Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(155)

“You don’t—”

“I don’t mean it? You think I need a partner who won’t take instruction, who does what I’ve explicitly told her not to do, who makes me look like a trouble-making egotistical prick in front of the police and causes a murder suspect to disappear under the force’s nose?”

He said it in a single breath and Robin, who had taken a step backwards, knocked the England Ruby calendar off the wall with a rustle and thud she failed to hear, so loudly was the blood pounding in her ears. She thought she might faint. She had imagined him shouting “I ought to fire you!” but not once had she considered that he might actually do it, that everything she had done for him—the risks, the injuries, the insights and the inspirations, the long hours of discomfort and inconvenience—would be washed away, rendered negligible by this one act of well-intentioned disobedience. She could not even get enough breath into her lungs to argue, because his expression was such that she knew all she could expect was further icy condemnation of her actions and an exposition of how badly she had screwed up. The memory of Angel and Alyssa holding each other on the sofa, the reflection that Angel’s suffering was finished and that her mother believed and supported her, had comforted Robin through the hours of suspense during which she waited for this blow to fall. She had not dared tell Strike what she had done. Now she thought it might have been better if she had.

“What?” she said stupidly, because he had asked her something. The noises had been meaningless.

“Who was the man you took with you?”

“That’s none of your business,” she whispered after a short hesitation.

“They said he threatened Brockbank with a kni—Shanker!” said Strike, light dawning only now, and in that instant she saw a trace of the Strike she knew in the reanimated, infuriated face. “How the f*ck did you get Shanker’s number?”

But she could not speak. Nothing mattered beside the fact that she was fired. She knew that Strike did not relent when he decided that a relationship had run its course. His girlfriend of sixteen years had never heard from him again after he had ended it, although Charlotte had tried to initiate contact since.

He was already leaving. She followed him into the hall on numb legs, feeling herself to be acting like a beaten dog who still slinks after the punisher, hoping desperately for forgiveness.

“Goodnight,” Strike called to Linda and Matthew, who had retreated into the sitting room.

“Cormoran,” Robin whispered.

“I’ll send your last month’s salary on,” he said without looking at her. “Quick and clean. Gross misconduct.”

The door closed behind him. She could hear his size fourteens moving away up the path. With a gasp, she began to cry. Linda and Matthew both came hurrying into the hall, but too late: Robin had fled to the bedroom, unable to face their relief and delight that, at last, she would have to give up her dream of being a detective.





56



When life’s scorned and damage done

To avenge, this is the pact.

Blue ?yster Cult, “Vengeance (The Pact)”



Half past four the following morning found Strike awake after virtually no sleep. His tongue ached from the amount of smoking he had done overnight at the Formica table in his kitchen, while contemplating the decimation of his business and his prospects. He could barely bring himself to think about Robin. Fine cracks, like those in thick ice during a thaw, were starting to appear in what had been implacable fury, but what lay beneath was scarcely less cold. He could understand the impulse to save the child—who couldn’t? Hadn’t he, as she had so injudiciously pointed out, knocked Brockbank out cold after viewing Brittany’s taped evidence?—but the thought of her heading off with Shanker, without telling him, and after Carver had warned them not to go anywhere near the suspects, made rage thunder through his veins all over again as he upended his cigarette pack and found it empty.

He pulled himself to his feet, picked up his keys and left the flat, still wearing the Italian suit in which he had dozed. The sun was coming up as he trudged down Charing Cross Road in a dawn that made everything look dusty and fragile, a gray light full of pale shadows. He bought cigarettes in a corner shop in Covent Garden and continued to walk, smoking and thinking.


After two hours spent walking the streets, Strike reached a decision about his next move. Heading back towards the office, he saw a waitress in a black dress unlocking the doors to the Caffè Vergnano 1882 on Charing Cross Road, realized how hungry he was and turned inside.

The small coffee shop smelled of warm wood and espresso. As Strike sank gratefully onto a hard oak chair he became uncomfortably aware that for the past thirteen hours he had smoked ceaselessly, slept in his clothes and eaten steak and drunk red wine without cleaning his teeth. The man in the reflection beside him looked crumpled and grimy. He tried not to give the young waitress any opportunity to smell his breath as he ordered a ham and cheese panini, a bottle of water and a double espresso.

As the copper-domed coffee maker on the counter hissed into life, Strike sank into a reverie, searching his conscience for a truthful answer to an uncomfortable question.

Was he any better than Carver? Was he contemplating a high-risk and dangerous course of action because he really thought it the only way to stop the killer? Or was he inclining to the higher-stakes option because he knew that if he brought it off—if he were the one to catch and incriminate the murderer—it would reverse all the damage done to his reputation and his business, restoring to him the luster of a man who succeeded where the Met failed? Was it, in short, necessity or ego that was driving him towards what many would say was a reckless and foolish measure?