He gestured with his thumb towards the lung that had been punctured by a cornered killer.
‘What’s she like?’ said Lucy, who appeared curious and interested, but in no way resentful.
‘Nice,’ said Strike. ‘I mean, she’s not you—’
‘You don’t need to say that,’ said Lucy, with a shaky laugh. ‘I know what we went through together, I know nobody else will ever understand that. You know, Joan always wanted you to make it up with Rokeby.’
‘Prudence isn’t Rokeby,’ said Strike.
‘I know,’ said Lucy, ‘but it’s still good you’re seeing her. Joan would be happy.’
‘I didn’t think you’d take it like this.’
‘Why not? I see my dad’s other kids.’
‘Do you?’
‘Of course I do! I didn’t want to go on about it, because—’
‘You thought I’d be hurt?’
‘Probably because I felt guilty that I’ve got a relationship with my dad and half-siblings, and you haven’t,’ said Lucy.
After a short pause, she said,
‘I saw Charlotte in the paper, with her new boyfriend.’
‘Yeah,’ said Strike, ‘well, she likes a certain lifestyle. That was always a problem, me being broke.’
‘You don’t wish—?’
‘Christ, no,’ said Strike. ‘That’s dead and buried.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Lucy. ‘I’m really glad. You deserve so much better. You’ll stay for lunch, won’t you?’
Given the revelations of the morning, Strike felt he had no choice but to agree.
12
The inferior thing seems so harmless and inviting that a man delights in it; it looks so small and weak that he imagines he may dally with it and come to no harm.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Strike made an uncharacteristic effort to appear cheerful while at lunch, tolerating his brother-in-law and eldest nephew with a grace he’d rarely shown before. He didn’t rush away afterwards, but stayed until the rain had passed off, when the whole family went into the back garden and watched Luke, Jack and Adam play with their Firetek Bows, even feigning good humour when Luke, in what Strike refused to believe was an accident, discharged his dart into the side of his uncle’s face, eliciting roars of laughter from Greg.
Only once he’d left the house did Strike allow his face to slacken, losing the determined grin he’d worn for much of the last couple of hours. Having firmly resisted Lucy’s offers of a lift, he walked back to the station under a grey sky, brooding on everything he’d just heard.
Strike was a mentally resilient man who’d survived plenty of reverses in his life, not least the loss of part of his right leg. One of the tools of self-discipline he’d forged in youth and honed in the army was a habit of compartmentalisation that rarely failed him, but right now, it wasn’t working. Emotions he didn’t want to feel and memories he generally suppressed were closing in on him, and he, who detested anything that smacked of self-indulgence, travelled back towards Denmark Street brooding so deeply that he barely registered the passing Tube stations and realised, almost too late to disembark, that he was already at Tottenham Court Road.
By the time he arrived back at his attic flat, he felt as grimly unhappy as he’d been for a long time. In consequence, he poured himself a double whisky, refilled his vape pen, sat down at his kitchen table and stared into space while alternately downing Scotch and exhaling vapour in the direction of his draughty window.
He’d rarely felt as angry at his mother as he did this afternoon. She’d died of what had been ruled an accidental overdose when Strike was nineteen, an overdose which Strike believed to this day had been administered by her far younger husband. His reaction to the news had been to drop out of university and join the military police, a decision he knew his unconventional mother would have found both inexplicable and vaguely comical. But why? he demanded of the Leda in his head. You knew I wanted order, and boundaries, and a life without endless fucking mess. If you hadn’t been what you were, maybe I wouldn’t be what I am. Maybe I’m reaping what you sowed, so don’t you fucking laugh at the army, or me, you with your paedophile mates and the squatters and the junkies…
These thoughts of Leda led inevitably to thoughts of Charlotte Campbell, because he knew that plenty of armchair psychologists, including close friends and family members, thought he’d been so irreparably damaged by Leda’s parenting, he’d been inevitably drawn to a similarly chaotic and unstable woman. This had always irritated Strike, and it irritated him now as he sat with his whisky, staring out of his attic window, because it so happened that there’d been profound differences between his ex-fiancée and his late mother.
Leda had had a bottomless compassion for underdogs and an incurable optimism about human nature that had never failed her. That, indeed, had been the problem: her naive, unconquerable conviction that genuine evil was only found in the repressions of small-town respectability. She might have taken endless risks, but she wasn’t self-destructive: on the contrary, she’d fully expected to live to a hundred.
Charlotte, on the other hand, was profoundly unhappy, and Strike suspected he was the only person who truly knew the depths of her misery. The surface of Charlotte’s life might look glamorous and easy, because she was extraordinarily beautiful, and came from a rich and newsworthy family, but her real value to the gossip columns was her instability. There were several suicide attempts in Charlotte’s past, and a long history of psychiatric evaluations. He’d seen the press pictures of her, dead-eyed in her red slip dress, and his only thought had been that she’d probably taken something to get her through another night of revelry, a supposition backed up by the fact that she’d called his office at midnight on the same night, leaving an incoherent message on the answer machine, which he’d deleted before anyone else could hear it.
Strike was well aware that Lucy, and some of his friends, believed him trapped perpetually in the shadow cast by those two dark caryatids, Leda and Charlotte. They wanted him to stride out into the sunlight, free at last, to find a less complicated woman, and a love untainted by pain. But what was a man supposed to do if he thought he might finally be ready to do that, and it was too late? Alone of the women jostling in his thoughts, Robin brought feelings of warmth, though they were tinged with a bitterness no less easier to bear because it was self-directed. He should have spoken up, should have forced a conversation about their respective feelings before Ryan Murphy swooped in and carried off the prize Strike had complacently thought was his for the taking.
Fuck this.
The sky outside the window was rapidly darkening. He got up from the table, went into his bedroom, returned to the kitchen with his notebook and laptop, and opened both. Work had always been his greatest refuge, and the sight of an email from Eric Wardle headed Census information at the top of his inbox felt like an immediate reward for turning away from alcohol, and back to investigation.
Wardle had done him proud. The last three censuses for Chapman Farm were attached: 1991, 2001 and 2011. Strike typed out a brief message of thanks to Wardle, then opened the first attachment, scanning the list of names provided.
After an hour and a half of online cross-referencing, and having found a bonus in the form of an interesting article about the church dating from 2005, dusk was drawing in. Strike poured himself a second whisky, sat back down at his table and contemplated the immediate results of his research: a list of names, only one of which so far had an address beside it.
He contemplated his mobile, thinking back on the days he’d occasionally called Robin at home, while she was still married. Those calls, he knew, had sometimes caused trouble, given Matthew’s resentment of his wife’s growing dedication to the job. It was Saturday night: Robin and Murphy might be at a restaurant, or the bloody theatre again. Strike took another swig of whisky, and pressed Robin’s number.
‘Hi,’ she said, answering on the second ring. ‘What’s up?’
‘Got a moment to talk? I’ve been digging information out of the census.’
‘Oh, great – Wardle came through?’
Strike heard the rattle of what he thought might be a saucepan.
‘Sure you’re not busy?’
‘No, it’s fine, I’m cooking. Ryan’s coming over for dinner, but he’s not here yet.’
‘I might have a couple of leads. There’s a woman called Sheila Kennett who lived at Chapman Farm with her late husband until the nineties. She’s knocking on a bit, but I’ve got an address for her in Coventry. Wondering whether you’d mind driving up there and interviewing her. Old lady – better you than me.’
‘No problem,’ said Robin, ‘but it’ll have to be week after next, because Midge is away from Wednesday and I’m covering for her.’
‘OK. I’ve also found an article written by a journalist called Fergus Robertson, who got an ex-member of the UHC to speak to him anonymously in 2006. There are a lot of “allegeds”: violence used against members, misappropriation of funds. They protect their sources, journalists, but I thought there might be stuff Robertson couldn’t put in, for fear of litigation. Fancy coming with me if he agrees to talk?’
‘Depends when it is,’ said Robin, ‘I’ve got a heavy week on the new stalker case, but – ouch—’
‘You OK?’
‘Burned myself – sorry, I – hang on, that’s Ryan.’
He heard her walking away towards the door. Slightly despising himself, Strike hung on: he really wanted Ryan Murphy to arrive and find Robin on the phone to him.
‘Hi,’ he heard her say, and then came Murphy’s muffled voice, and the unmistakeable sound of a kiss. ‘Dinner’s nearly done,’ she said, and Murphy said something, Robin laughed, and said ‘No, it’s Strike,’ while her detective partner sat frowning in front of his laptop.