Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(9)

Matthew had been appalled at her news, but even so, she had heard a faint trace of satisfaction in his voice, felt his unexpressed conviction that now, at last, she must see what a ridiculous choice it had been to throw in her lot with a rackety private detective who could not afford to give her a decent salary. Strike had her working unsociable hours that meant she had to have packages sent to work instead of the flat. (“I didn’t get sent a leg because Amazon couldn’t deliver to the house!” Robin had said hotly.) And, of course, on top of everything else, Strike was now mildly famous and a source of fascination to their friends. Matthew’s work as an accountant did not carry quite the same cachet. His resentment and jealousy ran deep and, increasingly, burst their bounds.

Strike was not fool enough to encourage Robin in any disloyalty to Matthew that she might regret when she was less shaken.

“Addressing the leg to you instead of me was an afterthought,” he said. “They put my name on there first. I reckon they were either trying to worry me by showing they knew your name, or trying to frighten you off working for me.”

“Well, I’m not going to be frightened off,” said Robin.

“Robin, this is no time for heroics. Whoever he is, he’s telling us he knows a lot about me, that he knows your name and, as of this morning, exactly what you look like. He saw you up close. I don’t like that.”

“You obviously don’t think my countersurveillance abilities are up to much.”

“Seeing as you’re talking to the man who sent you on the best bloody course I could find,” said Strike, “and who read that fulsome letter of commendation you shoved under my nose—”

“Then you don’t think my self-defense is any good.”

“I’ve never seen any of it and I’ve got only your word that you ever learned any.”

“Have you ever known me lie about what I can and can’t do?” demanded Robin, affronted, and Strike was forced to acknowledge that he had not. “Well then! I won’t take stupid risks. You’ve trained me to notice anyone dodgy. Anyway, you can’t afford to send me home. We’re struggling to cover our cases as it is.”

Strike sighed and rubbed his face with two large hairy-backed hands.

“Nothing after dark,” he said. “And you need to carry an alarm, a decent one.”

“Fine,” she said.

“Anyway, you’re doing Radford from next Monday,” he said, taking comfort from the thought.

Radford was a wealthy entrepreneur who wanted to put an investigator, posing as a part-time worker, into his office to expose what he suspected were criminal dealings by a senior manager. Robin was the obvious choice, because Strike had become more recognizable since their second high-profile murder case. As Strike drained his third pint, he wondered whether he might be able to convince Radford to increase Robin’s hours. He would be glad to know she was safe in a palatial office block, nine to five every day, until the maniac who had sent the leg was caught.

Robin, meanwhile, was fighting waves of exhaustion and a vague nausea. A row, a broken night, the dreadful shock of the severed leg—and now she would have to head home and justify all over again her wish to continue doing a dangerous job for a bad salary. Matthew, who had once been one of her primary sources of comfort and support, had become merely another obstacle to be navigated.

Unbidden, unwanted, the image of the cold, severed leg in its cardboard box came back to her. She wondered when she would stop thinking about it. The fingertips that had grazed it tingled unpleasantly. Unconsciously, she tightened her hand into a fist in her lap.





5



Hell’s built on regret.

Blue ?yster Cult, “The Revenge of Vera Gemini”

Lyrics by Patti Smith



Much later, after he had seen Robin safely onto the Tube, Strike returned to the office and sat alone in silence at her desk, lost in thought.

He had seen plenty of dismembered corpses, seen them rotting in mass graves and lying, freshly blown apart, by roadsides: severed limbs, flesh pulped, bones crushed. Unnatural death was the business of the Special Investigation Branch, the plainclothes wing of the Royal Military Police, and his and his colleagues’ reflexive reaction had often been humor. That was how you coped when you saw the dead torn and mutilated. Not for the SIB the luxury of corpses washed and prettified in satin-lined boxes.

Boxes. It had looked quite ordinary, the cardboard box in which the leg had come. No markings to indicate its origin, no trace of a previous addressee, nothing. The whole thing had been so organized, so careful, so neat—and this was what unnerved him, not the leg itself, nasty object though it was. What appalled him was the careful, meticulous, almost clinical modus operandi.

Strike checked his watch. He was supposed to be going out with Elin this evening. His girlfriend of two months was in the throes of a divorce that was proceeding with the chilly brinkmanship of a grandmaster chess tournament. Her estranged husband was very wealthy, something that Strike had not realized until the first night he had been permitted to come back to the marital home and found himself in a spacious, wood-floored apartment overlooking Regent’s Park. The shared custody arrangements meant that she was only prepared to meet Strike on nights when her five-year-old daughter was not at home, and when they went out, they chose the capital’s quieter and more obscure restaurants as Elin did not wish her estranged husband to know that she was seeing anyone else. The situation suited Strike perfectly. It had been a perennial problem in his relationships that the normal nights for recreation were often nights that he had to be out tailing other people’s unfaithful partners, and he had no particular desire to kindle a close relationship with Elin’s daughter. He had not lied to Robin: he did not know how to talk to children.