Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(147)

“Drop it,” said Strike. He sounded angry, just like Matthew. “We’re done, Robin. I should never have sent you to Stephanie. I’ve let my grudge against Whittaker color my judgment ever since that leg arrived and it nearly got you—”

“Oh for God’s sake,” said Robin impatiently. “You didn’t try and kill me, he did. Let’s keep the blame where it belongs. You had good reason for thinking it was Whittaker—the lyrics. Anyway, that still leaves—”

“Carver’s looked into Laing and Brockbank and he doesn’t think there’s anything there. We’re staying out of it, Robin.”

Ten miles away in his office, Strike hoped that he was convincing her. He had not told Robin about the epiphany that had occurred to him after his encounter with the toddler outside the hospital. He had tried to contact Carver the following morning, but a subordinate had told him that Carver was too busy to take his call and advised him not to try again. Strike had insisted on telling the irritable and faintly aggressive subordinate what he had hoped to tell Carver. He would have bet his remaining leg that not a word of his message had been passed on.

The windows in Strike’s office were open. Hot June sunshine warmed the two rooms now devoid of clients and soon, perhaps, to be vacated due to an inability to afford the rent. Two-Times’s interest in the new lap-dancer had petered out. Strike had nothing to do. Like Robin, he yearned for action, but he did not tell her that. All he wanted was for her to heal and be safe.

“Police still in your street?”

“Yes,” she sighed.

Carver had placed a plainclothes officer in Hastings Road around the clock. Matthew and Linda took immense comfort in the fact that he was out there.

“Cormoran, listen. I know we can’t—”

“Robin, there’s no ‘we’ just now. There’s me, sitting on my arse with no work, and there’s you, staying at bloody home until that killer’s caught.”

“I wasn’t talking about the case,” she said. Her heart was banging hard and fast against her ribs again. She had to say it aloud, or she would burst. “There’s one thing we—you can do, then. Brockbank might not be the killer, but we know he’s a rapist. You could go to Alyssa and warn her she’s living with—”

“Forget it,” said Strike’s voice harshly in her ear. “For the last f*cking time, Robin, you can’t save everyone! He’s never been convicted! If we go blundering in there, Carver will string us up.”

There was a long silence.

“Are you crying?” Strike asked anxiously, because he thought her breathing had become ragged.

“No, I’m not crying,” said Robin truthfully.

An awful coldness had spread through her at Strike’s refusal to help the young girls living in Brockbank’s vicinity.

“I’d better go, it’s lunch,” she said, though nobody had called her.

“Look,” he said, “I get why you want—”

“Speak later,” she said and hung up.

There’s no “we” just now.

It had happened all over again. A man had come at her out of the darkness and had ripped from her not only her sense of safety, but her status. She had been a partner in a detective agency…

Or had she? There had never been a new contract. There had never been a pay rise. They had been so busy, so broke, that it had never occurred to her to ask for either. She had simply been delighted to think that that was how Strike saw her. Now even that was gone, perhaps temporarily, perhaps forever. There’s no “we” anymore.

Robin sat in thought for a few minutes, then got off the bed, the newspapers rustling. She approached the dressing table where the white shoebox sat, engraved with the silver words Jimmy Choo, reached out a hand and stroked the pristine surface of the cardboard.

The plan did not come to her like Strike’s epiphany outside the hospital, with the exhilarating force of flame. Instead it rose slowly, dark and dangerous, born of the hateful enforced passivity of the past week and out of ice-cold anger at Strike’s stubborn refusal to act. Strike, who was her friend, had joined the enemy’s ranks. He was a six-foot-three ex-boxer. He would never know what it was like to feel yourself small, weak and powerless. He would never understand what rape did to your feelings about your own body: to find yourself reduced to a thing, an object, a piece of f*ckable meat.

Zahara had sounded three at most on the telephone.

Robin remained quite still in front of her dressing table, staring down at the box containing her wedding shoes, thinking. She saw the risks plainly spread beneath her, like the rocks and raging waters beneath a tightrope walker’s feet.

No, she could not save everyone. It was too late for Martina, for Sadie, for Kelsey and for Heather. Lila would spend the rest of her days with two fingers on her left hand and a grisly scar across her psyche that Robin understood only too well. However, there were also two young girls who faced God knows how much more suffering if nobody acted.

Robin turned away from the new shoes, reached for her mobile and dialed a number she had been given voluntarily, but which she had never imagined she would use.





54



And if it’s true it can’t be you,

It might as well be me.

Blue ?yster Cult, “Spy in the House of the Night”