‘All right,’ said Robin, but Strike could tell from the tone that he’d barely got away with this. His partner never took kindly to Strike expressing concern in any manner that implied he didn’t trust her to look after herself. In truth, while he had good reason for thinking her occasionally reckless – he wouldn’t soon forget her jumping in front of a moving train to try and drag a man she definitely couldn’t have lifted to safety, nor sprinting ahead of him into a house where a known killer was waiting in the dark – he trusted her ability to assess risk more than perhaps she knew. And of all the members of the agency, her work ethic was the only one that truly matched his.
‘Did you tell Murph—?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Robin, with an edge to her voice, and Strike decided it was safest to drop the subject completely.
But Robin was lying. She’d said precisely nothing to Murphy about the man in Harrods, because she was damned if she was going to take security lectures from more than one man, or have to discuss the rape yet again. The small rubber gorilla was now wrapped in a freezer bag in her sock drawer at home.
Strike and Robin were due a face-to-face catch-up on December the twenty-second, which would be the last morning Robin spent at work before Christmas. Strike woke that morning with the alarm, slapped it off, tugged his vape pen loose from its charger, then took a deep drag on it, the chill December air creeping into the flat from his poorly fitted windows as he watched the vapour drifting across his shadowy ceiling.
He’d been asking himself ever since their last conversation whether today might not be as good a time as any to force the discussion with Robin for which he’d as yet found no natural opening. It wouldn’t, of course, be the way he’d planned it. He’d hoped for a far-flung pub or restaurant, where wine and laughter might have lowered her guard, but he was worried about the house-hunting, and about Christmas, with the possibility that Murphy might be about to spring a festive proposal. If Strike declared himself today, before Robin travelled north to Masham, she’d have time and space to think about what she really wanted. Perhaps this, after all, was the way: on a winter’s day, unromantically, in the office where their friendship had been forged and where Strike, most unwillingly, had fallen in love with her.
He lay, still vaping, trying to frame an opening in his head.
‘Listen, there’s something I want to say.’
‘I need you to know something.’
‘I’ve been looking for a way to tell you this.’
It now occurred to him that this would be only the second time in his life he’d made the first move on a woman. Every other time (and he could imagine the reactions of other men, should he ever be fool enough to say this out loud) the woman had been the instigator, or had signalled so very clearly that a sexual approach would be welcome that it came to the same thing. The one exception had been at that student party in Oxford, where he’d swaggered drunkenly up to Charlotte, to whom he’d never spoken before in his life. She’d been the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, but he’d risked nothing whatsoever: at worst, he knew he’d have had a good anecdote to tell about his audacity in approaching the woman every man at the party was eyeing with equal parts of lust and awe.
This was different. If he laid everything on the line today, he needed to brace for the possible consequences: the business blown up, his most important friendship destroyed, all hope of the one relationship he really wanted, gone. The unerasable mental image of Robin’s expression as he’d moved to kiss her outside the Ritz rose in his mind’s eye as he lay in bed, listening to the window pane in the kitchen shivering in the wind. If he were to be met today with that same look…
But he had to speak. He couldn’t live with knowing that he hadn’t at least tried. Thus resolved, he sat up, swung himself off the bed and hopped, using the familiar balancing aids of chair backs and door jambs, towards the bathroom.
He’d just finished breakfast when, at nine o’clock precisely, somebody hammered on the door of his flat. Disconcerted, he opened it to find his office manager on the landing.
‘Have you read it?’ demanded Pat in her baritone.
‘Read what?’
‘You. In the paper. By that Culpepper man.’
‘What – another one?’
‘Yeah. I didn’t realise – they called yesterday, asking for a comment. I thought it was about the last thing. There’s fifteen-odd messages on the answer machine downstairs, and there’s two of ’em hanging around outside.’
Strike strode immediately to the laptop that was charging on his kitchen table, sat down and flicked it open.
‘What d’you want me to do?’ said Pat, watching him.
‘Say “no comment” to anyone who rings.’
He’d just spotted the story. As Pat closed the door behind her, Strike began to read the article.
Jonny Rokeby Son in Sex Worker Abuse Claim