Strike let them get a short head start, then stripped off the mask and the old gray hoodie, replaced the former with the sunglasses he had pocketed for this eventuality and set off after them, dumping the mask and hoodie on top of their banners.
The pace Jimmy now set was completely different to the leisurely march. Every few strides, Flick had to jog to keep up, and Strike was soon gritting his teeth as the nerve endings at the inflamed skin at the end of his stump rubbed against the prosthesis, his overworked thigh muscles groaning in protest.
He was perspiring hard, his gait becoming more and more unnatural. Passersby were starting to stare. He could feel their curiosity and pity as he dragged his prosthetic leg along. He knew he should have been doing his bloody physio exercises, that he ought to have kept to the no chips rule, that in an ideal world he’d have taken the day off today, and rested up, the prosthesis off, an ice pack on his stump. On he limped, refusing to listen to the body pleading with him to stop, the distance between himself, Jimmy and Flick growing ever wider, the compensating movement of his upper body and arms becoming grotesque. He could only pray that neither Jimmy nor Flick would turn and look behind them, because there was no way Strike could remain incognito if they saw him hobbling along like this. They were already disappearing into the neat little brick box that was Bow station, while Strike was panting and swearing on the opposite side of the road.
As he stepped off the curb, an excruciating pain shot through the back of his right thigh, as though a knife had sliced through the muscle. The leg buckled and he fell, his outstretched hand skidding along asphalt, hitting hip, shoulder and head on the open road. Somewhere in the vicinity a woman yelped in shock. Onlookers would think he was drunk. It had happened before when he had fallen. Humiliated, furious, groaning in agony, Strike crawled back onto the pavement, dragging his right leg out of the way of oncoming traffic. A young woman approached nervously to see whether he needed help, he barked at her, then felt guilty.
“Sorry,” he croaked, but she was gone, hurrying away with two friends.
He dragged himself to the railings bordering the pavement and sat there, back against metal, sweating and bleeding. He doubted whether he would be able to stand again without assistance. Running his hands over the back of his stump, he felt an egg-shaped swelling and, with a groan, guessed that he had torn a hamstring. The pain was so sharp that it was making him feel sick.
He tugged his mobile out of his pocket. The screen was cracked where he had fallen on it.
“Fuck. It. All,” he muttered, closing his eyes and leaning his head back against the cold metal.
He sat motionless for several minutes, dismissed as a tramp or a drunk by the people navigating around him, while he silently assessed his limited options. At last, with a sense of being utterly cornered, he opened his eyes, wiped his face with his forearm, and punched in Lorelei’s number.
23
… ailing and languishing in the gloom of such a marriage…
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
In retrospect, Robin knew that her anniversary weekend had been doomed before it had even begun, down in the House of Commons crypt where she had turned down Strike’s request to tail Jimmy.
Trying to throw off her sense of guilt, she had confided Strike’s request to Matthew when he picked her up after work. Already tense due to the demands of navigating the Friday night traffic in the Land Rover, which he disliked, Matthew went on the offensive, demanding to know why she felt bad after all the slave labor Strike had had out of her over the past two years and proceeding to badmouth Strike so viciously that Robin had felt compelled to defend him. They were still arguing about her job an hour later, when Matthew suddenly noticed that there was neither wedding nor engagement ring on Robin’s gesticulating left hand. She never wore these when playing the unmarried Venetia Hall, and had entirely forgotten that she would not be able to retrieve them from Albury Street before leaving for the hotel.
“It’s our bloody anniversary and you can’t even remember to put your rings back on?” Matthew had shouted.
They drew up outside the soft golden brick hotel an hour and a half later. A beaming man in uniform opened the door for Robin. Her “thank you” was almost inaudible due to the hard, angry lump in her throat.
They barely spoke over their Michelin-starred dinner. Robin, who might as well have been eating polystyrene and dust, looked around at the surrounding tables. She and Matthew were by far the youngest couple there, and she wondered whether any of these husbands and wives had been through this kind of trough in their marriages, and survived it.
They slept back to back that night.
Robin woke on Saturday in the awareness that every moment in the hotel, every step through the beautifully cultivated grounds, with the lavender walk, the Japanese garden, the orchard and organic vegetable beds, was costing them a small fortune. Perhaps Matthew was thinking the same, because he became conciliatory over breakfast. Nevertheless, their conversation felt perilous, straying regularly into dangerous territory from which they retreated precipitately. A tension headache began pounding behind Robin’s temple, but she did not want to ask hotel staff for painkillers, because any sign of dissatisfaction might lead to another argument. Robin wondered what it would be like to have a wedding day and honeymoon about which it was safe to reminisce. They eventually settled on talking about Matthew’s job as they strolled the grounds.
There was to be a charity cricket match between his firm and another the following Saturday. Matthew, who was as good at cricket as he had been at rugby, was greatly looking forward to the game. Robin listened to his boasts about his own prowess and jokes about Tom’s inadequate bowling, laughed at the appropriate moments and made sounds of agreement, and all the time a chilled and miserable part of her was wondering what was happening right now in Bow, whether Strike had gone on the march, whether he was getting anything useful on Jimmy and wondering how she, Robin, had ended up with the pompous, self-involved man beside her, who reminded her of a handsome boy she had once loved.
For the first time ever, Robin had sex with Matthew that night purely because she could not face the row that would ensue if she refused. It was their anniversary, so they had to have sex, like a notary’s stamp on the weekend, and about as pleasurable. Tears stung her eyes as Matthew climaxed, and that cold, unhappy self buried deep in her compliant body wondered why he could not feel her unhappiness even though she was trying so hard to dissemble, and how he could possibly imagine that the marriage was a success.
She put her arm over her wet eyes in the darkness after he had rolled off her and said all the things you were supposed to say. For the first time, when she said “I love you, too,” she knew, beyond doubt, that she was lying.
Very carefully, once Matthew was asleep, Robin reached out in the darkness for the phone that lay on her bedside table, and checked her texts. There was nothing from Strike. She Googled pictures of the march in Bow and thought she recognized, in the middle of the crowd, a tall man with familiar curly hair, who was wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Robin turned her mobile face down on the bedside table to shut out its light, and closed her eyes.
24
… her ungovernable, wild fits of passion—which she expected me to reciprocate…
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Strike returned to his two attic rooms in Denmark Street six days later, early on Friday morning. Leaning on crutches, his prosthesis in a holdall over his shoulder and his right trouser leg pinned up, his expression tended to repel the sidelong glances of sympathy that passersby gave him as he swung along the short street to number twenty-four.
He hadn’t seen a doctor. Lorelei had called her local practice once she and the lavishly tipped cabbie had succeeded in supporting Strike upstairs to her flat, but the GP had asked Strike to come into his surgery for an examination.
“What d’you want me to do, hop there? It’s my hamstring, I can feel it,” he had snapped down the phone. “I know the drill:
rest, ice, all that bollocks. I’ve done it before.”
He had been forced to break his no-consecutive-overnights-at-a-woman’s rule, spending four full days and five nights at Lorelei’s. He now regretted it, but what choice had he had? He had been caught, as Chiswell would have put it, a fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi. He and Lorelei had been supposed to have dinner on Saturday night. Having chosen to tell her the truth rather than make an excuse not to meet, he had been forced to let her help. Now he wished that he had phoned his old friends Nick and Ilsa, or even Shanker, but it was too late. The damage was done.
The knowledge that he was being unfair and ungrateful was hardly calculated to improve Strike’s mood as he dragged himself and his holdall up the stairs. In spite of the fact that parts of the sojourn at Lorelei’s flat had been thoroughly enjoyable, all had been ruined by what had happened the previous evening, and it was entirely his own fault. He had let it happen, the thing that he had tried to guard against ever since leaving Charlotte, let it happen because he’d dropped his guard, and accepted mugs of tea, home-cooked meals and gentle affection, until finally, last night in the darkness, she had whispered onto his bare chest, “I love you.”
Grimacing again with the effort of balancing on his crutches as he unlocked his front door, Strike almost fell into his flat. Slamming the door behind him, he dropped the holdall, crossed to the small chair at the Formica table in his kitchen-cum-living room, fell into it and cast his crutches aside. It was a relief to be home and alone, however difficult it was to manage with his leg in this state. He ought to have returned sooner, of course, but being in no condition to tail anyone and in considerable discomfort, it had been easier to remain in a comfortable armchair, his stump resting on a large square pouf, texting Robin and Barclay instructions while Lorelei fetched him food and drink.
Strike lit a cigarette and thought back over all the women there had been since he’d left Charlotte. First, Ciara Parker, a gorgeous one-night stand, with no regrets on either side. A few weeks after he had hit the press for solving the Landry case, Ciara had called him. He had become elevated in the model’s mind from casual shag to possible boyfriend material by his newsworthiness, but he had turned down further meetings with her. Girlfriends who wanted to be photographed with him were no good to him in his line of work.
Next had come Nina, who had worked for a publisher, and whom he had used to get information on a case. He had liked her, but insufficiently, as he looked back on it, to treat her with common consideration. He had hurt Nina’s feelings. He wasn’t proud of it, but it hardly kept him up at nights.
Elin had been different, beautiful and, best of all, convenient, which was why he’d hung around. She had been in the process of divorcing a wealthy man and her need for discretion and compartmentalization had been at least as great as his own. They had managed a few months together before he’d spilled wine all over her, and walked out of the restaurant where they were having dinner. He had called her afterwards to apologize and she had dumped him before he finished the sentence. Given that he had left her humiliated in Le Gavroche with a hefty dry-cleaning bill, he felt that it would have been in poor taste to respond with “that’s what I was going to say next.”
After Elin there had been Coco, on whom he preferred not to dwell, and now there was Lorelei. He liked her better than any of the others, which was why he was sorry that it had been she who said “I love you.”
Strike had made a vow to himself two years previously, and he made very few vows, because he trusted himself to keep them. Having never said “I love you” to any woman but Charlotte, he would not say it to another unless he knew, beyond reasonable doubt, that he wanted to stay with that woman and make a life with her. It would make a mockery of what he’d been through with Charlotte if he said it under circumstances any less serious. Only love could have justified the havoc they had lived together, or the many times he had resumed the relationship, even while he knew in his soul that it couldn’t work. Love, to Strike, was pain and grief sought, accepted, endured. It was not in Lorelei’s bedroom, with the cowgirls on the curtains.
And so he had said nothing after her whispered declaration, and then, when she’d asked whether he’d heard her, he’d said, “Yeah, I did.”
Strike reached for his cigarettes. Yeah, I did. Well, that had been honest, as far as it went. There was nothing wrong with his hearing. After that, there’d been a fairly lengthy silence, then Lorelei had got out of bed and gone to the bathroom and stayed there for thirty minutes. Strike assumed that she’d gone there to cry, though she’d been kind enough to do it quietly, so that he couldn’t hear her. He had lain in bed, wondering what he could say to her that was both kind and truthful, but he knew that nothing short of “I love you, too” would be acceptable, and the fact was that he didn’t love her, and he wasn’t going to lie.
When she came back to bed, he had reached out for her in the bed. She’d let him stroke her shoulder for a while, then told him she was tired and needed some sleep.
What was I supposed to fucking do? he demanded of an imaginary female inquisitor who strongly resembled his sister, Lucy.
You could try not accepting tea and blow jobs, came the snide response, to which Strike, with his stump throbbing, answered, fuck you.
His mobile rang. He had sellotaped up the shattered screen, and through this distorted carapace he saw an unknown number.
“Strike.”
“Hi, Strike, Culpepper here.”
Dominic Culpepper, who had worked for the News of the World until its closure, had previously put work Strike’s way. Relations between them, never personally warm, had become slightly antagonistic when Strike had refused Culpepper the inside story on his two most recent murder cases. Now working for the Sun, Culpepper had been one of those journalists who had most enthusiastically raked over Strike’s personal life in the aftermath of the Shacklewell Ripper arrest.
“Wondered if you were free to do a job for us,” said Culpepper.
You’ve got a fucking nerve.
“What kind of thing’re you after?”
“Digging up dirt on a government minister.”
“Which one?”
“You’ll know if you take the job.”
“I’m pretty stretched just now. What kind of dirt are we talking?”
“That’s what we need you to find out.”
“How do you know there’s dirt there?”
“A well-placed source,” said Culpepper.
“Why do you need me if there’s a well-placed source?”
“He’s not ready to talk. He just hinted that there are beans to be spilled. Lots of them.”
“Sorry, can’t do it, Culpepper,” said Strike. “I’m booked solid.”
“Sure? We’re paying good money, Strike.”
“I’m not doing too badly these days,” said the detective, lighting a second cigarette from the tip of his first.
“No, I’ll bet you aren’t, you jammy bastard,” said Culpepper. “All right, it’ll have to be Patterson. D’you know him?”
“The ex-Met guy? Run across him a couple of times,” said Strike.
The call finished with mutually insincere good wishes, leaving Strike with an increased feeling of foreboding. He Googled Culpepper’s name and found his byline on a story about the Level Playing Field from two weeks previously.
Of course, it was possible that more than one government minister was currently in danger of being exposed by the Sun for an offense against public taste or morals, but the fact that Culpepper had recently been in close proximity with the Winns strongly suggested Robin had been right in suspecting Geraint of tipping off the Sun, and that it was Chiswell whom Patterson would shortly be investigating.
Strike wondered whether Culpepper knew that he, Strike, was already working for Chiswell, whether his call had been designed to startle information out of the detective, but it seemed unlikely. The newspaperman would have been very stupid to tell Strike whom he was about to hi
re, if he was aware that Strike was already in the minister’s pay.
Strike knew of Mitch Patterson by reputation: they had twice been hired by different halves of divorcing couples in the last year. Previously a senior officer in the Metropolitan Police who had “taken early retirement,” Patterson was prematurely silver-haired and had the face of an angry pug. Though personally unpleasant, or so Eric Wardle had told Strike, Patterson was a man who “got results.”
“Course, he won’t be able to kick the shit out of people in his new career,” Wardle had commented, “so that’s one useful tool in his arsenal gone.”
Strike didn’t much relish the thought that Patterson would shortly be on the case. Picking up his mobile again, he noted that neither Robin nor Barclay had called in an update within the last twelve hours. Only the previous day, he had had to reassure Chiswell, who had called to express his doubts about Robin, given her lack of results thus far.
Frustrated by his employees and his own incapacity, Strike texted Robin and Barclay the same message:
Sun just tried to hire me to investigate Chiswell. Call with update asap. Need usable info NOW.
Pulling his crutches back towards him, he got up to examine the contents of his fridge and kitchen cupboards, discovering that he would be eating nothing but tinned soup for the next four meals unless he made a trip to the supermarket. After pouring spoiled milk down the sink, he made himself a mug of black tea and returned to the Formica table, where he lit a third cigarette and contemplated, without pleasure, the prospect of doing his hamstring stretches.
His phone rang again. Seeing that it was Lucy, he let it go to voicemail. The last thing he needed right now was updates on the school board’s last meeting.
A few minutes after that, when Strike was in the bathroom, she called back. He had hopped back into the kitchen with his trousers at half-mast, in the hope that it was either Robin or Barclay. When he saw his sister’s number for a second time, he merely swore loudly and returned to the bathroom.
Lethal White Page 22
