Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(80)

Apparently deciding that a woman brave enough to pick it up was worthy of respect, the dog allowed her to take a firmer grip, twisted in midair and attempted to lick her hand.

“Sorry,” said the woman. “He was my mother’s. He’s a bloody nightmare. He likes you, look. Miracle.”

Her shoulder-length brown hair had gray roots. Deep marionette lines lay either side of a thin-lipped mouth. She was leaning on a stick, one of her ankles swollen and bandaged, the foot encased in a sandal that displayed yellowing toenails.

Strike introduced himself, then showed Lorraine his driving license and a business card.

“Are you Lorraine MacNaughton?”

“Yeah,” she said hesitantly. Her eyes flickered to Robin, who smiled reassuringly over the Jack Russell’s head. “You’re a—what did you say?”

“A detective,” said Strike, “and I was wondering whether you could tell me anything about Donald Laing. Telephone records show he was living here with you a couple of years ago.”

“Yeah, he was,” she said slowly.

“Is he still here?” Strike asked, although he knew the answer.

“No.”

Strike indicated Robin.

“Would it be all right if my colleague and I come in and ask you a few questions? We’re trying to find Mr. Laing.”

There was a pause. Lorraine chewed her inner lip, frowning. Robin cradled the Jack Russell, which was now enthusiastically licking her fingers where, no doubt, it could taste traces of Danish pastry. Strike’s torn trouser leg flapped in a light breeze.

“All right, come in,” said Lorraine, and she backed away on her crutches to admit them.

The frowzy front room smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke. There were countless old-ladyish touches: crocheted tissue-box covers, cheap frilled cushions and an array of fancily dressed teddy bears arranged on a polished sideboard. One wall was dominated by a painting of a saucer-eyed child dressed as a pierrot. Strike could no more imagine Donald Laing living here than he could visualize a bullock bedded down in the corner.

Once inside, the Jack Russell scrabbled to get down out of Robin’s arms, then started barking at Strike again.

“Oh, shut up,” groaned Lorraine. Sinking down onto the faded brown velvet sofa, she used both arms to lift her bandaged ankle back onto a leather pouffe, reached sideways to retrieve her packet of Superkings and lit up.

“I’m supposed to keep it raised,” she explained, cigarette waggling in her mouth as she picked up a full cut-glass ashtray and set it on her lap. “District nurse is in every day to change the dressings. Sit down.”

“What have you done?” asked Robin, squeezing past the coffee table to sit beside Lorraine on the sofa. The Jack Russell immediately jumped up beside her and, mercifully, stopped barking.

“I got a load of chip fat dropped on me,” said Lorraine. “At work.”

“Christ,” said Strike, settling himself in the armchair. “That must’ve been agony.”

“Yeah, it was. They say I’ll be off at least a month. Least it wasn’t far to go to casualty.”

Lorraine, it transpired, worked in the canteen of the local hospital.

“So what’s Donnie done?” Lorraine muttered, puffing smoke, once the subject of her injury had been thoroughly aired. “Robbery again, is it?”

“Why do you say that?” asked Strike carefully.

“He robbed me,” she said.

Robin saw, now, that the brusqueness was a fa?ade. Lorraine’s long cigarette trembled as she said it.

“When was this?” asked Strike.

“When he walked out. Took all my jewelry. Mum’s wedding ring, everything. He knew what that meant to me. She’d not been dead a year. Yeah, one day he just walks out of the house and never comes back. I called the police, I thought he’d had an accident. Then I realized my purse was empty and my jewelry was gone.”

The humiliation had not left her. Her sunken cheeks flushed as she said it.

Strike felt in the inside pocket of his jacket.

“I want to make sure we’re talking about the same man. Does this picture look familiar?”

He handed her one of the photographs Laing’s ex-mother-in-law had given him in Melrose. Big and broad in his blue and yellow kilt, with his dark ferret-like eyes and that low-sprouting crop of fox-red hair, Laing was standing outside a registry office. Rhona clung to his arm, less than half his width in what looked like a poorly fitting, possibly secondhand wedding gown.

Lorraine examined the photograph for what seemed like a very long time. At last she said:

“I think it’s him. It could be.”

“You can’t see it, but he had a big tattoo of a yellow rose on his left forearm,” said Strike.

“Yeah,” said Lorraine heavily. “That’s right. He did.”

She smoked, staring at the picture.

“He’d been married, had he?” she asked, with a slight quaver in her voice.

“Didn’t he tell you?” asked Robin.

“No. Told me he’d never been.”

“How did you meet him?” asked Robin.

“Pub,” said Lorraine. “He didn’t look much like that when I knew him.”

She turned in the direction of the sideboard behind her and made a vague attempt to get up.