Career of Evil

“What?” said Strike, thrown.

“I know it was him. We’d told Rhona she was making an awful mistake, last time we saw her before she married him. That night we couldn’t find Purdy. Next day she was on the back lawn, dead. The vet said she’d been strangled.”

On the plasma screen over her shoulder a scarlet-clad Dimitar Berbatov was celebrating a goal against Fulham. The air was full of Borders voices. Glasses clinked and cutlery tinkled as Strike’s companion talked of death and mutilation.

“I know he did it, I know he killed Purdy,” she said feverishly. “Look at what he did to Rhona and the baby. He’s evil.”

Her hands fumbled with the catch on her bag and pulled out a small wad of photographs.

“My husband always says, ‘Why are you keeping them? Burn them.’ But I always thought we might need pictures of him one day. There,” she said, thrusting them into Strike’s eager hands. “You have them, you keep them. Gateshead. That’s where he went next.”

Later, after she had left with renewed tears and thanks, after he had paid the bill, Strike walked to Millers of Melrose, a family butcher he had noticed on his stroll around the town. There he treated himself to some venison pies that he suspected would be far tastier than anything he would be able to purchase at the station before boarding the sleeper back to London.

Returning to the car park via a short street where golden roses bloomed, Strike thought again about the tattoo on that powerful forearm.

Once, years ago, it had meant something to Do

Had Donald Laing found a warmer welcome in Gateshead? Had he moved from there to Corby? Or, Strike wondered, as he folded himself back into Hardacre’s Mini, had these been mere stopping posts on his way to London and Strike?

17 The Girl That Love Made Blind

Tuesday morning. It was asleep after what It said had been a long, hard night. Like he fucking cared, although he had to act like he did. He had persuaded It to go and lie down, and when It began to breathe deeply and evenly he watched It for a while, imagining choking the fucking life out of It, seeing Its eyes open and Its struggle for breath, Its face slowly turning purple…

When he had been sure that he would not wake It, he had left the bedroom quietly, pulled on a jacket and slipped out into the early morning air to find The Secretary. This was his first chance of following her in days and he was too late to pick up the trail at her home station. The best he could do was to lurk around the mouth of Denmark Street.

He spotted her from a distance: that bright, wavy strawberry-blonde head was unmistakable. The vain bitch must like standing out in the crowd or she’d cover it or cut it or dye it. They all wanted attention, he knew that for a fact: all of them.

As she moved closer, his infallible instinct for other people’s moods told him something had changed. She was looking down as she walked, hunch-shouldered, oblivious to the other workers swarming around her, clutching bags, coffees and phones.

He passed right by her in the opposite direction, drawing so close that he could have smelled her perfume if they had not been in that bustling street full of car fumes and dust. He might have been a traffic bollard. That a

On the other hand, he had made a discovery: she had been crying for hours. He knew what it looked like when women did that; he had seen it plenty of times. Puffy and reddened and flabby-faced, leaking and whining: they all did it. They liked playing the victim. You’d kill them just to make them shut up.

He turned and followed her the short distance to Denmark Street. When women were in her state, they were often malleable in ways they would not be when less distressed or frightened. They forgot to do all the things that bitches did routinely to keep the likes of him at bay: keys between their knuckles, phones in their hands, rape alarms in their pockets, walking in packs. They became needy, grateful for a kind word, a friendly ear. That was how he had landed It.

His pace quickened as she turned into Denmark Street, which the press had at last given up as a bad job after eight days. She opened the black door of the office and went inside.

Would she come out again, or was she going to spend the day with Strike? He really hoped they were screwing each other. They probably were. Just the two of them in the office all the time—bound to be.

He withdrew into a doorway and pulled out his phone, keeping one eye on the second-floor window of number twenty-four.

18

I’ve been stripped, the insulation’s gone.

Blue Öyster Cult, “Lips in the Hills”

The first time that Robin had ever entered Strike’s office had been on her first morning as an engaged woman. Unlocking the glass door today, she remembered watching the new sapphire on her finger darken, shortly before Strike had come hurtling out of the office and nearly knocked her down the metal staircase to her death.

There was no ring on her finger anymore. The place where it had sat all these months felt hypersensitive, as though it had left her branded. She was carrying a small holdall that contained a change of outfit and a few toiletries.

You can’t cry here. You mustn’t cry here.

Automatically she performed the usual start-of-the-working-day tasks: took off her coat, hung it up with her handbag on a peg beside the door, filled and switched on the kettle, and stowed the holdall under her desk, where Strike would not see it. She kept turning back to check that she’d done what she had meant to do, feeling disembodied, like a ghost whose chilly fingers might slip through the handles of handbags and kettles.

It had taken four days to dismantle a relationship that had lasted nine years. Four days of mounting animosity, of grudges aired and accusations hurled. Some of it seemed so trivial, looking back. The Land Rover, the Grand National, her decision to take her laptop home. On Sunday there had been a petty squabble about whose parents were paying for the wedding cars, which had led yet again to an argument about her pitiful pay packet. By the time they had got into the Land Rover on Monday morning to drive back home, they had barely been speaking.

Then last night, at home in West Ealing, had come the explosive argument that had rendered all the squabbling that had gone before trivial, mere warning tremors of the seismic disaster that would lay waste to everything.

Strike would be down shortly. She could hear him moving around in the flat upstairs. Robin knew that she must not look shaky or unable to cope. Work was all she had now. She would have to find a room in somebody else’s flat, which would be all she would be able to afford on the pittance Strike paid her. She tried to imagine future housemates. It would be like being back in halls of residence.