There was nothing in Strike’s immediate future likely to cheer him up. He’d gladly have slept through the next three days, but he wasn’t even allowed that. The following day was Christmas Eve, which meant having to attend Lucy’s party for the neighbours, followed by a night in the spare room and the enforced jollity of Christmas Day, with his brother-in-law Greg making the usual barbed comments about Strike’s life choices. The detective usually ignored these for his sister’s sake, though it occurred to him, as he sat in his car watching the warehouse where Plug was shopping, that punching Greg might be almost as satisfying as battering Dominic Culpepper, and he indulged himself for a few seconds by imagining knocking Greg out over the turkey. However, before he got anywhere near Christmas lunch, he had to meet Sacha Legard at the National Theatre, a prospect that was dredging up memories of Strike’s late fiancée which, in his weakened emotional state, he was finding impossible to fend off.
Charlotte’s attitude towards her half-brother Sacha, and indeed her entire family, had always swung between two polar extremes. She’d spent much of her life damning them all to hell and declaring that she hated and dreaded Heberley House, the stately home in which she’d spent most of her childhood, and where her mother and stepfather had thrown extravagant, druggy parties, at one of which Charlotte, aged ten, had accidentally ingested LSD. She’d insisted that she despised the conventions of her class, blamed her boarding schools and relatives for her unhappiness, and claimed that all she wanted out of life now that she was free of them were simple pleasures and genuine human connection. This had been the part of Charlotte that Strike had both loved and pitied, and which, in the earliest days of their affair, he’d allowed himself to believe was the ‘real’ Charlotte.
However, with age and experience had come the unwilling realisation that the woman he loved was chameleon-like, multifaceted and often manipulative, containing many other selves which were just as real as his favourite one. Shifts between these different aspects of her personality would come without warning; suddenly, she’d find the amusements Strike could afford on a military policeman’s salary dull and restrictive, and she’d announce a desire for an expensive day out at the races with champagne and heavy betting, or a drop-of-the-hat trip to Marrakesh with high society friends, including ‘Sachy’ and ‘Val’, because ‘come on, darling, it’ll be fun’, and then she’d mock Strike for his reluctance and for his bourgeois obsession with solvency and sincerity.
‘Oh, of
In the manic episodes that seized Charlotte at regular intervals, she’d ask why Strike cared that the public face didn’t match the private mores, as long as the person concerned was entertaining and stylish. Why did Strike have to bore and embarrass everyone with quibbles rooted in actual experience of poverty and squalor? And arguments would ensue, in which she’d accuse Strike of parsimony and joylessness, and if he reminded Charlotte of things she’d said, days or even hours previously, about her hatred of double standards, falseness and materialism, there’d be a sudden eruption of rage, in which she’d throw wild accusations at him: that he hated and despised her, and thought her worthless and shallow, and then would come either self-destructive drinking or flung missiles, and often both.
The one family member towards whom Charlotte had never, under any circumstances, expressed love, was her mother. Charlotte had been regarded as surplus to requirements by both her parents, who’d been hoping for a son after her elder sister. Charlotte had only ever known disdain and unkindness from Tara, which Strike had always believed was rooted in their close physical resemblance, the narcissistic Tara hating to see her own lost youthful beauty blinking at her across the breakfast table. Never, before or since, had he known a parent and child hate each other as Tara and Charlotte had, and he ascribed most of Charlotte’s mental instability to a childhood of neglect that had amounted, at times, to outright abuse.