Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(22)

Nick, whose sandy hair had begun receding in his twenties, was a friend from the comprehensive in Hackney where Strike had finished his school career. Nick and Ilsa had met at Strike’s eighteenth birthday party in London, dated for a year, then split up when they went off to separate universities. In their midtwenties they had met again, by which time Ilsa was engaged to another lawyer and Nick dating a fellow doctor. Within weeks both relationships were over; a year later, Nick and Ilsa had married, with Strike as best man.

Strike returned to their house at half past ten in the evening. As he closed the front door Nick and Ilsa greeted him from the sitting room and urged him to help himself to their still-plentiful takeaway curry.

“What’s this?” he asked, looking around, disconcerted, at long lengths of Union Jack bunting, many sheets of scribbled notes and what looked like two hundred red, white and blue plastic cups in a large polythene bag.

“We’re helping organize the street party for the royal wedding,” said Ilsa.

“Jesus Christ almighty,” said Strike darkly, heaping his plate with lukewarm Madras.

“It’ll be fun! You should come.”

Strike threw her a look that made her snigger.

“Good day?” asked Nick, passing Strike a can of Tennent’s.

“No,” said Strike, accepting the lager with gratitude. “Another job canceled. I’m down to two clients.”

Nick and Ilsa made sympathetic noises, and there followed a comradely silence while he shoveled curry into his mouth. Tired and dispirited, Strike had spent most of the journey home contemplating the fact that the arrival of the severed leg was having, as he had feared, the effect of a wrecking ball on the business he had been working so hard to build up. His photograph was currently proliferating online and in the papers, in connection with a horrible, random act. It had been a pretext for the papers to remind the world that he was himself one-legged, a fact of which he was not ashamed, but which he was hardly likely to use in advertising; a whiff of something strange, something perverse, was attached to him now. He was tainted.

“Any news about the leg?” asked Ilsa, once Strike had demolished a considerable amount of curry and was halfway down the can of lager. “Have the police got anything?”

“I’m meeting Wardle tomorrow night to catch up, but it doesn’t sound like they’ve got much. He’s been concentrating on the gangster.”

He had not given Nick and Ilsa details about three of the men he thought might be dangerous and vengeful enough to have sent him the leg, but he had mentioned that he had once run across a career criminal who had previously cut off and mailed a body part. Understandably, they had immediately taken Wardle’s view that he was the likely culprit.

For the first time in years, sitting on their comfortable green sofa, Strike remembered that Nick and Ilsa had met Jeff Whittaker. Strike’s eighteenth birthday party had taken place at the Bell pub in Whitechapel; his mother was by this time six months pregnant. His aunt’s face had been a mask of mingled disapproval and forced jollity and his Uncle Ted, usually the peacemaker, had been unable to disguise his anger and disgust as a patently high Whittaker had interrupted the disco to sing one of his self-penned songs. Strike remembered his own fury, his longing to be away, to be gone to Oxford, to be rid of it all, but perhaps Nick and Ilsa would not remember much about that: they had been engrossed in each other that night, dazed and amazed by their sudden, profound mutual attraction.

“You’re worried about Robin,” said Ilsa, more statement than question.

Strike grunted agreement, his mouth full of naan bread. He had had time to reflect on it over the last four days. In this extremity, and through no fault of her own, she had become a vulnerability, a weak spot, and he suspected that whoever had decided to re-address the leg to her had known it. If his employee had been male, he would not currently feel so worried.

Strike had not forgotten that Robin had hitherto been an almost unqualified asset. She was able to persuade recalcitrant witnesses to speak when his own size and naturally intimidating features inclined them to refuse. Her charm and ease of manner had allayed suspicion, opened doors, smoothed Strike’s path a hundred times. He knew he owed her; he simply wished that, right now, she would bow out of the way, stay hidden until they had caught the sender of the severed leg.

“I like Robin,” said Ilsa.

“Everyone likes Robin,” said Strike thickly, through a second mouthful of naan. It was the truth: his sister Lucy, the friends who called in at the office, his clients—all made a point of telling Strike how much they liked the woman who worked with him. Nevertheless, he detected a note of faint inquiry in Ilsa’s voice that made him keen to make any discussion of Robin impersonal, and he felt vindicated when Ilsa’s next question was:

“How’s it going with Elin?”

“All right,” said Strike.

“Is she still trying to hide you from her ex?” asked Ilsa, a faint sting in the inquiry.

“Don’t like Elin, do you?” said Strike, taking the discussion unexpectedly into the enemy camp for his own amusement. He had known Ilsa on and off for thirty years: her flustered denial was exactly what he had expected.

“I do like—I mean, I don’t really know her, but she seems—anyway, you’re happy, that’s what counts.”

He had thought that this would be sufficient to make Ilsa drop the subject of Robin—she was not the first of his friends to say that he and Robin got on so well, wasn’t there a possibility…? Hadn’t he ever considered…?—but Ilsa was a lawyer and not easily scared away from pursuing a line of questioning.