Lucy believed the stress of Ted’s removal to a nursing home had brought on his fatal stroke, and Strike had had to force himself not to become impatient with her repeated bursts of self-recrimination, doing his utmost not to match her fractiousness with ill-temper, not to snap, nor to become irritable when explaining that just because he didn’t want to take more of the objects associated with the most stable parts of their childhood, it didn’t mean he wasn’t suffering as much as she was from the loss of the man who’d been his only true father figure. All Strike had taken for himself were Ted’s Royal Military Police red beret, his ancient fishing hat, his old ‘priest’ (a wooden cosh with which to finish off fish still fighting for life), and a handful of faded photos. These items were currently sitting in a shoe box inside the holdall Strike hadn’t yet had time to unpack.
Mile by mile, with no company except the emotional hangover of the past ten days and the aching of his hamstring, the dislike Strike had already taken towards today’s prospective client mounted. Decima Mullins had the kind of accent he associated with the many wealthy, wronged wives who’d come to his detective agency hoping to prove their husbands’ infidelity or criminality in hope of securing a better divorce settlement. On the evidence of their only phone conversation to date, she was melodramatic and entitled. She’d said she couldn’t possibly visit Strike’s office in Denmark Street, for reasons she’d disclose in person, and insisted that she was only prepared to discuss her problem face to face at her house in Kent. All she’d deigned to divulge so far was that she wanted something proven, and as Strike couldn’t imagine any possible investigative scenario that didn’t involve proving something, he wasn’t particularly grateful for the pointer.
In this unpropitious mood he proceeded along Canterbury Road through a landscape of bare trees and sodden fields. At last, windscreen wipers still swishing and clunking, he turned up a narrow, puddled track to the left, following a sign to Delamore Lodge.
The house to which Strike had driven wasn’t what he’d been expecting. Far from being a country manor, Delamore Lodge was a small, run-down dwelling of dark stone that resembled an abandoned chapel, set in a wild garden that looked as though it hadn’t been touched in years. As Strike parked, he noticed that one of the Gothic windows had several cracked panes which had been covered from the inside with what looked like a black bin bag. Some of the roof tiles were missing. Viewed against an ominous November sky and through driving rain, Delamore Lodge was the kind of place local children might easily believe to be inhabited by a witch.
Placing his fake foot carefully, because sodden leaves from a few bare trees had formed a slimy carpet on the uneven path, Strike approached the oak front door and knocked. It opened seconds later.
Strike’s mental image of Decima Mullins as a well-groomed blonde in tailored tweed could hardly have been wider of the mark. He found himself facing a pale, dumpy woman whose long, straggly brown hair had greying roots and which looked as though it hadn’t been cut in a long time. She was wearing black tracksuit bottoms and a thick black woollen poncho. In conjunction with the wild garden and the ramshackle house, her outfit made Strike wonder whether he was looking at an upper-class eccentric who’d turned her back on society to paint bad pictures or throw wonky pots. It was a type he failed to find endearing.
‘Miss Mullins?’
‘Yes. You’re Cormoran?’
‘That’s me,’ said Strike, noticing that she got his first name right. Most people said ‘Cameron’.
‘Could I see some ID?’
Given how unlikely it was that a roving burglar had decided to turn up at her house by daylight in a BMW, at exactly the same time she was expecting a detective she’d summoned into Kent, Strike resented having to stand in the downpour while fumbling in his pocket for his driving licence. Once he’d shown it to her, she moved aside to let him enter a cramped hall, which seemed unusually full of umbrella stands and shoe racks, as though successive owners had added their own without removing the older ones. Strike, who’d endured too much squalor in his childhood, was unsympathetic to untidiness and dirtiness in those capable of tackling them, and his negative impression of this dowdy upper-class woman intensified. Possibly some of his disapproval showed in his expression because Decima said,
