‘You don’ wan’ kids?’ said Shanker, his tone suggesting this was akin to not wanting to breathe.
‘No,’ said Strike.
‘You miserable bastard,’ said Shanker, contemplating Strike with incredulity. ‘Kids is wha’ it’s all abou’. Fuckin’ ’ell, look at your mum. You free was everyfing to ’er.’
‘Yeah,’ said Strike automatically. ‘Well—’
‘You should see fuckin’ Alyssa, wiv Angel bein’ ill. That’s fuckin’ love, man.’
‘Yeah – well, give her my best, OK? And Angel.’
Strike got to his feet, bill in his hand.
‘Cheers for this, Shanker. I’d better get going. Got a lot of work on.’
Having paid for the coffees and the bacon roll, Strike headed back up Bethnal Green Road, lost in not entirely productive thought.
Strike never thought of Leda as having had three children, but his old friend had reminded him of the existence of somebody whom Strike probably thought about once a year at most: the much younger half-brother who’d been the product of his mother’s marriage to her killer. The boy, who’d been given the predictably eccentric name Switch by his parents, had been born shortly before Strike left for Oxford University. The latter had felt literally nothing for the squalling baby, even as a beaming Leda insisted her older son hold his brother. Strike’s most vivid memory of that time was his own feeling of dread at leaving Leda in the squat with her increasingly erratic and aggressive husband. The baby had been merely an additional complication, forever tainted in Strike’s eyes by being Whittaker’s son. His half-brother had just turned one when Leda died, and had then been adopted by his paternal grandparents.
He felt no curiosity about Switch’s current whereabouts and no desire to meet or know him. As far as he knew, Lucy felt the same way. But then Strike corrected himself: he didn’t know how Lucy felt. Perhaps Switch was one of the half-siblings with whom she maintained contact, hiding this from the elder brother who’d arrogantly assumed he knew everything about her.
Strike re-entered Bethnal Green station, burdened with guilt and unease. He’d have called Robin had she been available, not to bore her with his personal problems, but to let her know Shanker was prepared to help loosen Jordan Reaney’s tongue, that Shanker, too, thought the police were wrong about Pirbright’s murder, and that the Frank brothers had gone out in disguise to buy rope. Once again, the fact that she was unavailable, and likely to be so for the foreseeable future, made him realise just how much the sound of her voice generally raised his spirits. He was ever more conscious of how much he, the most self-sufficient of men, had come to rely on the fact that she was always there, and always on his side.
Robin was craving solitude, sleep and food, but the routine at Chapman Farm was designed to give as little of all three as possible, and some recruits were starting to show the strain. Robin had witnessed green-haired Penny Brown being berated by Taio Wace for dropping some of the large pile of clean folded sheets she’d been carrying across the courtyard. Becca Pirbright ushered Fire Group quickly onwards towards the pig pen, but not in time to prevent them seeing Penny break down in sobs.
In subtle and not so subtle ways, an apocalyptic note began to creep into the critiques of materialism and social inequality with which new recruits were being bombarded. The lack of contact with the outside world served to heighten the sense of being in a bunker, with church members delivering regular bulletins on the horrors of the Syrian war and the slow death of the planet. A sense of increasing urgency permeated these briefings: only the awoken could possibly head off global catastrophe, because the bubble people were continuing, selfishly and apathetically, to hasten humanity’s doom.
