and Joan had stood on the doorstep and pleaded with Strike to come too. He had refused, his resolve hardening with every plea Joan made, determined to sit Whittaker out, not to leave him alone with his mother. By now, he had heard Whittaker talking lucidly about what it would feel like to take a life, as though it were an epicurean treat. He had not believed, then, that Whittaker meant it, but he had known him capable of violence, and had seen him threaten their fellow squatters. Once—Leda refused to believe it had happened—Strike had witnessed Whittaker attempt to bludgeon a cat that had inadvertently woken him from a doze. Strike had wrested the heavy boot from Whittaker’s hand as he chased the terrified cat around the room, swinging at it, screaming and swearing, determined to make the animal pay.

The knee onto which the prosthesis was fitted was begi

“Bollocks,” he muttered.

He had no objection to semiclad women gyrating around him while he enjoyed a pint, but he could not justify the exorbitant price of drinks in such an establishment, not when he had lost two clients in a single day.

He therefore entered the next Starbucks he encountered, found a seat and heaved his sore leg onto an empty chair while he moodily stirred a large black coffee. The squashy earth-colored sofas, the tall cups of American froth, the wholesome young people working with quiet efficiency behind a clean glass counter: these, surely, were the perfect antidote to Whittaker’s stinking specter, and yet he would not be driven out. Strike found himself unable to stop reliving it all, remembering…

While he had lived with Leda and her son, Whittaker’s teenage history of delinquency and violence had been known only to social services in the north of England. The tales he told about his past were legion, highly colored and often contradictory. Only after he had been arrested for murder had the truth leaked out from people from his past who surfaced, some hoping for money from the press, some determined to revenge themselves on him, others trying in their own muddled fashion to defend him.

He had been born into a moneyed upper-middle-class family headed by a knighted diplomat whom Whittaker had believed, until the age of twelve, was his father. At that point he had discovered that his older sister, whom he had been led to believe was in London working as a Montessori teacher, was actually his mother, that she had serious alcohol and drug problems and that she was living in poverty and squalor, ostracized by her family. From this time onward, Whittaker, already a problem child prone to outbursts of extreme temper during which he lashed out indiscriminately, had become determinedly wild. Expelled from his boarding school, he had joined a local gang and soon became ringleader, a phase that culminated in a spell in a correctional facility because he had held a blade to a young girl’s throat while his friends sexually assaulted her. Aged fifteen, he had run away to London, leaving a trail of petty crime in his wake and finally succeeding in tracking down his biological mother. A brief, enthusiastic reunion had deteriorated almost at once into mutual violence and animosity.

“Is anyone using this?”

A tall youth had bent over Strike, his hands already gripping the back of the chair on which Strike’s leg was resting. He reminded Strike of Robin’s fiancé Matthew, with his wavy brown hair and clean-cut good looks. With a grunt, Strike removed his leg, shook his head and watched the guy walk away carrying the chair, rejoining a group of six or more. The girls there were eager for his return, Strike could see: they straightened up and beamed as he placed the chair down and joined them. Whether because of the resemblance to Matthew, or because he had taken Strike’s chair, or because Strike genuinely sensed a tosser when he saw one, Strike found the youth obscurely objectionable.