Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(102)

Bitterly did Robin now regret betraying her distress when the Vettriano card had arrived. She ought to have known better than to let any hint of fear show, especially after telling him about the rape. He said it had made no difference, but she knew better: she’d had plenty of experience of people telling her what was, and wasn’t, good for her.

The taxi bowled along the Inner Circle and Robin had to remind herself that it was not her mother’s fault that they had blundered in on Two-Times. She ought to have called Strike first. The truth was that she had hoped that Strike would be out, or upstairs; that she would be able to show Linda around the office and take her away without having to introduce them. She had been afraid that, if she phoned him, Strike would make a point of being there to meet her mother, out of a characteristic blend of mischief and curiosity.

Linda and Strike had chatted away while Robin made tea, keeping deliberately quiet. She strongly suspected that one of the reasons Linda wanted to meet Strike was to assess the precise degree of warmth that existed between him and her daughter. Helpfully, Strike looked appalling, a good ten years older than his real age, with that blue-jawed, sunken-eyed look that he got when he forfeited sleep for work. Linda would surely be hard pressed to imagine that Robin was nursing a secret infatuation now she had seen her boss.

“I liked him,” said Linda as the red-brick palace of St. Pancras came into view, “and I have to say, he might not be pretty, but he’s got something about him.”

“Yes,” said Robin coldly. “Sarah Shadlock feels the same way.”

Shortly before they had left for the station, Strike had asked for five minutes with her alone in the inner office. There, he had handed her the beginnings of a list of massage parlors, strip joints and lap-dancing clubs in Shoreditch and asked her to begin the laborious process of ringing them all in search of Noel Brockbank.

“The more I think about it,” Strike had said, “the more I think he’ll still be working as a heavy or a bouncer. What else is there for him, big bloke with brain damage and his history?”

Out of deference to the listening Linda, Strike had omitted to add that he was sure Brockbank would still be working in the sex industry, where vulnerable women might be most easily found.

“OK,” Robin had replied, leaving Strike’s list where he had put it on her desk. “I’ll see Mum off and come back—”

“No, I want you to do it from home. Keep a record of all the calls; I’ll reimburse you.”

A mental picture of the Destiny’s Child Survivor poster had flickered in Robin’s mind.

“When do I come back into the office?”

“Let’s see how long that takes you,” he said. Correctly reading her expression, he had added: “Look, I think we’ve just lost Two-Times for good. I can cover Mad Dad alone—”

“What about Kelsey?”

“You’re trying to trace Brockbank,” he said, pointing at the list in her hand. Then (his head was pounding, though Robin did not know it), “Look, everyone’ll be off work tomorrow, it’s a bank holiday, the royal wedding—”

It could not have been clearer: he wanted her out of the way. Something had changed while she had been out of the office. Perhaps Strike was remembering that, after all, she had not been trained by the military police, had never seen dismembered limbs before a leg was delivered to their door, that she was not, in short, the kind of partner who was of use to him in this extremity.

“I’ve just had five days off—”

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, losing patience, “you’re only making lists and phone calls—why d’you have to be in here to do it?”

You’re only making lists and phone calls.

She remembered how Elin had called her Strike’s secretary.

Sitting in the taxi with her mother, a lava slide of anger and resentment swept away rationality. He had called her his partner in front of Wardle, back when he had needed her to look at the photographs of a dismembered body. There had been no new contract, though, no formal renegotiation of their working relationship. She was a faster typist than Strike, with his wide hairy fingers: she dealt with the bulk of the invoices and emails. She did most of the filing too. Perhaps, Robin thought, Strike himself had told Elin that she was his secretary. Perhaps calling her partner had been a sop to her, a mere figure of speech. Maybe (she was deliberately inflaming her own resentment now, and she knew it) Strike and Elin discussed Robin’s inadequacies during their sneaky dinners away from Elin’s husband. He might have confided in Elin how much he now regretted taking on a woman who, after all, had been a mere temp when she had come to him. He had probably told Elin about the rape too.

It was a difficult time for me too, you know.

You’re only making lists and phone calls.

Why was she crying? Tears of rage and frustration were trickling down her face.

“Robin?” said Linda.

“It’s nothing, nothing,” said Robin savagely, wiping under her eyes with the heels of her hands.

She had been desperate to get back to work after five days in the house with her mother and Matthew, after the awkward three-cornered silences in the tiny space, the whispered conversations she knew that Linda had had with Matthew while she was in the bathroom, and about which she had chosen not to ask. She did not want to be trapped at home all over again. Irrational though it might have been, she felt safer in the middle of London, keeping an eye out for that large figure in the beanie hat, than she did in her flat in Hastings Road.