The terrorist’s car had mounted the pavement on the bridge and mown down pedestrians, one of whom had fallen over the balustrade into the Thames. He’d driven on, crashing into the perimeter fence of the Palace of Westminster, then fled on foot, armed with a knife, and stabbed an unarmed police officer.
Eyes fixed on the screen, Robin called Strike yet again. No answer.
‘Oh, please God, let him be OK,’ she whispered.
The driver of the car had been shot dead by armed police. The entire attack had spanned eighty-two seconds, but tens of broken and bloody humans had been harmed and possibly killed.
Robin’s mobile rang: Strike.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘had my mobile on mute to listen to her talking to a friend.’
‘Where are you?’ said Robin, who could hear sirens and good deal of shouting.
‘St Stephen’s Tavern.’
‘You were right by it!’ said Robin, who knew the pub; they’d been there together.
‘Yeah, and we’re not allowed to leave, there’s armed coppers everywhere,’ said Strike, who was having to raise his voice over the surrounding commotion. ‘I’ll keep you posted, but I’m fine.’
‘Great,’ said Robin faintly.
Her legs were trembling. When Strike had rung off, she dropped down onto her sofa, staring at the television. The act of wanton brutality had ratcheted up her feeling of ever-present danger.
Then an ugly thought flashed through her head. Would she have been as terrified and stricken if it had been Murphy who’d been in Westminster, Murphy whom she hadn’t been able to contact?
115
A. E. Housman
As Strike drove towards Camden at seven o’clock that evening, he listened to the car radio. Four passers-by had been killed by the still-unidentified terrorist who’d ploughed into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge. More than twenty had been injured, some seriously. A woman had been knocked over the balustrade into the Thames and was in a critical condition.
Strike hoped nobody he knew would ever find out what he’d felt and done when he’d heard the screams outside St Stephen’s Tavern, glimpsed armed police running and civilians fleeing, then heard the gunshot. Hours later, he remained mortified by the memory of his own instinctive, unthinking reaction.
Cold sweat had drenched his entire body and he’d limped as fast as he could towards the street, barging past panicking drinkers, as though he was still armed and wearing a bullet-proof vest, and had two whole legs, and it was on him, personally, to save London. A running policeman had bellowed at him to get the fuck back inside, and Strike’s reason had reasserted itself in a wave of shame; he retreated into the pub, a forty-two-year-old have-a-go hero…
But for a few seconds, the pub and the screams and the drinkers had blurred into non-existence: he’d been back on the yellow dirt road in Afghanistan, in the vehicle that was about to blow up, because he’d shouted ‘brake’ too late. Strike suspected his blood pressure had remained elevated for hours after the terror attack and wasn’t confident it was normal now.
He had no idea what effect the attack would have had on Rena Liddell, who deplored the influx of Islamists into Britain, and who’d made a half-hearted attempt to procure a gun, so she could shoot Muslims. He thought it likely that she wouldn’t turn up for their rendezvous at the Engineer at all. The effect of cataclysmic acts of violence on minds already unbalanced could, as Strike well knew, be catastrophic. He remembered the story told to him by an army medic friend, of a severely injured man who’d been in a state of paranoid psychosis, and appeared to believe he, personally, was causing buildings to blow up in Baghdad, even though he was lying in a hospital bed in Germany.
Strike parked his BMW in Gloucester Avenue, where the Engineer stood. The pub, he noted, was only a couple of hundred yards away from a bridge over Regent’s Canal. The sign over the pub’s door showed the top-hatted Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
Upon entering Strike found a stylish gastropub. The bar was of highly polished wood, the walls were of scarlet and the clientele all looked well groomed. There was no woman with a face tattoo, either inside or in the beer garden. Resolved to make absolutely certain, he returned to the bar.
‘My name’s Cormoran Strike and I was supposed to be meeting someone here. Has any message been left for me? A young blonde woman.’
The young barman looked slightly amused, for which Strike couldn’t blame him. Who left messages to be passed on by human beings, in a world where mobile phones existed? Didn’t this aged idiot realise he’d been stood up? But an older woman behind the bar looked round at Strike’s words.
‘Has she got a tattoo on her face?’