Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(94)

Strike took the Tube to West Finchley and endured a long walk to Summers Lane rather than find a taxi, because his finances were so bad. Sweating slightly in the mild weather, he moved through road after road of quiet detached houses, cursing the place for its leafy quiet and its lack of landmarks. Finally, thirty minutes after he had left the station, he found Kelsey Platt’s house, smaller than many of its fellows, with a whitewashed exterior and a wrought-iron gate.

He rang the doorbell and immediately heard voices through the pane of frosted glass like the one in his own office door.

“Ah think it’s the detective, pet,” said a Geordie voice.

“You get it!” said a woman’s high-pitched voice.

A large red mass bloomed behind the glass and the door opened onto the hall, which was mostly concealed by a burly, barefoot man in a scarlet toweling robe. He was bald, but his bushy gray beard, coupled with the scarlet robe, would have suggested Santa had he looked jolly. However, he was frantically mopping his face with the sleeve of his dressing gown. The eyes behind his glasses were swollen into bee-stung slits and his ruddy cheeks were shining with tears.

“Sorry,” he said gruffly, moving aside to let Strike in. “Working nights,” he added in explanation of his attire.

Strike sidled past. The man smelled strongly of Old Spice and camphor. Two middle-aged women were locked in a tight embrace at the foot of the stairs, one blonde, the other dark, both sobbing. They broke apart as Strike watched, wiping their faces.

“Sorry,” gasped the dark-haired woman. “Sheryl’s our neighbor. She’s been in Magaluf, she’s only just h-heard about Kelsey.”

“Sorry,” echoed red-eyed Sheryl. “I’ll give you space, Hazel. Anything you need. Anything, Ray—anything.”

Sheryl squeezed past Strike—“sorry”—and hugged Ray. They swayed together briefly, both big people, their bellies pressed together, arms stretched around each other’s necks. Ray began sobbing again, his face in her broad shoulder.

“Come through,” hiccoughed Hazel, dabbing at her eyes as she led the way into the sitting room. She had the look of a Bruegel peasant, with her rounded cheeks, prominent chin and wide nose. Eyebrows as thick and bushy as tiger moth caterpillars overhung her puffy eyes. “It’s been like this all week. People hearing and coming over and… sorry,” she finished on a gasp.

He had been apologized to half a dozen times in the space of two minutes. Other cultures would have been ashamed of an insufficient display of grief; here in quiet Finchley, they were ashamed to have him witness it.

“Nobody knows what to say,” Hazel whispered, pressing away her tears as she gestured him to the sofa. “It’s not like she was hit by a car, or was ill. They don’t know what you say when someone’s been—” She hesitated, but balked at the word and her sentence ended in a gargantuan sniff.

“I’m sorry,” said Strike, taking his turn. “I know this is a terrible time for you.”

The sitting room was immaculate and somehow unwelcoming, perhaps because of its chilly color scheme. A three-piece suite covered in striped silvery-gray cloth, white wallpaper with a thin gray stripe, cushions angled on their points, ornaments on the mantelpiece perfectly symmetrical. The dust-free television screen gleamed with reflected light from the window.

Sheryl’s misty form trotted past on the other side of the net curtains, wiping her eyes. Ray shuffled past the sitting-room door on his bare feet, dabbing under his glasses with the end of his toweling-robe belt, his shoulders stooped. As though she had read Strike’s mind, Hazel explained:

“Ray broke his back trying to get a family out of a boarding house that caught fire. Wall gave way and his ladder fell. Three stories.”

“Christ,” said Strike.

Hazel’s lips and hands were trembling. Strike remembered what Wardle had said: that the police had mishandled Hazel. Suspicion or rough questioning of her Ray would have seemed unforgivable cruelty to her in this state of shock, an inexcusable exacerbation of their appalling ordeal. Strike knew a lot about the brutal intrusion of officialdom into private devastation. He had been on both sides of the fence.

“Anyone want a brew?” Ray called huskily from what Strike assumed was the kitchen.

“Go to bed!” Hazel called back, clutching a sodden ball of tissues. “I can make ’em! Go to bed!”

“You sure?”

“Get to bed, I’ll wake you at three!”

Hazel wiped her whole face with a fresh tissue, as though it were a face cloth.

“He’s not one for disability pay and all that, but nobody wants to give him a proper job,” she told Strike quietly as Ray shuffled, sniffing, back past the door. “Not with his back and his age and his lungs not being the best. Cash in hand… shift work…”

Her voice trailed away, her mouth trembled, and for the first time she looked Strike directly in the eye.

“I don’t really know why I asked you to come,” she confessed. “It’s all confused in my head. They said she wrote to you but you never wrote back and then you got sent her—her—”

“It must have been an appalling shock to you,” said Strike, fully aware that anything he could say would understate the case.

“It’s been—” she said feverishly “—terrible. Terrible. We didn’t know anything, anything at all. We thought she was on a college placement. When the police came to the door—she said she was going away with college and I believed her, some residential placement at a school. It sounded right—I never thought—but she was such a liar. She lied all the time. Three years she’s been living with me and I still haven’t—I mean, I couldn’t get her to stop.”