The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(64)

‘You know, I could follow the Brocklehurst girl for you,’ she offered again, ‘if your leg’s too—?’

‘No,’ snapped Strike.

He felt sore, angry with himself, irritated by Matthew and suddenly a bit nauseous. He ought not to have eaten the chocolate before having steak, chips, crumble and three pints.

‘I need you to go back to the office and type up Gunfrey’s last invoice. And text me if those bloody journalists are still around, because I’ll go straight from here to Anstis’s, if they are.

‘We really need to be thinking about taking someone else on,’ he added under his breath.

Robin’s expression hardened.

‘I’ll go and get typing, then,’ she said. She snatched up her coat and bag and left. Strike caught a glimpse of her angry expression, but an irrational vexation prevented him from calling her back.





23





For my part, I do not think she hath a soul so black



To act a deed so bloody.



John Webster, The White Devil





An afternoon in the pub with his leg propped up had not much reduced the swelling in Strike’s knee. After buying painkillers and a cheap bottle of red on the way to the Tube, he set out for Greenwich where Anstis lived with his wife Helen, commonly known as Helly. The journey to their house in Ashburnham Grove took him over an hour due to a delay on the Central line; he stood the whole way, keeping his weight on his left leg, regretting anew the hundred pounds he had spent on taxis to and from Lucy’s house.

By the time he got off the Docklands Light Railway spots of rain were again peppering his face. He turned up his collar and limped away into the darkness for what should have been a five-minute walk, but which took him nearly fifteen.

Only as he turned the corner into the neat terraced street with its well-tended front gardens did it occur to Strike that he ought, perhaps, to have brought a gift for his godson. He felt as little enthusiasm for the social part of the evening ahead as he felt eager to discuss with Anstis the forensic information.

Strike did not like Anstis’s wife. Her nosiness was barely concealed beneath a sometimes cloying warmth; it emerged from time to time like a flick knife flashing suddenly from beneath a fur coat. She gushed gratitude and solicitousness every time Strike swam into her orbit, but he could tell that she itched for details of his chequered past, for information about his rock star father, his dead, drug-taking mother, and he could well imagine that she would yearn for details of his break-up with Charlotte, whom she had always treated with an effusiveness that failed to mask dislike and suspicion.

At the party following the christening of Timothy Cormoran Anstis – which had been postponed until he was eighteen months old, because his father and his godfather had to be airlifted out of Afghanistan and discharged from their respective hospitals – Helly had insisted on making a tearful, tipsy speech about how Strike had saved her baby’s daddy’s life, and how much it meant to her to have him agree to be Timmy’s guardian angel, too. Strike, who had not been able to think of any valid reason to refuse being the boy’s godfather, had stared at the tablecloth while Helly spoke, careful not to meet Charlotte’s eye in case she made him laugh. She had been wearing – he remembered it vividly – his favourite peacock blue wrap-over dress, which had clung to every inch of her perfect figure. Having a woman that beautiful on his arm, even while he was still on crutches, had acted as a counterweight to the half a leg still not yet fit for a prosthesis. It had transformed him from the Man With Only One Foot to the man who had managed – miraculously, as he knew nearly every man who came into contact with her must think – to snag a fiancée so stunning that men stopped talking in mid-sentence when she entered the room.

‘Cormy, darling,’ crooned Helly when she opened the door. ‘Look at you, all famous… we thought you’d forgotten us.’

Nobody else ever called him Cormy. He had never bothered to tell her he disliked it.

She treated him, without encouragement, to a tender hug that he knew was intended to suggest pity and regret for his single status. The house was warm and brightly lit after the hostile winter night outside and he was glad to see, as he extricated himself from Helly, Anstis stride into view, holding a pint of Doom Bar as a welcoming gift.

‘Ritchie, let him get inside. Honestly…’

But Strike had accepted the pint and taken several grateful mouthfuls before he bothered to take off his coat.

Strike’s three-and-a-half-year-old godson burst into the hall, making shrill engine noises. He was very like his mother, whose features, small and pretty though they were, were oddly bunched up in the middle of her face. Timothy sported Superman pyjamas and was swiping at the walls with a plastic lightsaber.

‘Oh, Timmy, darling, don’t, our lovely new paintwork… He wanted to stay up and see his Uncle Cormoran. We tell him about you all the time,’ said Helly.

Strike contemplated the small figure without enthusiasm, detecting very little reciprocal interest from his godson. Timothy was the only child Strike knew whose birthday he had a hope of remembering, not that this had ever led Strike to buy him a present. The boy had been born two days before the Viking had exploded on that dusty road in Afghanistan, taking with it Strike’s lower right leg and part of Anstis’s face.