Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(93)

Strike and Shanker were still talking. A whiff of decay caught her nostrils through the fug of Shanker’s body odor.

“Oh God,” said Robin quietly, but neither man heard her. She flipped over the Vettriano print.

A rotting toe was taped to the inner corner of the card. Carefully printed in capital letters were the words:

SHE’S AS BEAUTIFUL AS A FOOT



She dropped it onto the desk and stood up. In slow motion, it seemed, she turned to Strike. He looked from her stricken face to the obscene object lying on the desk.

“Get away from it.”

She obeyed, sick and trembling and wishing that Shanker was not there.

“What?” Shanker kept saying. “What? What is it? What?”

“Somebody’s sent me a severed toe,” said Robin in a collected voice that was not her own.

“You’re f*cking kidding me,” said Shanker, moving forwards with eager interest.

Strike physically restrained Shanker from picking up the card, which lay where it had fallen from Robin’s hand. Strike recognized the phrase “She’s as Beautiful as a Foot.” It was the title of another Blue ?yster Cult song.

“I’ll call Wardle,” Strike said, but instead of taking out his mobile he scribbled a four-digit code on a Post-it note and extracted his credit card from his wallet. “Robin, go and get the rest of Shanker’s money out for him, then come back here.”

She took the note and the credit card, absurdly grateful for the prospect of fresh air.

“And Shanker,” said Strike sharply, as the two of them reached the glass door, “you walk her back here, all right? Walk her back to the office.”

“You got it, Bunsen,” said Shanker, energized, as he always had been, by strangeness, by action, by the whiff of danger.





34



The lies don’t count, the whispers do.

Blue ?yster Cult, “The Vigil”



Strike sat alone at the kitchen table in his attic flat that night. The chair was uncomfortable and the knee of his amputated leg aching after several hours tailing Mad Dad, who had taken time out of work today to stalk his younger son on a trip to the Natural History Museum. The man owned his own company or he would surely have been fired for the working hours he spent intimidating his children. Platinum, however, had gone unwatched and unphotographed. On learning that Robin’s mother was due to visit that evening, Strike had insisted on Robin taking three days off, overriding all her objections, walking her to the Tube and insisting that she text him once safely back at her flat.

Strike yearned for sleep, yet felt too weary to get up and go to bed. He had been more disturbed by the second communication from the killer than he had been prepared to admit to his partner. Appalling though the arrival of the leg had been, he now acknowledged that he had nourished a vestige of hope that the addressing of the package to Robin had been a nasty embellishment, but an afterthought. The second communication with her, sly sideways wink at Strike notwithstanding (“She’s as Beautiful as a Foot”), had told him for certain that this man, whoever he was, had Robin in his sights. Even the name of the painting on the front of the card he had selected—the image of the solitary, leggy blonde—was ominous: “In Thoughts of You.”

Rage burgeoned in the motionless Strike, chasing away his tiredness. He remembered Robin’s white face and knew that he had witnessed the death of her faint hope that the sending of the leg had not been the random act of a madman. Even so, she had argued vociferously against taking time off, pointing out that their only two paying jobs frequently clashed: Strike would be unable to cover both properly on his own and would consequently have to choose on a daily basis whether to follow Platinum or Mad Dad. He had been adamant: she should return to work only when her mother returned to Yorkshire.

Their persecutor had now succeeded in reducing Strike’s business to two clients. He had just endured a second incursion of police into his office and was worried that the press would get wind of what had happened, even though Wardle had promised not to release news of the card and the toe. Wardle agreed with Strike that one of the killer’s objectives was to focus press and police attention on the detective, and that it was playing into the killer’s hands to alert the media.

His mobile rang loudly in the small kitchen. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was twenty past ten. He seized it, barely registering Wardle’s name as he raised it to his ear, because his mind had been on Robin.

“Good news,” Wardle told him. “Well, of a kind. He hasn’t killed another woman. The toe’s Kelsey’s. Off the other leg. Waste not, want not, eh?”

Strike, who was not in the mood for humor, replied brusquely. After Wardle had hung up, he continued to sit at his kitchen table, lost in thought while the traffic growled past in Charing Cross Road below. Only the recollection that he had to get to Finchley the next morning to meet Kelsey’s sister finally motivated him to begin the usual onerous process of dealing with his prosthesis before bed.

Strike’s knowledge of London was, thanks to his mother’s peripatetic habits, extensive and detailed, but there were gaps, and Finchley was one of them. All he knew about the area was that it had been Margaret Thatcher’s constituency in the 1980s, while he, Leda and Lucy had been moving between squats in places like Whitechapel and Brixton. Finchley would have been too far away from the center to suit a family entirely reliant on public transport and takeaways, too expensive for a woman who frequently ran out of coins for the electricity meter: the kind of place, as his sister Lucy might once have wistfully put it, where proper families lived. In marrying a quantity surveyor and producing three impeccably turned-out sons, Lucy had fulfilled her childhood yearning for neatness, order and security.