Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(27)

The changing room smelled of new carpet and polish. While Robin’s mother Linda watched the dressmaker pin, tuck and twitch the yards of chiffon Robin, depressed by her own reflection, focused instead on the little corner stand carrying crystal tiaras and fake flowers.

“Remind me, have we fixed on a headdress?” asked the dressmaker, who had the habit of using the first person plural so often found in nursing staff. “We were leaning towards a tiara for the winter wedding, weren’t we? I think it might be worth trying flowers with the strapless.”

“Flowers would be nice,” Linda agreed from the corner of the dressing room.

Mother and daughter closely resembled each other. Though her once slender waist had thickened and the faded red-gold hair piled untidily on top of her head was now laced with silver, Linda’s blue-gray eyes were her daughter’s and they rested now upon her second child with an expression of concern and shrewdness that would have been comically familiar to Strike.

Robin tried on an array of fake floral headdresses and liked none of them.

“Maybe I’ll stick with the tiara,” she said.

“Or fresh flowers?” suggested Linda.

“Yes,” said Robin, suddenly keen to get away from the carpet smell and her pale, boxed-in reflection. “Let’s go and see whether the florist could do something.”

She was glad to have the changing room to herself for a few minutes. As she worked her way out of the dress and pulled her jeans and sweater back on, she tried to analyze her low mood. While she regretted that she had been forced to miss Strike’s meeting with Wardle, she had been looking forward to putting a couple of hundred miles between her and the faceless man in black who had handed her a severed leg.

Yet she had no sense of escape. She and Matthew had rowed yet again on the train coming north. Even here, in the changing room in James Street, her multiplying anxieties haunted her: the agency’s dwindling caseload, the fear of what would happen if Strike could no longer afford to employ her. Once dressed, she checked her mobile. No messages from Strike.

She was almost monosyllabic among the buckets of mimosa and lilies a quarter of an hour later. The florist fussed and fiddled, holding blooms against Robin’s hair and accidentally letting drops of cold, greenish water fall from the long stem of a rose onto her cream sweater.

“Let’s go to Bettys,” suggested Linda when a floral headdress had at last been ordered.

Bettys of Harrogate was a local institution, the spa town’s long-established tea room. There were hanging flower baskets outside, where customers queued under a black, gold and glass canopy, and within were tea-canister lamps and ornamental teapots, squashy chairs and waitresses in broderie anglaise uniforms. It had been a treat to Robin, ever since she was small, to peer through the glass counter at rows of fat marzipan pigs, to watch her mother buying one of the luxurious fruitcakes laced with alcohol that came in its own special tin.

Today, sitting beside the window staring out at primary-colored flowerbeds resembling the geometric shapes cut out of plasticine by small children, Robin declined anything to eat, asked for a pot of tea and flipped over her mobile again. Nothing.

“Are you all right?” Linda asked her.

“Fine,” said Robin. “I was just wondering if there was any news.”

“What kind of news?”

“About the leg,” said Robin. “Strike met Wardle last night—the Met officer.”

“Oh,” said Linda and silence fell between them until their tea arrived.

Linda had ordered a Fat Rascal, one of Bettys’ large scones. She finished buttering it before she asked:

“You and Cormoran are going to try and find out who sent that leg yourselves, are you?”

Something in her mother’s tone made Robin proceed warily.

“We’re interested in what the police are doing, that’s all.”

“Ah,” said Linda, chewing, watching Robin.

Robin felt guilty for being irritable. The wedding dress was expensive and she had not been appreciative.

“Sorry for being snappy.”

“That’s all right.”

“It’s just, Matthew’s on my case all the time about working for Cormoran.”

“Yes, we heard something about that last night.”

“Oh God, Mum, I’m sorry!”

Robin had thought they’d kept the row quiet enough not to wake her parents. They had argued on the way up to Masham, suspended hostilities while having supper with her parents, then resumed the argument in the living room after Linda and Michael had gone to bed.

“Cormoran’s name came up a lot, didn’t it? I assume Matthew’s—?”

“He’s not worried,” said Robin.

Matthew determinedly treated Robin’s work as a kind of joke, but when forced to take it seriously—when, for instance, somebody sent her a severed leg—he became angry rather than concerned.

“Well, if he’s not worried, he should be,” said Linda. “Somebody sent you part of a dead woman, Robin. It’s not so long ago that Matt called us to say you were in hospital with concussion. I’m not telling you to resign!” she added, refusing to be cowed by Robin’s reproachful expression. “I know this is what you want! Anyway”—she forced the larger half of her Fat Rascal into Robin’s unresisting hand—“I wasn’t going to ask whether Matt was worried. I was going to ask whether he was jealous.”