Robert Galbraith - Career of Evil

He thought about Laing, living alone in his grim Wollaston Close flat, claiming his disability benefit, overweight and infirm, looking far older than his real age of thirty-four. He had been a funny man, once. Did he still have it in him to charm a young girl to the point that she would have ridden on motorbikes with him or taken him trustingly to a flat in Shepherd’s Bush, about which her family knew nothing?

What about Whittaker, stinking of crack, with his blackened teeth and his thinning, matted hair? True, Whittaker had once had mesmeric charm, and emaciated, drug-addicted Stephanie seemed to find him appealing, but Kelsey’s only known passion had been for a clean-cut blond boy just a few years older than herself.

Then there was Brockbank. To Strike, the massive, swarthy ex-flanker was downright repulsive, as unlike pretty Niall as it was possible to be. Brockbank had been living and working miles from Kelsey’s home and work, and while both had attended churches, their places of worship were on opposite banks of the Thames. The police would surely have unearthed any contact between the two congregations by now.

Did the absence of any known connection between Kelsey and Strike’s three suspects rule each of them out as the killer? While logic seemed to urge the answer yes, something stubborn inside Strike continued to whisper no.

Robin’s trip home was tinged throughout with the strangest sense of unreality. She felt out of step with everybody, even her mother, who was preoccupied with the wedding arrangements and, while sympathetic to Robin’s constant checking of her phone for any development on the Shacklewell Ripper, a little harassed.

Back in the familiar kitchen where Rowntree snoozed at her feet, the seating plan for the reception spread out on the scrubbed wooden table between them, Robin began to appreciate how fully she had abnegated responsibility for her wedding. Linda was constantly firing questions at her about favors, speeches, the bridesmaids’ shoes, her headdress, when it would be convenient to speak to the vicar, where she and Matt wanted the presents sent, whether Matthew’s Auntie Sue ought to be on the top table or not. Robin had imagined that being at home would be restful. Instead she was required to deal, on the one hand, with a tidal wave of trivial queries from her mother; on the other, a series of questions from her brother Martin, who pored over accounts of the discovery of Heather Smart’s body until Robin lost her temper with what she saw as his ghoulishness, whereupon an overwrought Linda banned all mention of the killer from their house.

Matthew, meanwhile, was angry, though trying not to show it, that Robin had not yet asked Strike for two weeks off for the honeymoon.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said Robin at dinner. “We’ve got hardly any work on and Cormoran says the police have taken over all our leads.”

“He still hasn’t confirmed,” said Linda, who had been beadily watching how little Robin was eating.

“Who hasn’t?” asked Robin.

“Strike. No RSVP.”

“I’ll remind him,” said Robin, taking a large slug of wine.

She had not told any of them, not even Matthew, that she kept having nightmares that woke her gasping in the darkness, back in the bed where she had slept in the months following her rape. A massive man kept coming for her in these dreams. Sometimes he burst into the office where she worked with Strike. More frequently he loomed out of the darkness in the backstreets of London, knives shining. That morning he had been on the point of gouging out her eyes when she woke, gasping, to the sound of Matthew drowsily asking her what she had said.

“Nothing,” she had said, pushing sweaty hair off her forehead. “Nothing.”

Matthew had to return to work on Monday. He seemed pleased to leave her behind in Masham, helping Linda with preparations for the wedding. Mother and daughter met the vicar at St. Mary the Virgin for a final discussion about the form of the service on Monday afternoon.

Robin tried hard to concentrate on the minister’s cheerful suggestions, his ecclesiastical pep talk, but all the time he was talking her eyes kept drifting to the large stone crab that appeared to be clinging to the church wall on the right of the aisle.

This crab had fascinated her in her childhood. She had not been able to understand why there was a big carved crab crawling up the stones of their church, and her curiosity on the point had ended up infecting Linda, who had gone to the local library, looked up the records and triumphantly informed her daughter that the crab had been the emblem of the ancient Scrope family, whose memorial sat above it.

Nine-year-old Robin had been disappointed by the answer. In a way, an explanation had never been the point. She had simply liked being the only one who wanted to find out the truth.

She was standing in the dressmaker’s box-like changing room, with its gilt-framed mirror and its new-carpet smell, when Strike called next day. Robin knew that it was Strike because of the unique ringtone that she had attached to his calls. She lunged for her handbag, causing the dressmaker to emit a little cry of annoyance and surprise as the folds of chiffon that she was dexterously repinning were torn from her hands.

“Hello?” said Robin.

“Hi,” said Strike.

The single syllable told her that something bad had happened.

“Oh God, has someone else been killed?” Robin blurted out, forgetting the dressmaker crouching at the hem of her wedding dress. The woman stared at her in the mirror, her mouth full of pins.

“Sorry, could you give me a moment? Not you!” she added to Strike, in case he hung up.

“Sorry,” she repeated as the curtain closed behind the dressmaker and she sank down onto the stool in the corner in her wedding dress, “I was with someone. Has someone else died?”

“Yes,” said Strike, “but it’s not what you think. It’s Wardle’s brother.”

Robin’s tired and overwrought brain tried to join dots that refused to connect.

“It’s nothing to do with the case,” said Strike. “He was knocked down on a zebra crossing by a speeding van.”

“God,” said Robin, utterly fazed. She had temporarily forgotten that death came in any manner other than at the hands of a maniac with knives.

“It’s a fucker, all right. He had three kids, and a fourth on the way. I’ve just spoken to Wardle. Bloody terrible thing to happen.”

Robin’s brain seemed to grind back into gear again.

“So is Wardle—?”

“Compassionate leave,” said Strike. “Guess who’s taken over from him?”

“Not Anstis?” Robin asked, suddenly worried.

“Worse than that,” said Strike.

“Not — not Carver?” said Robin, with a sudden presentiment of doom.

Of the policemen whom Strike had managed to offend and upstage during his two most famous detective triumphs, Detective Inspector Roy Carver had been the most comprehensively outclassed and was consequently the most deeply embittered. His failings during the investigation into a famous model’s fall from her penthouse flat had been extensively documented and, indeed, exaggerated in the press. A sweaty man with dandruff and a mottled, purple face like corned beef, he had had an antipathy towards Strike even before the detective had publicly proven that the policeman had failed to spot murder.

“Right in one,” said Strike. “I’ve just had him here for three hours.”

“Oh, God — why?”

“Come off it,” said Strike, “you know why. This is a wet dream for Carver, having an excuse to interrogate me about a series of murders. He stopped just short of asking me for alibis, and he spent a hell of a lot of time on those fake letters to Kelsey.”