Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(146)

However, during the week that followed she found it almost impossible to sleep, and not only because of the throbbing of her injured forearm, which was now in a protective half-cast. In the short dozes she managed at night or by day, she felt her attacker’s thick arms around her again and heard him breathing in her ear. Sometimes the eyes she had not seen became the eyes of the rapist when she was nineteen: pale, one pupil fixed. Behind their black balaclava and gorilla mask, the nightmare figures merged, mutated and grew, filling her mind day and night.

In the worst dreams, she watched him doing it to somebody else and was waiting her turn, powerless to help or escape. Once, the victim was Stephanie with her pulverized face. On another unbearable occasion, a little black girl screamed for her mother. Robin woke from that one shouting in the dark, and Matthew became so worried about her that he called in sick to work the following day so that he could stay with her. Robin did not know whether she was grateful or resentful.

Her mother came, of course, and tried to make her come home to Masham.

“You’ve got ten days until the wedding, Robin, why don’t you just come home with me now and relax before—”

“I want to stay here,” said Robin.

She was not a teenager anymore: she was a grown woman. It was up to her where she went, where she stayed, what she did. Robin felt as though she were fighting all over again for the identities she had been forced to relinquish the last time a man had lunged at her out of the darkness. He had transformed her from a straight-A student into an emaciated agoraphobic, from an aspiring forensic psychologist into a defeated girl who agreed with her overbearing family that police work would only exacerbate her mental problems.

That was not going to happen again. She would not let it. She could barely sleep, she did not want to eat, but furiously she dug in, denying her own needs and fears. Matthew was frightened of contradicting her. Weakly he agreed with her that there was no need for her to go home, yet Robin heard him whispering with her mother in the kitchen when they thought she could not hear them.

Strike was no help at all. He had not bothered to say good-bye to her at the hospital, nor he had come to see how she was doing, merely speaking to her on the phone. He, too, wanted her to go back to Yorkshire, safely out of the way.

“You must have a load of stuff to do for the wedding.”

“Don’t patronize me,” said Robin furiously.

“Who’s patronizing—?”

“Sorry,” she said, dissolving into silent tears that he could not see and doing everything in her power to keep her voice normal. “Sorry… uptight. I’m going home on the Thursday before; there’s no need to go earlier.”

She was no longer the person who had lain on her bed staring at Destiny’s Child. She refused to be that girl.

Nobody could understand why she was so determined to remain in London, nor was she ready to explain. She threw away the sundress in which he had attacked her. Linda entered the kitchen just as Robin was shoving it into the bin.

“Stupid bloody thing,” said Robin, catching her mother’s eye. “I’ve learned that lesson. Don’t run surveillance in long dresses.”

She spoke defiantly. I’m going back to work. This is temporary.

“You’re not supposed to be using that hand,” said her mother, ignoring the unspoken challenge. “The doctor said to rest and elevate it.”

Neither Matthew nor her mother liked her reading about the progress of the case in the press, which she did obsessively. Carver had refused to release her name. He said he did not want the media descending on her, but she and Strike both suspected that he was afraid that Strike’s continued presence in the story would give the press a delicious new twist: Carver versus Strike all over again.

“In fairness,” Strike said to Robin over the phone (she tried to limit herself to one call to him a day), “that’s the last bloody thing anyone needs. It won’t help catch the bastard.”

Robin said nothing. She was lying on her and Matthew’s bed with a number of newspapers that she had bought against Linda and Matthew’s wishes spread around her. Her eyes were fixed on a double-page spread in the Mirror, where the five supposed victims of the Shacklewell Ripper were again pictured in a row. A sixth black silhouette of a woman’s head and shoulders represented Robin. The legend beneath the silhouette read “26-year-old office worker, escaped.” Much was made of the fact that the 26-year-old office worker had managed to spray the killer with red ink during the attack. She was praised by a retired policewoman in a side column for her foresight in carrying such a device, and there was a separate feature on rape alarms over the page.

“You’ve really given up on it?” she asked.

“It’s not a question of giving up,” said Strike. She could hear him moving around the office, and she wished she were there, even if only making tea or answering emails. “I’m leaving it to the police. A serial killer’s out of our league, Robin. It always was.”

Robin was looking down at the gaunt face of the only other woman who had survived the killing spree. “Lila Monkton, prostitute.” Lila, too, knew what the killer’s pig-like breathing sounded like. He had cut off Lila’s fingers. Robin would only have a long scar on her arm. Her brain buzzed angrily in her skull. She felt guilty that she had got off so lightly.

“I wish there was something—”