Robert Galbraith - Career of Evil

“Right y’are, Bunsen. Sure you’re gonna be all right with him?” Shanker added, eyes on Strike’s broken nose, his bleeding ear and hand.

“Yeah, ’course I will,” said Strike, vaguely touched.

He heard Shanker picking up the metal canister in the next room and, shortly afterwards, saw him passing the kitchen window on the balcony outside.

“SHANKER!”

His old friend was back in the kitchen so fast that Strike knew he must have sprinted; the heavy gas canister was raised, but Laing still lay handcuffed and quiescent on the floor, and Strike stood smoking beside the cooker.

“Fuckin’ ’ell, Bunsen, I fort ’e’d jumped you!”

“Shanker, could you get hold of a car and drive me somewhere tomorrow morning? I’ll give you—”

Strike looked down at his bare wrist. He had sold his watch yesterday for the cash that had paid for Shanker’s help tonight. What else did he have to flog?

“Listen, Shanker, you know I’m going to make money out of this one. Give me a few months and I’ll have clients queuing up.”

“’S’all right, Bunsen,” said Shanker, after brief consideration. “You can owe me.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah,” said Shanker, turning to go. “Gimme a bell when you’re ready to leave. I’ll go get us a car.”

“Don’t nick one!” Strike called after him.

Mere seconds after Shanker had passed the window for the second time, Strike heard the distant sound of a police siren.

“Here they come, Donnie,” he said.

It was then that Donald Laing spoke in his true voice to Strike, for the first and last time.

“Your mother,” he said, in a deep Borders accent, “was a fucking whore.”

Strike laughed.

“Maybe so,” he said, bleeding and smoking in the darkness as the sirens grew louder, “but she loved me, Donnie. I heard yours didn’t give a shit about you, little policeman’s bastard that you were.”

Laing began to thrash around, trying fruitlessly to free himself, but he merely spun on his side, arms still pinned behind his back.

Strike did not meet Carver that night. He suspected the man would have shot off his own kneecaps rather than face Strike now. A pair of CID officers he had never met interrogated him in a side room in Accident and Emergency, between the various medical procedures his injuries warranted. His ear had been stitched back together, his slashed palm bandaged, a dressing had been applied to his back, which the falling machete had nicked, and for the third time in his life his nose had been painfully manipulated back into approximate symmetry. At convenient intervals, Strike had given the police a lucid exposition of the line of reasoning that had led him to Laing. He was careful to tell them that he had phoned that information through to a subordinate of Carver’s two weeks previously and had also tried to tell Carver directly the last time they had spoken.

“Why aren’t you writing that down?” he asked the officers who sat in silence, staring at him. The younger man made a cursory note.

“I also,” Strike continued, “wrote a letter and sent it to DI Carver, recorded delivery. He should have got it yesterday.”

“You sent it recorded delivery?” repeated the older of the two officers, a sad-eyed man with a mustache.

“That’s right,” said Strike. “Thought I’d make sure it was good and hard to lose.”

The policeman made a far more detailed note.

Strike’s story was that, suspecting the police weren’t convinced by his suspicions about Laing, he had never stopped watching him. He had followed Laing to the nightclub, worried about whether he was going to try to pick up a woman, then tailed him to his flat where he had decided to confront him. About Alyssa, who had played the part of his temp with such aplomb, and Shanker, whose enthusiastic intervention had certainly spared Strike several more stab wounds, he said nothing.

“The clincher,” Strike told the officers, “is going to be finding this guy Ritchie, sometimes known as Dickie, whose motorbike Laing’s been borrowing. Hazel will be able to tell you all about him. He’s been giving Laing alibis all over the shop. I reckon he’s a petty criminal himself and probably thought he was just helping Laing cheat on Hazel or do a bit of benefit fraud. He doesn’t sound like a smart guy. I think he’ll crack pretty quickly once he realizes it was murder.”

The doctors and police finally decided that they needed nothing more from Strike at five o’clock in the morning. He refused the policemen’s offer of a lift, which he suspected was made partly to keep tabs on him as long as they could.

“We wouldn’t want this to get out before we’ve had a chance to speak to the families,” said the younger officer, whose white-blond hair stood out in the drab dawn on the forecourt where the three men were taking leave of one another.

“I’m not going to the press,” said Strike, yawning widely as he felt in his pockets for his remaining cigarettes. “I’ve got other stuff to do today.”

He had begun to walk away when a thought occurred to him.

“What was the church connection? Brockbank — what made Carver think it was him?”

“Oh,” said the mustached officer. He did not seem particularly eager to share the information. “There was a youth worker who’d transferred from Finchley to Brixton... didn’t lead anywhere, but,” he added, with an air of faint defiance, “we’ve got him. Brockbank. Got a tip-off from a homeless hostel yesterday.”

“Nice one,” said Strike. “Press love a pedophile. I’d lead with that when you talk to them.”

Neither officer smiled. Strike bade them good morning and left, wondering whether he had any money on him for a taxi, smoking left-handed because the local anesthetic was wearing off in his right hand, his broken nose stinging in the cool morning air.

“Fuckin’ Yorkshire?” Shanker said over the phone when he called to tell Strike he had a car and the detective had told him where he wanted to go. “ Yorkshire? ”

“Masham,” Strike had replied. “Look, I’ve already told you: I’ll pay you anything you like when I get the money. It’s a wedding and I don’t want to miss it. Time’s going to be tight as it is — anything you like, Shanker, you’ve got my word on it, and I’ll pay you when I can.”

“’Oo’s gettin’ married?”

“Robin,” said Strike.

“Ah,” said Shanker. He had sounded pleased. “Yeah, well, in that case, Bunsen, I’ll drive ya. I toldja you shouldn’t’ve—”

“—yeah—”

“—Alyssa toldja—”

“Yeah, she did, bloody loudly too.”

Strike had a strong suspicion that Shanker was now sleeping with Alyssa. He could think of few other explanations for the speed with which he had suggested her when Strike had explained the need for a woman to play a safe but essential part in the entrapment of Donald Laing. She had demanded a hundred pounds for doing the job and had assured Strike that it would have been considerably more had she not considered herself deep in his partner’s debt.

“Shanker, we can talk about all this on the way. I need food and a shower. We’re going to be bloody lucky to make it.”

So here they were, speeding north in the Mercedes Shanker had borrowed; from where, Strike did not inquire. The detective, who had had barely any sleep in the previous couple of nights, dozed for the first sixty miles, waking with a snort only when his mobile buzzed in his suit pocket.

“Strike,” he said sleepily.

“Bloody good job, mate,” said Wardle.