Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(40)

Strike laid a large hand briefly on the sobbing woman’s shoulder, then hoisted himself to his feet and approached the young barmaid who was watching them with her mouth open. Brandy seemed too strong for the sparrow-like creature behind him. Strike’s Aunt Joan, who was only a little older than Mrs. Bunyan, always regarded port as medicinal. He ordered a glass and took it back to her.

“Here. Drink this.”

His reward was a recrudescence of tears, but after much more dabbing with the sodden handkerchief she said shakily, “You’re very kind,” sipped it, gave a little gasping sigh and blinked at him, her fair-lashed eyes pink like a piglet’s.

“Have you got any idea where Laing went after turning up at Rhona’s?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Ben put out feelers through work, through the probation office. Apparently he went to Gateshead, but I don’t know whether he’s still there.”

Gateshead. Strike remembered the Donald Laing he had found online. Had he moved from Gateshead to Corby? Or were they different men?

“Anyway,” said Mrs. Bunyan, “he’s never bothered Rhona and Ben again.”

“I’ll bet he hasn’t,” said Strike, picking up his knife and fork. “A copper and German Shepherds, eh? He’s not stupid.”

She seemed to take courage and comfort from his words, and with a timid, tearful smile began to pick at her macaroni cheese.

“They married young,” commented Strike, who was keen to hear anything he could about Laing, anything that might give a lead on his associations or habits.

She nodded, swallowed and said:

“Far too young. She started seeing him when she was only fifteen and we didn’t like it. We’d heard things about Donnie Laing. There was a young girl who said he’d forced himself on her at the Young Farmers’ disco. It never came to anything: the police said there wasn’t enough evidence. We tried to warn Rhona he was trouble,” she sighed, “but that made her more determined. She was always headstrong, our Rhona.”

“He’d already been accused of rape?” asked Strike. His fish and chips were excellent. The pub was filling up, for which he was grateful: the barmaid’s attention was diverted from them.

“Oh yes. They’re a rough family,” said Mrs. Bunyan, with the sort of prim small-town snobbery that Strike knew well from his own upbringing. “All those brothers, they were always fighting, in trouble with the police, but he was the worst of them. His own brothers didn’t like him. I don’t think his mother liked him much, tae tell the truth. There was a rumor,” she said in a burst of confidence, “that he wasnae the father’s. The parents were always fighting and they separated round about the time she got pregnant with Donnie. They say she had a run-around with one of the local policemen, as a matter of fact. I don’t know whether it’s true. The policeman moved on and Mr. Laing moved back in, but Mr. Laing never liked Donnie, I know that. Never liked him at all. People said it was because he knew Donnie wasn’t his.

“He was the wildest of all of them. A big lad. He got into the junior sevens—”

“Sevens?”

“The rugby sevens,” she said, and even this small, genteel lady was surprised that Strike did not immediately understand what, to Melrose, seemed more religion than sport. “But they kicked him out. No discipline. Someone carved up Greenyards the week after they kicked him out. The pitch,” she added, in response to the Englishman’s mystifying ignorance.

The port was making her talkative. Words were tumbling out of her now.

“He took up boxing instead. He had the gift of the gab, though, oh aye. When Rhona first took up with him—she was fifteen and he was seventeen—I had some folk telling me he wasn’t a bad lad really. Oh, aye,” she repeated, nodding at Strike’s look of disbelief. “Folk that didn’t know him so well were took in by him. He could be charming when he wanted to, Donnie Laing.

“But you just ask Walter Gilchrist whether he was charming. Walter sacked him off the farm—he was always being late—and someone set fire to his barn after. Oh, they never proved it was Donnie. They never proved it was him who wrecked the pitch, neither, but I know what I believe.

“Rhona wouldn’t listen. She thought she knew him. He was misunderstood and I don’t know what else. We were prejudiced, narrow-minded. He wanted tae join the army. Good riddance, I thought. I hoped she’d forget him if he left.

“Then he came back. He got her pregnant but she lost it. She was angry with me because I said—”

She did not want to tell him what she had said, but Strike could imagine.

“—and then she wouldn’t talk to me anymore, and she went and married him on his next leave. Her dad and I weren’t invited,” she said. “Off to Cyprus together. But I know he killed our cat.”

“What?” said Strike, thrown.

“I know it was him. We’d told Rhona she was making an awful mistake, last time we saw her before she married him. That night we couldn’t find Purdy. Next day she was on the back lawn, dead. The vet said she’d been strangled.”

On the plasma screen over her shoulder a scarlet-clad Dimitar Berbatov was celebrating a goal against Fulham. The air was full of Borders voices. Glasses clinked and cutlery tinkled as Strike’s companion talked of death and mutilation.