Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(37)

“Excuse me,” said Strike. “Do you happen to know where Mrs. Laing lives? I’ve forgotten the number.”

“Messus Laing?” replied the dog walker, surveying Strike from beneath thick salt and pepper eyebrows. “Aye, she’s my next-door neighbor.”

Thank Christ.

“Three along,” said the man, pointing, “wi’ the stone wishing well oot front.”

“Thanks very much,” said Strike.

As he turned up Mrs. Laing’s drive he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, that the old man was still standing on the spot, watching him, in spite of the collie trying to tug him downhill.

Mrs. Laing’s bungalow looked clean and respectable. Stone animals of Disneyesque cuteness littered her lawn and peeped out from her flowerbeds. The front door lay at the side of the building, in shadow. Only as he raised his hand to the doorknocker did it occur to Strike that he might, within seconds, come face to face with Donald Laing.

For a whole minute after he knocked, nothing happened except that the elderly dog walker retraced his steps and stood at Mrs. Laing’s gate, unabashedly staring. Strike suspected that the man regretted giving out his neighbor’s address and was checking that the large stranger meant the woman no harm, but he was wrong.

“She’s in,” he called to Strike, who was deliberating as to whether to try again. “But she’s wud.”

“She’s what?” Strike called back as he knocked for a second time.

“Wud. Doolally.”

The dog walker took a few steps down the drive towards Strike.

“Demented,” he translated for the Englishman.

“Ah,” said Strike.

The door opened, revealing a tiny, wizened, sallow-faced old woman wearing a deep blue dressing gown. She glared up at Strike with a kind of unfocused malevolence. There were several stiff whiskers growing out of her chin.

“Mrs. Laing?”

She said nothing, but peered at him out of eyes that he knew, bloodshot and faded though they were, must have been beady and ferret-like in their day.

“Mrs. Laing, I’m looking for your son Donald.”

“No,” she said, with surprising vehemence. “No.”

She retreated and slammed the door.

“Bugger,” said Strike under his breath, which made him think of Robin. She would almost certainly have been better than him at charming the little old woman. Slowly he turned, wondering whether there was anyone else in Melrose who might help—he had definitely seen other Laings listed on 192.com—and found himself face to face with the dog walker, who had proceeded all the way down the drive to meet him and was looking cautiously excited.

“You’re the detective,” he said. “You’re the detective that put her son away.”

Strike was astonished. He could not imagine how he was recognizable to an elderly Scottish man whom he had never met before. His so-called fame was of a very low order when it came to being identified by strangers. He walked the streets of London daily without anyone caring who he was, and unless somebody met him or heard his name in the context of an investigation, was rarely associated with the newspaper stories about his successful cases.

“Aye, you did!” said the elderly man, his excitement rising. “My wife and I are friends of Margaret Bunyan’s.” And in the face of Strike’s mystification he elaborated: “Rhona’s mother.”

It took a few seconds for Strike’s capacious memory to render up the information that Laing’s wife, the young woman whom he had discovered tied to the bed beneath the bloodstained sheet, had been called Rhona.

“When Margaret seen you in the papers she said to us, ‘That’s him, that’s the lad that rescued our Rhona!’ You’ve done very well for yourself, haven’t you? Stop it, Wullie!” he added in a loud aside to the eager collie, which was still pulling on its lead, trying to regain the road. “Oh, aye, Margaret follows everything you do, all the stories in the papers. You found out who killed that model girl—and that writer! Margaret’s never forgot what you did for her girl, never.”

Strike muttered something indistinct, something he hoped sounded grateful for Margaret’s appreciation.

“Wha’ for are you wanting to talk to auld Mrs. Laing? He’s nae done something else, has he, Donnie?”

“I’m trying to find him,” said Strike evasively. “D’you know if he’s back in Melrose?”

“Och, no, I wouldnae think so. He came back to see his mother a few years back, but I dinnae know that he’s been here since. It’s a small toon: Donnie Laing back—we’d hear, ken?”

“D’you think Mrs.—Bunyan, did you say?—might have any—?”

“She’d love tae meet you,” said the old man excitedly. “No, Wullie,” he added to the whining Border collie, which was trying to tug him to the gate. “I’ll ring her, will I? She’s only over in Darnick. Next village. Will I ring?”

“That’d be very helpful.”

So Strike accompanied the old man next door and waited in a small, spotless sitting room while he gabbled excitedly into the phone over his dog’s increasingly furious whines.

“She’ll come over,” said the old man, with his hand over the receiver. “D’ye want to meet her here? You’re welcome. The wife’ll make tea—”