Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(11)

Forty minutes after leaving work she entered the large Waitrose near her home station. The fridge at home had almost nothing in it. Matthew did not enjoy food shopping and (although he had denied it during their last row but one) she was sure that he thought she, who contributed less than a third of the household income, ought to bolster her contribution by performing those mundane tasks he did not like.

Single men in suits were filling their baskets and trolleys with ready meals. Professional women hurried past, grabbing pasta that would be quick to cook for the family. An exhausted-looking young mother with a tiny baby screaming in its buggy wove around the aisles like a groggy moth, unable to focus, a single bag of carrots in her basket. Robin moved slowly up and down the aisles, feeling oddly jumpy. There was nobody there who resembled the man in black motorcycle leathers, nobody who might be lurking, fantasizing about cutting off Robin’s legs… cutting off my legs…

“Excuse me!” said a cross middle-aged woman trying to reach the sausages. Robin apologized and moved aside, surprised to find that she was holding a pack of chicken thighs. Throwing it into her trolley, she hurried off to the other end of the supermarket where, among the wines and spirits, she found relative quiet. Here she pulled out her mobile and called Strike. He answered on the second ring.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course—”

“Where are you?”

“Waitrose.”

A short, balding man was perusing the shelf of sherry just behind Robin, his eyes level with her breasts. When she moved aside, he moved with her. Robin glared; he blushed and moved away.

“Well, you should be OK in Waitrose.”

“Mm,” said Robin, her eyes on the bald man’s retreating back. “Listen, this might be nothing, but I’ve just remembered: we’ve had a couple of weird letters in the last few months.”

“Nutter letters?”

“Don’t start.”

Robin always protested at this blanket term. They had attracted a significant increase in oddball correspondence since Strike had solved his second high-profile murder case. The most coherent of the writers simply asked for money, on the assumption that Strike was now immensely rich. Then came those who had strange personal grudges that they wished Strike to avenge, those whose waking hours seemed devoted to proving outlandish theories, those whose needs and wishes were so inchoate and rambling that the only message they conveyed was mental illness, and finally (“Now these seem nutty,” Robin had said) a sprinkling of people, both male and female, who seemed to find Strike attractive.

“Addressed to you?” Strike asked, suddenly serious.

“No, you.”

She could hear him moving around his flat as they talked. Perhaps he was going out with Elin tonight. He never talked about the relationship. If Elin had not dropped by the office one day, Robin doubted that she would have known that she existed—perhaps not until he turned up for work one day wearing a wedding ring.

“What did they say?” asked Strike.

“Well, one of them was from a girl who wanted to cut off her own leg. She was asking for advice.”

“Say that again?”

“She wanted to cut off her own leg,” Robin enunciated clearly, and a woman choosing a bottle of rosé nearby threw her a startled look.

“Jesus Christ,” muttered Strike. “And I’m not allowed to call them nutters. You think she managed it and thought I’d like to know?”

“I thought a letter like that might be relevant,” said Robin repressively. “Some people do want to cut bits of themselves off, it’s a recognized phenomenon, it’s called… not ‘being a nutter,’” she added, correctly anticipating him, and he laughed. “And there was another one, from a person who signed with their initials: a long letter, they went on and on about your leg and how they wanted to make it up to you.”

“If they were trying to make it up to me you’d think they would’ve sent a man’s leg. I’d look pretty bloody stupid—”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t joke. I don’t know how you can.”

“I don’t know how you can’t,” he said, but kindly.

She heard a very familiar scraping noise followed by a sonorous clang.

“You’re looking in the nutter drawer!”

“I don’t think you should call it the ‘nutter drawer,’ Robin. Bit disrespectful to our mentally ill—”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, smiling against her will, and hung up on his laughter.

The fatigue she had been fighting all day washed over her anew as she ambled around the supermarket. It was deciding what to eat that was effortful; she would have found it quite soothing merely to shop from a list that somebody else had prepared. Like the working mothers seeking anything quick to cook, Robin gave up and chose a lot of pasta. Queuing at the checkout, she found herself right behind the young woman whose baby had at last exhausted itself and now slept as though dead, fists flung out, eyes tight shut.

“Cute,” said Robin, who felt the girl needed encouragement.

“When he’s asleep,” the mother replied with a weak smile.

By the time Robin had let herself in at home she was truly exhausted. To her surprise, Matthew was standing waiting for her in the narrow hall.