Robert Galbraith - Career of Evil

There remained, of course, the possibility that none of the men he suspected had anything to do with the leg, that everything was in his mind.

A harvest of limbs...

“How far from Edinburgh is Melrose?”

“’Bout an hour, hour and a half’s drive.”

Strike ground out his cigarette in the gutter.

“Hardy, I could come up Sunday night on the sleeper, nip into the office early, then drive down to Melrose, see whether Laing’s gone back to his family, or if they know where he is.”

“Nice one. I’ll pick you up at the station if you let me know when you’re getting in, Oggy. In fact,” Hardacre was gearing himself up for an act of generosity, “if it’s only a day trip you’re after, I’ll lend you my car.”

Strike did not immediately return to his curious friends and his cold curry. Smoking another cigarette, he strolled around the quiet street, thinking. Then he remembered that he was supposed to be attending a concert at the Southbank Centre with Elin on Sunday evening. She was keen to foster an interest in classical music that he had never pretended was more than lukewarm. He checked his watch. It was too late to ring and cancel now; he would need to remember to do so next day.

As he returned to the house, his thoughts drifted back to Robin. She spoke very little about the wedding that was now a mere two and a half months away. Hearing her tell Wardle about the disposable wedding cameras she had ordered had brought home to Strike how soon she would become Mrs. Matthew Cunliffe.

There’s still time, he thought. For what, he did not specify, even to himself.

Many men might think it a pleasant interlude to receive cash for following a pneumatic blonde around London, but Strike was becoming thoroughly bored of trailing Platinum. After hours hanging around Houghton Street, where the LSE’s glass and steel walkways occasionally revealed the part-time lap-dancer passing overhead on her way to the library, Strike followed her to Spearmint Rhino for her 4 p.m. shift. Here, he peeled away: Raven would call him if Platinum did anything that passed for untoward, and he was meeting Wardle at six.

He ate a sandwich in a shop near the pub chosen for their rendezvous. His mobile rang once, but on seeing that it was his sister, he let the call go to voicemail. He had a vague idea that it would soon be his nephew Jack’s birthday and he had no intention of going to his party, not after the last time, which he remembered mainly for the nosiness of Lucy’s fellow mothers and the ear-splitting screams of overexcited and tantrumming children.

The Old Blue Last stood at the top of Great Eastern Street in Shoreditch, a snub-nosed, imposing three-story brick building curved like the prow of a boat. Within Strike’s memory, it had been a strip club and brothel: an old school friend of his and Nick’s had allegedly lost his virginity there to a woman old enough to be his mother.

A sign just inside the doors announced the Old Blue Last’s rebirth as a music venue. From eight o’clock that evening, Strike saw, he would be able to enjoy live performances from the Islington Boys’ Club, Red Drapes, In Golden Tears and Neon Index. There was a wry twist to his mouth as he pushed his way into a dark wood-floored bar, where an enormous antique mirror behind the bar bore gilded letters advertising the pale ales of a previous age. Spherical glass lamps hung from the high ceiling, illuminating a crowd of young men and women, many of whom looked like students and most dressed with a trendiness that was beyond Strike.

Although she was in her soul a lover of stadium bands, his mother had taken him to many such venues in his youth, where bands containing her friends might scrape a gig or two before splitting up acrimoniously, re-forming and appearing at a different pub three months later. Strike found the Old Blue Last a surprising choice of meeting place for Wardle, who had previously only drunk with Strike in the Feathers, which was right beside Scotland Yard. The reason became clear when Strike joined the policeman, who was standing alone with a pint at the bar.

“The wife likes Islington Boys’ Club. She’s meeting me here after work.”

Strike had never met Wardle’s wife, and while he had never given the matter much thought, he would have guessed her to be a hybrid of Platinum (because Wardle’s eyes invariably followed fake tans and scanty clothing) and the only wife of a Met policeman that Strike knew, whose name was Helly and who was primarily interested in her children, her house and salacious gossip. The fact that Wardle’s wife liked an indie band of whom Strike had never heard, notwithstanding the fact that he was already predisposed to despise that very band, made him think that she must be a more interesting person than the one he had expected.

“What’ve you got?” Strike asked Wardle, having secured himself a pint from an increasingly busy barman. By unspoken consent they left the bar and took the last free table for two in the place.

“Forensics are in on the leg,” said Wardle as they sat down. “They reckon it came off a woman aged between midteens and midtwenties and that she was dead when it was cut off — but not long dead, looking at the clotting — and it was kept in a freezer in between cutting it off and handing it to your friend Robin.”

Midteens to midtwenties: by Strike’s calculations, Brittany Brockbank would be twenty-one now.

“Can’t they be any more precise on the age?”

Wardle shook his head.

“That’s as far as they’re prepared to go. Why?”

“I told you why: Brockbank had a stepdaughter.”

“Brockbank,” repeated Wardle in the noncommittal tone that denotes lack of recall.

“One of the guys I thought might’ve sent the leg,” said Strike, failing to conceal his impatience. “Ex — Desert Rat. Big dark guy, cauliflower ear—”

“Yeah, all right,” said Wardle, immediately nettled. “I get passed names all the time, pal. Brockbank — he had the tattoo on his forearm—”

“That’s Laing,” said Strike. “He’s the Scot I landed in jail for ten years. Brockbank was the one who reckoned I’d given him brain damage.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“His stepdaughter, Brittany, had old scarring on her leg. I told you that.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember.”

Strike stifled a caustic retort by sipping his pint. He would have felt far more confident that his suspicions were being taken seriously had it been his old SIB colleague Graham Hardacre who sat opposite him, rather than Wardle. Strike’s relationship with Wardle had been tinged from the first with wariness and, latterly, with a faint competitiveness. He rated Wardle’s detective abilities higher than those of several other Met officers whom Strike had run across, but Wardle still regarded his own theories with paternal fondness that he never extended to Strike’s.

“So have they said anything about the scarring on the calf?”

“Old. Long predated the death.”

“Jesus fuck,” said Strike.

The old scarring might be of no particular interest to forensics, but it was of vital importance to him. This was what he had dreaded. Even Wardle, whose habit it was to take the mickey out of Strike on every possible occasion, appeared to be experiencing something like empathy at the sign of the detective’s concern.

“Mate,” he said (and that, too, was new), “it’s not Brockbank. It’s Malley.”

Strike had been afraid of this, afraid that the very mention of Malley would send Wardle careering after him to the exclusion of Strike’s other suspects, excited at the thought of being the man who put away so notorious a gangster.