Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(45)

He had her pendant still, along with a few other souvenirs. They were his treasure. What, he wondered, would he take from The Secretary?

A Chinese boy near him was reading something on a tablet. Behavioral Economics. Dumb psychological crap. He had seen a psychologist once, been forced to.

“Tell me about your mother.”

The little bald man had literally said it, the joke line, the cliché. They were supposed to be smart, psychologists. He’d played along for the fun of it, telling the idiot about his mother: that she was a cold, mean, screwed-up bitch. His birth had been an inconvenience, an embarrassment to her, and she wouldn’t have cared if he’d lived or died.

“And your father?”

“I haven’t got a father,” he’d said.

“You mean you never see him?”

Silence.

“You don’t know who he is?”

Silence.

“Or you simply don’t like him?”

He said nothing. He was tired of playing along. People were brain dead if they fell for this kind of crap, but he had long since realized that other people were brain dead.

In any case, he’d told the truth: he had no father. The man who had filled that role, if you wanted to call it that—the one who had knocked him around day in, day out (“a hard man, but a fair man”)—had not fathered him. Violence and rejection, that was what family meant to him. At the same time, home was where he had learned to survive, to box clever. He had always known that he was superior, even when he’d been cowering under the kitchen table as a child. Yes, even then he’d known that he was made of better stuff than the bastard coming at him with his big fist and his clenched face…

The Secretary stood up, imitating the tart with the silver hair, who was just leaving with her laptop in a case. He downed his coffee in one and followed.

She was so easy today, so easy! She’d lost all her wariness; she barely had attention to spare for the platinum whore. He boarded the same Tube train as the pair of them, keeping his back to The Secretary but watching her reflection from between the reaching arms of a bunch of Kiwi tourists. He found it easy to slip into the crowd behind her when she left the train.

The three of them moved in procession, the silver-haired tart, The Secretary and him, up the stairs, onto the pavement, along the road to Spearmint Rhino… he was already late home, but he could not resist this. She had not stayed out after dark before and the holdall and the lack of engagement ring all added up to an irresistible opportunity. He would simply have to make up some story for It.

The silver-haired tart disappeared into the club. The Secretary slowed down and stood irresolute on the pavement. He slid out his mobile and pulled back into a shadowy doorway, watching her.





20



I never realized she was so undone.

Blue ?yster Cult, “Debbie Denise”

Lyrics by Patti Smith



Robin had forgotten her promise to Strike that she would not stay out after dark. In fact, she had hardly registered the fact that the sun had gone down until she realized that headlights were swooping past her and that the shop windows were lit up. Platinum had changed her routine today. She would usually have been inside Spearmint Rhino for several hours already, gyrating half naked for the benefit of strange men, not striding along the road, fully dressed in jeans, high-heeled boots and a fringed suede jacket. Presumably she had changed her shift, but she would soon be safely gyrating around a pole, which left the question of where Robin was going to spend the night.

Her mobile had been vibrating inside the pocket of her coat all day. Matthew had sent more than thirty texts.


We’ve got to talk.

Ring me, please.

Robin, we can’t sort anything out if you don’t talk to me.



As the day had worn on and her silence had not broken, he had started trying to call. Then the tone of his texts had changed.


Robin, you know I love you.

I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish I could change it, but I can’t.

It’s you I love, Robin. I always have and I always will.



She had not texted back, or picked up his calls, or rung him. All she knew was that she could not bear to go back to the flat, not tonight. What would happen tomorrow, or the next day, she had no idea. She was hungry, exhausted and numb.

Strike had become almost as importuning towards late afternoon.


Where are you? Ring me pls.



She had texted him back, because she could not face talking to him either.


Can’t speak. Platinum’s not at work.



She and Strike maintained a certain emotional distance, always, and she was afraid that if he were kind to her she would cry, revealing the sort of weakness that he would deplore in an assistant. With virtually no cases left, with the threat of the man who had sent the leg hanging over her, she must not give Strike another reason to tell her to stay at home.

He had not been satisfied with her response.


Call me asap.



She had ignored that one on the basis that she might easily have failed to receive it, being close to the Tube when he sent it and shortly afterwards having no reception as she and Platinum rode the Tube back to Tottenham Court Road. On emerging from the station Robin found another missed call from Strike on her phone, as well as a new text from Matthew.