Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(4)

Even as he said it, he realized that this was a right leg, like his own lost limb, and that it had been cut below the knee, which was exactly where he had been amputated. His mobile still clamped to his ear, Strike peered more closely at the limb, his nostrils filling with an unpleasant smell like recently defrosted chicken. Caucasian skin: smooth, pale and unblemished but for an old greenish bruise on the calf, imperfectly shaven. The stubbly hairs were fair and the unpainted toenails a little grubby. The severed tibia shone icy white against the surrounding flesh. A clean cut: Strike thought it likely to have been made by an axe or a cleaver.

“A woman’s, did you say?”

“Looks like—”

Strike had noticed something else. There was scarring on the calf where the leg had been severed: old scarring, unrelated to the wound that had taken it from the body.

How many times during his Cornish childhood had he been caught unawares as he stood with his back to the treacherous sea? Those who did not know the ocean well forgot its solidity, its brutality. When it slammed into them with the force of cold metal they were appalled. Strike had faced, worked with and managed fear all his professional life, but the sight of that old scarring rendered him temporarily winded by a terror all the worse for its unexpectedness.

“Are you still there?” said Wardle on the end of the line.

“What?”

Strike’s twice-broken nose was within an inch of the place where the woman’s leg had been cut off. He was remembering the scarred leg of a child he had never forgotten… how long was it since he had seen her? How old would she be now?

“You called me first…?” Wardle prompted.

“Yeah,” said Strike, forcing himself to concentrate. “I’d rather you did it than anyone else, but if you can’t—”

“I’m on my way,” said Wardle. “Won’t be long. Sit tight.”

Strike turned off his phone and set it down, still staring at the leg. Now he saw that there was a note lying underneath it, a typed note. Trained by the British Army in investigative procedure, Strike resisted the powerful temptation to tug it out and read it: he must not taint forensic evidence. Instead he crouched down unsteadily so that he could read the address hanging upside down on the open lid.

The box had been addressed to Robin, which he did not like at all. Her name was correctly spelled, typed on a white sticker that bore the address of their office. This sticker overlay another. Squinting, determined not to reposition the box even to read the address more clearly, he saw that the sender had first addressed the box to “Cameron Strike,” then overlain it with the second sticker reading “Robin Ellacott.” Why had they changed their mind?

“Fuck,” said Strike quietly.

He stood up with some difficulty, took Robin’s handbag from the peg behind the door, locked the glass door and headed upstairs.

“Police are on their way,” he told her as he set her bag down in front of her. “Want a cup of tea?”

She nodded.

“Want brandy in it?”

“You haven’t got any brandy,” she said. Her voice was slightly croaky.

“Have you been looking?”

“Of course not!” she said, and he smiled at how indignant she sounded at the suggestion she might have been through his cupboards. “You’re just—you’re not the sort of person who’d have medicinal brandy.”

“Want a beer?”

She shook her head, unable to smile.

Once the tea had been made, Strike sat down opposite her with his own mug. He looked exactly what he was: a large ex-boxer who smoked too much and ate too much fast food. He had heavy eyebrows, a flattened and asymmetrical nose and, when not smiling, a permanent expression of sullen crossness. His dense, dark curly hair, still damp from the shower, reminded her of Jacques Burger and Sarah Shadlock. The row seemed a lifetime ago. She had only briefly thought of Matthew since coming upstairs. She dreaded telling him what had happened. He would be angry. He did not like her working for Strike.

“Have you looked at—at it?” she muttered, after picking up and setting down the boiling tea without drinking it.

“Yeah,” said Strike.

She did not know what else to ask. It was a severed leg. The situation was so horrible, so grotesque, that every question that occurred to her sounded ridiculous, crass. Do you recognize it? Why do you think they sent it? And, most pressing of all, why to me?

“The police’ll want to hear about the courier,” he said.

“I know,” said Robin. “I’ve been trying to remember everything about him.”

The downstairs door buzzer sounded.

“That’ll be Wardle.”

“Wardle?” she repeated, startled.

“He’s the friendliest copper we know,” Strike reminded her. “Stay put, I’ll bring him to you here.”

Strike had managed to make himself unpopular among the Metropolitan Police over the previous year, which was not entirely his fault. The fulsome press coverage of his two most notable detective triumphs had understandably galled those officers whose efforts he had trumped. However, Wardle, who had helped him out on the first of those cases, had shared in some of the subsequent glory and relations between them remained reasonably amicable. Robin had only ever seen Wardle in the newspaper reports of the case. Their paths had not crossed in court.