The breeze was bracing, though it made his tired eyes water. Holding his burning cigarette out of the car between drags, he went on:
“So Flick got really angry, said she’d been doing ‘that shitty job for you’ and then said it wasn’t her fault they hadn’t got forty grand, at which Jimmy went, to quote Barclay, ‘apeshit.’ Flick stormed out and on Thursday morning, Jimmy texted Barclay and told him he was going back to where he grew up, to visit his brother.”
“Billy’s in Woolstone?” said Robin, startled. She realized that she had come to think of the younger Knight brother as an almost mythical person.
“Jimmy might’ve been using him as a cover story. Who knows where he’s really got to… Anyway, Jimmy and Flick reappeared last night in the pub, all smiles. Barclay says they’d obviously made up over the phone and in the two days he was away, she’s managed to find herself a nice non-bourgeois job.”
“That was good going,” said Robin.
“How d’you feel about shop work?”
“I did a bit in my teens,” said Robin. “Why?”
“Flick’s got herself a few hours part time in a jewelry shop in Camden. She told Barclay it’s run by some mad Wiccan woman. It’s minimum wage and the boss sounds barking mad, so they’re having trouble finding anyone else.”
“Don’t you think they might recognize me?”
“The Knight lot have never seen you in person,” said Strike. “If you did something drastic with your hair, broke out the colored contact lenses again… I’ve got a feeling,” he said, drawing deeply on his cigarette, “that Flick’s hiding a lot. How did she know what Chiswell’s blackmailable offense was? She was the one who told Jimmy, don’t forget, which is strange.”
“Wait,” said Robin. “What?”
“Yeah, she said, when I was following them on the march,” said Strike. “Didn’t I tell you?”
“No,” said Robin.
As she said it, Strike remembered that he had spent the week after the march at Lorelei’s with his leg up, when he had still been so angry at Robin for refusing to work that he had barely spoken to her. Then they had met at the hospital, and he had been far too distracted and worried to pass on information in his usual methodical fashion.
“Sorry,” he said. “It was that week after…”
“Yes,” she said, cutting him off. She, too, preferred not to think about the weekend of the march. “So what exactly did she say?”
“That he wouldn’t know what Chiswell had done, but for her.”
“That’s weird,” said Robin, “seeing as he’s the one who grew up right beside them.”
“But the thing they were blackmailing him about only happened six years ago, after Jimmy had left home,” Strike reminded her. “If you ask me, Jimmy’s been keeping Flick around because she knows too much. He might be scared of ending it, in case she starts talking.
“If you can’t get anything useful out of her, you can pretend selling earrings isn’t for you and leave, but the state their relationship’s in, I think Flick might be in the mood to confide in a friendly stranger. Don’t forget,” he said, throwing the end of his cigarette out of the window and winding it back up, “she’s also Jimmy’s alibi for the time of death.”
Excited about the prospect of going back undercover, Robin said:
“I hadn’t forgotten.”
She wondered how Matthew would react if she shaved the sides of her head, or dyed her hair blue. He had not put up much of a show of resentment at her spending Saturday with Strike. Her long days of effective house arrest, and her sympathy about the argument with Tom, seemed to have bought her credit.
Shortly after half past ten, they turned off the motorway onto a country road that wound down into the valley where the tiny village of Woolstone lay nestled. Robin parked beside a hedgerow full of Traveler’s Joy, so that Strike could reattach his prosthesis. Replacing her sunglasses in her handbag, Robin noticed two texts from Matthew. They had arrived two hours earlier, but the alert of her mobile must have been drowned out by the racket of the Land Rover.
The first read:
All day. What about Tom?
The second, which had been sent ten minutes later, said:
Ignore last, was meant for work.
Robin was rereading these when Strike said:
“Shit.”
He had already reattached his prosthesis, and was staring through his window at something she could not see.
“What?”
“Look at that.”
Strike pointed back up the hill down which they had just driven. Robin ducked her head so that she could see what had caught his attention.
A gigantic prehistoric white chalk figure had been cut into the hillside. To Robin, it resembled a stylised leopard, but the realization of what it was supposed to be had already hit her when Strike said:
“‘Up by the horse. He strangled the kid, up by the horse.’”
42
Henrik Ibsen,
