Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(33)

“And you’ve got famous.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Strike.

A pale young man in shirtsleeves put his head out of an office further down the corridor, interested in the conversation.

“Gotta get on, Emma,” said Hardacre briskly. “Knew they’d be interested if they saw you,” he told Strike, once he had ushered the private detective into his office and closed the door behind them.

The room was rather dark, due largely to the fact that the window looked directly out onto a bare face of craggy rock. Photographs of Hardacre’s kids and a sizable collection of beer steins enlivened the decor, which comprised the same shabby pink carpet and pale green walls as the corridor outside.

“All right, Oggy,” said Hardacre, tapping at his keyboard, then standing back to let Strike sit down at his desk. “Here he is.”

The SIB was able to access records across all three services. There on the computer monitor was a headshot of Noel Campbell Brockbank. It had been taken before Strike met him, before Brockbank had taken the hits to the face that had permanently sunken one of his eye sockets and enlarged one of his ears. A dark crew cut, a long, narrow face, tinged blue around the jaw and with an unusually high forehead: Strike had thought when they had first met that his elongated head and slightly lopsided features made it look as though Brockbank’s head had been squeezed in a vice.

“I can’t let you print anything out, Oggy,” said Hardacre as Strike sat down on the wheeled computer chair, “but you could take a picture of the screen. Coffee?”

“Tea, if you’ve got any. Cheers.”

Hardacre left the room, closing the door carefully behind him, and Strike took out his mobile to take pictures of the screen. When he was confident he had a decent likeness he scrolled down to see Brockbank’s full record, making a note of his date of birth and other personal details.

Brockbank had been born on Christmas Day in the year of Strike’s own birth. He had given a home address in Barrow-in-Furness when he had joined the army. Shortly before serving in Operation Granby—better known to the public as the first Gulf war—he had married a military widow with two daughters, one of them Brittany. His son had been born while he was serving in Bosnia.

Strike went through the record, making notes as he did so, all the way down to the life-changing injury that had put paid to Brockbank’s career. Hardacre reentered the room with two mugs and Strike muttered thanks as he continued to peruse the digital file. There was no mention in here of the crime of which Brockbank had been accused, which Strike and Hardacre had investigated and of which they both remained convinced that Brockbank was guilty. The fact that he had eluded justice was one of the biggest regrets of Strike’s military career. His most vivid memory of the man was Brockbank’s expression, feral in its wildness, as he launched himself at Strike bearing a broken beer bottle. He had been around Strike’s own size, perhaps even taller. The sound of Brockbank hitting the wall when Strike punched him had been, Hardacre said later, like a car ramming the side of the flimsy army accommodation.

“He’s drawing a nice fat military pension, I see,” muttered Strike, scribbling down the various locations to which it had been sent since Brockbank had left the military. He had gone home first: Barrow-in-Furness. Then Manchester, for a little under a year.

“Ha,” said Strike quietly. “So it was you, you bastard.”

Brockbank had left Manchester for Market Harborough, then returned to Barrow-in-Furness.

“What’s this here, Hardy?”

“Psych report,” said Hardacre, who had sat down on a low chair by the wall and was perusing a file of his own. “You shouldn’t be looking at that at all. Very careless of me to have left it up there.”

“Very,” agreed Strike, opening it.

However, the psychiatric report did not tell Strike much that he did not already know. Only once he had been hospitalized had it become clear that Brockbank was an alcoholic. There had been much debate among his doctors as to which of his symptoms could be attributed to alcohol, which to PTSD and which to his traumatic brain injuries. Strike had to Google some of the words as he went: aphasia—difficulty finding the right word; dysarthria—disordered speech; alexithymia—difficulty understanding or identifying one’s own emotions.

Forgetfulness had been very convenient to Brockbank around that time. How difficult would it have been for him to fake some of these classic symptoms?

“What they didn’t take into account,” said Strike, who had known and liked several other men with traumatic brain injury, “was that he was a cunt to start with.”

“True that,” said Hardacre, sipping his coffee while he worked.

Strike closed down Brockbank’s files and opened Laing’s. His photograph tallied exactly with Strike’s memories of the Borderer, who had been only twenty when they had first met: broad and pale, his hair growing low on his forehead, with the small, dark eyes of a ferret.

Strike had good recall of the details of Laing’s brief army career, which he himself had ended. Having taken a note of Laing’s mother’s address in Melrose, he skim-read the rest of the document and then opened the attached psychiatric report.

Strong indications of anti-social and borderline personality disorders… likely to present continuing risk of harm to others…