Robert Galbraith - Career of Evil

“What did you say?” she asked Strike, confused.

“I asked what made him tell you.”

“I don’t know. We were in the middle of a row. He thinks...” She took a deep breath. Two-thirds of a bottle of wine on an empty stomach was leading her to emulate Matthew’s honesty. “He doesn’t believe you and I are just friends.”

This was no surprise to Strike. He had read suspicion in every look Matthew had ever given him, heard insecurity in every chippy comment thrown his way.

“So,” Robin went on unsteadily, “I pointed out that we are just friends, and that he’s got a platonic friend himself, dear old Sarah Shadlock. So then it all came out. He and Sarah had an affair at university while I was... while I was at home.”

“That long ago?” Strike said.

“You think I shouldn’t mind if it was seven years ago?” she demanded. “If he’s lied about it ever since and we constantly see her?”

“I was just surprised,” said Strike evenly, refusing to be drawn into a fight, “that he’s owned up to it after all this time.”

“Oh,” said Robin. “Well, he was ashamed. Because of when it happened.”

“At university?” said Strike, confused.

“It was right after I dropped out,” said Robin.

“Ah,” said Strike.

They had never discussed what had made her leave her psychology degree and return to Masham.

Robin had not intended to tell Strike the story, but all resolutions were adrift tonight on the little sea of alcohol with which she had filled her hungry and exhausted body. What did it matter if she told him? Without that information he would not have the full picture or be able to advise her what to do next. She was relying on him, she realized dimly, to help her. Whether she liked it or not — whether he liked it or not — Strike was her best friend in London. She had never looked that fact squarely in the face before. Alcohol buoyed you up and it washed your eyes clean. In vino veritas, they said, didn’t they? Strike would know. He had an odd, occasional habit of quoting Latin.

“I didn’t want to leave uni,” said Robin slowly, her head swimming, “but something happened and afterwards I had problems...”

That was no good. That didn’t explain it.

“I was coming home from a friend’s, in another hall of residence,” she said. “It wasn’t that late... only eight o’clock or something... but there had been a warning out about him — on the local news—”

That was no good either. Far too much detail. What she needed was a bald statement of fact, not to talk him through every little bit of it, the way she’d had to in court.

She took a deep breath, looked into Strike’s face and read dawning comprehension there. Relieved not to have to spell it out, she asked:

“Please could I have some more crisps?”

When he returned from the bar he handed them to her in silence. She did not like the look on his face.

“Don’t go thinking — it doesn’t make any difference!” she said desperately. “It was twenty minutes of my life. It was something that happened to me. It isn’t me. It doesn’t define me.”

Strike guessed that they were phrases she had been led to embrace in some kind of therapy. He had interviewed rape victims. He knew the forms of words they were given to make sense of what, to a woman, was incomprehensible. A lot of things about Robin were explained now. The long allegiance to Matthew, for instance: the safe boy from home.

However, the drunken Robin read in Strike’s silence the thing she had most feared: a shift in the way he saw her, from equal to victim.

“It doesn’t make any difference!” she repeated furiously. “I’m still the same!”

“I know that,” he said, “but it’s still one fucking horrible thing to have happened to you.”

“Well, yes... it was...” she muttered, mollified. Then, firing up again: “My evidence got him. I noticed things about him while... He had this patch of white skin under his ear — they call it vitiligo — and one of his pupils was fixed, dilated.”

She was gabbling slightly now, wolfing down her third packet of crisps.

“He tried to strangle me; I went limp and played dead and he ran for it. He’d attacked two other girls wearing the mask and neither of them could tell the police anything about him. My evidence got him put away.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Strike.

She found this response satisfactory. They sat in silence for a minute while she finished the crisps.

“Only, afterwards, I couldn’t leave my room,” she said, as though there had been no pause. “In the end, the university sent me home. I was only supposed to take a term off, but I–I never went back.”

Robin contemplated this fact, staring into space. Matthew had urged her to stay at home. When her agoraphobia had resolved, which had taken more than a year, she had begun visiting him at his university in Bath, wandering hand in hand among dwellings of soft Cotswold stone, down sweeping Regency crescents, along the tree-lined banks of the River Avon. Every time they had gone out with his friends Sarah Shadlock had been there, braying at Matthew’s jokes, touching his arm, leading the conversation constantly to the good times they all enjoyed when Robin, the tedious girlfriend from home, was not present...

She was comforting me. It was a difficult time for me too, you know!

“Right,” said Strike, “we’ve got to get you a place to spend tonight.”

“I’m going to the Travel—”

“No, you’re not.”

He did not want her staying in a place where anonymous people might wander the corridors unchallenged, or could walk in off the street. Perhaps he was being paranoid, but he wanted her somewhere that a scream would not be lost in the raucous cries of hen parties.

“I could sleep in the office,” said Robin, swaying as she tried to stand; he grabbed her by the arm. “If you’ve still got that camp—”

“You’re not sleeping in the office,” he said. “I know a good place. My aunt and uncle stayed there when they came up to see The Mousetrap . C’mon, give me the holdall.”

He had once before put his arm around Robin’s shoulders but that had been quite different: he had been using her as a walking stick. This time it was she who could barely move in a straight line. He found her waist and held her steady as they left the pub.

“Matthew,” she said, as they moved off, “would not like this.”

Strike said nothing. In spite of everything he had heard, he was not as sure as Robin was that the relationship was over. They had been together nine years and there was a wedding dress ready and waiting in Masham. He had been careful to offer no criticism of Matthew that might be repeated to her ex-fiancé in the renewal of hostilities that was surely coming, because the accumulated ties of nine years could not be severed in a single night. His reticence was for Robin’s sake rather than his own. He had no fear of Matthew.

“Who was that man?” asked Robin sleepily, after they had walked a hundred yards in silence.

“Which man?”

“That man this morning... I thought he might be the leg man... he scared the hell out of me.”

“Ah... that’s Shanker. He’s an old friend.”

“He’s terrifying.”

“Shanker wouldn’t hurt you,” Strike assured her. Then, as an afterthought: “But don’t ever leave him alone in the office.”

“Why not?”

“He’ll nick anything that’s not nailed down. He does nothing for nothing.”

“Where did you meet him?”

The story of Shanker and Leda took them all the way to Frith Street, where quiet town houses looked down upon them, exuding dignity and order.