Strike was a mentally resilient man who’d survived plenty of reverses in his life, not least the loss of part of his right leg. One of the tools of self-discipline he’d forged in youth and honed in the army was a habit of compartmentalisation that rarely failed him, but right now, it wasn’t working. Emotions he didn’t want to feel and memories he generally suppressed were closing in on him, and he, who detested anything that smacked of self-indulgence, travelled back towards Denmark Street brooding so deeply that he barely registered the passing Tube stations and realised, almost too late to disembark, that he was already at Tottenham Court Road.
By the time he arrived back at his attic flat, he felt as grimly unhappy as he’d been for a long time. In consequence, he poured himself a double whisky, refilled his vape pen, sat down at his kitchen table and stared into space while alternately downing Scotch and exhaling vapour in the direction of his draughty window.
He’d rarely felt as angry at his mother as he did this afternoon. She’d died of what had been ruled an accidental overdose when Strike was nineteen, an overdose which Strike believed to this day had been administered by her far younger husband. His reaction to the news had been to drop out of university and join the military police, a decision he knew his unconventional mother would have found both inexplicable and vaguely comical.
These thoughts of Leda led inevitably to thoughts of Charlotte Campbell, because he knew that plenty of armchair psychologists, including close friends and family members, thought he’d been so irreparably damaged by Leda’s parenting, he’d been inevitably drawn to a similarly chaotic and unstable woman. This had always irritated Strike, and it irritated him now as he sat with his whisky, staring out of his attic window, because it so happened that there’d been profound differences between his ex-fiancée and his late mother.
Leda had had a bottomless compassion for underdogs and an incurable optimism about human nature that had never failed her. That, indeed, had been the problem: her naive, unconquerable conviction that genuine evil was only found in the repressions of small-town respectability. She might have taken endless risks, but she wasn’t self-destructive: on the contrary, she’d fully expected to live to a hundred.
Charlotte, on the other hand, was profoundly unhappy, and Strike suspected he was the only person who truly knew the depths of her misery. The surface of Charlotte’s life might look glamorous and easy, because she was extraordinarily beautiful, and came from a rich and newsworthy family, but her real value to the gossip columns was her instability. There were several suicide attempts in Charlotte’s past, and a long history of psychiatric evaluations. He’d seen the press pictures of her, dead-eyed in her red slip dress, and his only thought had been that she’d probably taken something to get her through another night of revelry, a supposition backed up by the fact that she’d called his office at midnight on the same night, leaving an incoherent message on the answer machine, which he’d deleted before anyone else could hear it.
Strike was well aware that Lucy, and some of his friends, believed him trapped perpetually in the shadow cast by those two dark caryatids, Leda and Charlotte. They wanted him to stride out into the sunlight, free at last, to find a less complicated woman, and a love untainted by pain. But what was a man supposed to do if he thought he might finally be ready to do that, and it was too late? Alone of the women jostling in his thoughts, Robin brought feelings of warmth, though they were tinged with a bitterness no less easier to bear because it was self-directed. He should have spoken up, should have forced a conversation about their respective feelings before Ryan Murphy swooped in and carried off the prize Strike had complacently thought was his for the taking.
