Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(16)

“… at Nick and Ilsa’s,” Strike was saying. “Yeah. No, I agree… yeah… all right… you too.”

He cut the call.

“Is that where you’re going to stay?” Robin asked. “With Nick and Ilsa?”

They were two of Strike’s oldest friends. She had met and liked both of them on a couple of visits to the office.

“Yeah, they say I can stay as long as I want.”

“Why not with Elin?” asked Robin, risking rebuff, because she was perfectly aware of the line Strike preferred to maintain between his personal and professional lives.

“Wouldn’t work,” he said. He didn’t seem annoyed that she had asked, but showed no inclination to elaborate. “I forgot,” he added, glancing back across the street to the Japanese Canteen. The table where the man in camouflage jacket and shades had sat was now unoccupied. “I got you this.”

It was a rape alarm.

“I’ve already got one,” said Robin, pulling it out of her coat pocket and showing him.

“Yeah, but this one’s better,” said Strike, showing her its features. “You want an alarm of at least 120 decibels and it sprays them with indelible red stuff.”

“Mine does 140 decibels.”

“I still think this one’s better.”

“Is this the usual bloke thing of thinking any gadget you’ve chosen must be superior to anything I’ve got?”

He laughed and drained his pint.

“I’ll see you later.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m meeting Shanker.”

The name was unfamiliar to her.

“The bloke who sometimes gives me tip-offs I can barter with the Met,” Strike explained. “The bloke who told me who’d stabbed that police informer, remember? Who recommended me as a heavy to that gangster?”

“Oh,” said Robin. “Him. You’ve never told me what he was called.”

“Shanker’s my best chance for finding out where Whittaker is,” said Strike. “He might have some information on Digger Malley as well. He runs with some of the same crowd.”

He squinted across the road.

“Keep an eye out for that camouflage jacket.”

“You’re jumpy.”

“Bloody right I’m jumpy, Robin,” he said, drawing out a pack of cigarettes ready for the short walk to the Tube. “Someone sent us an effing leg.”





9


One Step Ahead of the Devil


Seeing Strike in the mutilated flesh, walking along the opposite pavement towards the Court, had been an unexpected bonus.

What a fat f*cker he’d become since they had last seen each other, ambling up the road carrying his backpack like the dumb squaddie he had once been, without realizing that the man who had sent him a leg was sitting barely fifty yards away. So much for the great detective! Into the pub he’d gone to join little Secretary. He was almost certainly f*cking her. He hoped so, anyway. That would make what he was going to do to her even more satisfying.

Then, as he had stared through his sunglasses at the figure of Strike sitting just inside the pub window, he thought that Strike turned and looked back. Of course, he couldn’t make out features from across the road, through two panes of glass and his own tinted lenses, but something in the distant figure’s attitude, the full disc of its face turned in his direction, had brought him to a high pitch of tension. They had looked at each other across the road and the traffic growled past in either direction, intermittently blocking them from view.

He had waited until three double-deckers had come crawling end to end into the space between them, then slid out of his chair, through the glass doors of the restaurant and up the side street. Adrenaline coursed through him as he stripped off his camouflage jacket and turned it inside out. There could be no question of binning it: his knives were concealed inside the lining. Around another corner, he broke into a flat-out run.





10



With no love, from the past.

Blue ?yster Cult, “Shadow of California”



The unbroken stream of traffic obliged Strike to stand and wait before crossing Tottenham Court Road, his eyes sweeping the opposite pavement. When he reached the other side of the street he peered through the window of the Japanese restaurant, but there was no camouflage jacket to be seen, nor did any of the men in shirts or T-shirts resemble the sunglasses-wearer in size or shape.

Strike felt his mobile vibrate and pulled it out of his jacket pocket. Robin had texted him:


Get a grip.



Grinning, Strike raised a hand of farewell towards the windows of the Court and headed off towards the Tube.

Perhaps he was just jumpy, as Robin had said. What were the odds that the nutter who had sent the leg would be sitting watching Robin in broad daylight? Yet he had not liked the fixed stare of the big man in the camouflage jacket, nor the fact that he had been wearing sunglasses: the day was not that bright. Had his disappearance while Strike’s view was occluded been coincidental or deliberate?

The trouble was that Strike could place little reliance on his memories of what the three men who were currently preoccupying him looked like, because he had not seen Brockbank for eight years, Laing for nine and Whittaker for sixteen. Any of them might have grown fat or wasted in that time, lost their hair, become bearded or mustached, be incapacitated or newly muscled. Strike himself had lost a leg since he had last set eyes on any of them. The one thing that nobody could disguise was height. All three of the men Strike was concerned about had been six feet tall or over and Camouflage Jacket had looked at least that in his metal chair.