Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(20)
However, Leda’s fame was not all that attracted Whittaker. His lover had borne children to two wealthy rock stars who provided child support. Whittaker had entered the squat under the clear impression that it was part of Leda’s style to dwell in impoverished bohemia, but that somewhere nearby was a vast pool of money into which Strike and Lucy’s fathers—Jonny Rokeby and Rick Fantoni respectively—were pouring money. He did not seem to understand or believe the truth: that years of Leda’s financial mismanagement and profligacy had led both men to tie up the money in such a way that Leda could not fritter it away. Gradually, over the months, Whittaker’s spiteful asides and jibes on the subject of Leda’s reluctance to spend money on him had become more frequent. There were grotesque tantrums when Leda would not fork out for the Fender Stratocaster on which he had set his heart, would not buy him the Jean Paul Gaultier velvet jacket for which, stinking and shabby though he was, he suddenly had a yen.
He increased the pressure, telling outrageous and easily disprovable lies: that he needed urgent medical treatment, that he was ten thousand pounds in debt to a man threatening to break his legs. Leda was alternately amused and upset.
“Darling, I haven’t got any dough,” she would say. “Really, darling, I haven’t, or I’d give you some, wouldn’t I?”
Leda had fallen pregnant in Strike’s eighteenth year, while he was applying for university. He had been horrified, but even then he had not expected her to marry Whittaker. She had always told her son that she had hated being a wife. Her first teenage essay into matrimony had lasted two weeks before she had fled. Nor did marriage seem at all Whittaker’s style.
Yet it had happened, undoubtedly because Whittaker thought it would be the only sure way to get his hands on those mysteriously hidden millions. The ceremony took place at the Marylebone registry office, where two Beatles had previously married. Perhaps Whittaker had imagined that he would be photographed in the doorway like Paul McCartney, but nobody had been interested. It would take the death of his beaming bride to bring the photographers swarming to the court steps.
Strike suddenly realized that he had walked all the way to Aldgate East station without meaning to. This whole trip, he castigated himself, had been a pointless detour. If he had got back on the train at Whitechapel he would have been well on the way to Nick and Ilsa’s by now. Instead, he had careered off as fast as he could in the wrong direction, timing his arrival perfectly to hit the rush-hour crush on the Tube.
His size, to which was added the offense of a backpack, caused unexpressed disgruntlement in those commuters forced to share the space with him, but Strike barely noticed. A head taller than anyone near him, he held on to a hand strap and watched his swaying reflection in the darkened windows, remembering the last part, the worst part: Whittaker in court, arguing for his liberty, because the police had spotted anomalies in his story of where he had been on the day that the needle entered his wife’s arm, inconsistencies in his account of where the heroin had come from and what Leda’s history of drug use had been.
A raggle-taggle procession of fellow squat-dwellers had given evidence about Leda and Whittaker’s turbulent, violent relationship, about Leda’s eschewal of heroin in all its forms, about Whittaker’s threats, his infidelities, his talk of murder and of money, his lack of noticeable grief after Leda’s body had been found. They had insisted over and again, with unwise hysteria, that they were sure Whittaker had killed her. The defense found them pathetically easy to discredit.
An Oxford student in the dock had come as a refreshing change. The judge had eyed Strike with approval: he was clean, articulate and intelligent, however large and intimidating he might be if not suited and tied. The prosecution had wanted him there to answer questions on Whittaker’s preoccupation with Leda’s wealth. Strike told the silent court about his stepfather’s previous attempts to get his hands on a fortune that existed largely in Whittaker’s own head, and about his increasing pleas to Leda for her to put him in her will as proof of her love for him.
Whittaker watched out of his gold eyes, almost entirely impassive. In the last minute of his evidence, Strike and Whittaker’s eyes had met across the room. The corner of Whittaker’s mouth had lifted in a faint, derisive smile. He had raised his index finger half an inch from the place where it rested on the bench in front of him and made a tiny sideways swiping motion.
Strike had known exactly what he was doing. The micro-gesture had been made just for him, a miniature copy of one with which Strike was familiar: Whittaker’s midair, horizontal slash of the hand, directed at the throat of the person who had offended him.
“You’ll get yours,” Whittaker used to say, the gold eyes wide and manic. “You’ll get yours!”
He had brushed up well. Somebody in his moneyed family had stumped up for a decent defense lawyer. Scrubbed clean, soft-spoken and wearing a suit, he had denied everything in quiet, deferential tones. He had his story straight by the time he appeared in court. Everything that the prosecution tried to pull in to draw a picture of the man he really was—Charles Manson on the ancient record player, the Satanic Bible on the bed, the stoned conversations about killing for pleasure—were batted away by a faintly incredulous Whittaker.
“What can I tell you… I’m a musician, your honor,” he said at one point. “There’s poetry in the darkness. She understood that better than anyone.”