Robert Galbraith - Career of Evil

Strike turned back to the hall, feeling in his pocket. He always carried a notebook and pen on him. He scribbled a brief note to Elin, alluding to the best part of the previous night, and left it on the hall table so as not to risk waking her. Then, as quietly as he had done everything else, he hoisted his holdall onto his shoulder and let himself out of the flat. He was meeting Robin at West Ealing station at eight.

The last traces of mist were lifting from Hastings Road when Robin left her house, flustered and heavy-eyed, a carrier bag of food in one hand and a holdall full of clean clothes in the other. She unlocked the rear of the old gray Land Rover, swung the clothes into it and hurried around to the driver’s seat with the food.

Matthew had just tried to hug her in the hall and she had forcibly resisted, two hands on his smooth warm chest, pushing him away, shouting at him to get off. He had been wearing only boxer shorts. Now she was afraid that he might be struggling into some clothes, ready to give chase. She slammed the car door and dragged on her seatbelt, eager to be gone, but as she turned the key in the ignition Matthew burst out of the house, barefoot, in T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. She had never seen his expression so naked, so vulnerable.

“Robin,” he called as she stepped on the accelerator and pulled away from the curb. “I love you. I love you! ”

She spun the wheel and moved precariously out of the parking space, missing their neighbor’s Honda by inches. She could see Matthew shrinking in the rearview mirror; he, whose self-possession was usually total, was proclaiming his love at the top of his voice, risking the neighbors’ curiosity, their scorn and their laughter.

Robin’s heart thumped painfully in her chest. A quarter past seven; Strike would not be at the station yet. She turned left at the end of the road, intent only on putting distance between herself and Matthew.

He had risen at dawn, while she was trying to pack without waking him.

“Where are you going?”

“To help Strike with the investigation.”

“You’re going away overnight?”

“I expect so.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

She was afraid to tell him their destination in case he came after them. Matthew’s behavior when she had arrived home the previous evening had left her shaken. He had cried and begged. She had never seen him like that, not even after his mother’s death.

“Robin, we’ve got to talk.”

“We’ve talked enough.”

“Does your mother know where you’re going?”

“Yes.”

She was lying. Robin had not told her mother about the ruptured engagement yet, nor that she was heading off north with Strike. After all, she was twenty-six; it was none of her mother’s business. She knew, though, that Matthew was really asking whether she had told her mother that the wedding was off, because they were both aware that she would not have been getting in the Land Rover to drive off to an undisclosed location with Strike if their engagement had still been intact. The sapphire ring was lying exactly where she had left it, on a bookshelf loaded with his old accountancy textbooks.

“Oh shit,” Robin whispered, blinking away tears as she turned at random through the quiet streets, trying not to focus on her naked finger, or on the memory of Matthew’s anguished face.

One short walk took Strike much further than simple physical distance. This, he thought as he smoked his first cigarette of the day, was London: you started in a quiet, symmetrical Nash terrace that resembled a sculpture in vanilla ice-cream. Elin’s pin-striped Russian neighbor had been getting into his Audi, and Strike had received a curt nod in response to his “Morning.” A short walk past the silhouettes of Sherlock Holmes at Baker Street station and he was sitting on a grimy Tube train surrounded by chattering Polish workmen, fresh and businesslike at 7 a.m. Then bustling Paddington, forcing a path through commuters and coffee shops, holdall over shoulder. Finally a few stops on the Heathrow Connect, accompanied by a large West Country family who were already dressed for Florida in spite of the early morning chill. They watched the station signs like nervous meerkats, their hands gripping their suitcase handles as though expecting an imminent mugging.

Strike arrived at West Ealing station fifteen minutes early and desperate for a cigarette. Dropping the holdall by his feet he lit up, hoping that Robin would not be too prompt, because he doubted that she would want him smoking in the Land Rover. He had only taken a couple of satisfying drags, however, when the box-like car rounded the corner, Robin’s bright red-gold head clearly visible through the windscreen.

“I don’t mind,” she called over the running engine as he hoisted his holdall back onto his shoulder and made to extinguish the cigarette, “as long as you keep the window open.”

He climbed inside, shoved his bag into the back and slammed the door.

“You can’t make it smell worse than it already does,” said Robin, managing the stiff gears with her usual expertise. “It’s pure dog in here.”

Strike pulled on a seatbelt as they accelerated away from the pavement, looking around at the interior of the car. Shabby and scuffed, a pungent fug of Wellington boot and Labrador certainly pervaded. It reminded Strike of military vehicles that he had driven across all terrains in Bosnia and Afghanistan, but at the same time it added something to his picture of Robin’s background. This Land Rover spoke of muddy tracks and plowed fields. He remembered her saying that an uncle had a farm.

“Did you ever have a pony?”

She glanced at him, surprised. In that fleeting full-face look he noted the heaviness of her eyes, her pallor. She had clearly not slept much.

“What on earth do you want to know that for?”

“This feels like the kind of car you’d take to the gymkhana.”

Her reply had a touch of defensiveness:

“Yes, I did.”

He laughed, pushing the window down as far as it would go and resting his left hand there with the cigarette.

“Why is that funny?”

“I don’t know. What was it called?”

“Angus,” she said, turning left. “He was a bugger. Always carting me off.”

“I don’t trust horses,” said Strike, smoking.

“Have you ever been on one?”

It was Robin’s turn to smile. She thought it might be one of the few places where she would see Strike truly discomforted, on the back of a horse.

“No,” said Strike. “And I intend to keep it that way.”

“My uncle’s got something that’d carry you,” said Robin. “Clydesdale. It’s massive.”

“Point taken,” said Strike drily, and she laughed.

Smoking in silence as she concentrated on navigating through the increasingly heavy morning traffic, Strike noted how much he liked making her laugh. He also recognized that he felt much happier, much more comfortable, sitting here in this ramshackle Land Rover talking inconsequential nonsense with Robin than he had felt last night at dinner with Elin.

He was not a man who told himself comfortable lies. He might have argued that Robin represented the ease of friendship; Elin, the pitfalls and pleasures of a sexual relationship. He knew that the truth was more complicated, and certainly made more so by the fact that the sapphire ring had vanished from Robin’s finger. He had known, almost from the moment they had met, that Robin represented a threat to his peace of mind, but endangering the best working relationship of his life would be an act of willful self-sabotage that he, after years of a destructive on-off relationship, after the hard graft and sacrifice that had gone into building his business, could not and would not let happen.