He remembered particularly the hotel dinner they’d shared that evening, shortly after he’d just broken up with his last girlfriend, and before Robin had gone on her first date with Ryan Murphy. Robin, he remembered, had been wearing a blue shirt. They’d drunk Rioja and laughed together, and waiting upstairs had been those two bedrooms, side by side on the top floor. Everything, he thought, had been propitious: wine, sea view, both of them single, nobody else around to interrupt, and what had he done? Nothing. Even telling her that his relationship – short, unsatisfactory and undertaken purely to distract himself from inconvenient desire for his partner – was over might have precipitated a conversation that would have drawn out Robin’s own feelings, but instead he’d maintained his habitual reserve, determined not to mess up their friendship and business partnership, but afraid, too, of rejection. His one, admittedly aborted, drunken move to kiss Robin, outside the Ritz Hotel on her thirtieth, had been met with such a look of horror that it remained branded on his memory.
Naked, he returned to the bedroom to take off his prosthesis. As it parted unwillingly with the gel pad at the end of his stump, he listened to the seagulls wheeling overhead in the sunset and wished to God he’d said something that night in Whitstable, because if he had, he might not currently be feeling so bloody miserable, and resting all his hopes on Ryan Murphy succumbing to one more alcoholic drink.
Strike woke next morning to a moment of confusion as to where he was. He’d been dreaming that he was sitting beside Robin in her old Land Rover and exchanging anecdotes about drowning, which in the dream both had experienced several times.
Bleary eyed, he reached across to his mobile to silence the alarm and immediately saw that seven texts had come in over the last half an hour: from Pat, Lucy, Prudence, Shanker, Ilsa, Dave Polworth and journalist Fergus Robertson. With a lurch of dread, he opened Pat’s message.
Her sister’s just called. I said you weren’t here. Hope you’re all right.
Strike opened Lucy’s next.
Stick, I’m so sorry, I’ve just seen. It’s awful. I don’t know what else to say. Hope you’re ok xxx
Now with a real sense of foreboding, Strike hitched himself up in bed and opened the text from Fergus Robertson.
I’ve got the news desk asking if you’ve got a comment. Might be wise to give them something, get everyone off your back. Don’t know if you’re aware, but there’s a rumour she left a note.
His heart now beating uncomfortably fast, Strike opened his phone browser and typed in Charlotte’s name.
Death of an It-Girl: Charlotte Campbell Found Dead
Former Wild Child Charlotte Campbell Found Dead by Cleaner
Charlotte Campbell Dead in Wake of Assault Charge
He stared at the headlines, unable to take in what he was seeing. Then he pressed the link to the last story.
