Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(48)

“Does Ilsa like Elin?” asked Robin.

Strike was startled by this flash of perception.

“Er—yeah, I think so,” he lied.

Robin sipped her Coke.

“OK,” said Strike, restraining his impatience with difficulty, “your turn.”

“We’ve split up,” she said.

Interrogation technique told him to remain silent, and after a minute or so the decision was vindicated.

“He… told me something,” she said. “Last night.”

Strike waited.

“And we can’t go back from that. Not that.”

She was pale and composed but he could almost feel the anguish behind the words. Still he waited.

“He slept with someone else,” she said in a small, tight voice.

There was a pause. She picked up her crisp packet, found that she had finished the contents and dropped it on the table.

“Shit,” said Strike.

He was surprised: not that Matthew had slept with another woman, but that he had admitted it. His impression of the handsome young accountant was of a man who knew how to run his life to suit himself, to compartmentalize and categorize where necessary.

“And not just once,” said Robin, in that same tight voice. “He was doing it for months. With someone we both know. Sarah Shadlock. She’s an old friend of his from university.”

“Christ,” said Strike. “I’m sorry.”

He was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain she was in. Yet the revelation had caused certain other feelings—feelings he usually kept under tight rein, considering them both misguided and dangerous—to flex inside him, to test their strength against their restraining bonds.

Don’t be a stupid f*cker, he told himself. That’s one thing that can never happen. It’d screw everything up royally.

“What made him tell you?” Strike asked.

She did not answer, but the question brought back the scene in awful clarity.

Their magnolia sitting room was far too tiny to accommodate a couple in such a state of fury. They had driven all the way home from Yorkshire in the Land Rover that Matthew had not wanted. Somewhere along the way, an incensed Matthew had asserted that it was a matter of time before Strike made a pass at Robin and what was more, he suspected that she would welcome the advance.

“He’s my friend, that’s all!” she had bellowed at Matthew from beside their cheap sofa, their weekend bags still in the hall. “For you to suggest I’m turned on by the fact he’s had his leg—”

“You’re so bloody naive!” he had bellowed. “He’s your friend until he tries to get you into bed, Robin—”

“Who are you judging him by? Are you biding your time before you jump on your coworkers?”

“Of course I’m bloody not, but you’re so frigging starry-eyed about him—he’s a man, it’s just the two of you in the office—”

“He’s my friend, like you’re friends with Sarah Shadlock but you’ve never—”

She had seen it in his face. An expression she had never noticed before passed across it like a shadow. Guilt seemed to slide physically over the high cheekbones, the clean jaw, the hazel eyes she had adored for years.

“—have you?” she said, her tone suddenly wondering. “Have you?”

He hesitated too long.

“No,” he had said forcefully, like a paused film jerking back into action. “Of course n—”

“You have,” she said. “You’ve slept with her.”

She could see it in his face. He did not believe in male-female friendships because he had never had one. He and Sarah had been sleeping together.

“When?” she had asked. “Not… was it then?”

“I didn’t—”

She heard the feeble protestation of a man who knows he has lost, who had even wanted to lose. That had haunted her all night and all day: on some level, he had wanted Robin to know.

Her strange calm, more stunned than accusatory, had led him on to tell her everything. Yes, it had been then. He felt terrible about it, he always had—but he and Robin hadn’t been sleeping together at the time and, one night, Sarah had been comforting him, and, well, things had got out of hand—

“She was comforting you?” Robin had repeated. Rage had come then, at last, unfreezing her from her state of stunned disbelief. “She was comforting you?”

“It was a difficult time for me too, you know!” he had shouted.

Strike watched as Robin shook her head unconsciously, trying to clear it, but the recollections had turned her pink and her eyes were sparkling again.

“What did you say?” she asked Strike, confused.

“I asked what made him tell you.”

“I don’t know. We were in the middle of a row. He thinks…” She took a deep breath. Two-thirds of a bottle of wine on an empty stomach was leading her to emulate Matthew’s honesty. “He doesn’t believe you and I are just friends.”

This was no surprise to Strike. He had read suspicion in every look Matthew had ever given him, heard insecurity in every chippy comment thrown his way.

“So,” Robin went on unsteadily, “I pointed out that we are just friends, and that he’s got a platonic friend himself, dear old Sarah Shadlock. So then it all came out. He and Sarah had an affair at university while I was… while I was at home.”