Career of Evil

“It wouldn’t surprise me to hear Laing had done someone in,” said Strike, “but he hadn’t, as far as I know, before he went down. He used a knife on his ex-wife, I know that—tied her up and cut her. He spent a decade inside and I doubt they managed to rehabilitate him. He’s been out over four years: plenty of time to commit murder.

“I haven’t told you—I met his ex-mother-in-law in Melrose. She reckons he went to Gateshead when he got out of the nick and we know he might have been in Corby in 2008… but,” said Strike, “she also told me he was ill.”

“What kind of ill?”

“Some form of arthritis. She didn’t know the details. Could an unfit man have done what we saw in those photos?” Strike picked up the menu. “Right. I’m bloody starving and you haven’t eaten anything except crisps for two days.”

When Strike had ordered pollock and chips and Robin a plowman’s, he made another conversational swerve.

“Did the victim look twenty-four to you?”

“I—I couldn’t tell,” said Robin, trying and failing to block the image of the head with its smooth chubby cheeks, its frosted-white eyes. “No,” she said, after a brief pause. “I thought it—she—looked younger.”

“Me too.”

“I might… bathroom,” said Robin, standing up.

“You OK?”

“I just need a pee—too much tea.”

He watched her go, then finished his pint, following a train of thought he had not yet confided to Robin, or indeed anyone else.

The child’s essay had been shown to him by a female investigator in Germany. Strike could still remember the last line, written in neat girlish handwriting on a sheet of pale pink paper.

The lady changed her name to Anastassia and died her hair and nobody ever found out were she went, she vanished.

“Is that what you’d like to do, Brittany?” the investigator had asked quietly on the tape Strike had watched later. “You’d like to run away and vanish?”

“It’s just a story!” Brittany had insisted, trying for a scornful laugh, her little fingers twisting together, one leg almost wrapped around the other. Her thin blonde hair had hung lank around her pale, freckly face. Her spectacles had been wonky. She had reminded Strike of a yellow budgerigar. “I only made it up!”

DNA testing would find out soon enough who the woman in the fridge had been, and then the police would trawl backwards to see who Oxana Voloshina—if that was her name—really was. Strike could not tell whether he was being paranoid or not in continuing to worry that the body belonged to Brittany Brockbank. Why had the name Kelsey been used on the first letter to him? Why did the head look so young, still smooth with puppy fat?

“I should be on Platinum by now,” said Robin sadly, checking her watch as she sat back down at the table. One of the office workers beside them seemed to be celebrating her birthday: with much raucous laughter from her colleagues she had just unwrapped a red and black basque.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Strike said absently, as his fish and chips and Robin’s plowman’s descended in front of them. He ate silently for a couple of minutes, then set down his knife and fork, pulled out his notebook, looked something up in the notes he had made back in Hardacre’s Edinburgh office and picked up his phone. Robin watched him key in words, wondering what he was doing.

“Right,” said Strike, after reading the results, “I’m going to Barrow-in-Furness tomorrow.”

“You’re—what?” asked Robin, bewildered. “Why?”

“Brockbank’s there—or he’s supposed to be.”

“How do you know?”

“I found out in Edinburgh that his pension’s being sent there and I’ve just looked up the old family address. Someone called Holly Brockbank’s living in the house now. Obviously a relative. She should know where he is. If I can establish that he’s been in Cumbria for the last few weeks, we’ll know he hasn’t been delivering legs or stalking you in London, won’t we?”

“What aren’t you telling me about Brockbank?” Robin asked, her blue-gray eyes narrowing.

Strike ignored the question.

“I want you to stay at home while I’m out of town. Sod Two-Times, he’s got only himself to blame if Platinum cops off with another punter. We can live without his money.”

“That’ll leave us with a single client,” Robin pointed out.

“I’ve got a feeling we’ll have none at all unless this nutter’s caught,” said Strike. “People aren’t going to want to come near us.”

“How are you going to get to Barrow?” asked Robin.

A plan was dawning. Hadn’t she foreseen this very eventuality?

“Train,” he said, “you know I can’t afford a hire car right now.”

“How about,” said Robin triumphantly, “I drive you in my new—well, it’s ancient, but it goes fine—Land Rover!”

“Since when have you had a Land Rover?”

“Since Sunday. It’s my parents’ old car.”

“Ah,” he said. “Well, that sounds great—”

“But?”

“No, it’d be a real help—”

“But?” repeated Robin, who could tell that he had some reservations.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be up there.”

“That doesn’t matter. You’ve just told me I’ll be moldering at home in any case.”

Strike hesitated. How much of her desire to drive him was rooted in the hope of wounding Matthew, he wondered. He could well imagine how the accountant would view an open-ended trip north, the two of them alone, staying overnight. A clean and professional relationship ought not to include using each other to make partners jealous.

“Oh shit,” he said suddenly, plunging his hand into his pocket for his mobile.

“What’s the matter?” asked Robin, alarmed.

“I’ve just remembered—I was supposed to be meeting Elin last night. Fuck—totally forgot. Wait there.”

He walked out into the street, leaving Robin to her lunch. Why, she wondered, her eyes on Strike’s large figure as he paced up and down outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, phone pressed to his ear, hadn’t Elin called or texted to ask where Strike was? From there it was an easy step to wondering—for the first time, no matter what Strike had suspected—what Matthew was going to say if she returned home only to pick up the Land Rover and disappeared with several days’ worth of clothes in a bag.

He can’t complain, she thought, with a bold attempt at defiance. It’s nothing to do with him anymore.

Yet the thought of having to see Matthew, even briefly, was u

Strike returned, rolling his eyes.

“Doghouse,” he said succinctly. “I’ll meet her tonight instead.”

Robin did not know why the a

It isn’t her birthday, Robin realized. She’s getting married.

“Well, am I driving you, or what?” she asked curtly.

“Yeah,” said Strike, who appeared to be warming to the idea (or was he merely cheered by the thought of his date with Elin?). “You know what, that’d be great. Thanks.”

23

Moments of pleasure, in a world of pain.

Blue Öyster Cult, “Make Rock Not War”

Mist lay in thick, soft layers like cobweb over the treetops of Regent’s Park next morning. Strike, who had swiftly silenced his alarm so as not to wake Elin, stood balancing on his single foot at the window, the curtain behind him to block out the light. For a minute he looked out upon the ghostly park and was transfixed by the effect of the rising sun on leafy branches rising from the sea of vapor. You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it, but the battle to get through the days made it easy to forget that this totally cost-free luxury existed. He carried memories like this from his childhood, especially those parts of it that he had spent in Cornwall: the glitter of the sea as you first saw it on a morning as blue as a butterfly’s wing; the mysterious emerald-and-shadow world of the Gu