“After the one up the hill,” said Robin, as they set off across the road together. “Look at the sign.”
Painted on the board atop a wooden pole was the strange chalk figure they had seen earlier.
“The pub where I met Jimmy Knight the first time was called the White Horse, too,” said Strike.
“The White Horse,” said Robin, as they walked up the steps into the beer garden, Strike’s limp now more pronounced than ever, “is one of the ten most popular pub names in Britain. I read it in some article. Quick, those people are leaving—grab their table, I’ll get the drinks.”
The low-ceilinged pub was busy inside. Robin headed first for the Ladies where she stripped off her jacket, tied it around her waist and washed her smarting hands. She wished that she had managed to find dock leaves on the journey back from Steda Cottage, but most of her attention on the return walk had been given to Strike who had nearly fallen twice more and hobbled on looking furious with himself, repelling offers of assistance with bad grace and leaning heavily on the walking stick she had fashioned from a branch.
The mirror showed Robin that she was disheveled and grubby compared to the prosperous middle-aged people she had just seen in the bar, but being in a hurry to return to Strike and review the morning’s activities, she merely dragged a brush through her hair, wiped a green stain off her neck and returned to queue for drinks.
“Cheers, Robin,” said Strike gratefully, when she returned to him with a pint of Arkell’s Wiltshire Gold, shoving the menu across the table to her. “Ah, that’s good,” he sighed, taking a swig. “So what’s the most popular one?”
“Sorry?”
“The most popular pub name. You said the White Horse is in the top ten.”
“Oh, right… it’s either the Red Lion or the Crown, I can’t remember which.”
“The Victory’s my real local,” said Strike reminiscently.
He had not been back to Cornwall in two years. He saw the pub now in his mind’s eye, a squat building of whitewashed Cornish stone, the steps beside it winding down to the bay. It was the pub in which he had first managed to get served without ID, sixteen years old and dumped back at his uncle and aunt’s for a few weeks, while his mother’s life went through one of its regular bouts of upheaval.
“Ours is the Bay Horse,” said Robin, and she, too, had a sudden vision of a pub from what she would always think of as home, also white, standing on a street that led off the market square in Masham. It was there that she had celebrated her A-level results with her friends, the same night that Matthew and she had got into a stupid row, and he had left, and she had refused to follow, but remained with her friends.
“Why ‘bay’?” asked Strike, now halfway down his pint and luxuriating in the sunshine, his sore leg stretched out in front of him. “Why not just ‘brown’?”
“Well, there
“What color was your pony—Angus, wasn’t it?”
“How did you remember that?” asked Robin, surprised.
“Dunno,” said Strike. “Same as you remembering pub names. Some things stick, don’t they?”
“He was gray.”
“Meaning white. It’s all just jargon to confuse non-riding plebs, isn’t it?”
“No,” said Robin, laughing. “Gray horses have black skin under the white hair. True whites—”
“—die young,” said Strike, as a barmaid arrived to take their order. Having ordered a burger, Strike lit another cigarette and as the nicotine hit his brain, felt a wave of something close to euphoria. A pint, a hot day in August, a well-paid job, food on the way and Robin, sitting across from him, their friendship restored, if not entirely to what it had been before her honeymoon, then perhaps as close as was possible, now that she was married. Right now, in this sunny beer garden, and in spite of the pain in his leg, his tiredness and the unresolved mess that was his relationship with Lorelei, life felt simple and hopeful.
“Group interviews are never a good idea,” he said, exhaling away from Robin’s face, “but there were some interesting crosscurrents among the Chiswells, weren’t there? I’m going to keep working on Izzy. I think she might be a bit more forthcoming without the family around.”
“I’ve got something to show you. Look.”
She brought up her photograph of Freddie Chiswell’s birthday party.
“That,” she said, pointing at the girl’s pale, unhappy face, “is Rhiannon Winn. She was at Freddie Chiswell’s eighteenth birthday party. Turns out—” she scrolled back a picture, to show the group in white tunics, “they were on the British fencing team together.”
“Christ, of course,” said Strike, taking the phone from Robin. “The sword—the sword in Ebury Street. I bet it was Freddie’s!”
“Of course!” echoed Robin, wondering why she hadn’t realized that before.
