The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(29)

This, Strike reflected, retiring to the inner office and shutting the door on the pretext of making phone calls, was exactly why it was a bad idea to meet your only member of staff outside working hours.

Hunger forced him to emerge a few hours later. Robin had bought sandwiches as usual, but she had not knocked on the door to let him know that they were there. This, too, seemed to point to feelings of awkwardness after the previous evening. To postpone the moment when it must be mentioned, and in the hope that if he kept off the subject long enough she might never bring it up (although he had never known the tactic to work on a woman before), Strike told her truthfully that he had just got off the phone with Mr Gunfrey.

‘Is he going to go to the police?’ asked Robin.

‘Er – no. Gunfrey isn’t the type of bloke who goes to the police if someone’s bothering him. He’s nearly as bent as the bloke who wants to cut his son. He’s realised he’s in over his head this time, though.’

‘Didn’t you think of recording what that gangster was paying you to do and taking it to the police yourself?’ asked Robin, without thinking.

‘No, Robin, because it’d be obvious where the tip-off came from and it’ll put a strain on business if I’ve got to dodge hired killers while doing surveillance.’

‘But Gunfrey can’t keep his son at home for ever!’

‘He won’t have to. He’s going to take the family off for a surprise holiday in the States, phone our knife-happy friend from LA and tell him he’s given the matter some thought and changed his mind about interfering with his business interests. Shouldn’t look too suspicious. The bloke’s already done enough shitty stuff to him to warrant a cooling off. Bricks through his windscreen, threatening calls to his wife.

‘S’pose I’ll have to go back to Crouch End next week, say the boy never showed up and give his monkey back.’ Strike sighed. ‘Not very plausible, but I don’t want them to come looking for me.’

‘He gave you a—?’

‘Monkey – five hundred quid, Robin,’ said Strike. ‘What do they call that in Yorkshire?’

‘Shockingly little to stab a teenager,’ said Robin forcefully and then, catching Strike off guard, ‘What did you think of Matthew?’

‘Nice bloke,’ lied Strike automatically.

He refrained from elaboration. She was no fool; he had been impressed before now by her instinct for the lie, the false note. Nevertheless, he could not help hurrying them on to a different subject.

‘I’m starting to think, maybe next year, if we’re turning a proper profit and you’ve already had your pay rise, we could justify taking someone else on. I’m working flat out here, I can’t keep going like this for ever. How many clients have you turned down lately?’

‘A couple,’ Robin responded coolly.

Surmising that he had been insufficiently enthusiastic about Matthew but resolute that he would not be any more hypocritical than he had already been, Strike withdrew shortly afterwards into his office and shut the door again.

However, on this occasion, Strike was only half right.

Robin had indeed felt deflated by his response. She knew that if Strike had genuinely liked Matthew he would never have been as definitive as ‘nice bloke.’ He’d have said ‘Yeah, he’s all right,’ or ‘I s’pose you could do worse.’

What had irritated and even hurt was his suggestion of bringing in another employee. Robin turned back to her computer monitor and started typing fast and furiously, banging the keys harder than usual as she made up this week’s invoice for the divorcing brunette. She had thought – evidently wrongly – that she was here as more than a secretary. She had helped Strike secure the evidence that had convicted Lula Landry’s killer; she had even collected some of it alone, on her own initiative. In the months since, she had several times operated way beyond the duties of a PA, accompanying Strike on surveillance jobs when it would look more natural for him to be in a couple, charming doormen and recalcitrant witnesses who instinctively took offence at Strike’s bulk and surly expression, not to mention pretending to be a variety of women on the telephone that Strike, with his deep bass voice, had no hope of impersonating.

Robin had assumed that Strike was thinking along the same lines that she was: he occasionally said things like ‘It’s good for your detective training’ or ‘You could use a counter-surveillance course.’ She had assumed that once the business was on a sounder footing (and she could plausibly claim to have helped make it so) she would be given the training she knew she needed. But now it seemed that these hints had been mere throwaway lines, vague pats on the head for the typist. So what was she doing here? Why had she thrown away something much better? (In her temper, Robin chose to forget how little she had wanted that human resources job, however well paid.)

Perhaps the new employee would be female, able to perform these useful jobs, and she, Robin, would become receptionist and secretary to both of them, and never leave her desk again. It was not for that that she had stayed with Strike, given up a much better salary and created a recurring source of tension in her relationship.

At five o’clock on the dot Robin stopped typing in mid-sentence, pulled on her trench coat and left, closing the glass door behind her with unnecessary force.

The bang woke Strike up. He had been fast asleep at his desk, his head on his arms. Checking his watch he saw that it was five and wondered who had just come into the office. Only when he opened the dividing door and saw that Robin’s coat and bag were gone and her computer monitor dark did he realise that she had left without saying goodbye.