Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(18)
He had meant to get back on the Tube and yet before he knew it, he was walking, heading for the one place in London he had avoided for seventeen years: the building where his mother had died. It had been the last of Leda’s squats, two floors of a decrepit building on Fulbourne Street, which was barely a minute from the station. As he walked, Strike began to remember. Of course: he had walked over this metal bridge over the railway line during his A-level year. He remembered the name, Castlemain Street, too… surely one of his fellow A-level students, a girl with a pronounced lisp, had lived there…
He slowed to an amble as he reached the end of Fulbourne Street, experiencing a strange double impression. His vague memory of the place, weakened no doubt by his deliberate attempts to forget, lay like a faded transparency over the scene in front of his eyes. The buildings were as shabby as he remembered them, white plaster peeling away from the frontages, but the businesses and shops were totally unfamiliar. He felt as though he had returned to a dreamscape where the scene had shifted and mutated. Of course, everything was impermanent in the poor areas of London, where fragile, fair-weather businesses grew up and faded away and were replaced: cheap signage tacked up and removed; people passing through, passing away.
It took him a minute or two to identify the door of what had once been the squat, because he had forgotten the number. At last he found it, beside a shop selling cheap clothing of both Asian and Western varieties, which he thought had been a West Indian supermarket in his day. The brass letter box brought back a strange stab of memory. It had rattled loudly whenever anyone went in or out of the door.
Fuck, f*ck, f*ck…
Lighting a second cigarette from the tip of the first, he walked briskly out onto Whitechapel Road, where market stalls stood: more cheap clothing, a multitude of gaudy plastic goods. Strike sped up, walking he was not sure where, and some of what he passed triggered more memories: that snooker hall had been there seventeen years ago… so had the Bell Foundry… and now the memories were rising to bite him as though he had trodden on a nest of sleeping snakes…
As she neared forty, his mother had begun to go for younger men, but Whittaker had been the youngest of the lot: twenty-one when she had started sleeping with him. Her son had been sixteen when she first brought Whittaker home. The musician had looked ravaged even then, with sallow hollows under his wide-apart eyes, which were a striking golden hazel. His dark hair fell in dreadlocks to his shoulders; he lived in the same T-shirt and jeans and consequently stank.
A well-worn phrase kept echoing in Strike’s head, keeping pace with his footsteps as he trudged down Whitechapel Road.
Hiding in plain sight. Hiding in plain sight.
Of course people would think he was obsessed, biased, unable to let go. They would say his thoughts had jumped to Whittaker when he saw the leg in the box because he had never got over the fact that Whittaker had walked free on the charge of killing Strike’s mother. Even if Strike explained his reasons for suspecting Whittaker, they would probably laugh at the notion that such an ostentatious lover of the perverse and the sadistic could have cut off a woman’s leg. Strike knew how deeply ingrained was the belief that the evil conceal their dangerous predilections for violence and domination. When they wear them like bangles for all to see, the gullible populace laughs, calls it a pose, or finds it strangely attractive.
Leda had met Whittaker at the record company where she worked as a receptionist, a minor, living piece of rock history employed as a kind of totem on the front desk. Whittaker, who played the guitar and wrote lyrics for a succession of thrash metal bands that, one by one, threw him out because of his histrionics, substance abuse and aggression, claimed to have met Leda while pursuing a record deal. However, Leda had confided to Strike that their first encounter had happened while she was trying to persuade security not to be so rough with the young man they were throwing out. She had brought him home, and Whittaker had never left.
The sixteen-year-old Strike had not been sure whether or not Whittaker’s gloating, open pleasure in everything that was sadistic and demonic was genuine or a pose. All he had known was that he hated Whittaker with a visceral loathing that had transcended anything he had felt for any of the other lovers whom Leda had taken up, then left behind. He had been forced to breathe in the man’s stench as he did his homework of an evening in the squat; he had almost been able to taste him. Whittaker tried patronizing the teenager—sudden explosions and waspish put-downs revealed an articulacy he was careful to hide when he wished to ingratiate himself with Leda’s less educated friends—but Strike had been ready with put-downs and comebacks of his own and he had the advantage of being less stoned than Whittaker, or, at least, only as stoned as a person could be living in a constant fug of cannabis smoke. Out of Leda’s hearing, Whittaker had jeered at Strike’s determination to continue his oft-disrupted education. Whittaker was tall and wiry, surprisingly well muscled for one who lived an almost entirely sedentary life; Strike was already over six feet and boxing at a local club. The tension between the two stiffened the smoky air whenever both were present, the threat of violence constant.
Whittaker had driven Strike’s half-sister Lucy away for good with his bullying, his sexual taunts and sneers. He had strutted around the squat naked, scratching his tattooed torso, laughing at the fourteen-year-old girl’s mortification. One night she had run to the telephone box at the corner of the street and begged their aunt and uncle in Cornwall to come and fetch her. They had arrived at the squat at dawn next day, having driven overnight from St. Mawes. Lucy was ready with her meager possessions in a small suitcase. She had never lived with her mother again.