Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(51)
Had Strike deposited her here in elegant, old-fashioned luxury as preemptive compensation for the serious talk he would initiate today? You’re obviously in a very emotional place… I think it would be good if you took a break from work.
Two-thirds of a bottle of bad wine and she had told him everything. With a weak groan, Robin sank back on the pillows, covered her face with her arms and succumbed to the memories that had regained all their power now that she was weak and miserable.
The rapist had worn a rubber gorilla mask. He had held her down with one hand and the weight of a whole arm on her throat, telling her she was about to die as he raped her, telling her he was going to choke the f*cking life out of her. Her brain a scarlet cavity of screaming panic, his hands tightening like a noose around her neck, her survival had hung on her ability to pretend that she was already dead.
Later there had been days and weeks when she had felt as though she had in fact died, and was trapped in the body from which she felt entirely disconnected. The only way to protect herself, it had seemed, was to separate herself from her own flesh, to deny their connection. It had been a long time before she had felt able to take possession again.
He had been soft-spoken in court, meek, “yes, your honor,” “no, your honor,” a nondescript middle-aged white man, florid in complexion except for that white patch under his ear. His pale, washed-out eyes blinked too often, eyes that had been slits viewed through the holes in his mask.
What he had done to her shattered her view of her place in the world, ended her university career and drove her back to Masham. It forced her through a grueling court case in which the cross-examination had been almost as traumatic as the original attack, for his defense was that she had invited him into the stairwell for sex. Months after his gloved hands had reached out of the shadows and dragged her, gagging, into the cavity behind the stairs, she had not been able to stand physical contact, not even a gentle hug from a family member. He had polluted her first and only sexual relationship, so that she and Matthew had had to start again, with fear and guilt attending them every step of the way.
Robin pressed her arms down over her eyes as though she might obliterate it all from her mind by force. Now, of course, she knew that the young Matthew, whom she had considered a selfless paragon of kindness and understanding, had in fact been cavorting with a naked Sarah in his student house in Bath while Robin lay on her lonely bed in Masham for hours at a stretch, staring blankly at Destiny’s Child. Alone in the sumptuous quiet of Hazlitt’s, Robin contemplated for the first time the question of whether Matthew would have left her for Sarah, had she been happy and unharmed, or even whether she and Matthew might have grown naturally apart if she had completed her degree.
She lowered her arms and opened her eyes. They were dry today; she felt as though she had no tears left to weep. The pain of Matthew’s confession no longer pierced her. She felt it as a dull ache underlying the more urgent panic about the damage she feared she might have done to her work prospects. How could she have been so stupid as to tell Strike what had happened to her? Hadn’t she already learned what happened when she was honest?
A year after the rape, when the agoraphobia had been overcome, when her weight was nearly back to normal, when she was itching to get back out into the world and make up the time she had lost, she had expressed a vague interest in “something related” to criminal investigative work. Without her degree and with her confidence so recently shredded, she had not dared voice aloud her true desire to be some kind of investigator. A good thing too, because every single person she knew had tried to dissuade her even from her tentatively expressed desire to explore the outer reaches of police work, even her mother, usually the most understanding of creatures. They had all taken what they thought a strange new interest as a sign of continuing sickness, a symptom of her inability to throw off what had happened to her.
It was not true: the desire had long predated the rape. At the age of eight she had informed her brothers that she was going to catch robbers and had been roundly mocked, for no better reason than that she ought to be laughed at, given that she was a girl and their sister. Though Robin hoped that their response was not a true reflection of their estimate of her abilities, but based on a kind of collegiate male reflex, it had left her diffident about expressing her interest in detective work to three loud, opinionated brothers. She had never told anyone that she had chosen to study psychology with a secret eye towards investigative profiling.
Her pursuit of that goal had been utterly thwarted by the rapist. That was another thing he had taken from her. Asserting her ambition while recuperating from a state of intense fragility, at a time when everyone around her appeared to be waiting for her to fall apart again, had proved too difficult. Out of exhaustion and a feeling of obligation to the family that had been so protective and loving in her time of greatest need she had let a lifelong ambition fall by the wayside, and everyone else had been satisfied to see it go.
Then a temping agency had sent her by mistake to a private detective. She should have been there a week, but she had never left. It had felt like a miracle. Somehow, by luck, then through talent and tenacity, she had made herself valuable to the struggling Strike and ended up almost exactly where she had fantasized being before a total stranger had used her for his perverse enjoyment like a disposable, inanimate object, then beaten and throttled her.
Why, why, had she told Strike what had happened to her? He had been worried about her before she revealed her history: now what? He would decide she was too fragile to work, Robin was sure of it, and from there it would be a swift, short step to the sidelines, because she was unable to take on all the responsibilities he needed a workmate to shoulder.