Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(129)

“No,” said her mother.

“Oh,” said Robin. “Well, he says he’s going to.”

“You want to put him next to Sarah, do you?”

“No, of course not!” snapped Robin.

There was a short pause.

“Sorry,” said Robin. “Sorry, Mum… stressed… no, could you sit Cormoran next to… I don’t know…”

“Is his girlfriend coming?”

“He says not. Put him anywhere, just not near bloody—I mean, not by Sarah.”

So, Robin settled in to wait for a glimpse of Stephanie on the warmest morning so far. The shoppers on Catford Broadway were wearing T-shirts and sandals; black women passed in brightly colored head wraps. Robin, who had put on a sundress under an old denim jacket, leaned back into one of her accustomed nooks in the theater building, pretending that she was talking on the mobile and killing time before she pretended to peruse the scented candles and incense sticks on the nearest stall.

It was difficult to maintain concentration when you were convinced that you had been sent on a wild goose chase. Strike might insist that he still thought Whittaker a suspect in Kelsey’s killing, but Robin was quietly unconvinced. She increasingly inclined to Wardle’s view that Strike had it in for his ex-stepfather and that his usually sound judgment was clouded by old grievances. Glancing up periodically at the unmoving curtains of Whittaker’s flat, she remembered that Stephanie had last been seen being bundled into the back of a transit van by Whittaker, and wondered whether she was even inside the flat.

From faint resentment that this was going to be another wasted day, she fell easily to dwelling on the main grudge she currently felt against Strike: his appropriation of the search for Noel Brockbank. Somehow Robin had come to feel that Brockbank was particularly her own suspect. Had she not successfully impersonated Venetia Hall, they would never have known that Brockbank was living in London, and if she had not had the wit to recognize that Nile was Noel, they would never have traced him to the Saracen. Even the low voice in her ear—Do A know you, little girl?—creepy as it had been, constituted a strange kind of connection.

The mingled smells of raw fish and incense that had come to represent Whittaker and Stephanie filled her nostrils as she leaned back against chilly stone and watched the unmoving door of his flat. Like foxes to a dustbin, her unruly thoughts slunk back to Zahara, the little girl who had answered Brockbank’s mobile. Robin had thought of her every day since they had spoken and had asked Strike for every detail about the little girl’s mother on his return from the strip club.

He had told Robin that Brockbank’s girlfriend was called Alyssa and that she was black, so Zahara must be too. Perhaps she looked like the little girl with stiff pigtails now waddling along the street, holding tight to her mother’s forefinger and staring at Robin with solemn dark eyes. Robin smiled, but the little girl did not: she merely continued to scrutinize Robin as she and her mother passed. Robin kept smiling until the little girl, twisting almost 180 degrees so as not to break eye contact with Robin, tripped over her tiny sandaled feet. She hit the ground and began to wail; her impassive mother scooped her up and carried her. Feeling guilty, Robin resumed her observation of Whittaker’s windows as the fallen toddler’s wails reverberated down the street.

Zahara almost certainly lived in the flat in Bow that Strike had told her about. Zahara’s mother complained about the flat, apparently, although Strike said that one of the girls…

One of the girls had said…

“Of course!” Robin muttered excitedly. “Of course!”

Strike wouldn’t have thought of that—of course he wouldn’t, he was a man! She began to press the keys on her phone.

There were seven nurseries in Bow. Absently replacing her mobile in her pocket and energized by her train of thought, Robin began her usual drift through the market stalls, casting the occasional glance up at the windows of Whittaker’s flat and at the perennially closed door, her mind entirely given over to the pursuit of Brockbank. She could think of two possible courses of action: stake out each of these seven nurseries, watching for a black woman picking up a girl called Zahara (and how would she know which was the right mother and daughter?) or… or… She paused beside a stall selling ethnic jewelry, barely seeing it, preoccupied by thoughts of Zahara.

Entirely by chance, she looked up from a pair of feather and bead earrings as Stephanie, whom Strike had accurately described, came out of the door beside the chip shop. Pale, red-eyed and blinking in the bright light like an albino rabbit, Stephanie leaned on the chip-shop door, toppled inside and proceeded to the counter. Before Robin could collect her wits, Stephanie had brushed past her holding a can of Coke and gone back into the building through the white door.

Shit.

“Nothing,” she told Strike on the phone an hour later. “She’s still in there. I didn’t have a chance to do anything. She was in and out in about three minutes.”

“Stick with it,” said Strike. “She might come out again. At least we know she’s awake.”

“Any luck with Laing?”

“Not while I was there, but I’ve had to come back to the office. Big news: Two-Times has forgiven me. He’s just left. We need the money—I could hardly refuse.”

“Oh, for God’s sake—how can he have another girlfriend already?” asked Robin.