Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(13)

Robin scrolled slowly down through the photographs. Soon the pictures of what she thought of as “Strike’s Whittaker” became interspersed with pictures of other Whittakers who had been in trials. A cherubic-looking African-American called Jeff Whittaker had taken his neighbor to court for allowing his dog to repeatedly foul his lawn.

Why did Strike think his ex-stepfather (she found it odd to think of him in those terms, as he was only five years older than Strike) would have sent him the leg? She wondered when Strike had last seen the man he thought had murdered his mother. There was so much she did not know about her boss. He did not like to talk about his past.

Robin’s fingers slid back to the keys and typed Eric Bloom.

The first thing that occurred to her, staring at the pictures of the leather-clad seventies rocker, was that he had Strike’s exact hair: dense, dark and curly. This reminded her of Jacques Burger and Sarah Shadlock, which did nothing to improve her mood. She turned her attention to the other two men whom Strike had mentioned as possible suspects, but she could not remember what their names had been. Donald something? And a funny name beginning with B… Her memory was usually excellent. Strike often complimented her on it. Why couldn’t she remember?

On the other hand, would it matter if she could? There was little you could do on a laptop to find two men who might be anywhere. Robin had not worked for a detective agency for this long without being perfectly aware that those who used pseudonyms, lived rough, favored squats, rented their accommodation or did not add their names to electoral rolls could easily fall through the wide mesh of Directory Enquiries.

After sitting in thought for several more minutes, and with a sense that she was somehow betraying her boss, Robin typed Leda Strike into the search box and then, feeling guiltier than ever, naked.

The picture was black and white. The young Leda posed with her arms over her head, a long cloud of dark hair falling down over her breasts. Even in the thumbnail version, Robin could make out an arch of curly script set above the dark triangle of pubic hair. Squinting slightly, as though rendering the image a little fuzzy somehow mitigated her actions, Robin brought up the full-sized picture. She did not want to have to zoom in and nor did she need to. The words Mistress of were clearly legible.

The bathroom fan whirred into life next door. With a guilty start, Robin shut down the page she had been viewing. Matthew had lately developed a habit of borrowing her laptop and a few weeks previously she had caught him reading her emails to Strike. With this in mind, she reopened the web page, cleared her browsing history, brought up her settings and, after a moment’s consideration, changed her password to DontFearTheReaper. That would scupper him.

As she slid out of bed to go and throw the hot chocolate down the kitchen sink it occurred to Robin that she had not bothered to look up any details about Terence “Digger” Malley. Of course, the police would be far better placed than she or Strike to find a London gangster.

Doesn’t matter, though, she thought sleepily, heading back to the bedroom. It isn’t Malley.





7


Good to Feel Hungry


Of course, if he’d had the sense he was born with—that had been a favorite phrase of his mother’s, vicious bitch that she’d been (You haven’t got the sense you were born with, have you, you stupid little bastard?)—if he’d had the sense he was born with, he wouldn’t have followed The Secretary the very day after handing her the leg. Only it had been difficult to resist the temptation when he did not know when he would next have a chance. The urge to tail her again had grown upon him in the night, to see what she looked like now that she had opened his present.

From tomorrow, his freedom would be severely curtailed, because It would be home and It required his attention when It was around. Keeping It happy was very important, not least because It earned the money. Stupid and ugly and grateful for affection, It had barely noticed that It was keeping him.

Once he’d seen It off to work that morning he had hurried out of the house to wait for The Secretary at her home station, which had been a smart decision, because she hadn’t gone to the office at all. He had thought the arrival of the leg might disrupt her routine and he had been right. He was nearly always right.

He knew how to follow people. At some points today he had been wearing a beanie hat, at others he had been bareheaded. He had stripped to his T-shirt, then worn his jacket and then his jacket turned inside out, sunglasses on, sunglasses off.

The Secretary’s value to him—over and above the value any female had to him, if he could get her alone—was in what he was going to do, through her, to Strike. His ambition to be avenged on Strike—permanently, brutally avenged—had grown in him until it became the central ambition of his life. He had always been this way. If someone crossed him they were marked and at some point, whenever opportunity presented itself, even if it took years, they would get theirs. Cormoran Strike had done him more harm than any other human being ever, and he was going to pay a just price.

He had lost track of Strike for several years and then an explosion of publicity had revealed the bastard: celebrated, heroic. This was the status he had always wanted, had craved. It had been like drinking acid, choking down the fawning articles about the cunt, but he had devoured everything he could, because you needed to know your target if you wanted to cause maximum damage. He intended to inflict as much pain on Cormoran Strike as was—not humanly possible, because he knew himself to be something more than human—as was superhumanly possible. It would go way beyond a knife in the ribs in the dark. No, Strike’s punishment was going to be slower and stranger, frightening, tortuous and finally devastating.