‘Proper man’ was a Polworth-ism with many connotations. To be a proper man meant to be a strong man, an outdoors man, but also a man of principle. It meant lack of bombast, a repudiation of shallowness and a core of quiet self-belief. It meant being slow to anger, but firm in conviction. Polworth, like Strike, had had to take his male role models where he could find them, because neither had a father who qualified as ‘proper’, and both boys had found in Edward Nancarrow a man worthy of admiration and emulation, whose approval meant more than any school teacher’s star and whose rebukes spurred a desire to do better, to work harder, to earn back Ted’s good opinion.
Now Strike took out the old pictures and examined them, one by one, pausing on the oldest one of all, which was black and white. It showed a large, swarthy, crudely handsome man with dark, curly hair exactly like Strike’s, standing with his back to the sea, his enormous hand on the shoulder of Ted the boy, whose face was pinched with anxiety.
Trevik Nancarrow, Strike’s Cornish grandfather, had died before Strike was born, and given what he knew about the man, Strike had no sense of loss. Hard-drinking and powerfully built, Trevik had passed for a solid member of the community outside the family home. Within it, according to his children, he’d been pure terror.
Trevik’s long-suffering wife had died young, leaving him in sole charge of two children, born fourteen years apart: Ted, who’d been sixteen, and Peggy, Strike’s mother, who’d been only two – the same age Rupert Fleetwood had been, it now occurred to Strike, when both his parents disappeared beneath a deadly mass of thundering snow. Trevik’s mother had offered the fetching little Peggy a home. As capricious and mean-spirited as her hard-drinking son, the old woman had had no time for Ted: teenage boys were messy and loud, and their place was with their father, whereas Peggy, the old woman insisted, loved and needed her granny, who took pride in dressing her and looking after her mane of long dark hair.
Ted had told Strike much later that he’d known if he’d stayed in his father’s house beyond the age of eighteen, murder would have been done, and it was a toss-up which of them would be killer and which the victim. National Service had saved the young man, and having no desire to return to St Mawes while his father lived, Ted, to Trevik’s disgust, had remained in the army, forgoing the sea and the rugged coastline he loved for the military police, returning only when news reached him of his father’s premature death. Ted had then married the local girl with whom he’d corresponded for seven years.
It was Ted who’d broken the pattern of hard-drinking violence that had plagued the Nancarrow men through generations. Ted’s wife had had no need to fear his fists and his surrogate children had known firmness, but never brutality. Ted had embodied the virtues, hitherto almost unknown in that family, of steadiness, sobriety and fair play, whereas Peggy, who at eighteen had seized her first chance of escaping her draconian grandmother and run away with a youth who’d come to Truro with the fair, had rechristened herself ‘Leda’ and carried chaos with her wherever she went, until her death in a squalid squat in London.
Staring at Ted and Trevik, Strike found himself wishing the strong, capable storehouse of sense he’d just lost could be here with him tonight. Ted had always had a way of putting into words things the unsettled and often angry teenage Strike had recognised as true, even if he hadn’t yet lived long enough to test Ted’s words for himself.
‘There’s no pride in having what you never worked for,’ had been one of Ted’s well-worn maxims. Strike was prepared to put in the work with Robin, but the weeks that had elapsed since he’d seen the look of shock on her face had afforded few opportunities to advance his own cause. It wasn’t only that, until the hiring of Kim, the agency had been overstretched covering its cases. Strike could also tell that Robin was finding the onslaught of press coverage about the UHC hard to handle; she seemed jumpier and more anxious than usual, yet had snapped at him when he’d mooted the idea of her taking more time off. He’d several times cut one of the subcontractors short when they’d wanted to tell Robin gleefully about a further UHC arrest, in the expectation that she’d be as happy about it as they were.
For weeks now, Strike had daily postponed the declaration he wanted to make, because he feared that dumping his feelings on Robin right now would be selfish. Then Ted’s death had forced Strike away from London, and now this this virus of Robin’s was prolonging their separation and, no doubt, affording Murphy endless opportunities to play the considerate boyfriend.