Sometimes since, when tallying up promising signs, he’d reminded himself that embarrassment didn’t necessarily denote revulsion, that Robin had once uttered the words ‘I don’t want to lose you’ and that she’d freely told him he, too, was her best friend. He recalled her wedding day, when she’d run out on her first dance to follow and hug him. Yet in his darker moments he relived those fatal, drunken few seconds outside the Ritz a little over two years previously, when he’d moved to kiss her and seen a clear refusal in her expression. He was eight years older than Murphy, and while he knew, without vanity, that he was very attractive to certain kinds of women, on the available evidence, he wasn’t physically what Robin liked. Both her current boyfriend and her ex-husband (Matthew Fucking Cunliffe) had been slim, fit, classically handsome men, whereas Strike resembled a broken-nosed Beethoven and was still, in spite of intermittently strenuous efforts, over a stone off his ideal weight, which in itself had to be calculated to accommodate the loss of half his leg.
And Robin had hung up as soon as he’d mentioned Charlotte today. Why? Because she feared hearing, again, that Charlotte had thought him in love with her? Because she wanted to shut down any further discussion of the subject?
His steak finished, and feeling, if anything, worse, Strike went to the holdall he’d brought back from Cornwall and extracted the shoe box containing Ted’s two old hats, the leather-bound fisherman’s cosh and the photographs Strike had removed from the familiar, now mournfully empty house.
He hadn’t cried at Ted’s funeral, in spite of the invisible, weighty slab that had lain on his chest throughout. His uncle had become increasingly frail and confused after the death of his wife two years previously, but even as Strike had nodded at the bromides delivered by well-wishers at the crowded wake – ‘perhaps it was for the best’, ‘he never wanted to be a burden’, ‘it’s what he would have wanted, going quickly’ – he’d found it hard to disguise a latent antagonism. They all appeared to have forgotten who Ted really was; not the shambling figure who’d got lost one morning on the beach he’d once known better than his own face, but the hero of Strike’s youth, his model of a man. Strike had been brought closest to tears when, in a welcome interlude at the bar with his oldest friend, Dave Polworth, the latter had raised a pint of Cornish ale to the ceiling and said,
‘Proper man, Ted.’
‘Proper man’ was a Polworth-ism with many connotations. To be a proper man meant to be a strong man, an outdoors man, but also a man of principle. It meant lack of bombast, a repudiation of shallowness and a core of quiet self-belief. It meant being slow to anger, but firm in conviction. Polworth, like Strike, had had to take his male role models where he could find them, because neither had a father who qualified as ‘proper’, and both boys had found in Edward Nancarrow a man worthy of admiration and emulation, whose approval meant more than any school teacher’s star and whose rebukes spurred a desire to do better, to work harder, to earn back Ted’s good opinion.
Now Strike took out the old pictures and examined them, one by one, pausing on the oldest one of all, which was black and white. It showed a large, swarthy, crudely handsome man with dark, curly hair exactly like Strike’s, standing with his back to the sea, his enormous hand on the shoulder of Ted the boy, whose face was pinched with anxiety.
Trevik Nancarrow, Strike’s Cornish grandfather, had died before Strike was born, and given what he knew about the man, Strike had no sense of loss. Hard-drinking and powerfully built, Trevik had passed for a solid member of the community outside the family home. Within it, according to his children, he’d been pure terror.
Trevik’s long-suffering wife had died young, leaving him in sole charge of two children, born fourteen years apart: Ted, who’d been sixteen, and Peggy, Strike’s mother, who’d been only two – the same age Rupert Fleetwood had been, it now occurred to Strike, when both his parents disappeared beneath a deadly mass of thundering snow. Trevik’s mother had offered the fetching little Peggy a home. As capricious and mean-spirited as her hard-drinking son, the old woman had had no time for Ted: teenage boys were messy and loud, and their place was with their father, whereas Peggy, the old woman insisted, loved and needed her granny, who took pride in dressing her and looking after her mane of long dark hair.
