Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(81)

“Can I help?” Robin offered.

“In that middle drawer. There might be a picture.”

The Jack Russell began barking again as Robin opened a drawer containing an assortment of napkin rings, crocheted doilies, souvenir teaspoons, toothpicks and loose photographs. Robin extracted as many of the latter as she could and brought them back to Lorraine.

“That’s him,” said Lorraine, after sorting through many pictures that mostly featured a very elderly woman whom Robin assumed to be Lorraine’s mother. Lorraine passed the picture straight to Strike.

He would not have recognized Laing if he had passed him in the street. The former boxer was massively swollen, especially around the face. His neck was no longer visible; his skin seemed tight, his features distorted. One arm was around a smiling Lorraine’s shoulders, the other hung loose at his side. He was not smiling. Strike peered closer. The yellow rose tattoo was visible, but partially obscured by angry red skin plaques that mottled the whole expanse of his forearm.

“Is there something wrong with his skin?”

“Psoriatic arthritis,” said Lorraine. “He was bad with it. That’s why he was on the sick benefit. Had to stop work.”

“Yeah?” said Strike. “What had he been working as before?”

“He come down here as a manager for one of the big construction firms,” she said, “but then he got ill and couldn’t work. He’d had his own building company up in Melrose. He was the managing director.”

“Really?” said Strike.

“Yeah, family business,” said Lorraine, searching her stack of photographs. “He inherited it from his dad. There he is again, look.”

They were holding hands in this picture, which looked as though it had been taken in a beer garden. Lorraine beamed and Laing looked blank, his moon face shrinking his dark eyes to slits. He had the characteristic look of a man on medically prescribed steroids. The hair like a fox’s pelt was the same, but otherwise Strike was hard pressed to make out the features of the fit young boxer who had once bitten his face.

“How long were you together?”

“Ten months. I met him right after Mum died. She was ninety-two—she lived here with me. I was helping with Mrs. Williams next door and all; she was eighty-seven. Senile. Her son’s in America. Donnie was good to her. He mowed her lawn and got shopping.”

Bastard knew which side his bread was buttered, thought Strike. Ill, unemployed and broke as Laing had been at the time, a lonely middle-aged woman without dependents who could cook, who had her own house, who had just inherited money from her mother, must have been a godsend. It would have been worth faking a bit of compassion to get his feet under the table. Laing had had charm when he chose to use it.

“He seemed all right when we met,” said Lorraine morosely. “Couldn’t do enough for me then. He wasn’t well himself. Joints swollen and everything. He had to have injections off the doctor… He got a bit moody later, but I thought that was just his health. You don’t expect ill people to be always cheerful, do you? Not everyone’s like Mum. She was a bloody marvel, her health was that bad and she was always smiling and… and…”

“Let me get you a tissue,” said Robin and she leaned slowly towards the crochet-covered box, so as not to disarrange the Jack Russell, which had its head on her lap.

“Did you report the theft of your jewelry?” Strike asked, once Lorraine had received her tissue, which she plied between deep drags on her Superking.

“No,” she said gruffly. “What was the point? They were never going to find it.”

Robin guessed that Lorraine had not wanted to draw official attention to her humiliation, and sympathized.

“Was he ever violent?” Robin asked gently.

Lorraine looked surprised.

“No. Is that why you’re here? Has he hurt someone?”

“We don’t know,” said Strike.

“I don’t think he’d hurt anyone,” she said. “He wasn’t that kind of man. I said that to the police.”

“Sorry,” said Robin, stroking the now-dozing Jack Russell’s head. “I thought you didn’t report the robbery?”

“This was later,” said Lorraine. “Month or so after he’d gone. Somebody broke into Mrs. Williams’s place, knocked her out and robbed the house. The police wanted to know where Donnie was. I said, ‘He’s long gone, moved out.’ Anyway, he wouldn’t do that, I told them. He’d been good to her. He wouldn’t punch an old lady.”

They had once held hands in a beer garden. He had mowed the old lady’s lawn. She refused to believe Laing had been all bad.

“I assume your neighbor couldn’t give the police a description?” Strike asked.

Lorraine shook her head.

“She never came back, after. Died in a home. Got a family in Northfield now,” said Lorraine. “Three little kids. You should hear the noise—and they’ve got the bloody cheek to complain about the dog!”

They had hit a complete dead end. Lorraine had no idea where Laing had gone next. She could not remember him mentioning any place to which he was connected other than Melrose and she had never met any of his friends. Once she had realized that he was never coming back, she had deleted his mobile number from her phone. She agreed to let them take the two photographs of Laing, but other than that, had no more help to offer.