Robert Galbraith - Career of Evil

“Once that I know of — but don’t forget, whoever did this hasn’t necessarily killed anyone,” temporized Strike. “The leg could have come off an existing corpse. Could be hospital waste. Wardle’s going to check all that out. We won’t know much until forensics have had a look.”

The ghastly possibility that the leg had been taken from a still-living person, he chose not to mention.

In the ensuing pause, Strike rinsed his razor under the kitchen tap and Robin stared out of the window, lost in thought.

“Well, you had to tell Wardle about Malley,” said Robin, turning back to Strike, who met her gaze in his shaving mirror. “I mean, if he’s already sent someone a — what exactly did he send?” she asked, a little nervously.

“A penis,” said Strike. He washed his face clean and dried it on a towel before continuing. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. More I think about it, though, the surer I am it’s not him. Back in a minute — I want to change this shirt. I ripped two buttons off it when you screamed.”

“Sorry,” said Robin vaguely, as Strike disappeared into the bedroom.

Sipping her tea, she took a look around the room in which she was sitting. She had never been inside Strike’s attic flat before. The most she had done previously was knock on the door to deliver messages or, in some of their busiest and most sleep-deprived stretches, to wake him up. The kitchen-cum-sitting room was cramped but clean and orderly. There were virtually no signs of personality: mismatched mugs, a cheap tea towel folded beside the gas ring; no photographs and nothing decorative, save for a child’s drawing of a soldier, which had been tacked up on one of the wall units.

“Who drew that?” she asked, when Strike reappeared in a clean shirt.

“My nephew Jack. He likes me, for some reason.”

“Don’t fish.”

“I’m not fishing. I never know what to say to kids.”

“So you think you’ve met three men who would’ve—?” Robin began again.

“I want a drink,” said Strike. “Let’s go to the Tottenham.”

There was no possibility of talking on the way, not with the racket of pneumatic drills still issuing from the trenches in the road, but the fluorescent-jacketed workmen neither wolf-whistled nor cat-called with Strike walking at Robin’s side. At last they reached Strike’s favorite local pub, with its ornate gilded mirrors, its panels of dark wood, its shining brass pumps, the colored glass cupola and the paintings of gamboling beauties by Felix de Jong.

Strike ordered a pint of Doom Bar. Robin, who could not face alcohol, asked for a coffee.

“So?” said Robin, once the detective had returned to the high table beneath the cupola. “Who are the three men?”

“I could be barking up a forest of wrong trees, don’t forget,” said Strike, sipping his pint.

“All right,” said Robin. “Who are they?”

“Twisted individuals who’ve all got good reason to hate my guts.”

Inside Strike’s head, a frightened, skinny twelve-year-old girl with scarring around her leg surveyed him through lopsided glasses. Had it been her right leg? He couldn’t remember. Jesus, don’t let it be her...

“ Who? ” Robin said again, losing patience.

“There are two army guys,” said Strike, rubbing his stubbly chin. “They’re both crazy enough and violent enough to — to—”

A gigantic, involuntary yawn interrupted him. Robin waited for cogent speech to resume, wondering whether he had been out with his new girlfriend the previous evening. Elin was an ex-professional violinist, now a presenter on Radio Three, a stunning Nordic-looking blonde who reminded Robin of a more beautiful Sarah Shadlock. She supposed that this was one reason why she had taken an almost immediate dislike to Elin. The other was that she had, in Robin’s hearing, referred to her as Strike’s secretary.

“Sorry,” Strike said. “I was up late writing up notes for the Khan job. Knackered.”

He checked his watch.

“Shall we go downstairs and eat? I’m starving.”

“In a minute. It’s not even twelve. I want to know about these men.”

Strike sighed.

“All right,” he said, dropping his voice as a man passed their table on the way to the bathroom. “Donald Laing, King’s Own Royal Borderers.” He remembered again eyes like a ferret’s, concentrated hatred, the rose tattoo. “I got him life.”

“But then—”

“Out in ten,” said Strike. “He’s been on the loose since 2007. Laing wasn’t your run-of-the-mill nutter, he was an animal, a clever, devious animal; a sociopath — the real deal, if you ask me. I got him life for something I shouldn’t have been investigating. He was about to get off on the original charge. Laing’s got bloody good reason to hate my guts.”

But he did not say what Laing had done or why he, Strike, had been investigating it. Sometimes, and frequently when talking about his career in the Special Investigation Branch, Robin could tell by Strike’s tone when he had come to the point beyond which he did not wish to speak. She had never yet pushed him past it. Reluctantly, she abandoned the subject of Donald Laing.

“Who was the other army guy?”

“Noel Brockbank. Desert Rat.”

“Desert — what?”

“Seventh Armoured Brigade.”

Strike was becoming steadily more taciturn, his expression brooding. Robin wondered whether this was because he was hungry — he was a man who needed regular sustenance to maintain an equable mood — or for some darker reason.

“Shall we eat, then?” Robin asked.

“Yeah,” said Strike, draining his pint and getting to his feet.

The cozy basement restaurant comprised a red-carpeted room with a second bar, wooden tables and walls covered in framed prints. They were the first to sit down and order.

“You were saying, about Noel Brockbank,” Robin prompted Strike when he had chosen fish and chips and she had asked for a salad.

“Yeah, he’s another one with good reason to hold a grudge,” said Strike shortly. He had not wanted to talk about Donald Laing and he was showing even more reluctance to discuss Brockbank. After a long pause in which Strike glared over Robin’s shoulder at nothing, he said, “Brockbank’s not right in the head. Or so he claimed.”

“Did you put him in prison?”

“No,” said Strike.

His expression had become forbidding. Robin waited, but she could tell nothing more was coming on Brockbank, so she asked:

“And the other one?”

This time Strike did not answer at all. She thought he had not heard her.

“Who’s—?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” grunted Strike.

He glowered into his fresh pint, but Robin refused to be intimidated.

“Whoever sent that leg,” she said, “sent it to me .”

“All right,” said Strike grudgingly, after a brief hesitation. “His name’s Jeff Whittaker.”

Robin felt a thrill of shock. She did not need to ask how Strike knew Jeff Whittaker. She already knew, although they had never discussed him.

Cormoran Strike’s early life was documented on the internet and it had been endlessly rehashed by the extensive press coverage of his detective triumphs. He was the illegitimate and unplanned offspring of a rock star and a woman always described as a supergroupie, a woman who had died of an overdose when Strike was twenty. Jeff Whittaker had been her much younger second husband, who had been accused and acquitted of her murder.

They sat in silence until their food arrived.

“Why are you only having a salad? Aren’t you hungry?” asked Strike, clearing his plate of chips. As Robin had suspected, his mood had improved with the ingestion of carbohydrates.