Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(123)

“Yes. I’ll take it out of petty cash.”

They walked on. Well-dressed men and women passed them, busy, bustling. A bohemian-looking girl with dreadlocks floated past in a long paisley dress, but a five-hundred-pound handbag revealed that her hippy credentials were as fake as Tempest’s disability.

“At least you didn’t punch her,” said Robin. “In her wheelchair. In front of all the art lovers.”

Strike began to laugh. Robin shook her head.

“I knew you’d lose it,” she sighed, but she was smiling.





44


Then Came the Last Days of May


He had thought she was dead. It had not troubled him that he hadn’t seen a news report, because she’d been a hooker. He’d never seen anything in the papers about the first one he’d done either. Prostitutes didn’t f*cking count, they were nothing, no one cared. The Secretary was the one who was going to make the big splash, because she was working for that bastard—a clean-living girl with her pretty fiancé, the kind the press went wild for…

He didn’t understand how the whore could still be alive, though. He remembered the feeling of her torso beneath the knife, the popping, puncturing sound of the metal slitting her skin, the grating of steel on bone, the blood gushing. Students had found her, according to the newspaper. Fucking students.

He still he had her fingers, though.

She’d produced a photofit. What a f*cking joke! The police were shaven monkeys in uniforms, the lot of them. Did they think this picture would help? It looked nothing like him, nothing at all; it could have been anyone, white or black. He would have laughed out loud if It hadn’t been there, but It wouldn’t like him laughing over a dead hooker and a photofit…

It was pretty bolshy at the moment. He had had to work hard to make up for the fact that he had treated It roughly, had to apologize, play the nice guy. “I was upset,” he had said. “Really upset.” He’d had to cuddle It and buy It f*cking flowers and stay home, to make up for being angry, and now It was taking advantage, the way women always did, trying to take more, as much as It could get.

“I don’t like it when you go away.”

I’ll make YOU f*cking go away if you keep this up.

He had told her a cock-and-bull story about the chance of a job, but for the first time ever she actually f*cking dared question him: Who told you about it? How long will you be gone?

He watched It talking and he imagined drawing back a fist and punching It so hard in It’s ugly f*cking face that the bones splintered…

Yet he needed It a little while longer, at least until he did The Secretary.

It still loved him, that was the trump card: he knew he could bring It back into line with the threat of leaving for good. He didn’t want to overplay that one, though. So he pressed on with the flowers, the kisses, the kindness that made the memory of his rage soften and dissolve in It’s stupid, addled memory. He liked to add a little emollient to her drinks, a little extra something to keep her off balance, weeping into his neck, clinging to him.

Patient, kind, but determined.

At last she agreed: a week away, completely away, free to do as he liked.





45



Harvester of eyes, that’s me.

Blue ?yster Cult, “Harvester of Eyes”



Detective Inspector Eric Wardle was far from delighted that Jason and Tempest had lied to his men, but Strike found him less angry than he might have expected when they met for a pint, at Wardle’s invitation, on Monday evening in the Feathers. The explanation for his surprising forbearance was simple: the revelation that Kelsey had been picked up from her rendezvous in Café Rouge by a man on a motorbike fitted perfectly with Wardle’s new pet theory.

“You remember the guy called Devotee who was on their website? Got a fetish for amputees, went quiet after Kelsey was killed?”

“Yeah,” said Strike, who recalled Robin saying that she had had an interaction with him.

“We’ve tracked him down. Guess what’s in his garage?”

Strike assumed, from the fact that no arrest had been made, that they had not found body parts, so he obligingly suggested: “Motorbike?”

“Kawasaki Ninja,” said Wardle. “I know we’re looking for a Honda,” he added, forestalling Strike, “but he crapped himself when we came calling.”

“So do most people when CID turn up on their doorstep. Go on.”

“He’s a sweaty little guy, name of Baxter, a sales rep with no alibi for the weekend of the second and third, or for the twenty-ninth. Divorced, no kids, claims he stayed in for the royal wedding, watching it. Would you have watched the royal wedding without a woman in the house?”

“No,” said Strike, who had only caught footage on the news.

“He claims the bike’s his brother’s and he’s just looking after it, but after a bit of questioning he admitted he’s taken it out a few times. So we know he can ride one, and he could have hired or borrowed the Honda.”

“What did he say about the website?”

“He downplayed that completely, says he’s only pissing around, doesn’t mean anything by it, he’s not turned on by stumps, but when we asked whether we could have a look at his computer he didn’t like it at all. Asked to talk to his lawyer before he gave an answer. That’s where we’ve left it, but we’re going back to see him again tomorrow. Friendly chat.”