Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(116)

The winded Whittaker made a gesture from the ground that had the effect of holding his friends at bay, which was the most common sense Strike had ever known him show. Faces were peering out of the pub window.

“You f*cking mother… you motherf*cker…” Whittaker wheezed.

“Yeah, let’s talk about mothers,” Strike said, jerking Stephanie to her feet. The blood was pounding in his ears. He itched to punch Whittaker until the yellow face was pulp. “He killed mine,” he told the girl, looking into her hollow eyes. Her arms were so thin that his hands almost met around them. “Did you hear that? He’s already killed one woman. Maybe more.”

Whittaker tried to grab Strike around his knees and bring him down; Strike kicked him off, still holding Stephanie. Whittaker’s red handprints stood out on her white neck, as did the imprint of the chain, from which hung the outline of a twisted heart.

“Come with me, now,” Strike told her. “He’s a f*cking killer. There are women’s refuges. Get away from him.”

Her eyes were like boreholes into a darkness he had never known. He might have been offering her a unicorn: his proposal was madness, outside the realm of the possible, and incredibly, though Whittaker had squeezed her throat until she could not speak, she wrenched away from Strike as if he were a kidnapper, stumbled over to Whittaker and crouched protectively over him, the twisted heart swinging.

Whittaker allowed Stephanie to help him to his feet and turned to face Strike, rubbing his stomach where the punch had landed and then, in his manic way, he began cackling like an old woman. Whittaker had won: they both knew it. Stephanie was clinging to him as though he had saved her. He pushed his filthy fingers deep into the hair at the back of her head and pulled her hard towards him, kissing her, his tongue down her throat, but with his free hand he gestured to his still-watching friends to get back in the van. Banjo climbed into the driver’s seat.

“See ya, mummy’s boy,” Whittaker whispered to Strike, pushing Stephanie in front of him into the back of the van. Before the doors shut on the obscenities and jeers of his male companions, Whittaker looked directly into Strike’s eyes and made the familiar throat-slashing gesture in midair, grinning. The van moved away.

Strike became suddenly aware that a number of people were standing around him, staring, all gazing at him with the vacant yet startled expressions of an audience when the lights go up unexpectedly. Faces were still pressed up against the pub window. There was nothing left for him to do except memorize the registration number of the battered old van before it turned the corner. As he departed the scene, furious, the onlookers scattered, clearing his way.





42



I’m living for giving the devil his due.

Blue ?yster Cult, “Burnin’ for You”



Fuck-ups happen, Strike told himself. His military career had not been entirely devoid of mishap. You could train as hard as you liked, check every piece of equipment, plan for every contingency and still some random mischance would screw you. Once, in Bosnia, a faulty mobile phone had unexpectedly dumped all its power, triggering a train of mishaps that culminated in a friend of Strike’s barely escaping with his life after driving up the wrong street in Mostar.

None of this altered the fact that if a subordinate in the SIB had been running surveillance and leaned up against the back of a carelessly parked van without first checking that it was empty, Strike would have had a lot to say about it, and loudly. He had not meant to confront Whittaker, or so he told himself, but a period of sober reflection forced him to admit that his actions told a different story. Frustrated by the long hours watching Whittaker’s flat, he had taken few pains to hide himself from the pub windows, and while he could not have known that Whittaker was inside the van, there was a savage retrospective pleasure in knowing that, at last, he had punched the f*cker.

God, he had wanted to hurt him. The gloating laugh, the rat’s-tail hair, the Slayer T-shirt, the acrid smell, the clutching fingers around the thin white neck, the taunting talk of mothers: the feelings that had erupted in Strike at the unexpected sight of Whittaker had been those of his eighteen-year-old self, eager to fight, careless of consequences.

Setting aside the pleasure it had been to hurt Whittaker, the encounter had not produced much meaningful information. Try though he might to effect a retrospective comparison, he could neither identify nor rule out Whittaker as the large figure in the beanie hat on looks alone. While the dark silhouette that Strike had chased through Soho had not had Whittaker’s matted locks, long hair can be tied back or tucked into a hat; it had looked burlier than Whittaker, but padded jackets easily add substance. Nor had Whittaker’s reaction on finding Strike outside his van given the detective real clues. The more he thought about it, the less he could decide whether he had read triumph in Whittaker’s gloating expression, or whether the last gesture, the dirty fingers slashing through the air, had been his usual play-acting, a toothless threat, the infantile retaliation of a man determined at all costs to be the worst, the scariest.

In brief, their encounter had revealed that Whittaker remained narcissistic and violent, and given Strike two small pieces of additional information. The first was that Stephanie had aggravated Whittaker by showing curiosity about Strike, and while Strike assumed that this was merely because he had once been Whittaker’s stepson, he did not entirely rule out the possibility that it had been triggered by Whittaker mentioning a desire for retribution, or letting slip that he was seeking it. Secondly, Whittaker had managed to make himself some male friends. While he had always had a, to Strike, incomprehensible attraction for certain women, Whittaker had been almost universally disliked and despised by men in the days that Strike had known him. His own gender had tended to deplore his histrionics, the Satanic bullshit, his craving to be first in all company and, of course, to resent his strange magnetic pull over females. Now, though, Whittaker seemed to have found a crew of sorts, men who shared drugs with him and allowed him to boss them around.