The Running Grave полностью

‘Very sorry about… I’m sorry,’ said Strike.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I was just calling to say, I’m back in town next week and I’d like to see you, if that’s possible.’

Possible, he thought, just not desirable.

‘To tell you the truth, I’m very busy at the moment. Would it be all right if I call you when I know I’ve got a couple of free hours?’

‘Yes,’ she said coldly, ‘all right.’

She gave him her mobile number and rang off, leaving Strike irked and unsettled. If he knew Charlotte, she’d left some kind of dirty bomb behind her, which her sister felt honour bound to pass on: a message, or a note, or some legacy in her will designed to haunt and oppress him, to be one last, and lasting, ‘fuck you’.

Strike returned to the inner office only to pick up the UHC file and Kim Cochran’s CV, then left through the glass door, which he locked. He felt as though Amelia’s call had temporarily polluted his workspace, leaving a wraith of Charlotte peering at him vengefully from the shadows, defying him to return callously to work when he’d just (as she’d undoubtedly see it) turned his back on her, one more time.

… one must move warily, like an old fox walking over ice… deliberation and caution are the prerequisites of success.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

When she arrived at 1 Great George Street the following day at half past twelve, Robin discovered that she’d been quite wrong in vaguely imagining the Institute of Civil Engineers would be based in a brutalist building where function had been prioritised over elegance. Rufus Fernsby’s place of work was a gigantic Edwardian building of considerable grandeur.

When she gave the name of the man she’d come to see, Robin was sent up a crimson-carpeted staircase which, coupled with the white walls, reminded her faintly of the farmhouse at Chapman Farm. She passed oil paintings of eminent engineers, and a stained-glass window with a coat of arms supported by a crane and a beaver bearing the motto Scientia et Ingenio, and finally reached a long open-plan room with rows of desks, where two men stood having what looked like a heated discussion while the other workers kept their heads down.

With one of those strange intuitions that admit of no explanation, Robin guessed immediately that the taller, angrier and odder looking of the two men was Rufus Fernsby. Perhaps he looked like the kind of man who’d slam down a phone on someone who mentioned his unsatisfactory father. His argument with the shorter man seemed to centre on whether somebody called Bannerman should, or shouldn’t, have forwarded an email.

‘Nobody’s claiming Grierson shouldn’t have been copied in,’ he was saying heatedly, ‘that’s not the point. What I’m raising here is a pattern of persistent—’

The shorter man, becoming aware of Robin, and possibly looking for a route of escape, said,

‘Can I help you?’

‘—failure to follow an established procedure, which increases the risk of miscommunications, because I might not have realised—’

‘I’m here to meet Rufus Fernsby.’

As she’d feared, the taller man broke off mid-sentence to say angrily,

‘I’m Fernsby.’

‘I’m Robin Ellacott. We spoke—’

‘What are you doing here? You should have waited in the atrium.’

‘The man on the desk sent me up.’

‘Right, well, that’s unhelpful,’ said Rufus.

Dark, lean and wearing a Lycra T-shirt with his work trousers, he had the weather-beaten, sinewy look common to dedicated runners and cyclists, and was sporting what Robin thought was the oddest of all facial hair variations: a chin curtain beard with no moustache.

‘Good luck,’ murmured the second man to Robin as he walked away.

‘I was going to meet you in the café,’ said Rufus irritably, as though Robin should have known this, and perhaps already ordered his food. He checked his watch. Robin suspected he’d have liked to find she’d arrived too early, but as she was exactly on time he said,

‘Come on then – no, wait!’ he added explosively, and Robin came to a halt, wondering what she’d done wrong now, but Rufus had merely realised he was still clutching papers in his hand. Having stalked off to put them back on his desk, he rejoined her, walking out of the room so fast she had to almost jog to keep up.

‘This is a very beautiful building,’ she said, hoping to ingratiate herself. Rufus appeared to consider the comment beneath his notice.

The café on the ground floor was infinitely more upmarket than any that had graced the offices where Robin had once worked as a temporary secretary; there were booths of black leather banquettes, sleek light fittings and expressionist prints on the walls. As they headed for the queue at the counter, and in what she feared would be another doomed attempt to conciliate herself, Robin said,

‘I’m starting to think I should have done engineering, if these are the perks.’