First: he’d managed to acquire a stalker. He thought this highly unlikely. While he had plenty of supporting evidence to prove he was attractive to certain kinds of women, and his investigative career had taught him that even apparently successful and wealthy people could be harbouring strange impulses, Strike found it very hard to imagine a woman that good looking and well dressed would be following him around for kicks.
Second: she was something to do with the Universal Humanitarian Church. His chat with Fergus Robertson had made it clear to what extremes the church was prepared to go to protect its interests. Was it possible she was one of the church’s wealthier and more influential members? If that was the explanation, the UHC evidently knew the agency was investigating them, which had serious implications not only for the case, but for Robin’s safety. Indeed, it might imply that Robin had been identified at Chapman Farm.
The last, and, in his opinion, most likely possibility was that the woman was a second Patterson operative. In this case, her loud, public approach might have been done purely to draw attention to him and scupper his job. It was this possibility that made Strike text a description of the woman to Barclay, Shah and Midge, telling them to be on the lookout for her.
The evening before his trip to Cromer, Strike worked late in the otherwise empty office, dealing with tedious paperwork while eating a packaged quinoa salad. It was the day of the Brexit referendum, but Strike hadn’t had time to vote: the Franks had decided to split up that day and he’d been pinned down, watching for the younger brother in Bexleyheath.
A combination of tedium and hunger made him particularly irritated by the sound of the office phone ringing at nearly eleven at night. Certain it was Charlotte, he let it go to voicemail. The phone rang again twenty minutes later, and at one minute to midnight rang for a third time.
Finally closing the various folders on the desk, he added his signature to a couple of documents and got up to file everything away.
Before leaving the office for his attic flat he paused at Pat’s desk again and pressed a button on her phone. He didn’t want anyone else to listen to Charlotte’s tirades: once had been enough.
‘Bluey, pick up. Seriously, Bluey, please, please pick up. I’m desp—’
Strike pressed delete, then played the next message. She sounded angry as well as pleading now.
‘
He pressed delete, then play.
Now a malevolent whisper filled the room, and he could visualise Charlotte’s expression, because he’d seen her like that at her most destructive, when there was no limit to her appetite to wound.
‘You’ll wish you’d picked up, you know. You will. And so will precious fucking
Strike slammed his hand onto the phone, deleting the message.
He knew why Charlotte was taking things this far: she’d at long last admitted to herself that Strike wasn’t ever coming back. For nearly six years she’d believed the craving she couldn’t eradicate in herself lived on in him, too, and that her beauty, her vulnerability and their long, shared history would reunite them, no matter all that had gone before, no matter how determined he was not to return. Charlotte’s flashes of insight and extraordinary ability to sniff out weak spots had always had something of the witch about them. She’d correctly intuited that he must be in love with his business partner, and this certainty was driving her to new heights of vindictiveness.
He’d have liked to comfort himself with the belief that Charlotte’s threats were empty, but he couldn’t: he knew her far too well. Possible scenarios ran through his head, each more damaging than the last: Charlotte turning up outside Robin’s house, Charlotte tracking down Murphy, Charlotte making good on her threat, and speaking to the press.
He’d had a little malicious fun in the pub with Murphy, refusing to disclose what he might have heard from Wardle to Murphy’s discredit. Now he looked back on what he felt might have been a dangerous bit of self-indulgence. Ryan Murphy would have no sense of loyalty to Strike, should Charlotte decide to spin him a line about what Strike was ‘really like’, or to pass on to Robin the vitriol Charlotte might choose to unleash in the press.
After what might have been one minute or ten, Strike became aware that he was still standing beside Pat’s desk, every muscle in his arms and neck tense. The office looked strange, almost alien, in the overhead lights, with the darkness closing in against the windows. As he headed to the door with both partners’ names engraved upon it, the only cold comfort he could draw from the situation was that Charlotte couldn’t ambush Robin, as long as she was at Chapman Farm.
