‘Is he as handsome in person?’ asked Pat, watching as Robin placed her notes inside the file, then scribbled the cricketer’s name on the front.
‘If you like that sort of thing,’ said Robin, as the glass door opened.
‘Sort of thing’s that?’ asked Strike, entering in his suit, his tie loosened and his vape pen in his hand.
‘Blond cricketers,’ said Robin, looking round. Her partner looked tired and downtrodden.
‘Ah,’ grunted Strike, hanging up his jacket. ‘Was he as much of an arsehole in person as he was on the phone?’
Seeing as the not-bitching-about-clients-in-front-of-Pat ship had now set sail full speed out of the harbour, Robin asked,
‘How bad was he on the phone?’
‘A good eight point five out of ten,’ said Strike.
‘Then he’s the same in person.’
‘Fancy updating me before you leave?’ said Strike, checking his watch. He knew Robin was due to take some long-overdue leave today. ‘Unless you need to get going?’
‘No, I’m waiting for Ryan,’ said Robin. ‘I’ve got time.’
They entered the inner office and Strike closed the door. The board on the wall that so recently had been covered in the UHC pictures and notes was empty again. The Polaroids were with the police, and the rest had been added to the case file, which was locked in the safe, pending its use in the forthcoming court case. Jacob’s body had now been identified, and the accusation of child abuse against Robin had at long last been dropped; the weekend away with Murphy was at least partly in celebration of this fact. Even Robin could see how much happier and healthier she looked in the mirror, now that this weight had been lifted off her.
‘So,’ said Robin, sitting down, ‘he thinks his estranged wife is having an affair with a married Mail journalist, hence the stream of scurrilous stories the Mail have had on him lately.’
‘Which journalist?’
‘Dominic Culpepper,’ said Robin.
‘Married now, then, is he?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘to a Lady Violet somebody. Well, Lady Violet Culpepper, now.’
‘Should be juicy, when it breaks,’ said Strike, unsmiling. Depression was radiating from him as the smell of cigarette smoke had, before he’d embarked on his health kick.
‘Are you all right?’ Robin asked.
‘What?’ said Strike, though he’d heard her. ‘Yeah. I’m fine.’
But in reality, he’d called her into the inner office because he wanted her company as long as he could get it. Robin wondered whether she dared ask, and decided she did.
‘Pat told me you were meeting Charlotte’s sister.’
‘Did she?’ said Strike, though without rancour.
‘Did she ask to see you, or—?’
‘Yeah, she asked to see me,’ said Strike.
There was a short silence.
‘She wanted to meet me right after Charlotte died, but I couldn’t,’ said Strike. ‘Then she closed up shop and went off to the country with her kids for a month.’
‘I’m sorry, Cormoran,’ said Robin quietly.
‘Yeah, well,’ said Strike, with a slight shrug. ‘I gave her what she was after, I think.’
‘What was that?’
‘Dunno,’ said Strike, examining his vape pen. ‘Reassurance nobody could’ve stopped it happening? Except me,’ he added. ‘I could’ve.’
Robin felt desperately sorry for him, and knew it must have shown on her face, because when he glanced up at her he said,
‘I wouldn’t change anything.’
‘Right,’ said Robin, unsure of what else to say.
‘She called here,’ said Strike, dropping his gaze back to the vape pen in his hand, which he was turning over and over. ‘Three times, on the night she did it. I knew who it was and I didn’t answer. Then I listened to the messages and deleted them.’
‘You couldn’t have known—’
‘Yeah, I could,’ said Strike calmly, still turning the vape pen over in his hand, ‘she was a walking suicide even when I met her. She’d already tried a couple of times.’
Robin knew this from her conversations with Ilsa, who scathingly categorised Charlotte’s various suicide attempts into two categories: those meant to manipulate, and those that were genuine. However, Robin could no longer take Ilsa’s estimation at face value. Charlotte’s final attempt had been no empty gesture. She’d been determined to live no longer – unless, it seemed, Strike had answered the phone. The suicide of Carrie Curtis Woods, no matter that Robin now knew she’d been a collaborator in infanticide, would be a scar Robin bore forever. How it felt to know you might have prevented the death of somebody you’d loved for sixteen years, she had no idea.
‘Cormoran, I’m sorry,’ she said again.
‘Feel sorry for Amelia and her kids, not me,’ he said. ‘I was done. There’s nothing deader than dead love.’
For six years now, Robin had longed to know what Strike really felt for Charlotte Campbell, the woman he’d left for good on the very day Robin had arrived at the agency as a temp. Charlotte had been the most intimidating woman Robin had ever met: beautiful, clever, charming and also – Robin had seen evidence of it herself – devious and occasionally callous. Robin had felt guilty about hoarding every crumb of information about Strike and Charlotte’s relationship Ilsa had ever let fall, feeling she was betraying Strike in listening, in remembering. He’d always been so cagey about the relationship, even after some of the barriers between them had come down, even after Strike had openly called Robin his best friend.
Strike, meanwhile, was aware he was breaking a vow he’d made himself six years previously, when, fresh from the rupture with a woman he still loved, he’d noticed how sexy his temp was, almost at the same moment he’d noticed the engagement ring on her finger. He’d resolved then, knowing his own susceptibility, that there would be no easy slide into intimacy with a woman who, but for the engagement ring, he might willingly have rebounded onto. He’d been strict about not letting himself trawl for her sympathy. Even after his love for Charlotte had shrivelled into non-existence, leaving behind it a ghostly husk of pity and exasperation, Strike had maintained this reserve, because, against his will, his feelings for Robin were growing deeper and more complex, and her third finger was bare now, and he’d feared ruining the most important friendship of his life, and trashing the business for which both had sacrificed so much.
But today, with Charlotte dead, and with Robin perhaps destined for another engagement ring, Strike had things to say. Perhaps it was the delusion of the middle-aged male to think it would make any difference, but there came a time when a man needed to take charge of his own fate. So he inhaled nicotine, then said,
‘Last year, Charlotte begged me to get back together. I told her nothing on earth would make me help raise Jago Ross’s kids. This was after we – the agency – found out Jago was knocking his older daughters around. And she said I needn’t worry: it’d be shared custody now. In other words, she’d palm the kids off on him, if I was happy to come back.
‘I’d just handed her all the evidence a judge would need to keep those kids safe, and she told me she’d shunt them off on that bastard, thinking I’d say, “Great. Fuck ’em. Let’s go and get a drink.”’
Strike exhaled nicotine vapour. Robin hadn’t noticed she was holding her breath.
‘Always a bit of delusion in love, isn’t there?’ said Strike, watching the vapour rise to the ceiling. ‘You fill in the blanks with your own imagination. Paint them exactly the way you want them to be. But I’m a detective… some fucking detective. If I’d stuck to hard facts – if I’d done that, even in the first twenty-four hours I knew her – I’d have walked and never looked back.’
‘You were nineteen,’ said Robin. ‘Exactly the same age Will was, when he heard Jonathan Wace speak for the first time.’
‘Ha! You think I was in a cult, do you?’
‘No, but I’m saying… we’ve got to forgive who we were, when we didn’t know any better. I did the same thing, with Matthew. I did exactly that. Painted in the gaps the way I’d have liked them to be. Believed in Higher-Level Truths to explain away the bullshit. “He doesn’t really mean it.” “He isn’t really like that.” And, oh my God, the evidence was staring me in the face, and I bloody married him – and regretted it within an hour of him putting the ring on my finger.’
Hearing this, Strike remembered how he’d burst into her and Matthew’s wedding, at the very moment Robin had been about to say ‘I do’. He also remembered the hug he and Robin had shared, after he’d walked out of the reception, and she’d run out of her first dance to follow him, and he knew, now, there was no turning back.
‘So what did Amelia want?’ said Robin, bold enough to ask, now that Strike had told her this much. ‘Was she – she wasn’t blaming you, was she?’
‘No,’ said Strike. ‘She was carrying out her sister’s last wishes. Charlotte left a suicide note, with instructions to pass on a message to me.’
He smiled at Robin’s fearful expression.
‘It’s all right. Amelia burned it. Doesn’t matter – I could’ve written it myself – I told Amelia exactly what Charlotte wrote.’
Robin worried it might be indecent to ask, but Strike didn’t wait for the question.
‘She said that even though I was a bastard to her, she still loved me. That I’d know one day what I’d given up, that I’d never be happy, deep down, without her. That—’
Strike and Robin had once before sat in this office, after dark and full of whisky, and he’d come dangerously close to crossing the line between friend and lover. He’d felt then the fatalistic daring of the trapeze artist, preparing to swing out into the spotlight with only black air beneath him, and he felt the same now.
‘—she knew I was in love with you.’
A stab of cold shock, an electric charge to the brain: Robin couldn’t quite believe what she’d just heard. The passing seconds seemed to slow. She waited for Strike to say ‘which was her spite, obviously,’ or, ‘because she never understood that a man and a woman could just be friends’, or to make a joke. Yet he said nothing to defuse the grenade he’d just thrown, but simply looked at her.