Robert Galbraith - Career of Evil

“Once,” said Robin.

Strike deduced from her pink cheeks and her thickened speech that she was not on her second glass of wine. Both amused and concerned, he said:

“I think you need something to eat.”

“That’s ’zacktly what I said to you,” Robin replied, “that night when you were... and we ended up having a kebab — and I do not,” she said with dignity, “want a kebab.”

“Well,” said Strike, “y’know, it’s London. We can probably find you something that isn’t a kebab.”

“I like crisps,” said Robin, so he bought her some.

“What’s going on?” he repeated on his return. After a few seconds of watching her attempting to open the crisps he took them from her to do it himself.

“Nothing. I’m going to sleep in a Travelodge tonight, that’s all.”

“A Travelodge.”

“Yeah. There’s one in... there’s one...”

She looked down at her dead mobile and realized that she had forgotten to charge it the previous night.

“I can’t remember where it is,” she said. “Just leave me, I’m fine,” she added, groping in her holdall for something to blow her nose on.

“Yeah,” he said heavily, “I’m totally reassured now I’ve seen you.”

“I am fine,” she said fiercely. “I’ll be at work as usual tomorrow, you wait and see.”

“You think I came to find you because I’m worried about work?”

“Don’t be nice!” she groaned, burying her face in her tissues. “I can’t take it! Be normal!”

“What’s normal?” he asked, confused.

“G-grumpy and uncommunic — uncommunica—”

“What do you want to communicate about?”

“Nothing in particular,” she lied. “I just thought... keep things profess’nal.”

“What’s happened between you and Matthew?”

“What’s happening b’tween you and Elin?” she countered.

“How’s that important?” he asked, nonplussed.

“Same thing,” she said vaguely, draining her third glass. “I’d like ’nother—”

“You’re having a soft drink this time.”

She examined the ceiling while waiting for him. There were theatrical scenes painted up there: Bottom cavorted with Titania amid a group of fairies.

“Things are going OK with Elin,” he told her when he sat back down, having decided that an exchange of information was the easiest way to make her talk about her own problems. “It suits me, keeping it low key. She’s got a daughter she doesn’t want me getting too close to. Messy divorce.”

“Oh,” said Robin, blinking at him over her glass of Coke. “How did you meet her?”

“Through Nick and Ilsa.”

“How do they know her?”

“They don’t. They had a party and she came along with her brother. He’s a doctor, works with Nick. They hadn’t ever met her before.”

“Oh,” said Robin again.

She had briefly forgotten her own troubles, diverted by this glimpse into Strike’s private world. So normal, so unremarkable! A party and he had gone along and got talking to the beautiful blonde. Women liked Strike — she had come to realize that over the months they had worked together. She had not understood the appeal when she had started working for him. He was so very different from Matthew.

“Does Ilsa like Elin?” asked Robin.

Strike was startled by this flash of perception.

“Er — yeah, I think so,” he lied.

Robin sipped her Coke.

“OK,” said Strike, restraining his impatience with difficulty, “your turn.”

“We’ve split up,” she said.

Interrogation technique told him to remain silent, and after a minute or so the decision was vindicated.

“He... told me something,” she said. “Last night.”

Strike waited.

“And we can’t go back from that. Not that.”

She was pale and composed but he could almost feel the anguish behind the words. Still he waited.

“He slept with someone else,” she said in a small, tight voice.

There was a pause. She picked up her crisp packet, found that she had finished the contents and dropped it on the table.

“Shit,” said Strike.

He was surprised: not that Matthew had slept with another woman, but that he had admitted it. His impression of the handsome young accountant was of a man who knew how to run his life to suit himself, to compartmentalize and categorize where necessary.

“And not just once,” said Robin, in that same tight voice. “He was doing it for months. With someone we both know. Sarah Shadlock. She’s an old friend of his from university.”

“Christ,” said Strike. “I’m sorry.”

He was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain she was in. Yet the revelation had caused certain other feelings — feelings he usually kept under tight rein, considering them both misguided and dangerous — to flex inside him, to test their strength against their restraining bonds.

Don’t be a stupid fucker, he told himself. That’s one thing that can never happen. It’d screw everything up royally.

“What made him tell you?” Strike asked.

She did not answer, but the question brought back the scene in awful clarity.

Their magnolia sitting room was far too tiny to accommodate a couple in such a state of fury. They had driven all the way home from Yorkshire in the Land Rover that Matthew had not wanted. Somewhere along the way, an incensed Matthew had asserted that it was a matter of time before Strike made a pass at Robin and what was more, he suspected that she would welcome the advance.

“He’s my friend, that’s all!” she had bellowed at Matthew from beside their cheap sofa, their weekend bags still in the hall. “For you to suggest I’m turned on by the fact he’s had his leg—”

“You’re so bloody naive!” he had bellowed. “He’s your friend until he tries to get you into bed, Robin—”

“Who are you judging him by? Are you biding your time before you jump on your coworkers?”

“Of course I’m bloody not, but you’re so frigging starry-eyed about him — he’s a man, it’s just the two of you in the office—”

“He’s my friend, like you’re friends with Sarah Shadlock but you’ve never—”

She had seen it in his face. An expression she had never noticed before passed across it like a shadow. Guilt seemed to slide physically over the high cheekbones, the clean jaw, the hazel eyes she had adored for years.

“—have you?” she said, her tone suddenly wondering. “ Have you?”

He hesitated too long.

“No,” he had said forcefully, like a paused film jerking back into action. “Of course n—”

“You have,” she said. “You’ve slept with her.”

She could see it in his face. He did not believe in male-female friendships because he had never had one. He and Sarah had been sleeping together.

“When?” she had asked. “Not... was it then? ”

“I didn’t—”

She heard the feeble protestation of a man who knows he has lost, who had even wanted to lose. That had haunted her all night and all day: on some level, he had wanted Robin to know.

Her strange calm, more stunned than accusatory, had led him on to tell her everything. Yes, it had been then . He felt terrible about it, he always had — but he and Robin hadn’t been sleeping together at the time and, one night, Sarah had been comforting him, and, well, things had got out of hand—

“She was comforting you?” Robin had repeated. Rage had come then, at last, unfreezing her from her state of stunned disbelief. “She was comforting you? ”

“It was a difficult time for me too, you know!” he had shouted.

Strike watched as Robin shook her head unconsciously, trying to clear it, but the recollections had turned her pink and her eyes were sparkling again.