As he’d hoped, he was able to secure a single room, and as he supposed was inevitable in the summer season, it didn’t have a sea view, but looked out over the rooftops of Cromer. Consciously looking for the good, he noted that the room was clean and the bed seemed comfortable, but now that he was shut inside it, surrounded by the same soft yellow and red colour scheme as the lobby, he felt claustrophobic, which he knew to be entirely irrational. Between his childhood and the army, he’d slept in cars, tents pitched on hard ground, squats, that bloody awful barn at Chapman Farm and a multi-storey car park in Angola: he had no reason to complain of a perfectly adequate hotel room.
But as he hung up his jacket and glanced around to determine how many balancing aids were available between the bed and the ensuite bathroom, which he’d need to navigate one-legged next morning, the depression he’d been fighting off all day sagged down upon him. Letting himself drop down onto the bed, he passed a hand over his face, unable to distract himself any longer from the twin causes of his low mood: Charlotte and Robin.
Strike despised self-pity. He’d witnessed serious poverty, trauma and hardship, both in the military and during his detective career, and he believed in counting your blessings. Nevertheless, Charlotte’s midnight threats were gnawing at him. If she followed through on them, the consequences wouldn’t be pretty. He’d had enough press interest to know how severe a threat it posed to his business, and he was already dealing with an attempt at sabotage from Patterson. He’d hoped never to have to decamp from his office again, or to lose clients who needed an anonymous sleuth, not an unwilling celebrity, least of all one tarred with the suspicion of violence against a woman.
He took out his phone again and Googled his name and Charlotte’s.
There were a few hits, mostly old newspaper articles in which their relationship had been mentioned in passing, including the recent one about her assault on Landon Dormer. So she hadn’t talked, yet. Doubtless he’d know about it immediately if she did: helpful friends would text him their outrage, as people always did on reading bad news, thinking this would help.
He yawned, plugged the mobile in to charge and, even though it was still early, went to shower before turning in. He’d hoped the hot water would improve his mood, but as he soaped himself, he found his thoughts drifting towards Robin, which brought no consolation. He’d been with her on his last two visits to seaside towns, both taken in the course of other cases: he’d eaten chips with her in Skegness, and stayed overnight in neighbouring rooms in Whitstable.
He remembered particularly the hotel dinner they’d shared that evening, shortly after he’d just broken up with his last girlfriend, and before Robin had gone on her first date with Ryan Murphy. Robin, he remembered, had been wearing a blue shirt. They’d drunk Rioja and laughed together, and waiting upstairs had been those two bedrooms, side by side on the top floor. Everything, he thought, had been propitious: wine, sea view, both of them single, nobody else around to interrupt, and what had he done? Nothing. Even telling her that his relationship – short, unsatisfactory and undertaken purely to distract himself from inconvenient desire for his partner – was over might have precipitated a conversation that would have drawn out Robin’s own feelings, but instead he’d maintained his habitual reserve, determined not to mess up their friendship and business partnership, but afraid, too, of rejection. His one, admittedly aborted, drunken move to kiss Robin, outside the Ritz Hotel on her thirtieth, had been met with such a look of horror that it remained branded on his memory.
Naked, he returned to the bedroom to take off his prosthesis. As it parted unwillingly with the gel pad at the end of his stump, he listened to the seagulls wheeling overhead in the sunset and wished to God he’d said something that night in Whitstable, because if he had, he might not currently be feeling so bloody miserable, and resting all his hopes on Ryan Murphy succumbing to one more alcoholic drink.
64
Nine in the third place…
Darkening of the light during the hunt in the south…
One must not expect perseverance too soon.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Strike woke next morning to a moment of confusion as to where he was. He’d been dreaming that he was sitting beside Robin in her old Land Rover and exchanging anecdotes about drowning, which in the dream both had experienced several times.
Bleary eyed, he reached across to his mobile to silence the alarm and immediately saw that seven texts had come in over the last half an hour: from Pat, Lucy, Prudence, Shanker, Ilsa, Dave Polworth and journalist Fergus Robertson. With a lurch of dread, he opened Pat’s message.
Her sister’s just called. I said you weren’t here. Hope you’re all right.
Strike opened Lucy’s next.
Stick, I’m so sorry, I’ve just seen. It’s awful. I don’t know what else to say. Hope you’re ok xxx
Now with a real sense of foreboding, Strike hitched himself up in bed and opened the text from Fergus Robertson.
I’ve got the news desk asking if you’ve got a comment. Might be wise to give them something, get everyone off your back. Don’t know if you’re aware, but there’s a rumour she left a note.
His heart now beating uncomfortably fast, Strike opened his phone browser and typed in Charlotte’s name.
Death of an It-Girl: Charlotte Campbell Found Dead
Former Wild Child Charlotte Campbell Found Dead by Cleaner
Charlotte Campbell Dead in Wake of Assault Charge
He stared at the headlines, unable to take in what he was seeing. Then he pressed the link to the last story.
Charlotte Campbell, model and socialite, has died by suicide at the age of 41, her family’s lawyer confirmed on Friday evening. In a statement issued to The Times, Campbell’s mother and sister said,
‘Our beloved Charlotte took her own life on Thursday night. Charlotte was under considerable stress following a baseless accusation of assault and subsequent harassment by the press. We request privacy at this very difficult time, particularly for Charlotte’s adored young children.’
‘We’ve lost the funniest, cleverest, most original woman any of us knew,’ said Campbell’s half-brother, actor Sacha Legard, in a separate statement. ‘I’m just one of the heartbroken people who loved her, struggling to comprehend the fact that we’ll never hear her laugh again. Death lies on her like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.’
The younger daughter of broadcaster Sir Anthony Campbell and model Tara Clairmont, Campbell married Jago Ross, Viscount of Croy, in 2011. The couple had twins before divorcing last year. Prior to her marriage she was the long-term girlfriend of private detective Cormoran Strike, eldest son of rock star Jonny Rokeby. More recently Campbell dated Landon Dormer, American billionaire scion of the Dormer hotel empire, but the relationship ended ten days ago with Campbell’s arrest for assault. Friends of Dormer assert that he required stitches to his face after an altercation at Dormer’s Fitzrovia apartment.
Campbell, who first made news when she ran away from Cheltenham Ladies’ College aged 14, gained a degree in Classics at Oxford before becoming a regular fixture on the London social scene. Described as ‘mercurial and mesmerising’ by Vogue, she worked intermittently as a model and fashion writer, and spent several spells in rehab during the 90s and 00s. In 2014 she was admitted to the controversial Symonds House, a private psychiatric and addiction clinic, from which she was hospitalised after what was later described as an accidental overdose.
Campbell’s body is believed to have been discovered by a cleaner yesterday morning at her Mayfair flat.
Blood thudded in Strike’s ears. He scrolled slowly back up the article.
Two pictures accompanied the piece: the first showed Charlotte in academic gown alongside her parents on her graduation day at Oxford in the nineties. Strike remembered seeing the picture in the press while stationed in Germany with the military police. Unbeknownst to Sir Anthony and his wife, Tara, both of whom had loathed Strike, he and Charlotte had already resumed their affair at long distance.
The second picture showed Charlotte smiling into the camera, wearing a heavy, emerald-studded choker. This was a publicity still for a jewellery collection, and the irrelevant thought flashed through his numb brain that the designer, whom he’d briefly dated, would surely be glad it had been used.
‘Fuck,’ he muttered, pushing himself up on his pillows. ‘Fuck.’
Shock was battling a heavy sense of absolute inevitability. The final hand had been played and Charlotte had been wiped out, with nothing more to bet and nowhere to find credit. She must have done it right after calling him. Had one of the voicemail messages he’d deleted made her intentions explicit? After threatening to go to Robin and tell her what Strike really was, had Charlotte broken down and pleaded with him to contact her once more? Had she threatened (as she’d done so many times before) to kill herself if he didn’t give her what she wanted?
Mechanically, Strike opened the other texts he’d been sent. He could have predicted all of them except Dave Polworth’s. Dave had always loathed Charlotte, and had often told Strike he was a fool to keep taking her back.
Bit of a fucker this, Diddy.
These were the exact words Polworth had spoken on first visiting Strike in Selly Oak Military Hospital, following Strike’s loss of half a leg.