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Come let me talk with thee, allotted part
Of immortality – my own deep heart!
Maria Jane Jewsbury
To My Own Heart
The days following their night at the Ritz were, for Robin, full of agitation and suspense. She was well aware that Strike had posed a wordless question and that she’d silently returned a ‘no’, far more forcefully than if she hadn’t been full of bourbon and vermouth, and caught off guard. Now there was an increase of reserve in Strike’s manner, a slightly forced briskness and a determined avoidance of all personal subjects. Barriers that had come down over their five years working together seemed to have been re-erected. Robin was afraid she’d hurt Strike, and she didn’t underestimate what it took to hurt a man as quietly confident and resilient as her partner.
Meanwhile, Strike was full of self-recrimination. He shouldn’t have made that foolish, unconsummated move: hadn’t he concluded months previously that a relationship with his partner was impossible? They spent too much time together, they were legally bound to each other by the business, the friendship was too valuable to him to jeopardise, so why, in the golden glow of those exorbitantly priced cocktails, had he jettisoned every good resolution and yielded to powerful impulse?
Self-reproach mingled with feelings still less pleasant. The fact was that Strike had very rarely suffered rebuffs from women, because he was unusually good at reading people. Never before had he made a move without being certain that his advance would be welcome, and he’d certainly never had any woman react the way Robin had: with alarm that, in his worst moments, Strike thought could have been disgust. He might be broken-nosed, overweight and one-legged, with dense, dark curly hair that schoolfriends had dubbed pube-like, but that hadn’t ever stopped him pulling gorgeous women before. Indeed, male friends, to whose eyes the detective’s sexual appeal was largely invisible, had often expressed resentment and amazement that he had such a successful sex life. But perhaps it was insufferable vanity to think that the attraction he’d held for previous girlfriends lingered, even as his morning cough worsened and grey hairs started to appear among the dark brown?
Worse still was the idea that he’d totally misinterpreted Robin’s feelings over a period of years. He’d assumed her slight awkwardness at times when they were forced into physical or emotional proximity had the same root as his own: a determination not to succumb to temptation. In the days following her silent rejection of his kiss, he kept going over incidents he’d thought proved the attraction was mutual, returning again and again to the fact that she’d broken off her first dance at her wedding to follow him, leaving Matthew abandoned on the dance floor. She and Strike had hugged at the top of the hotel stairs, and as he’d held her in her wedding dress he could have sworn he’d heard the same dangerous thought in her mind as filled his: let’s run away, and to hell with the consequences. Had he imagined it all?
Perhaps he had. Perhaps Robin had wanted to run, but merely back to London and the job. Maybe she saw him as a mentor and a friend, but nothing more.
It was in this unsettled and depressed mood that Strike greeted his fortieth birthday, which was marked by a restaurant dinner organised, as Robin’s had been, by their mutual friends Nick and Ilsa.
Here, for the first time, Robin met Strike’s oldest friend from Cornwall, Dave Polworth, who, as Strike had once predicted, Robin didn’t much like. Polworth was small and garrulous, commented negatively on every aspect of London life and referred to women, including the waitress who served them, as ‘tarts’. Robin, who was at the opposite end of the table from Strike, spent much of the evening making laboured small talk with Polworth’s wife, Penny, whose main topics of conversation were her two children, how expensive everything in London was, and what a twat her husband was.
Robin had bought Strike a rare test pressing of Tom Waits’s first album, Closing Time, for his birthday. She knew Waits was his favourite artist, and her best memory of the evening was the look of unfeigned surprise and pleasure on Strike’s face when he unwrapped it. She thought she sensed some return of his usual warmth when he thanked her, and she hoped the gift would convey the message that a woman who found him repugnant wouldn’t have gone to so much effort to buy him something she knew he’d really want. She wasn’t to know that Strike was asking himself whether Robin considered him and the sixty-five-year-old Waits contemporaries.
A week after Strike’s birthday, the agency’s longest-serving subcontractor, Andy Hutchins, handed in his notice. It wasn’t entirely a surprise: although his MS was in remission, the job was taking its toll. They gave Andy a farewell drinks party, which everyone except the other subcontractor, Sam Barclay, attended, because he’d drawn the short straw and was currently following a target through the West End.
While Strike and Hutchins talked shop on the other side of the pub table, Robin talked to their newest hire, Michelle Greenstreet, known to her new colleagues, at her own request, as Midge. She was a Mancunian ex-policewoman, tall, lean and very fit, a gym fanatic with short, slicked-back dark hair and clear grey eyes. Robin had already been made to feel slightly inadequate by the sight of Midge’s six-pack as she stretched to reach the topmost file balanced on a cabinet, but she liked her directness, and the fact that she didn’t seem to hold herself superior to Robin, who alone at the agency wasn’t ex-police or military. Tonight, Midge confided in Robin for the first time that a major reason for wishing to relocate to London had been a bad break-up.
‘Was your ex police as well?’ asked Robin.
‘Nope. She never held a job for more than a coupla months,’ said Midge, with more than a trace of bitterness. ‘She’s an undiscovered genius who’s either gonna write a bestselling novel, or paint a picture that’ll win the Turner Prize. I was out all day making money to pay the bills, and she was at home pissing around online. I ended it when I found her dating profile on Zoosk.’
‘God, I’m sorry,’ said Robin. ‘My marriage ended when I found a diamond earring in our bed.’
‘Yeah, Vanessa told me,’ said Midge, who’d been recommended to the agency by Robin’s policewoman friend. ‘She said you didn’t keep it, either, you fookin’ mug.’
‘I’d’ve flogged it,’ rasped Pat Chauncey, the office manager, breaking unexpectedly into the conversation. Pat was a gravel-voiced fifty-seven-year-old with boot-black hair and teeth the colour of old ivory, who chain-smoked outside the office and sucked constantly on an e-cigarette inside it. ‘I had a woman send me my first husband’s Y-fronts in the post, cheeky cow.’
‘Seriously?’ asked Midge.
‘Oh yeah,’ growled Pat.
‘What did you do?’ Robin asked.
‘Pinned ’em to the front door so they were the first thing he’d see when he come home from work,’ said Pat. She took a deep pull on her e-cigarette and said, ‘And I sent her somefing back she wouldn’t forget.’
‘What?’ said Robin and Midge in unison.
‘Never you mind,’ said Pat. ‘But let’s just say it wouldn’t spread easy on toast.’
The three women’s shouts of laughter drew Strike and Hutchins’s attention: Strike caught Robin’s eye and she held it, grinning. He looked away feeling slightly more cheerful than he’d done in a while.
The departure of Andy placed a not-unfamiliar strain on the agency, because it currently had several time-consuming jobs on its books. The first and longest-running of these involved trying to dig up dirt on the ex-boyfriend of a client nicknamed Miss Jones, who was locked into a bitter custody battle over her baby daughter. Miss Jones was a good-looking brunette who had an almost embarrassing yen for Strike. He might have derived a much needed ego-boost from her unabashed pursuit of him, were it not for the fact that he found her combination of entitlement and neediness thoroughly unattractive.
Their second client was also the wealthiest: a Russian-American billionaire who lived between Moscow, New York and London. A couple of extremely valuable objects had recently disappeared from his house on South Audley Street, though the security alarm hadn’t been tripped. The client suspected his London-based stepson and wished to catch the young man in the act without alerting either the police or his wife, who was disposed to consider her hard-partying and jobless offspring a misunderstood paragon. Hidden spy cameras, monitored by the agency, were now concealed in every corner of the house. The stepson, who was known at the agency as Fingers, was likewise under surveillance in case he tried to sell the missing Fabergé casket or the Hellenistic head of Alexander the Great.
The agency’s last case, codenamed Groomer, was in Robin’s view a particularly nasty one. A well-known international correspondent for an American news channel had recently broken up with her boyfriend of three years, who was an equally successful TV producer. Shortly after their acrimonious split, the journalist had found out that her ex-partner was still in contact with her seventeen-year-old daughter, whom Midge had dubbed Legs. The seventeen-year-old, who was tall and slender, with long blonde hair, was already featuring in gossip columns, partly because of her famous surname and partly because she’d already done some modelling. Though the agency hadn’t yet witnessed sexual contact between Legs and Groomer, their body language was far from parental-filial during their secret meet-ups. The situation had plunged Legs’ mother into a state of fury, fear and suspicion that was poisoning her relationship with her daughter.
To everyone’s relief, because they’d been so stretched after Andy’s departure, at the start of December Strike succeeded in poaching an ex-Met officer by the name of Dev Shah from a rival detective agency. There was bad blood between Strike and Mitch Patterson, the boss of the agency in question, which dated back to the time Patterson had put Strike himself under surveillance. When Shah answered the question ‘Why d’you want to leave Patterson Inc?’ with the words ‘I’m tired of working for cunts,’ Strike hired him on the spot.
Like Barclay, Shah was married with a young child. He was shorter than both of his new male colleagues, with eyelashes so thick that Robin thought they looked fake. Everyone at the agency took to Dev: Strike, because he was quick on the uptake and methodical in his record-keeping; Robin, because she liked his dry sense of humour and what she inwardly termed a lack of dickishness; Barclay and Midge, because Shah demonstrated early on that he was a team player without any noticeable need to outshine the other subcontractors; and Pat, as she admitted in her gravelly voice to Robin while the latter was handing in her receipts one Friday, because he ‘could give Imran Khan a run for his money, couldn’t he? Those eyes!’
‘Mm, very handsome,’ said Robin indifferently, tallying her receipts. Pat had spent much of the previous twelve months openly hoping that Robin might fall for the charms of a previous subcontractor whose good looks had been equalled by his creepiness. Robin could only be grateful that Dev was married.
She’d been forced to temporarily shelve her flat-hunting plans because of the long hours she was working, but still volunteered to stake out the billionaire’s house over Christmas. It suited her to have an excuse not to return to her parents in Masham, because she was certain Matthew and Sarah would be parading their new-born child, sex so far unknown, around the familiar streets where once, as teenagers, he and Robin had strolled hand in hand. Robin’s parents were disappointed, and Strike was clearly uncomfortable about taking her up on the offer.
‘It’s fine,’ said Robin, disinclined to go into her reasons. ‘I’d rather stay in London. You missed Christmas last year.’
She was starting to feel mentally and physically exhausted. She’d worked almost non-stop for the past two years, years that had included separation and divorce. The recent increase of reserve between her and Strike was playing on her mind, and little as she’d wanted to go back to Masham, the prospect of working through the festive season was undeniably depressing.
Then, in mid-December, Robin’s favourite cousin, Katie, issued a last-minute invitation for her to join a skiing party over New Year. A couple had dropped out on finding out that the wife was pregnant; the chalet was already paid for, so Robin only needed to buy flights. She’d never skied in her life, but as Katie and her husband would be taking it in turns to look after their three-year-old son while the other was on the slopes, there’d always be somebody around to talk to, should she not wish to spend most of her time falling over on the nursery slopes. Robin thought the trip might give her the sense of perspective and serenity that was eluding her in London. Only after she’d accepted did she learn that in addition to Katie and her husband, and a couple of mutual friends from Masham, Hugh ‘Axeman’ Jacks would be of the party.
She told Strike none of these details, only that she had the chance of a skiing trip and would like to take it, which meant slightly increasing the amount of time she’d planned to take off over New Year. Aware that Robin was owed far more leave than she was proposing to take, Strike agreed without hesitation, and wished her a good time.