Career of Evil

“No, he was sort of—sort of tucked around the corner.”

“He kept his helmet on,” said Tempest, washing down a mouthful with wine, the quicker to rejoin the conversation.

“What color was the motorbike, can you remember?” Strike asked.

Tempest rather thought it had been black and Jason was sure it had been red, but they agreed that it had been parked far too far away to recognize the make.

“Can you remember anything else Kelsey said about her boyfriend?” asked Robin.

Both shook their heads.

Their main courses arrived midway through a lengthy explanation by Tempest of the advocacy and support services offered by the website she had developed. Only with her mouth full of chips did Jason finally find the courage to address Strike directly.

“Is it true?” he said suddenly. His face again grew bright red as he said it.

“Is what true?” asked Strike.

“That you—that—”

Chewing vigorously, Tempest leaned towards Strike in her wheelchair, placed her hand on his forearm and swallowed.

“That you did it yourself,” she whispered, with the ghost of a wink.

Her thick thighs had subtly readjusted themselves as she lifted them off the chair, bearing their own weight, instead of hanging behind the mobile torso. Strike had been in Selly Oak Hospital with men left paraplegic and quadriplegic by the injuries they had sustained in war, seen their wasted legs, the compensations they had learned to make in the movement of their upper bodies to accommodate the dead weight below. For the first time, the reality of what Tempest was doing hit him forcibly. She did not need the wheelchair. She was entirely able-bodied.

Strangely, it was Robin’s expression that kept Strike calm and polite, because he found vicarious release in the look of distaste and fury she threw Tempest. He addressed Jason.

“You’ll need to tell me what you’ve been told before I can tell you whether it’s true or not.”

“Well,” said Jason, who had barely touched his Black Angus burger, “Kelsey said you went to the pub with her brother and you got—got drunk and told him the truth. She reckoned you walked off your base in Afghanistan with a gun and you went as far as you could in the dark, then you—shot yourself in the leg, and then you got a doctor to amputate it for you.”

Strike took a large swig of beer.

“And I did this why?”

“What?” said Jason, blinking confusedly.

“Was I trying to get invalided out of the army, or—?”

“Oh, no!” said Jason, looking strangely hurt. “No, you were”—he blushed so hard it seemed unlikely that there was enough blood left in the rest of his body—“like us. You needed it,” he whispered. “You needed to be an amputee.”

Robin suddenly found that she could not look at Strike and pretended to be contemplating a curious painting of a hand holding a single shoe. At least, she thought it showed a hand holding a shoe. It might equally have been a brown plant pot with a pink cactus growing out of it.

“The—brother—who told Kelsey all about me—did he know she wanted to take off her own leg?”

“I don’t think so, no. She said I was the only one she’d ever told.”

“So you think it was just coincidence he mentioned—?”

“People keep it quiet,” said Tempest, shoehorning herself back into the conversation at the first opportunity. “There’s a lot of shame, a lot of shame. I’m not out at work,” she said blithely, waving towards her legs. “I have to say it’s a back injury. If they knew I’m transabled they’d never understand. And don’t get me started on the prejudice from the medical profession, which is absolutely unbelievable. I’ve changed GPs twice; I wasn’t going to put up with being offered bloody psychiatric help again. No, Kelsey told us she’d never been able to tell anyone, poor little love. She had nobody to turn to. Nobody understood. That’s why she reached out to us—and to you, of course,” she told Strike, smiling with a little condescension because, unlike her, he had ignored Kelsey’s appeal. “You’re not alone, mind. Once people have successfully achieved what they’re after they tend to leave the community. We get it—we understand—but it would mean a lot if people hung around just to describe what it feels like to finally be in the body you’re meant to be in.”

Robin was worried that Strike might explode, here in this polite white space where art lovers conversed in soft voices. However, she had reckoned without the self-control that the ex–Special Investigation Branch officer had learned through long years of interrogations. His polite smile to Tempest might have been a little grim, but he merely turned again to Jason and asked:

“So you don’t think it was Kelsey’s brother’s idea for her to contact me?”

“No,” said Jason, “I think that was all her own idea.”

“So what exactly did she want from me?”

“Well, obviously,” interposed Tempest, half-laughing, “she wanted advice on how to do what you’d done!”

“Is that what you think, Jason?” asked Strike and the boy nodded.

“Yeah… she wanted to know how badly she’d have to injure her leg to get it taken off, and I think she had a sort of idea you’d introduce her to the doctor who did yours.”

“That’s the pere

Robin let her knife and fork fall with a clatter, feeling on Strike’s behalf all the offense that she assumed him to be experiencing. His contact list! As though his amputation was a rare artefact that Strike had bought on the black market…

Strike questioned both Jason and Tempest for another fifteen minutes before concluding that they knew nothing more of any use. The picture they painted of their one meeting with Kelsey was of an immature and desperate girl whose urge to be amputated was so powerful that she would, by the consent of both of her cyberfriends, have done anything to achieve it.

“Yeah,” sighed Tempest, “she was one of those. She’d already had a go when she was younger, with some wire. We’ve had people so desperate they’ve put their legs on train tracks. One guy tried to freeze his leg off in liquid nitrogen. There was a girl in America who deliberately botched a ski jump, but the danger with that is you might not get exactly the degree of disability you’re after—”

“So what degree are you after?” Strike asked her. He had just put up a hand for the bill.

“I want my spinal cord severed,” said Tempest with total composure. “Paraplegic, yeah. Ideally I’ll have it done by a surgeon. In the meantime, I just get on with it,” she said, gesturing again to her wheelchair.

“Using the disabled bathrooms and stairlifts, the works, eh?” asked Strike.

“Cormoran,” said Robin in a warning voice.

She had thought this might happen. He was stressed and sleep-deprived. She supposed she ought to be glad that they had got all the information they needed first.

“It’s a need,” said Tempest composedly. “I’ve known ever since I was a child. I’m in the wrong body. I need to be paralyzed.”

The waiter had arrived; Robin held out her hand for the bill, because Strike hadn’t noticed him.

“Quickly, please,” she said to the waiter, who looked sullen. He was the man Strike had barked at for putting ice in his beer glass.

“Know many disabled people, do you?” Strike was asking Tempest.

“I know a couple,” she said. “Obviously we’ve got a lot in—”

“You’ve got fuck all in common. Fuck all.”