“Why?” repeated the teenager, a little nervous now.

“Please sit down. It isn’t anything bad,” Robin coaxed her. “I’m just worried about you.”

Stephanie hesitated, then sank slowly back into the seat she had vacated. For the first time, Robin noticed the deep red mark around her neck.

“He didn’t—he didn’t try and strangle you, did he?” she asked.

“Wha’?”

Stephanie felt her thin neck and tears welled again in her eyes.

“Oh, tha’s—tha’ was my necklace. ’E give it me an’ then ’e…’cause I ain’t makin’ enough money,” she said, and began to cry in earnest. “’E’s sold it.”

Unable to think what else to do, Robin stretched her other hand across the table and held on to Stephanie’s with both of her own, holding tightly, as though Stephanie were on some moving plateau that was drifting away.

“Did you say he made you… with the whole band?” Robin asked quietly.

“That were f’free,” said Stephanie tearfully, and Robin understood that Stephanie was still thinking of her money-making abilities. “I only blew ’em.”

“After the gig?” asked Robin, releasing one hand to press paper napkins into Stephanie’s.

“No,” said Stephanie, wiping her nose, “next night. We stayed over in the van at the lead singer’s ’ouse. ’E lives in Enfield.”

Robin would not have believed that it was possible to feel simultaneously disgusted and delighted. If Stephanie had been with Whittaker on the night of the fifth of June, Whittaker could not have killed Heather Smart.

“Was he—your boyfriend—was he there?” she asked in a quiet voice. “All the time, while you were—you know—?”

“The fuck’s going on ’ere?”

Robin looked up. Stephanie snatched her hand away, looking frightened.

Whittaker was standing over them. Robin recognized him immediately from the pictures she had seen online. He was tall and broad-shouldered, yet scrawny. His old black T-shirt was washed out almost to gray. The heretic priest’s golden eyes were fascinating in their intensity. In spite of the matted hair, the sunken, yellowing face, in spite of the fact that he repulsed her, she could yet feel the strange, manic aura of him, a magnetic pull like the reek of carrion. He woke the urge to investigate provoked by all dirty, rotten things, no less powerful because it was shameful.

“’Oo are you?” he asked, not aggressively, but with something close to a purr in his voice. He was looking unabashedly right down the front of her sundress.

“I bumped into your girlfriend outside the chippy,” said Robin. “I bought her a drink.”

“Didjoo now?”

“We’re closing,” said the waitress loudly.

The appearance of Whittaker had been a little too much for her, Robin could tell. His flesh tunnels, his tattoos, his maniac’s eyes, his smell would be desirable in very few establishments selling food.

Stephanie looked terrified, even though Whittaker was ignoring her completely. His attention was entirely focused on Robin, who felt absurdly self-conscious as she paid the bill, then stood and walked, Whittaker just behind her, out onto the street.

“Well—good-bye then,” she said weakly to Stephanie.

She wished that she had Strike’s courage. He had urged Stephanie to come away with him right underneath Whittaker’s nose, but Robin’s mouth was suddenly dry. Whittaker was staring at her as though he had spotted something fascinating and rare on a dung heap. Behind them, the waitress was bolting the doors. The sinking sun was throwing cold shadows across the street that Robin only knew as hot and smelly.

“Jus’ bein’ kind, were you, darlin’?” Whittaker asked softly, and Robin could not tell whether there was more malice or sweetness in his voice.

“I suppose I was worried,” said Robin, forcing herself to look into those wide-apart eyes, “because Stephanie’s injuries look quite serious.”

“That?” said Whittaker, putting out a hand to Stephanie’s purple and gray face. “Come off a pushbike, din’choo, Steph? Clumsy little cow.”

Robin suddenly understood Strike’s visceral hatred for this man. She would have liked to hit him too.

“I hope I’ll see you again, Stephanie,” she said.

She did not dare give the girl a number in front of Whittaker. Robin turned and began to walk away, feeling like the worst kind of coward. Stephanie was about to walk back upstairs with the man. She ought to have done more, but what? What could she say that would make a difference? Could she report the assault to the police? Would that constitute an interference with Carver’s case?

Only when she was definitely out of sight of Whittaker did she lose the sensation that invisible ants were crawling up her spine. Robin pulled out her mobile and called Strike.

“I know,” she said, before Strike could start telling her off, “it’s getting late but I’m on my way to the station right now and when you’ve heard what I’ve got, you’ll understand.”

She walked fast, chilly in the increasing cool of the evening, telling him everything that Stephanie had said.

“So he’s got an alibi?” said Strike slowly.

“For Heather’s death, yes, if Stephanie’s telling the truth, and I honestly think she is. She was with him—and the whole of Death Cult, as I say.”

“She definitely said Whittaker was there while she was servicing the band?”

“I think so. She was just answering that when Whittaker turned up and—hang on.”

Robin stopped and looked around. Busy talking, she had taken a wrong turning somewhere on the way back to the station. The sun was setting now. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw a shadow move behind a wall.

“Cormoran?”

“Still here.”

Perhaps she had imagined the shadow. She was on a stretch of unfamiliar residential road, but there were lit windows and a couple walking along in the distance. She was safe, she told herself. It was all right. She just needed to retrace her steps.

“Everything OK?” asked Strike sharply.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ve taken a wrong turn, that’s all.”

“Where are you exactly?”

“Near Catford Bridge station,” she said. “I don’t know how I’ve ended up here.”

She did not want to mention the shadow. Carefully she crossed the darkening road, so that she would not have to walk past the wall where she thought she had seen it, and after transferring her mobile into her left hand she took a tighter hold of the rape alarm in her right pocket.

“I’m going back the way I came,” she told Strike, wanting him to know where she was.

“Have you seen something?” he demanded.

“I don’t kn—maybe,” she admitted.

Yet when she drew level with the gap between houses where she had thought she had seen the figure, there was nobody there.

“I’m jumpy,” she said, speeding up. “Meeting Whittaker wasn’t fun. There’s definitely something—nasty—about him.”

“Where are you now?”

“About twenty feet away from where I was the last time you asked me. Hang on, I can see a street name. I’m crossing back over, I can see where I’ve gone wrong, I should’ve turned—”

She heard the footsteps only when they were right behind her. Two massive black-clad arms closed around her, pinning hers to her sides, squeezing the air from her lungs. Her mobile slipped out of her hand and fell with a crack onto the pavement.

52

Do not envy the man with the x-ray eyes.

Blue Öyster Cult, “X-Ray Eyes”

Strike, who had been standing in the shadow of a warehouse in Bow, keeping watch on Blondin Street, heard Robin’s sudden gasp, the thud of the mobile on the pavement and then the scuffling and skidding of feet on asphalt.

He began to run. The phone connection to Robin was still open, but he could hear nothing. Panic sharpened his mental processes and obliterated all percepti

on of pain as he sprinted down a darkening street in the direction of the nearest station. He needed a second phone.

“Need to borrow that, mate!” he bellowed at a pair of skinny black youths walking towards him, one of whom was chuckling into a mobile. “Crime’s being committed, need to borrow that phone!”

Strike’s size and his aura of authority as he pelted towards them made the teenager surrender the phone with a look of fear and bewilderment.

“Come with me!” Strike bellowed at the two boys, running on past them towards busier streets where he might be able to find a cab, his own mobile still pressed to his other ear. “Police!” Strike yelled into the boy’s phone as the stunned teenagers ran alongside him like bodyguards. “There’s a woman being attacked near Catford Bridge station, I was on the line to her when it happened! It’s happening right—no, I don’t know the street but it’s one or two away from the station—right now, I was on the line to her when he grabbed her, I heard it happen—yeah—and fucking hurry!

“Cheers, mate,” Strike panted, throwing the mobile back into the hands of its owner, who continued to run alongside him for several yards without realizing that he no longer needed to.

Strike hurtled around a corner; Bow was a totally unfamiliar area of London to him. On he ran past the Bow Bells pub, ignoring the red-hot jabs of the ligaments in his knee, moving awkwardly with only one free arm to balance himself, his silent phone still clamped to his ear. Then he heard a rape alarm going off at the other end of the line.

“TAXI!” he bellowed at a distant glowing light. “ROBIN!” he yelled into the phone, sure she could not hear him over the screeching alarm. “ROBIN, I’VE CALLED THE POLICE! THE POLICE ARE ON THEIR WAY. ARE YOU LISTENING, YOU FUCKER?”

The taxi had driven off without him. Drinkers outside the Bow Bells stared at the lunatic hobbling past at high speed, yelling and swearing into his phone. A second taxi appeared.

“TAXI! TAXI!” Strike bellowed and it turned, heading towards him, just as Robin’s voice spoke in his ear, gasping.

“Are… you there?”

“JESUS CHRIST! WHAT’S HAPPENED?”

“Stop… shouting…”

With enormous difficulty he modulated his volume.

“What’s happened?”

“I can’t see,” she said. “I can’t… see anything…”

Strike wrenched open the back door of the cab and threw himself inside.

“Catford Bridge station, hurry! What d’you mean, you can’t—? What’s he done to you? NOT YOU!” he bellowed at the confused cabbie. “Go! Go!”

“No… it’s your bloody… rape alarm… stuff… in my face… oh… shit…”

The taxi was speeding along, but Strike had to physically restrain himself from urging the driver to floor it.

“What happened? Are you hurt?”

“A—a bit… there are people here…”

He could hear them now, people surrounding her, murmuring, talking excitedly amongst themselves.

“… hospital…” he heard Robin say, away from the phone.

“Robin? ROBIN?”

“Stop shouting!” she said. “Listen, they’ve called an ambulance, I’m going to—”

“WHAT’S HE DONE TO YOU?”

“Cut me… up my arm… I think it’ll need stitching… God, it stings…”

“Which hospital? Let me speak to someone! I’ll meet you there!”

Strike arrived at the Accident and Emergency Department at University Hospital Lewisham twenty-five minutes later, limping heavily and wearing such an anguished expression that a kindly nurse reassured him that a doctor would be with him shortly.

“No,” he said, waving her away as he clumped towards the reception desk, “I’m here with someone—Robin Ellacott, she’s been knifed—”

His eyes traveled frantically over the packed waiting room where a young boy was whimpering on his mother’s lap and a groaning drunk cradled his bloodied head in his hands. A male nurse was showing a breathless old lady how to use an inhaler.

“Strike… yes… Miss Ellacott said you’d be coming,” said the receptionist, who had checked her computer records with what Strike felt was unnecessary and provocative deliberation. “Down the corridor and to the right… first cubicle.”

He slipped a little on the shining floor in his haste, swore and hurried on. Several people’s eyes followed his large, ungainly figure, wondering whether he was quite right in the head.

“Robin? Fucking hell!”

Scarlet spatters disfigured her face; both eyes were swollen. A young male doctor, who was examining an eight-inch wound in her forearm, barked:

“Out until I’ve finished!”

“It isn’t blood!” Robin called as Strike retreated behind the curtain. “It’s the damn spray stuff in your rape alarm!”

“Stay still, please,” Strike heard the doctor say.

He paced a little outside the cubicle. Five other curtained beds hid their secrets along the side ward. The nurses’ rubber soles squeaked on the highly polished gray floor. God, how he hated hospitals: the smell of them, the institutional cleanliness underlaid with that faint whiff of human decomposition, immediately transported him back to those long months in Selly Oak after his leg had been blown off.

What had he done? What had he done? He had let her work, knowing the bastard had her in his sights. She could have died. She should have died. Nurses rustled past in their blue scrubs. Behind the curtain, Robin gave a small gasp of pain and Strike ground his teeth.

“Well, she’s been extremely lucky,” said the doctor, ripping the curtains open ten minutes later. “He could have severed the brachial artery. There’s tendon damage, though, and we won’t know how much until we get her into theater.”

He clearly thought they were a couple. Strike did not put him right.

“She needs surgery?”

“To repair the tendon damage,” said the doctor, as though Strike were a bit slow. “Plus, that wound needs a proper clean. I want to X-ray her ribs as well.”

He left. Bracing himself, Strike entered the cubicle.

“I know I screwed up,” said Robin.

“Holy shit, did you think I was going to tell you off?”

“Maybe,” she said, pulling herself up a little higher on the bed. Her arm was bound up in a temporary crêpe bandage. “After dark. I wasn’t paying attention, was I?”

He sat down heavily beside the bed on the chair that the doctor had vacated, accidentally knocking a metal kidney dish to the floor. It clanged and rattled; Strike put his prosthetic foot on it to silence it.

“Robin, how the fuck did you get away?”

“Self-defense,” she said. Then, correctly reading his expression, she said crossly, “I knew you didn’t believe I’d done any.”

“I did believe you,” he said, “but Jesus fucking Christ—”

“I had lessons from this brilliant woman in Harrogate who was ex-army,” said Robin, wincing a little as she readjusted herself on her pillows again. “After—you know what.”

“Was this before or after the advanced driving tests?”

“After,” she said, “because I was agoraphobic for a while. It was the driving that really got me back out of my room and then, after that, I did self-defense classes. The first one I signed to was run by a man and he was an idiot,” said Robin. “All judo moves and—just useless. But Louise was brilliant.”

“Yeah?” said Strike.

Her composure was unnerving him.

“Yeah,” said Robin. “She taught us it’s not about clever throws when you’re an ordinary woman. It’s about reacting smartly and fast. Never let yourself get taken to a second location. Go for the weak spots and then run like hell.

“He grabbed me from behind but I heard him just before he got to me. I practiced it loads with Louise. If they grab you from behind, you bend over.”

“Bend over,” repeated Strike numbly.

“I had the rape alarm in my hand.

I bent right over and slammed it into his balls. He was wearing tracksuit pants. He let go for a couple of seconds and I tripped on this damn dress again—he pulled out the knife—I can’t remember exactly what happened then—I know he cut me as I was trying to get up—but I managed to press the button on the alarm and it went off and that scared him—the ink went all over my face and must’ve gone in his as well, because he was close to me—he was wearing a balaclava—I could hardly see—but I got in a good jab at his carotid artery as he bent over me—that’s the other thing Louise taught us, side of the neck, you can make them collapse if you do it right—and he staggered, and then I think he realized people were coming and he ran.”

Strike was speechless.

“I’m really hungry,” said Robin.

Strike felt in his pockets and pulled out a Twix.

“Thanks.”

But before she could take a bite, a nurse escorting an old man past the foot of her bed said sharply:

“Nil by mouth, you’re going to theater!”

Robin rolled her eyes and handed the Twix back to Strike. Her mobile rang. Strike watched, dazed, as she picked it up.

“Mum… hi,” said Robin.

Their eyes met. Strike read Robin’s unexpressed desire to save her mother, at least temporarily, from what had just happened, but no diversionary tactics were necessary because Linda was gabbling without allowing Robin to speak. Robin laid the mobile on her knees and switched it to speakerphone, her expression resigned.

“… let her know as soon as possible, because lily of the valley is out of season, so if you want it, it’ll be a special order.”

“OK,” said Robin. “I’ll skip lily of the valley.”

“Well, it would be great if you could call her directly and tell her what you do want, Robin, because it isn’t easy being the intermediary. She says she’s left you loads of voicemails.”

“Sorry, Mum,” said Robin. “I’ll call her.”

“You’re not supposed to be using that in here!” said a second cross nurse.

“Sorry,” said Robin again. “Mum, I’ll have to go. I’ll speak to you later.”