Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(61)

Screw you, she thought, ramming the mobile back into her pocket as she returned to the café, where Strike sat eating a double Croissan’Wich with sausage and bacon.

Strike noted her flushed face, her tense jaw, and guessed that Matthew had been in touch.

“Everything all right?”

“Fine,” said Robin and then, before he could ask anything else, “So are you going to tell me about Brockbank?”

The question came out a little more aggressively than she had intended. The tone of Matthew’s text had riled her, as had the fact that it had raised in her mind the question of where she and Strike were actually going to sleep that night.

“If you want,” said Strike mildly.

He drew his phone out of his pocket, brought up the picture of Brockbank that he had taken from Hardacre’s computer and passed it across the table to Robin.

Robin contemplated the long, swarthy face beneath its dense dark hair, which was unusual, but not unattractive. As though he had read her mind, Strike said:

“He’s uglier now. That was taken when he’d just joined up. One of his eye sockets is caved in and he’s got a cauliflower ear.”

“How tall is he?” asked Robin, remembering the courier standing over her in his leathers, his mirrored visor.

“My height or bigger.”

“You said you met him in the army?”

“Yep,” said Strike.

She thought for a few seconds that he was not going to tell her anything more, until she realized that he was merely waiting for an elderly couple, who were dithering about where to sit, to pass out of earshot. When they had gone Strike said:

“He was a major, Seventh Armoured Brigade. He married a dead colleague’s widow. She had two small daughters. Then they had one of their own, a boy.”

The facts flowed, having just reread Brockbank’s file, but in truth Strike had never forgotten them. It had been one of those cases that stayed with you.

“The eldest stepdaughter was called Brittany. When she was twelve, Brittany disclosed sexual abuse to a school friend in Germany. The friend told her mother, who reported it. We were called in—I didn’t interview her personally, that was a female officer. I just saw the tape.”

What had crucified him was how grown-up she had tried to be, how together. She was terrified of what would happen to the family now she had blabbed, and was trying to take it back.

No, of course she hadn’t told Sophie that he had threatened to kill her little sister if she told on him! No, Sophie wasn’t lying, exactly—it had been a joke, that was all. She’d asked Sophie how to stop yourself having a baby because—because she’d been curious, everyone wanted to know stuff like that. Of course he hadn’t said he’d carve up her mum in little pieces if she told—the thing about her leg? Oh, that—well, that was a joke, too—it was all joking—he told her she had scars on her leg because he’d nearly cut her leg off when she was little, but her mum had walked in and seen him. He’d said he did it because she’d trodden on his flowerbeds when she was a toddler, but of course it was a joke—ask her mum. She’d got stuck in some barbed wire, that was all, and badly cut trying to pull herself free. They could ask her mum. He hadn’t cut her. He’d never cut her, not Daddy.

The involuntary expression she had made when forcing herself to say “Daddy” was with Strike still: she had looked like a child trying to swallow cold tripe, under threat of punishment. Twelve years old and she had learned life was only bearable for her family if she shut up and took whatever he wanted to do without complaint.

Strike had taken against Mrs. Brockbank from their first interview. She had been thin and over made-up, a victim, no doubt, in her way, but it seemed to Strike that she had voluntarily jettisoned Brittany to save the other two children, that she turned two blind eyes to the long absences from the house of her husband and eldest child, that her determination not to know was tantamount to collaboration. Brockbank had told Brittany that he would strangle both her mother and her sister if she ever spoke about what he did to her in the car when he took her on lengthy excursions into nearby woods, into dark alleyways. He would cut all of them up into little bits and bury them in the garden. Then he’d take Ryan—Brockbank’s small son, the only family member whom he seemed to value—and go where no one would ever find them.

“It was a joke, just a joke. I didn’t mean any of it.”

Thin fingers twisting, her glasses lopsided, her legs not long enough for her feet to reach the floor. She was still refusing point blank to be physically examined when Strike and Hardacre went to Brockbank’s house to bring him in.

“He was pissed when we got there. I told him why we’d come and he came at me with a broken bottle.

“I knocked him out,” said Strike without bravado, “but I shouldn’t’ve touched him. I didn’t need to.”

He had never admitted this out loud before, even though Hardacre (who had backed him to the hilt in the subsequent inquiry) had known it as well.

“If he came at you with a bottle—”

“I could’ve got the bottle off him without decking him.”

“You said he was big—”

“He was pretty pissed. I could’ve managed him without punching him. Hardacre was there, it was two on one.

“Truth is, I was glad he came at me. I wanted to punch him. Right hook, literally knocked him senseless—which is how he got away with it.”