‘Yeah,’ said Strike.
‘It’s her,’ the barmaid told the barman. ‘That filthy one that started shouting.’
‘Oh,’ said the barman, clearly revising his opinion of Strike’s state of delusion, though apparently despising his taste.
‘I don’t think she’s very well,’ said Strike. ‘When was she here?’
‘Hour ago, something like that.’
‘Did she leave a message?’
‘No,’ said the barmaid. ‘She shouted something about a bridge, and then she left.’
‘Right,’ said Strike. ‘Thanks.’
He left the pub for the street again. What would Rena have done after fleeing the Engineer? Hitchhiked out of London? He looked towards the bridge over the canal; no blonde stood there.
He walked on, and when he spotted steps to his left leading down from the street to Regent’s Canal, he descended them with no very clear idea why he was doing it, except that his own natural impulse when close to a body of water was to go and look at it, but also because he was wondering whether Rena might have gone this way.
He emerged on a stretch of footpath running parallel with the sludge-green, slow-moving canal, so that he was standing between two bridges, one made of brick, for cars and pedestrians, the other of iron, bearing train tracks.
The evening light was fading fast. Shadows from the trees splayed patches of deeper darkness over the sluggish water. A single swan glided slowly towards Strike, its small dark eyes knowing. He watched it drift beneath the iron bridge, its pure white turning dirty grey in the shade, and then he spotted a dark, huddled mass beneath the bridge that he thought might well be human.
A jogger passed Strike, scowling because Strike had forced him to deviate a foot from his self-determined course. He ran past what looked like a pile of rags without glancing at it. This was London: unless people were screaming their distress and belonged to a demographic likely to evoke sympathy, and sometimes not even then, their fellow city-dwellers were too busy to stop and too tired to care. Strike knew this from personal experience. He was too large, too male and too menacing-looking to raise protective impulses in the breasts of passers-by, as he was aware from the universal suspicion with which he’d been treated when he’d fallen and been unable to get up off a city pavement, on the occasion when his hamstring had packed up completely.
Strike approached the figure slowly. It was curled up in the foetal position, silent and unmoving, beside a bulging rucksack. The filthy hands resting on the top of the dirty blonde head were clutched there, covered in self-inked tattoos. It was small; definitely not male.
‘Rena?’ he said quietly.
She looked up. Even in the gloom of the sheltering bridge he could see her complexion was unhealthily pale and spotty. She had an ugly herpes sore on her lower lip, and a blurry tattoo of a tear beneath her right eye.
‘I’m Corm—’
From start to finish, that morning’s terror attack had lasted eighty-two seconds. This happened far faster, but Strike’s reaction was all the quicker for having so recently been near mass murder. He’d seized her thin wrist before his conscious mind knew he’d seen the muzzle of the gun, he pointed it upwards, his other hand prising it from her grasp; she screamed and beat him on the legs with her free fist, her voice echoing around the underbelly of the bridge.
He fended her off, trying not to be rougher than he had to be, his nostrils full of the smell of her; it was as though she hadn’t washed in months.
‘It’s me – Cormoran Strike – you wanted to meet me – fuck’s
The sense of his words seemed to have penetrated: she stopped fighting and he let go of her at once, not wanting to be accused of assault. He looked down at the gun to check whether it was loaded, and saw at once it was a replica, and an unconvincing one at that. Shoving it into his pocket, he held out a hand.
‘Get up. You’ll catch your death of cold, sitting under here. We can get some food.’
‘Fuck off,’ she said fiercely. ‘Ah’m stayin’ here.’
‘Why?’
‘Ah want tae. Ah’ve got people aftae me.’
As Strike knew for a fact that Rena was of interest to MI5, he couldn’t attribute the belief entirely to Gatesheadery.
‘Well, it’s good to finally meet you,’ he said.
She squinted up at him and he thought she seemed half-intrigued, half-suspicious.
‘Are ye really him, are ye? The detective?’
‘I am, yeah,’ said Strike.
‘They told me not tae speak tae ye.’
‘I know,’ said Strike. ‘They think I want to make trouble. I don’t. I’m just trying to find out what happened to Niall Semple.’
‘Ah thought you were tryna find mah brother?’