Robin stopped typing again. Her eyes strayed to the noticeboard and she noticed that Strike had taken down the paragraph about Reata Lindvall. Robin knew perfectly well that none of their suspected Wrights had any known connection to Reata Lindvall, or to Belgium, but she was glad to have another reason to be angry at Strike, who’d cavalierly removed the thing she’d stumbled across on Christmas Eve, with her ex-husband standing beside her, and her angry boyfriend in the pub behind her, and Robin’s mind focused, as ever, on the job.
I noticed you’ve taken down the paragraph about Reata Lindvall but as we haven’t got any other leads on who ‘Rita Linda’ might be, could you please ask Jade whether Niall or anyone in the family has either heard of her, or has any connection with Liège?
Robin paused yet again, staring at the screen with stinging eyes, then typed on.
I won’t be able to hang around long in Ironbridge, because Ryan and I are looking at houses together and have got a couple lined up to view next week.
See you Tuesday.
PART FIVE
John Oxenham
57
A. E. Housman
Cormoran Strike had been called many things by the women in his life, but ‘stupid’ had never been one of them. Robin’s bald announcement that she and Murphy were setting up home together, the icy tone of her email and the terse work-related texts they exchanged over the following forty-eight hours all told him as plainly as if she’d shouted it in his face that he’d now been issued the unvarnished rebuff he’d been alert for all these months, but which, until now, had never materialised.
Something had changed, but he didn’t know what. Had her anger at his refusal to put surveillance on Albie Simpson-White mounted to white-hot rage since their coffee at Bar Italia? Had Murphy raised objections to their trip north, asking (with some justification) why two of them needed to travel to Scotland to interview a lone woman? Had Strike been oblivious to an accumulation of smaller grievances, symbolised by Robin’s angry reference to his removal of Reata Lindvall from the noticeboard?
He’d called Robin after arriving at the office and hearing the new threatening message, left by the unknown man with the rasping voice, but the call had gone to voicemail. Robin had responded with a brief text, telling him that she was taking all possible precautions. The tone of this message made him wonder whether to try and force a conversation, to send a facile ‘is everything all right?’ text, but long experience of women who were angry at him made him suspect the most he’d get in return was a passive-aggressive ‘fine’. The sordid Bijou business was weighing on his conscience, but Robin couldn’t know anything about that, could she? Ilsa had promised not to tell her, and if Kim had blabbed, Robin would surely have asked him about it? He certainly wasn’t going to tell her about it unforced: he didn’t want to look any more of a feckless, philandering bastard than he already did.
He cancelled his booking at the Lake District hotel, because he was damned if he was going to stare out at Windermere on his own, and at half past eleven on Monday evening, in spite of the self-discipline that usually prevented him drinking alone, Strike clambered aboard the Caledonian Sleeper with two pints of Doom Bar already inside him, and a bottle of Scotch nestling in the holdall he’d packed for his overnight journey to Glasgow.
His cabin was small and overheated. Without taking off his coat, Strike sat down on the lower bunk and downed a plastic cup of neat whisky. The Scotsmen next door were talking so loudly Strike could make out some of the words, mainly ‘ya cunt’ and ‘ya bastard’. It was impossible to tell whether they were bantering or arguing.