okout for her.
The evening before his trip to Cromer, Strike worked late in the otherwise empty office, dealing with tedious paperwork while eating a packaged quinoa salad. It was the day of the Brexit referendum, but Strike hadn’t had time to vote: the Franks had decided to split up that day and he’d been pinned down, watching for the younger brother in Bexleyheath.
A combination of tedium and hunger made him particularly irritated by the sound of the office phone ringing at nearly eleven at night. Certain it was Charlotte, he let it go to voicemail. The phone rang again twenty minutes later, and at one minute to midnight rang for a third time.
Finally closing the various folders on the desk, he added his signature to a couple of documents and got up to file everything away.
Before leaving the office for his attic flat he paused at Pat’s desk again and pressed a button on her phone. He didn’t want anyone else to listen to Charlotte’s tirades: once had been enough.
‘Bluey, pick up. Seriously, Bluey, please, please pick up. I’m desp—’
Strike pressed delete, then played the next message. She sounded angry as well as pleading now.
‘I need to talk to you. If you’ve got any humanity at a—’
He pressed delete, then play.
Now a malevolent whisper filled the room, and he could visualise Charlotte’s expression, because he’d seen her like that at her most destructive, when there was no limit to her appetite to wound.
‘You’ll wish you’d picked up, you know. You will. And so will precious fucking Robin, when she hears what you really are. I know where she lives, you realise that? I’ll be doing her a fav—’
Strike slammed his hand onto the phone, deleting the message.
He knew why Charlotte was taking things this far: she’d at long last admitted to herself that Strike wasn’t ever coming back. For nearly six years she’d believed the craving she couldn’t eradicate in herself lived on in him, too, and that her beauty, her vulnerability and their long, shared history would reunite them, no matter all that had gone before, no matter how determined he was not to return. Charlotte’s flashes of insight and extraordinary ability to sniff out weak spots had always had something of the witch about them. She’d correctly intuited that he must be in love with his business partner, and this certainty was driving her to new heights of vindictiveness.
He’d have liked to comfort himself with the belief that Charlotte’s threats were empty, but he couldn’t: he knew her far too well. Possible scenarios ran through his head, each more damaging than the last: Charlotte turning up outside Robin’s house, Charlotte tracking down Murphy, Charlotte making good on her threat, and speaking to the press.
He’d had a little malicious fun in the pub with Murphy, refusing to disclose what he might have heard from Wardle to Murphy’s discredit. Now he looked back on what he felt might have been a dangerous bit of self-indulgence. Ryan Murphy would have no sense of loyalty to Strike, should Charlotte decide to spin him a line about what Strike was ‘really like’, or to pass on to Robin the vitriol Charlotte might choose to unleash in the press.
After what might have been one minute or ten, Strike became aware that he was still standing beside Pat’s desk, every muscle in his arms and neck tense. The office looked strange, almost alien, in the overhead lights, with the darkness closing in against the windows. As he headed to the door with both partners’ names engraved upon it, the only cold comfort he could draw from the situation was that Charlotte couldn’t ambush Robin, as long as she was at Chapman Farm.
62
Nine in the second place…
To bear with fools in kindliness brings good fortune.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Strike learned in the car on the way to the Heatons’ house in Cromer that Britain had voted to leave the EU. He switched off the radio after an hour of listening to commentators speculating on what this would mean for the country and listened instead to Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones.
He might have chosen to pick up Robin’s latest letter on the way back from Cromer, but he’d allotted the job to Midge. Having done it once already, he’d learned the hard way how difficult it was for a man with half his leg missing to get over the wall and barbed wire without injuring himself or falling into the nettle patch on the other side. However, he deliberately chose to drive past the entrance to Lion’s Mouth and Chapman Farm, even though, under normal circumstances, it was the last place he’d have ventured near. Inevitably, more unpleasant memories assailed him, as he passed the electric gates, and saw on the horizon that curious tower that resembled a giant chess piece; he remembered being convinced, at the age of eleven, that it had something to do with the Crowther brothers, that it was a watchtower of some description, and even though he’d never known exactly what was going on in the cabins and tents, out of sight, his inner antenna for evil had imagined children locked up in there. The fact that Robin was momentarily so close, but unreachable, did nothing whatsoever to improve his spirits, and he drove away from Chapman Farm with his mood even lower than it had been over breakfast, when his thoughts had been dominated by Charlotte’s threats of the previous night.
Cornishman that he was, proximity to the ocean generally cheered him up, but on entering Cromer he saw many old walls and buildings covered in rounded flints, which reminded him unpleasantly of the farmhouse into which Leda had periodically disappeared to discuss philosophy and politics, leaving her children unsupervised and unprotected.
He parked the BMW in a car park in the middle of town and got out beneath an overcast sky. The Heatons lived in Garden Street, which lay within walking distance, and narrowed into a pedestrian alley as it approached the seafront, the ocean framed between old houses as a small square of teal beneath a cloudy grey sky. Their house lay on the left side of the street: a solid-looking terraced residence with a dark green front door that opened directly onto the pavement. Strike imagined it would be a noisy place to live, with pedestrians tramping up and down from the beach to the shops and the Wellington pub.
When he rapped on the door using a knocker shaped like a horseshoe, a dog started yapping furiously from the interior. The door was opened by a woman in her early sixties, whose platinum hair was cut short and whose skin was the colour and texture of old leather. The dog, which was tiny, fluffy and white, was clutched to her sizeable bosom. For a split second, Strike thought he must have come to the wrong house, because gales of laughter issued from behind her, audible even over the still-yapping dog.
‘Got friends over,’ she said, beaming. ‘They wanted to meet you. Averyone’s excited.’
You have to be kidding me.
‘I take it you’re—?’
‘Shelley Heaton,’ she said, extending a hand, on which a heavy gold charm bracelet tinkled. ‘Come on in. Len’s through there with the rest of ’em. Do you shet up, Dilly.’
The dog’s yapping subsided. Shelley led Strike down a dark hallway and left into a comfortable but not over-large sitting room, which seemed to be full of people. Hazy shadows of holiday-makers drifted to and fro behind the net curtains: as Strike had expected, the noise from the street was constant.
‘Thass Len,’ said Shelley, pointing at a large, ruddy-faced man with the most obvious comb-over Strike had seen in years. Leonard Heaton’s right leg, which was encased in a surgical boot, was resting on a squat pouffe. The table beside him was crammed with framed photographs, many of them featuring the dog in Shelley’s arms.
‘Hare he is,’ said Len Heaton loudly, offering a sweaty paw embellished with a large signet ring. ‘Cameron Strike, I presume?’
‘That’s me,’ said Strike, shaking hands.
‘I’ll juss make the tea,’ said Shelley, looking hungrily at Strike. ‘Don’t go starting without me!’
She set down the small dog and left with a jangle of jewellery. The dog trotted after her.
‘This is our friends George and Gillian Cox,’ said Leonard Heaton, pointing at the sofa, where three plump people, also in their sixties, were tightly wedged, ‘and thass Suzy, Shell’s sister.’
Suzy’s eager eyes looked like raisins in her doughy face. George, whose paunch rested almost on his knees, was entirely bald and wheezing slightly, even though he was stationary. Gillian, who had curly grey hair and wore silver spectacles, said proudly,
‘I’m the one you spoke to, on the phone.’
‘Do you set down,’ Heaton told Strike comfortably, pointing at the armchair with its back to the window, facing his own. ‘Happy about the referendum?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Strike, who judged from Len Heaton’s expression that this was the correct answer.
During the few minutes Heaton’s wife moved in and out of the kitchen carrying tea, cups, plates and lemon drizzle cake, regularly crying ‘Wait fur me, I wanna hear it all!’, Strike had ample time to realise that the three blondes who’d cornered him at his godson’s christening had been mere amateurs in nosiness. The sofa-dwellers bombarded him with questions, not only about all his most newsworthy cases, but also about his parentage, his missing half leg and even – here, his determined good nature nearly failed – his relationship with Charlotte Campbell.
‘That was a long time ago,’ he said as firmly as was compatible with politeness, before turning to Leonard Heaton. ‘So you’re just back from Spain?’
‘Ah, thass right,’ said Leonard, whose forehead was peeling. ‘Got ourselves a little place in Fuengirola ahter I sowd my business. We’re normally there November through to April, but—’