Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(115)

Strike leaned up against the van and lit a cigarette. He had just resolved to find a vantage point that was a little further away, so that he might observe whom Stephanie left the pub with, when the rear doors of the van behind which he was lurking suddenly opened.

Strike took several hasty steps backwards as four men clambered out of the back, along with a smoky haze that gave out a powerful, acrid smell of burned plastic that the ex-SIB man recognized immediately as crack.

All four were unkempt, their jeans and T-shirts filthy, their age hard to gauge because each of them was sunken-faced and prematurely wrinkled. The mouths of two of them had collapsed inwards onto gums that had lost teeth. Momentarily taken aback to find the clean-suited stranger at such close quarters, they seemed to understand from his startled expression that he had not known what was happening inside and slammed the van doors.

Three of them swaggered off towards the pub, but the fourth man did not leave. He was staring at Strike, and Strike was staring right back at him. It was Whittaker.

He was bigger than Strike remembered. Although he had known that Whittaker was almost as tall as he was, he had forgotten the scale of him, the breadth of his shoulders, the heft of the bones beneath his heavily tattooed skin. His thin T-shirt, emblazoned with the logo of the band Slayer, which was both militaristic and occult, blew back against him as they stood facing each other, revealing the outline of ribs.

His yellow face looked freeze-dried like an old apple, the flesh wasted, the skin shrunken against the bone, with cavities beneath the high cheekbones. His matted hair was thinning at the temples: it hung in rats’ tails around his stretched earlobes, each of which was adorned with a silver flesh tunnel. There they stood, Strike in his Italian suit, abnormally well groomed, and Whittaker, stinking of crack fumes, his heretic priest’s golden eyes now set beneath wrinkled, sagging lids.

Strike could not have said how long they stared at each other, but a stream of perfectly coherent thoughts passed through his mind while they did…

If Whittaker were the killer, he might be panicked but not too surprised to see Strike. If he were not the killer, his shock at finding Strike right outside his van ought to be extreme. Yet Whittaker had never behaved like other people. He always liked to appear unshockable and omniscient.

Then Whittaker reacted and Strike felt at once that it would have been unreasonable to expect him to do anything other than what he did. Whittaker grinned, revealing blackened teeth, and instantly the hatred of twenty years ago rose in Strike, and he yearned to put his fist through Whittaker’s face.

“Looky look,” said Whittaker quietly. “It’s Sergeant Sherlock facking Holmes.”

He turned his head and Strike saw scalp shining through the thinning roots and took some petty pleasure in the fact that Whittaker was going bald. He was a vain f*cker. He wouldn’t like that.

“Banjo!” shouted Whittaker at the last of his three companions, who had only just reached the pub. “Bring ’er out ’ere!”

His smile remained insolent, although the mad eyes flickered from the van to Strike and back to the pub. His filthy fingers were flexing. For all his assumed insouciance, he was edgy. Why didn’t he ask why Strike was there? Or did he already know?

The friend called Banjo reappeared, dragging Stephanie out of the pub by her thin wrist. In her free hand she was still clutching the pharmacist’s white paper bag. It looked glaringly pristine against her and Banjo’s cheap and dirty clothes. A gold necklace bounced around her neck.

“Why’re you—? What—?” she whimpered, uncomprehending.

Banjo deposited her beside Whittaker.

“Go get us a pint,” Whittaker instructed Banjo, who shuffled obediently away. Whittaker slid a hand around the back of Stephanie’s thin neck and she looked up at him with the slavish adoration of a girl who, like Leda before her, saw in Whittaker wonderful things that were totally invisible to Strike. Then Whittaker’s fingers gripped her neck until the skin around them went white and began to shake her, not so vigorously as to attract the attention of a passer-by, but with sufficient force to change her expression instantly to one of abject fear.

“Know anything about this?”

“’Bout w-what?” she stammered. The pills were rattling in her white paper bag.

“’Im!” said Whittaker quietly. “’Im that you’re so interested in, you filthy little bitch—”

“Get off her,” said Strike, speaking for the first time.

“Do I take orders?” Whittaker asked Strike quietly, his grin wide, his eyes manic.

With sudden, shocking strength, he seized Stephanie around the neck with both hands and lifted her bodily into the air, so that she dropped the white bag on the pavement to try to fight free, her feet scrabbling, her face growing purple.

No thought, no reflection. Strike punched Whittaker hard in the gut and he fell backwards, taking Stephanie with him; before Strike could do anything to prevent it, he heard the smack of her head on the concrete. Temporarily winded, Whittaker tried to get to his feet, a stream of whispered filth pouring from between his black teeth, while out of the corner of his eye Strike saw Whittaker’s three friends, Banjo at the fore, pushing their way out of the pub: they had seen everything through its one dingy window. One of them was holding a short, rusty blade.

“Do it!” Strike taunted them, standing his ground and opening his arms wide. “Bring the cops round your mobile crack den!”