Blank-faced, she fetched kitchen roll and mopped up the spilled excess on the floor, then set the water bottle, with its incriminating dregs, on the coffee table. She stood for another minute, staring at it, then headed into the kitchen, where she made a methodical search of the cupboards that turned up no spirits whatsoever.
The sky outside was dark; she hadn’t noticed night falling. She headed into the bedroom and opened Murphy’s wardrobe. Presumably her boyfriend had searched other people’s cupboards and drawers in a professional capacity, but private detectives rarely if ever got to rifle through the personal belongings of suspects.
Robin had to stand on tiptoe to access the top shelf. Behind a pile of T-shirts and a small box of foreign currency and old charging leads was a hessian bag that clinked when she touched it. She tugged it down, already certain of what she was about to see.
There were six bottles of vodka inside, one of them almost empty.
90
Robert Browning
Strike was, yet again, back in Carnival Street in Haringey, watching the house where Plug’s friends were keeping the gigantic black dog. He was starting to feel a lot of sympathy for the client’s view that it was outrageous Plug hadn’t been arrested yet. Strike wasn’t overly sentimental about animals; with the sole exception of a snake he’d once succeeded in catching as a boy, he’d never felt the urge for a pet. Nevertheless, what he’d witnessed at the dog fight, and seen of Plug since, had convinced him the sadistic bastard deserved a prison sentence, as soon as possible, thereby freeing both his mother and his son from his bullying and coercion.
Strike was currently standing in a patch of deep shadow beneath a non-functioning street lamp, vaping and waiting for the reappearance of his target. Stars appeared gradually above him, a little more visible than they might have been in a better lit street, though by no means as bright as they’d been when viewed from Sark. Preferring not to brood about the night at the Old Forge, Strike crossed the road and found himself another patch of shadow on the pavement outside the junkyard. A large sign proclaimed that the place was called Brian Judge Scrap and its border fence ran the length of the road. Strike could see the tops of heaps of compacted metal. He wondered whether Robin’s old Land Rover had been consigned to such a metal cemetery.
A rusted van passed and pulled up at the entrance of the yard. The driver killed the lights, got out and went to speak into the intercom beside the gate.
As the man’s face was illuminated by the security light over the gate, Strike had the strange feeling he’d seen him somewhere before. He was smaller than average, hairy, fortyish, very dark and not particularly good-looking. Strike had the idea he’d once seen the man wearing a suit and tie rather than the grubby sweatshirt and jeans he was currently sporting, and that he’d been walking along with a group of similarly smartly attired others, but when or where this might have happened, he couldn’t think.
Chains clinked from within the yard. The gates began to open. The driver got back into the van, leaving the lights off, and drove inside. The gates closed again.
Where the hell had he seen that man before? At a wedding? A funeral? He associated him vaguely with church, but Strike hadn’t set foot in a church more than a handful of times in the past ten years. The dark man most certainly hadn’t attended either Ted’s or Joan’s funerals, nor had he been present in the empty church Strike had spent part of the morning he’d learned that Charlotte was dead.
The door of the house Strike was watching opened. Plug emerged, holding a large, wriggling puppy. Strike took a few photos from the shadows and was about to tail Plug back up the street when he suddenly remembered where he’d seen the van driver before.
A few years previously, Strike and Robin had investigated a cold case that had brought them within the orbit of a pair of violent criminals called the Ricci brothers. The pair visited their father, Niccolò (a gangster who’d been known as ‘Mucky’ in his pimping and pornography-making heyday), every Sunday at his nursing home. Strike could now visualise the group turning up, children and wives smartly dressed, the two men in suits. The older brother, Luca, had had the more fearsome reputation, but Marco, the younger of the two, and the man who’d just driven a van into Brian Judge Scrap, had his own respectable tally of acid attacks and knifings.