Robert Galbraith - Career of Evil

“It was a joke, just a joke. I didn’t mean any of it.”

Thin fingers twisting, her glasses lopsided, her legs not long enough for her feet to reach the floor. She was still refusing point blank to be physically examined when Strike and Hardacre went to Brockbank’s house to bring him in.

“He was pissed when we got there. I told him why we’d come and he came at me with a broken bottle.

“I knocked him out,” said Strike without bravado, “but I shouldn’t’ve touched him. I didn’t need to.”

He had never admitted this out loud before, even though Hardacre (who had backed him to the hilt in the subsequent inquiry) had known it as well.

“If he came at you with a bottle—”

“I could’ve got the bottle off him without decking him.”

“You said he was big—”

“He was pretty pissed. I could’ve managed him without punching him. Hardacre was there, it was two on one.

“Truth is, I was glad he came at me. I wanted to punch him. Right hook, literally knocked him senseless — which is how he got away with it.”

“Got away with—”

“Got off,” said Strike. “Got clean away.”

“How?”

Strike drank more coffee, his eyes unfocused, remembering.

“He was hospitalized after I hit him because he had a massive epileptic seizure when he came out of the concussion. Traumatic brain injury.”

“Oh God,” said Robin.

“He needed emergency surgery to stop the bleeding from his brain. He kept having fits. They diagnosed TBI, PTSD and alcoholism. Unfit to stand trial. Lawyers came stampeding in. I was put on an assault charge.

“Luckily, my legal team found out that, the weekend before I hit him, he’d played rugby. They dug around a bit and found out he’d taken a knee to the head from an eighteen-stone Welshman and been stretchered off the field. A junior medic had missed the bleeding from his ear because he was covered in mud and bruises, and just told him to go home and take it easy. As it turned out, they’d missed a basal skull fracture, which my legal team found out when they got doctors to look at the post-match X-ray. The skull fracture had been done by a Welsh forward, not me.

“Even so, if I hadn’t had Hardy as a witness to the fact that he’d come at me with the bottle, I’d have been in it up to my neck. In the end, they accepted that I’d acted in self-defense. I couldn’t have known his skull was already cracked, or how much damage I’d do by punching him.

“Meanwhile, they found child porn on his computer. Brittany’s story tallied with frequent sightings of her being driven out, alone, by her stepfather. Her teacher was interviewed and said she was getting more and more withdrawn at school.

“Two years he’d been assaulting her and warning her he’d kill her, her mother and her sister if she told anyone. He had her convinced that he’d already tried to cut her leg off once. She had scarring all around her shin. He’d told her he was just sawing it off when the mother came in and stopped him. In her interview, the mother said the scarring was from an accident when she was a toddler.”

Robin said nothing. Both hands were over her mouth and her eyes were wide. Strike’s expression was frightening.

“He lay in hospital while they tried to get his fits under control, and whenever anyone tried to interview him he faked confusion and amnesia. He had lawyers swarming all over him, smelling a big fat payout: medical neglect, assault. He claimed he’d been a victim of abuse himself, that the child porn was just a symptom of his mental issues, his alcoholism. Brittany was insisting she’d made everything up, the mother was screaming to everyone that Brockbank had never laid a finger on any of the kids, that he was a perfect father, that she’d lost one husband and now she was going to lose another. Top brass just wanted the accusation to go away.

“He was invalided out,” said Strike, his dark eyes meeting Robin’s blue-gray ones. “He got off scot-free, with a payout and pension to boot, and off he went, Brittany in tow.”

The rattling Land Rover devoured the miles with stoic competence, but the journey north had begun to seem interminably long before the first signs to Barrow-in-Furness appeared. The map had not adequately conveyed how far away the seaport was, how isolated. Barrow-in-Furness was not destined to be passed through, or visited incidentally; an end unto itself, it constituted a geographical cul-de-sac.

Through the southernmost reaches of the Lake District they traveled, past rolling fields of sheep, dry stone walls and picturesque hamlets that reminded Robin of her Yorkshire home, through Ulverston (“Birthplace of Stan Laurel”), until they achieved their first glimpse of a wide estuary that hinted at their approach to the coast. At last, past midday, they found themselves in an unlovely industrial estate, the road flanked by warehouses and factories, which marked the periphery of the town.

“We’ll grab something to eat before we go to Brockbank’s,” said Strike, who had been examining a map of Barrow for the past five minutes. He disdained using electronic devices to navigate on the basis that you did not need to wait for paper to download, nor did the information disappear under adverse conditions. “There’s a car park up here. Take a left at the roundabout.”

They passed a battered side entrance to Craven Park, home ground of the Barrow Raiders. Strike, whose eyes were peeled for a sighting of Brockbank, drank in the distinct character of the place. He had expected, Cornish-born as he was, to be able to see the sea, to taste it, but they might have been miles inland for all he could tell. The initial impression was of a gigantic out-of-town retail center, where the garish façades of high-street outlets confronted them on all sides, except that here and there, standing proud and incongruous between the DIY stores and pizza restaurants, were architectural gems that spoke of a prosperous industrial past. The art deco customs house had been turned into a restaurant. A Victorian technical college embellished with classical figures bore the legend Labor Omnia Vincit . A little further and they came across rows and rows of terraced housing, the kind of cityscape Lowry painted, the hive where workers lived.

“Never seen so many pubs,” said Strike as Robin turned into the car park. He fancied a beer, but with Labor Omnia Vincit in mind, agreed to Robin’s suggestion of a quick bite to eat in a nearby café.

The April day was bright, but the breeze carried with it a chill off the unseen sea.

“Not overselling themselves, are they?” he muttered as he saw the name of the café: The Last Resort. It stood opposite Second Chance, which sold old clothing, and a flourishing pawnbroker’s. Notwithstanding its unpropitious name, The Last Resort was cozy and clean, full of chattering old ladies, and they returned to the car park feeling pleasantly well fed.

“His house won’t be easy to watch if no one’s home,” said Strike, showing Robin the map when they were back in the Land Rover. “It’s in a dead straight dead end. Nowhere to lurk.”

“Has it occurred to you,” said Robin, not entirely flippantly, as they drove away, “that Holly is Noel? That he’s had a sex change?”

“If he has, he’ll be a cinch to find,” said Strike. “Six foot eight in high heels, with a cauliflower ear. Take a right here,” he added as they passed a nightclub called Skint. “Christ, they tell it like it is in Barrow, don’t they?”

Ahead, a gigantic cream building with the name BAE SYSTEMS on it blocked any view of the seafront. The edifice was windowless and seemed to stretch a mile across, blank, faceless, intimidating.