Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(19)
Ted and Joan had stood on the doorstep and pleaded with Strike to come too. He had refused, his resolve hardening with every plea Joan made, determined to sit Whittaker out, not to leave him alone with his mother. By now, he had heard Whittaker talking lucidly about what it would feel like to take a life, as though it were an epicurean treat. He had not believed, then, that Whittaker meant it, but he had known him capable of violence, and had seen him threaten their fellow squatters. Once—Leda refused to believe it had happened—Strike had witnessed Whittaker attempt to bludgeon a cat that had inadvertently woken him from a doze. Strike had wrested the heavy boot from Whittaker’s hand as he chased the terrified cat around the room, swinging at it, screaming and swearing, determined to make the animal pay.
The knee onto which the prosthesis was fitted was beginning to complain as Strike strode faster and faster along the street. The Nag’s Head pub rose up on the right as though he had conjured it, squat, square and brick. Only at the door did he catch sight of the dark-clad bouncer and remember that the Nag’s Head was another lap-dancing club these days.
“Bollocks,” he muttered.
He had no objection to semiclad women gyrating around him while he enjoyed a pint, but he could not justify the exorbitant price of drinks in such an establishment, not when he had lost two clients in a single day.
He therefore entered the next Starbucks he encountered, found a seat and heaved his sore leg onto an empty chair while he moodily stirred a large black coffee. The squashy earth-colored sofas, the tall cups of American froth, the wholesome young people working with quiet efficiency behind a clean glass counter: these, surely, were the perfect antidote to Whittaker’s stinking specter, and yet he would not be driven out. Strike found himself unable to stop reliving it all, remembering…
While he had lived with Leda and her son, Whittaker’s teenage history of delinquency and violence had been known only to social services in the north of England. The tales he told about his past were legion, highly colored and often contradictory. Only after he had been arrested for murder had the truth leaked out from people from his past who surfaced, some hoping for money from the press, some determined to revenge themselves on him, others trying in their own muddled fashion to defend him.
He had been born into a moneyed upper-middle-class family headed by a knighted diplomat whom Whittaker had believed, until the age of twelve, was his father. At that point he had discovered that his older sister, whom he had been led to believe was in London working as a Montessori teacher, was actually his mother, that she had serious alcohol and drug problems and that she was living in poverty and squalor, ostracized by her family. From this time onward, Whittaker, already a problem child prone to outbursts of extreme temper during which he lashed out indiscriminately, had become determinedly wild. Expelled from his boarding school, he had joined a local gang and soon became ringleader, a phase that culminated in a spell in a correctional facility because he had held a blade to a young girl’s throat while his friends sexually assaulted her. Aged fifteen, he had run away to London, leaving a trail of petty crime in his wake and finally succeeding in tracking down his biological mother. A brief, enthusiastic reunion had deteriorated almost at once into mutual violence and animosity.
“Is anyone using this?”
A tall youth had bent over Strike, his hands already gripping the back of the chair on which Strike’s leg was resting. He reminded Strike of Robin’s fiancé Matthew, with his wavy brown hair and clean-cut good looks. With a grunt, Strike removed his leg, shook his head and watched the guy walk away carrying the chair, rejoining a group of six or more. The girls there were eager for his return, Strike could see: they straightened up and beamed as he placed the chair down and joined them. Whether because of the resemblance to Matthew, or because he had taken Strike’s chair, or because Strike genuinely sensed a tosser when he saw one, Strike found the youth obscurely objectionable.
His coffee unfinished but resentful that he had been disturbed, Strike heaved himself back to his feet and left. Spots of rain hit him as he walked back along Whitechapel Road, smoking again and no longer bothering to resist the tidal wave of memory now carrying him along…
Whittaker had had an almost pathological need for attention. He resented Leda’s focus being diverted from him at any time and for any reason—her job, her children, her friends—and he would turn his flashes of mesmeric charm on other women whenever he deemed her inattentive. Even Strike, who hated him like a disease, had to acknowledge that Whittaker possessed a powerful sex appeal which worked on nearly every woman who passed through the squat.
Thrown out of his most recent band, Whittaker continued to dream of stardom. He knew three guitar chords and covered every bit of paper not hidden from him with lyrics that drew heavily on the Satanic Bible, which Strike remembered lying, its black cover emblazoned with a pentagram and goat-head combined, on the mattress where Leda and Whittaker slept. Whittaker had an extensive knowledge of the life and career of the American cult leader Charles Manson. The scratchy sound of an old vinyl copy of Manson’s album LIE: The Love and Terror Cult formed the soundtrack to Strike’s GCSE year.
Whittaker had been familiar with Leda’s legend when he met her, and liked to hear about the parties she had been at, the men she had slept with. Through her, he became connected to the famous, and as Strike got to know him better he came to conclude that Whittaker craved celebrity above almost anything else. He made no moral distinction between his beloved Manson and the likes of Jonny Rokeby, rock star. Both had fixed themselves permanently in the popular consciousness. If anything, Manson had achieved it more successfully, because his myth would not fluctuate with fashion: evil was always fascinating.