r Charlotte one more chance at a clean sucker punch via her proxy, before they were finally done.
Strike’s BMW, from which the police had now dug out a bullet, remained in the repair shop, so he took a taxi to Elizabeth Street in Belgravia. Here, he found Amelia’s eponymous shop, which was full of expensive curtain fabrics, tasteful ceramics and chinoiserie table lamps.
She emerged from a back room on hearing the bell over the door ring. Dark-haired like Charlotte, she had similar hazel-flecked green eyes, but there the resemblance ended. Amelia was thin-lipped, with a patrician profile she’d inherited from her father.
‘I’ve booked us a table at the Thomas Cubitt,’ she told him, in lieu of any greeting.
So they walked the short distance to the restaurant, which lay just a few doors down from the shop. Once seated at a white-clothed table, Amelia asked for two menus and a glass of wine, while Strike ordered a beer.
Amelia waited for the drinks to arrive and the waiter to disappear again before drawing a deep breath and saying,
‘So: I asked you to meet me, because Charlotte left a note. She wanted me to show it to you.’
Of course she fucking did.
Amelia took a large swig of Pinot Noir and Strike a similarly large slug of his beer.
‘But I’m not going to,’ said Amelia, setting down her glass. ‘I thought I had to, immediately after—I thought I owed it to her, whatever… whatever it said. But I’ve had a lot of time to think things over while I’ve been in the country, and I don’t think… maybe you’ll be angry,’ said Amelia, taking a deep breath, ‘but when the police were done with it… I burned it.’
‘I’m not angry,’ said Strike.
She looked taken aback.
‘I… I can still tell you, broadly, what she said. Your bit, anyway. It was long. Several pages. Nobody was spared.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’ she said, with a trace of the acerbity he remembered from their prior acquaintance.
‘Sorry your sister killed herself,’ said Strike. ‘Sorry she left a letter you’re probably finding it hard to forget.’
Unlike Sir Colin Edensor, who’d been born working class, and unlike Lucy, whose childhood had been unclassifiable, Amelia Crichton didn’t cry in public. However, she did press her thin lips together and blink rather rapidly.
‘It was… horrible, seeing it all written down, in her handwriting,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Knowing what she was about to do… but, as I say, if you want me to tell you what she said about you, I can, and then I’ll have done what she asked – more or less.’
‘I’m pretty sure I know,’ said Strike. ‘She said, if I’d picked up the phone, it would all have been different. That after all the pain and abuse I doled out to her, she still loved me. That she knows I’m now having an affair with my detective partner, which started days after I walked out on her, proving how little I valued our relationship. That I’ve fallen in love with Robin because she’s biddable, and unchallenging, and hero-worships me, which is what men like me want, whereas Charlotte stood up to me, which was the root of all our problems. That one day I’ll get bored with Robin and realise what I’ve lost, but it’ll be too late, because I hurt Charlotte so deeply she’s done with life.’
He knew just how accurately he’d guessed the contents of Charlotte’s note by Amelia’s expression.
‘It wasn’t just you,’ said Amelia, now with a softer and sadder look than he’d ever seen on her face before. ‘She blamed everyone. Everyone. And only a single line about James and Mary: “Show them this, when they’re old enough to understand.” That’s the main reason I burned it, I can’t… I couldn’t let…’
‘You did the right thing.’
‘Ruairidh doesn’t think so,’ said Amelia miserably. Strike only vaguely remembered her husband: a Nicholas Delaunay type, but ex-Blues and Royals. ‘He said she wanted it kept, and I had a duty to—’
‘She was full of drink and drugs when she wrote that letter, and you’ve got a duty to the living,’ said Strike. ‘To her kids, above all. In her best moments – and she had them, as we both know – she always regretted the things she’d done when she was high, or angry. If there’s anything beyond, she’ll know she shouldn’t have written what she did.’
The waiter returned to take their food order. Strike doubted Amelia wanted food any more than he did, but social convention meant they both ordered a single course. Once they were alone again, Amelia said,
‘She was always so… unhappy.’
‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘I know.’
‘But she wouldn’t ever… there was a – a darkness in her.’
‘Yeah,’ said Strike, ‘and she was in love with it. It’s dangerous to make a cult of your own unhappiness. Hard to get out, once you’ve been in there too long. You forget how.’
He drank some more of his rapidly diminishing pint before saying,
‘I once quoted Aeschylus at her. “Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.” Didn’t go down well.’
‘You did Classics as well?’ said Amelia, mildly surprised. She’d never shown much interest in him as a human being while he’d been with Charlotte. He’d been a misfit, a ne’er-do-well of mongrel breeding.
‘No,’ said Strike, ‘but there was an alcoholic ex-Classics teacher in one of the squats my mother took me to live in. He used to drop pearls of wisdom like that, mainly to patronise us all.’
When Strike had told Robin the story of this man, and how he, Strike, had stolen his Classics books in revenge at being condescended to, she’d laughed. Amelia merely looked at him as though he were talking about life on some faraway planet.
Their salads arrived. Both ate quickly, making forced conversation about the congestion charge, how often each of them got into the country and whether the Labour Party could win a general election under Jeremy Corbyn. Strike didn’t ask whether Charlotte had genuinely had breast cancer, though he suspected, from the absence of any mention of it from Amelia, that she hadn’t. What did it matter, now?
Neither ordered pudding or coffee. With perhaps equal relief, they rose from the table barely three quarters of an hour after sitting down.
Back on the pavement, Amelia said unexpectedly,
‘You’ve done wonderfully well with your business. I’ve been reading about that church… it sounds the most dreadful place.’
‘It was,’ said Strike.
‘You actually helped out a friend of ours, recently, with a nasty man who was taking advantage of his mother. Well… thank you for meeting me. It’s been… thank you, anyway.’
She looked up at him uncertainly, and he bent down to allow her to give him the standard upper-class farewell, an air kiss in the vicinity of each cheek.
‘Well – goodbye and – and good luck.’
‘You too, Amelia.’
Strike heard her sensible heels tapping away on the pavement as he turned to walk away. The sun slid out from behind its cloud, and it was that, surely, and nothing else, that made Strike’s eyes sting.
136
Confucius says… Life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings.
Now the course is checked, now it runs straight again.
Here winged thoughts may pour freely forth in words,
There the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence.
But when two people are at one in their inmost hearts,
They shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
‘Oh, good,’ panted Robin, entering the office pink-faced, at speed. She’d just half-run along Denmark Street. ‘He’s not here yet – Ryan, I mean.’
‘He’s dropping by, is he?’ said Pat, typing with her e-cigarette jammed between her teeth as usual, and looking pleased at the prospect of seeing the handsome Murphy.
‘Yes,’ said Robin, taking off the jacket she didn’t need on such a warm September day. ‘He’s picking me up, we’re going away for a couple of days and I’m really late – but so’s he.’
‘Tick him off for it,’ said Pat, still typing. ‘You might get flowers.’
‘Pretty shady behaviour, Pat.’
The office manager removed her e-cigarette from between her teeth.
‘Know where he is?’
‘No,’ said Robin, who was now reaching for an empty case folder on the shelf. She understood Pat to be referring to Strike, who the office manager usually called ‘he’ when he wasn’t around.
‘Meeting her sister.’
‘Whose sister?’
‘Charlotte’s,’ said Pat in a loud whisper, though it was only the two of them in the office.
‘Oh,’ said Robin.
Deeply interested, but not wanting to gossip about Strike’s private life with their office manager, Robin took down the folder and rummaged in her bag.
‘I’m only back to file these notes. Could you tell Strike they’re in here when he gets back, if I’m already gone? He might want to look over them.’
Robin had just met the agency’s newest client, a professional cricketer, at his Chelsea flat. She’d expected the interview to last an hour, but it had gone on for two.
‘Will do. What’s he like, then, the new bloke?’ asked Pat, e-cigarette between her teeth. The man in question was tall, blond and good looking, and Pat had evinced a certain disappointment that he wasn’t going to have his preliminary interview at the office, but at home.
‘Er,’ said Robin who, in addition to not gossiping about Strike behind his back, also tried not to criticise clients in front of Pat. ‘Well, he didn’t like McCabes. That’s why he’s come back to us.’
In fact, she’d found the South African cricketer, who Strike had called an ‘arsehole’ after one phone conversation, an unpleasant combination of arrogant and inappropriately flirtatious, especially as his girlfriend had been lurking in the kitchen all through the interview. He’d given the impression he took it for granted that he was the best-looking man Robin had seen in a long while, and had made it clear he didn’t consider her entirely unworthy of notice. Robin had to assume the stunning brunette who’d seen her out of the flat at the end of the interview either took him at his own valuation, or enjoyed the gorgeous flat and the Bugatti too much to complain.