Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(2)
They were going to get on the number 83. He did not have a lot of money in his pockets, but he was so enjoying watching her that he did not want it to end yet. As he climbed aboard behind them he heard the man mention Wembley Central. He bought a ticket and followed them upstairs.
The couple found seats together, right at the front of the bus. He took a place nearby, next to a grumpy woman whom he forced to move her bags of shopping. Their voices carried sometimes over the hum of the other passengers. When not talking, The Secretary looked out of the window, unsmiling. She did not want to go wherever they were going, he was sure of it. When she pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes he noticed that she was wearing an engagement ring. So she was going to be getting married… or so she thought. He hid his faint smile in the upturned collar of his jacket.
The warm midday sun was pouring through the dirt-stippled bus windows. A group of men got on and filled the surrounding seats. A couple of them were wearing red and black rugby shirts.
He felt, suddenly, as though the day’s radiance had dimmed. Those shirts, with the crescent moon and star, had associations he did not like. They reminded him of a time when he had not felt like a god. He did not want his happy day spotted and stained by old memories, bad memories, but his elation was suddenly draining away. Angry now—a teenage boy in the group caught his eye, but looked hurriedly away, alarmed—he got up and headed back to the stairs.
A father and his small son were holding tight to the pole beside the bus doors. An explosion of anger in the pit of his stomach: he should have had a son. Or rather, he should still have had a son. He pictured the boy standing beside him, looking up at him, hero-worshipping him—but his son was long gone, which was entirely due to a man called Cormoran Strike.
He was going to have revenge on Cormoran Strike. He was going to wreak havoc upon him.
When he reached the pavement he looked up at the bus’s front windows and caught one last glimpse of The Secretary’s golden head. He would be seeing her again in less than twenty-four hours. That reflection helped calm the sudden rage caused by the sight of those Saracens shirts. The bus rumbled off and he strode away in the opposite direction, soothing himself as he walked.
He had a wonderful plan. Nobody knew. Nobody suspected. And he had something very special waiting for him in the fridge at home.
2
A rock through a window never comes with a kiss.
Blue ?yster Cult, “Madness to the Method”
Robin Ellacott was twenty-six years old and had been engaged for over a year. Her wedding ought to have taken place three months previously, but the unexpected death of her future mother-in-law had led to the ceremony’s postponement. Much had happened during the three months since the wedding should have happened. Would she and Matthew have been getting on better if vows had been exchanged, she wondered. Would they be arguing less if a golden band was sitting beneath the sapphire engagement ring that had become a little loose on her finger?
Fighting her way through the rubble on Tottenham Court Road on Monday morning, Robin mentally relived the argument of the previous day. The seeds had been sown before they had even left the house for the rugby. Every time they met up with Sarah Shadlock and her boyfriend Tom, Robin and Matthew seemed to row, something that Robin had pointed out as the argument, which had been brewing since the match, dragged on into the small hours of the morning.
“Sarah was shit-stirring, for God’s sake—can’t you see it? She was the one asking all about him, going on and on, I didn’t start it…”
The everlasting roadworks around Tottenham Court Road station had obstructed Robin’s walk to work ever since she had started at the private detective agency in Denmark Street. Her mood was not improved by tripping on a large chunk of rubble; she staggered a few steps before recovering her balance. A barrage of wolf-whistles and lewd remarks issued from a deep chasm in the road full of men in hard hats and fluorescent jackets. Shaking long strawberry-blonde hair out of her eyes, red in the face, she ignored them, her thoughts returning irresistibly to Sarah Shadlock and her sly, persistent questions about Robin’s boss.
“He is strangely attractive, isn’t he? Bit beaten-up-looking, but I’ve never minded that. Is he sexy in the flesh? He’s a big guy, isn’t he?”
Robin had seen Matthew’s jaw tightening as she tried to return cool, indifferent answers.
“Is it just the two of you in the office? Is it really? Nobody else at all?”
Bitch, thought Robin, whose habitual good nature had never stretched to Sarah Shadlock. She knew exactly what she was doing.
“Is it true he was decorated in Afghanistan? Is it? Wow, so we’re talking a war hero too?”
Robin had tried her hardest to shut down Sarah’s one-woman chorus of appreciation for Cormoran Strike, but to no avail: a coolness had crept into Matthew’s manner towards his fiancée by the end of the match. His displeasure had not prevented him bantering and laughing with Sarah on the journey back from Vicarage Road, though, and Tom, whom Robin found boring and obtuse, had chortled away, oblivious to any undercurrents.
Jostled by passersby also navigating the open trenches in the road, Robin finally reached the opposite pavement, passing beneath the shadow of the concrete grid-like monolith that was Centre Point and becoming angry all over again as she remembered what Matthew had told her at midnight, when the argument had burst back into flame.