Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(21)

His voice had cracked melodramatically and he broke into dry sobs. Counsel for the defense hastened to ask whether he needed to take a moment.

It was then that Whittaker had shaken his head bravely and offered his gnomic pronouncement on Leda’s death:

“She wanted to die. She was the quicklime girl.”

Nobody else had understood the reference at the time, perhaps only Strike who had heard the song so many times through his childhood and adolescence. Whittaker was quoting from “Mistress of the Salmon Salt.”

He had walked free. The medical evidence supported the view that Leda had not been a habitual heroin user, but her reputation was against her. She had done plenty of other drugs. She was an infamous party girl. To the men in curled wigs whose job it was to classify violent deaths, it seemed wholly in character that she would die on a dirty mattress in pursuit of pleasure her mundane life could not give her.

On the court steps, Whittaker announced that he intended to write a biography of his late wife, then vanished from view. The promised book had never appeared. Leda and Whittaker’s son had been adopted by Whittaker’s long-suffering grandparents and Strike had never seen him again. Strike had quietly left Oxford and joined the army; Lucy had gone off to college; life had carried on.

Whittaker’s periodic reappearance in the newspapers, always connected with some criminal act, could never be a matter of indifference to Leda’s children. Of course, Whittaker was never front-page news: he was a man who had married somebody famous for sleeping with the famous. Such limelight as he achieved was a weak reflection of a reflection.

“He’s the turd that won’t flush,” as Strike put it to Lucy, who did not laugh. She was less inclined even than Robin to embrace rough humor as a means of dealing with unpalatable facts.

Tired and increasingly hungry, swaying with the train, his knee aching, Strike felt low and aggrieved, mainly at himself. For years he had turned his face resolutely towards the future. The past was unalterable: he did not deny what had happened, but there was no need to wallow in it, no need to go seeking out the squat of nearly two decades ago, to recall the rattling of that letter box, to relive the screams of the terrified cat, the sight of his mother in the undertaker’s, pale and waxen in her bell-sleeved dress…

You’re a f*cking idiot, Strike told himself angrily as he scanned the Tube map, trying to work out how many changes he would have to make to get to Nick and Ilsa’s. Whittaker never sent the leg. You’re just looking for an excuse to get at him.

The sender of that leg was organized, calculating and efficient; the Whittaker he had known nearly two decades previously had been chaotic, hot-headed and volatile.

And yet…

You’ll get yours…

She was the quicklime girl…

“Fuck!” said Strike loudly, causing consternation all around him.

He had just realized that he had missed his connection.





11



Feeling easy on the outside,

But not so funny on the inside.

Blue ?yster Cult, “This Ain’t the Summer of Love”



Strike and Robin took turns tailing Platinum over the next couple of days. Strike made excuses to meet during the working day and insisted that Robin leave for home during daylight hours, when the Tube was still busy. On Thursday evening, Strike followed Platinum until the Russian was safely back under the ever-suspicious gaze of Two-Times, then returned to Octavia Street in Wandsworth, where he was still living to avoid the press.

This was the second time in his detective career that Strike had been forced to take refuge with his friends Nick and Ilsa. Theirs was probably the only place he could have borne to stay, but Strike still felt strangely undomesticated within the orbit of a dual-career married couple. Whatever the drawbacks of the cramped attic space above his office, he had total freedom to come and go as he pleased, to eat at 2 a.m. when he had come in from a surveillance job, to move up and down the clanging metal stairs without fear of waking housemates. Now he felt unspoken pressure to be present for the occasional shared meal, feeling antisocial when he helped himself from the fridge in the small hours, even though he had been invited to do so.

On the other hand, Strike had not needed the army to teach him to be tidy and organized. The years of his youth that had been spent in chaos and filth had caused an opposite reaction. Ilsa had already remarked on the fact that Strike moved around the house without leaving any real mark on it, whereas her husband, a gastroenterologist, might be found by the trail of discarded belongings and imperfectly closed drawers.

Strike knew from acquaintances back in Denmark Street that press photographers were still hanging around the door to his office and he was resigned to spending the rest of the week in Nick and Ilsa’s guest room, which had bare white walls and a melancholy sense of awaiting its true destiny. They had been trying unsuccessfully for years to have a child. Strike never inquired as to their progress and sensed that Nick, in particular, was grateful for his restraint.

He had known them both for a long time, Ilsa for most of his life. Fair-haired and bespectacled, she came from St. Mawes in Cornwall, which was the most constant home that Strike had ever known. He and Ilsa had been in the same primary school class. Whenever he had gone back to stay with Ted and Joan, as had happened regularly through his youth, they had resumed a friendship initially based on the fact that Joan and Ilsa’s mother were themselves old schoolmates.