Robin left Strike to stare back out of the window, feeling as though he was some creaky old codger being looked after by a granddaughter. He hadn’t yet seen his face in a mirror, but he knew the spade injury must look bad, because it was drawing covert looks from the men playing pool. His knee, which he’d twisted during his unwise dash over wet grass in pursuit of Danny de Leon, also felt dangerously swollen again. Wondering how far away the B&B would prove to be, he watched a trickle of primary-age children running past outside, clearly just released from school, all healthy and nimble. He was still exhausted, knew he looked terrible, and, after the unforeseen physical challenges he’d already met on Sark, was in nearly as poor a state as he’d been on the occasion, over a year previously, when Robin had told him he wasn’t fit to walk upstairs with her, into what he’d feared might be a murderous trap. This wasn’t the way he’d wanted the trip to go, and, to compound his feeling of misery, he wondered whether Robin’s odd look when he’d mentioned breeding didn’t indicate that she’d soon have – or, perhaps, already had – something to tell him that would indicate a cementing of her relationship with Murphy that no declaration of his could weaken.
It took Robin almost an hour, firstly to find the supermarket, then to load up a bag with the ingredients for spaghetti carbonara, adding wine she felt they deserved and painkillers and alcohol wipes for Strike’s face. She returned to the Captain’s Bar because she didn’t want Strike to have to walk alone to meet her, given the state of his leg. By the time she returned, the bruising and swelling of his jaw was even worse, giving his face a very lopsided appearance.
‘How does it feel?’ Robin asked.
‘Still not as bad as that bloody spray of yours.’
Strike forced himself back into a standing position.
‘I can carry one of those,’ he said, holding out his hand.
‘It’s fine, I can—’
‘Give me one of the fucking bags, I’ve got one hand free and one good leg.’
‘All right, all right,’ said the exasperated Robin. ‘There, happy?’
‘Ecstatic,’ said Strike, and they moved off towards the stairs.
As they walked back along Rue de la Seigneurie, unavoidably slowly, because Strike was now severely impeded by his twisted knee, he said,
‘What would you think of Wardle coming to work for us?’
‘Wardle?’ said Robin, in surprise. ‘Would he be interested?’
‘He would, yeah.’
‘Well, he’d be great,’ said Robin, ‘but can we afford him?’
‘He’s not expecting the salary he’s on in the CID. Cost-benefit; we could take on more work with another subcontractor. I think he’d more than pay for himself.’
‘What’s made him want to leave the police?’
While Strike explained the combination of personal circumstances that had made Wardle keen on a change of career, Robin had time to remember that Murphy didn’t like Eric Wardle. He’d never explained why, but usually had a critical comment to make whenever his name came up. However, it wasn’t up to Murphy who the agency hired, any more than it was up to him which cases they decided to investigate.
The rain had passed off again, but the light was rapidly fading and, their progress being so slow, the sun had set before they reached the lonely lane along which the Old Forge was supposed to lie. Soon they were immersed in velvety darkness.
‘The stars are incredible, aren’t they?’ said Robin, looking upwards. In the absence of street lights, they shone hard and bright against the deep black, every constellation clearly marked.
‘Yeah,’ said Strike, who might, under other circumstances, have attempted to wax poetic, but was now in a lot of pain and mainly concentrating on the damp, uneven terrain, which Robin was illuminating with her phone torch. The wind was whispering through the hedgerows; Robin kept glancing back, expecting to see a vehicle behind her, but it was a relief to think that nobody in a gorilla mask was about to appear.
‘I think this is it,’ she said at last, as a building loomed to the right.
Forbearing to say ‘Christ, I hope so,’ Strike followed her carefully up a short gravelled drive, down a few stone steps, and at last, with enormous relief, through the unlocked door of the B&B, where Robin turned on the lights.
They stood in a large hallway, with a wooden walkway overhead connecting two upstairs bedrooms. To the right was a bedroom, to the left, a shower room. Their bags, still with the green tags attached, were sitting in the middle of the wooden floor.
‘D’you want to take the ground-floor bedroom?’ said Robin.
‘Cheers,’ said Strike. ‘All right if I get a shower before we eat?’
‘Of course, I’ll cook,’ said Robin, taking the bag of shopping from him.
Their fingers touched as he handed it over. Robin felt a tiny thrill pass through her, and then a sudden sense of mingled excitement and panic.
87