It had taken Strike a further forty-eight hours to track Charlotte down to a hospital. She’d swallowed a handful of anti-depressants with as much whisky as she could stomach in the middle of a Soho bar. When she’d slipped sideways off her chair, the manager had gone to her assistance, only to be roundly insulted and told to keep his fucking hands off her. Incredibly, she’d still been able to walk, because she then staggered out onto the pavement and blundered into traffic, where she’d been clipped by a passing bus. When Strike finally found her, a day after his own thirtieth birthday, which he’d spent making fruitless calls to more relatives and ringing hospitals, she was lying in a surgical ward after having her stomach pumped, with self-harm marks up her arms and a fractured shoulder. His reward for three days of dread and non-stop attempts to interest her relatives in her fate had been to be told what a complete fucking bastard he was for having gone out for a pint with Nick, just when she most needed him. She’d then presented him with one of her regular me-or-the-army ultimatums and Strike had, as usual, chosen the military, and returned to Germany, where he was then stationed, a temporarily free man.
When Charlotte had been found dead in a blood-filled bath by the police, Sacha had had the perfect, poignant statement ready for the papers: ‘I’m just one of the heartbroken people who loved her, struggling to comprehend the fact that we’ll never hear her laugh again. “
Sitting in his chilly BMW, unwillingly remembering all of this, Strike asked himself yet again what the hell he’d been playing at, all those times he’d agreed to take Charlotte back. He prized truth; she’d been an incorrigible liar. He’d insisted that you could, with work, rise above your genetic inheritance, whereas Charlotte had had a fatalistic belief that she was inescapably damned by a family plagued with addiction. Yet they’d known each other so well that each had been able to predict with almost frightening accuracy what the other was thinking and feeling. While enmeshed in the relationship, Strike had never been able to imagine loving another woman as deeply, but since it had ended, he thought of it in terms of a protracted infection he’d finally succeeded in throwing off.
It occurred to him now, as he sat staring at the builders’ warehouse, that Robin, who seemed so much less complicated than his dead ex-fiancée, was far more of a mystery to him than Charlotte had ever been. He didn’t know what Robin was thinking and feeling, and falling in love with her, which had happened entirely against his will, didn’t resemble an infection, but the recognition of a deficiency he’d never known he had, but which had become gradually and painfully symptomatic. And now – every thought led back there, no matter how seemingly unrelated – she was in Masham with Murphy, and he was alone and miserable, and he had nobody to blame but himself.
36
A. E. Housman
Strike had few strong opinions on architecture, but he’d always considered the brutalist building that housed the National Theatre, which resembled a cross between a multi-storey car park and a power station, one of London’s worst eyesores. Walking towards it at ten to three that afternoon, with the dull grey Thames glimmering in the middle distance, Strike thought it compared unfavourably with the builders’ warehouse where he’d just handed over surveillance to Midge. A banner hanging close to the door announced that Sacha’s play was called
A timid-looking, bushy-haired young woman in glasses was hovering beside the entrance, a lanyard around her neck.
‘Mr Strike?’
‘That’s me.’
‘I’m Grace. Sacha asked me to take you up to him. It’s a bit of a confusing building, if you don’t know it.’
‘OK,’ said Strike.
She held the door open for him, and, as they walked together across the vast, brown-carpeted foyer, with its high ceiling patterned like a gigantic concrete waffle, his guide asked Strike whether he’d seen Sacha’s play.
‘No,’ said Strike.
‘Oh, it’s wonderful,’ she said breathlessly, and she spoke for several minutes about the piece, in which Sacha played the real life Dr Walter Loebner, who’d survived Gestapo torture, escaped from a camp and lived to testify against his tormentors.