Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(29)

“He’d probably laugh,” said Martin airily.

“Because you’re peers?” said Robin, her tone brittle. “Both of you with your stunning war records, risking life and limb?”

Martin was the only one of the four Ellacott siblings who had not attended university, and the only one who still lived with their parents. He was always touchy at the slightest hint that he underachieved.

“The f*ck’s that supposed to mean—I should be in the army?” he demanded, firing up.

“Martin!” said Linda sharply. “Mind your language!”

“Does she have a go at you for still having both legs, Matt?” asked Martin.

Robin dropped her knife and fork and walked out of the kitchen.

The image of the severed leg was before her again, with its shining white tibia sticking out of the dead flesh, those slightly grubby toenails whose owner had meant, perhaps, to clean or paint before anybody else would see them…

And now she was crying, crying for the first time since she had taken the package. The pattern on the old stair carpet blurred and she had to grope for the doorknob of her bedroom. She crossed to the bed and dropped, face down, onto the clean duvet, her shoulders shaking and her chest heaving, her hands pressed over her wet face as she tried to muffle the sound of her sobs. She did not want any of them to come after her; she did not want to have to talk or explain; she simply wanted to be alone to release the emotion she had tamped down to get through the working week.

Her brother’s glibness about Strike’s amputation was an echo of Strike’s own jokes about the dismembered leg. A woman had died in what were likely to have been terrible, brutal circumstances, and nobody seemed to care as much as Robin did. Death and a hatchet had reduced the unknown female to a lump of meat, a problem to be solved and she, Robin, felt as though she was the only person to remember that a living, breathing human being had been using that leg, perhaps as recently as a week ago…

After ten minutes’ solid weeping she rolled over onto her back, opened her streaming eyes and looked around her old bedroom as though it might give her succor.

This room had once seemed like the only safe place on earth. For the three months after she had dropped out of university she had barely left it, even to eat. The walls had been shocking pink back then, a mistaken decorating choice she had made when she was sixteen. She had dimly recognized that it did not work, but had not wanted to ask her father to repaint, so she had covered the garish glare with as many posters as possible. There had been a large picture of Destiny’s Child facing her at the foot of the bed. Though there was nothing there now but the smooth eau de nil wallpaper Linda had put up when Robin left home to join Matthew in London, Robin could still visualize Beyoncé, Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams staring at her out of the cover of their album Survivor. The image was indelibly connected with the worst time of her life.

The walls bore only two framed photographs these days: one of Robin with her old sixth form on their last day of school (Matthew at the back of the shot, the most handsome boy in the year, refusing to pull a face or wear a stupid hat) and the other of Robin, aged twelve, riding her old Highland pony Angus, a shaggy, strong and stubborn creature who had lived on her uncle’s farm and on whom Robin had doted, his naughtiness notwithstanding.

Depleted and exhausted, she blinked away more tears and wiped her wet face with the heels of her hands. Muffled voices rose from the kitchen below her room. Her mother, she was sure, would be advising Matthew to leave her alone for a while. Robin hoped that he would listen. She felt as though she would like to sleep through the rest of the weekend.

An hour later she was still lying on the double bed, staring drowsily out of the window at the top of the lime tree in the garden, when Matthew knocked and entered with a mug of tea.

“Your mum thought you could use this.”

“Thanks,” said Robin.

“We’re all going to watch the National together. Mart’s put a big bet on Ballabriggs.”

No mention of her distress or of Martin’s crass comments; Matthew’s manner implied that she had somehow embarrassed herself and he was offering her a way out. She knew at once that he had no conception of what the sight and feel of that woman’s leg had stirred up in her. No, he was simply annoyed that Strike, whom none of the Ellacotts had ever met, was once again taking up space in weekend conversation. It was Sarah Shadlock at the rugby all over again.

“I don’t like watching horses break their necks,” said Robin. “Anyway, I’ve got some work to do.”

He stood looking down at her, then walked out, closing the door with a little too much force, so that it jumped open again behind him.

Robin sat up, smoothed her hair, took a deep breath and then went to fetch her laptop case from on top of the dressing table. She had felt guilty bringing it along on their trip home, guilty for hoping that she might find time for what she was privately calling her lines of inquiry. Matthew’s air of generous forgiveness had put paid to that. Let him watch the National. She had better things to do.

Returning to the bed, she made a pile of pillows behind her, opened the laptop and navigated to certain bookmarked webpages that she had talked to nobody about, not even Strike, who would no doubt think she was wasting her time.

She had already spent several hours pursuing two separate but related lines of inquiry suggested by the letters that she had insisted Strike should take to Wardle: the communication from the young woman who wished to remove her own leg, and the missive from the person who wished to do things to Strike’s stump that had made Robin feel faintly queasy.