“Where are you?” Linda asked.

“I’m… I’ll ring you later,” said Robin, and cut the call.

She looked at Strike and asked:

“Aren’t you going to ask me which of them I think it was?”

“I’m assuming you don’t know,” said Strike. “If he was wearing a balaclava and your eyes were full of ink.”

“I’m sure about one thing,” said Robin. “It wasn’t Whittaker. Not unless he changed into sweatpants the moment I left him. Whittaker was wearing jeans and he was—his physique wasn’t right. This guy was strong, but soft, you know? Big, though. As big as you.”

“Have you told Matthew what’s happened?”

“He’s on his w—”

He thought, when her expression changed to one of near horror, that he was about to turn and see a livid Matthew bearing down upon them. Instead, the disheveled figure of Detective Inspector Roy Carver appeared at the foot of Robin’s bed, accompanied by the tall, elegant figure of Detective Sergeant Vanessa Ekwensi.

Carver was in shirtsleeves. Large wet patches of sweat radiated out from his armpits. The constantly pink whites of his bright blue eyes always made him look as though he had been swimming in heavily chlorinated water. His thick, graying hair was full of large flakes of dandruff.

“How are—?” began Detective Sergeant Ekwensi, her almond-shaped eyes on Robin’s forearm, but Carver interrupted with an accusatory bark.

“What’ve you been up to, then, eh?”

Strike stood up. Here at last was the perfect target for his so far suppressed desire to punish somebody, anybody, for what had just happened to Robin, to divert his feelings of guilt and anxiety onto a worthy target.

“I want to talk to you,” Carver told Strike. “Ekwensi, you take her statement.”

Before anyone could speak or move, a sweet-faced young nurse stepped obliviously between the two men, smiling at Robin.

“Ready to take you to X-ray, Miss Ellacott,” she said.

Robin got stiffly off the bed and walked away, looking back over her shoulder at Strike, trying to convey warning and restraint with her expression.

“Out here,” Carver growled at Strike.

The detective followed the policeman back through A&E. Carver had commandeered a small visitors’ room where, Strike assumed, news of imminent or actual death was conveyed to relatives. It contained several padded chairs, a box of tissues on a small table and an abstract print in shades of orange.

“I told you to stay out of it,” Carver said, taking up a position in the middle of the room, arms folded, feet wide apart.

With the door closed, Carver’s body odor filled the room. He did not stink in the same way as Whittaker: not of ingrained filth and drugs, but of sweat that he could not contain through the working day. His blotchy complexion was not improved by the overhead strip lighting. The dandruff, the wet shirt, the mottled skin: he seemed to be visibly falling to pieces. Strike had undoubtedly helped him on his way, humiliating him in the press over the murder of Lula Landry.

“Sent her to stake out Whittaker, didn’t you?” asked Carver, his face growing slowly redder, as though he were being boiled. “You did this to her.”

“Fuck you,” said Strike.

Only now, with his nose full of Carver’s sweat, did he admit to himself that he had known it for a while: Whittaker was not the killer. Strike had sent Robin after Stephanie because, in his soul, he had thought it the safest place to put her, but he had kept her on the streets, and he had known for weeks that the killer was tailing her.

Carver knew that he had hit a nerve. He was grinning.

“You’ve been using murdered women to pay off your fucking grudge against your stepdaddy,” he said, taking pleasure in Strike’s rising color, grinning to see the large hands ball into fists. Carver would enjoy nothing more than running Strike in for assault; they both knew it. “We’ve checked out Whittaker. We checked all three of your fucking hunches. There’s nothing in any of them. Now you listen to me.”

He took a step closer to Strike. Though a head shorter, he projected the power of a furious, embittered but powerful man, a man with much to prove, and with the full might of the force behind him. Pointing at Strike’s chest, he said:

“Stay out of it. You’re fucking lucky you haven’t got your partner’s blood on your hands. If I find you anywhere near our investigation again, I’ll fucking run you in. Understand me?”

He poked his stubby fingertip into Strike’s sternum. Strike resisted the urge to knock it away, but a muscle in his jaw twitched. For a few seconds they eyeballed each other. Carver grinned more widely, breathing as though he had just triumphed in a wrestling match, then strutted to the door and left, leaving Strike to stew in rage and self-loathing.

He was walking slowly back through A&E when tall, handsome Matthew came running through the double doors in his suit, wild-eyed, his hair all over the place. For the first time in their acquaintanceship, Strike felt something other than dislike for him.

“Matthew,” he said.

Matthew looked at Strike as though he did not recognize him.

“She went for an X-ray,” said Strike. “She might be back by now. That way,” he pointed.

“Why’s she need—?”

“Ribs,” said Strike.

Matthew elbowed him aside. Strike did not protest. He felt he deserved it. He watched as Robin’s fiancé tore off in her direction, then, after hesitating, turned to the double doors and walked out into the night.

The clear sky was now dusted with stars. Once he reached the street he paused to light a cigarette, dragging on it as Wardle had done, as though the nicotine were the stuff of life. He began to walk, feeling the pain in his knee now. With every step, he liked himself less.

“RICKY!” bawled a woman down the street, imploring an escaping toddler to return to her as she struggled with the weight of a large bag. “RICKY, COME BACK!”

The little boy was giggling manically. Without really thinking what he was doing, Strike bent down automatically and caught him as he sped towards the road.

“Thank you!” said the mother, almost sobbing her relief as she jogged towards Strike. Flowers toppled off the bag in her arms. “We’re visiting his dad—oh God—”

The boy in Strike’s arms struggled frantically. Strike put him down beside his mother, who was picking up a bunch of daffodils off the pavement.

“Hold them,” she told the boy sternly, who obeyed. “You can give them to Daddy. Don’t drop them! Thanks,” she said again to Strike and marched away, keeping a tight grip on the toddler’s free hand. The little boy walked meekly beside his mother now, proud to have a job to do, the stiff yellow flowers upright in his hand like a scepter.

Strike walked on a few paces and then, quite suddenly, stopped dead in the middle of the pavement, staring as though transfixed by something invisible hanging in the cold air in front of him. A chilly breeze tickled his face as he stood there, completely indifferent to his surroundings, his focus entirely inward.

Daffodils… lily of the valley… flowers out of season.

Then the sound of the mother’s voice echoed through the night again—“Ricky, no!”—and caused a sudden explosive chain reaction in Strike’s brain, lighting a landing strip for a theory that he knew, with the certainty of a prophet, would lead to the killer. As the steel joists of a building are revealed as it burns, so Strike saw in this flash of inspiration the skeleton of the killer’s plan, recognizing those crucial flaws that he had missed—that everyone had missed—but which might, at last, be the means by which the murderer and his macabre schemes could be brought down.

53

You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars…

Blue Öyster Cult, “Veteran of the Psychic Wars”

It had been easy to feign insouciance in the brightly lit hospital. Robin had drawn strength, not merely from Strike’s amazement and admiration at her escape, but from listening to her own acc

ount of fighting off the killer. She had been the calmest of them all in the immediate aftermath of the attack, consoling and reassuring Matthew when he began to cry at the sight of her ink-stained face and the long wound in her arm. She had drawn strength from everyone else’s weakness, hoping that her adrenaline-fueled bravery would carry her safely back to normality, where she would find a sure footing and move on unscathed, without having to pass through the dark mire where she had lived so long after the rape…

However, during the week that followed she found it almost impossible to sleep, and not only because of the throbbing of her injured forearm, which was now in a protective half-cast. In the short dozes she managed at night or by day, she felt her attacker’s thick arms around her again and heard him breathing in her ear. Sometimes the eyes she had not seen became the eyes of the rapist when she was nineteen: pale, one pupil fixed. Behind their black balaclava and gorilla mask, the nightmare figures merged, mutated and grew, filling her mind day and night.

In the worst dreams, she watched him doing it to somebody else and was waiting her turn, powerless to help or escape. Once, the victim was Stephanie with her pulverized face. On another unbearable occasion, a little black girl screamed for her mother. Robin woke from that one shouting in the dark, and Matthew became so worried about her that he called in sick to work the following day so that he could stay with her. Robin did not know whether she was grateful or resentful.

Her mother came, of course, and tried to make her come home to Masham.

“You’ve got ten days until the wedding, Robin, why don’t you just come home with me now and relax before—”

“I want to stay here,” said Robin.

She was not a teenager anymore: she was a grown woman. It was up to her where she went, where she stayed, what she did. Robin felt as though she were fighting all over again for the identities she had been forced to relinquish the last time a man had lunged at her out of the darkness. He had transformed her from a straight-A student into an emaciated agoraphobic, from an aspiring forensic psychologist into a defeated girl who agreed with her overbearing family that police work would only exacerbate her mental problems.

That was not going to happen again. She would not let it. She could barely sleep, she did not want to eat, but furiously she dug in, denying her own needs and fears. Matthew was frightened of contradicting her. Weakly he agreed with her that there was no need for her to go home, yet Robin heard him whispering with her mother in the kitchen when they thought she could not hear them.

Strike was no help at all. He had not bothered to say good-bye to her at the hospital, nor he had come to see how she was doing, merely speaking to her on the phone. He, too, wanted her to go back to Yorkshire, safely out of the way.

“You must have a load of stuff to do for the wedding.”

“Don’t patronize me,” said Robin furiously.

“Who’s patronizing—?”

“Sorry,” she said, dissolving into silent tears that he could not see and doing everything in her power to keep her voice normal. “Sorry… uptight. I’m going home on the Thursday before; there’s no need to go earlier.”

She was no longer the person who had lain on her bed staring at Destiny’s Child. She refused to be that girl.

Nobody could understand why she was so determined to remain in London, nor was she ready to explain. She threw away the sundress in which he had attacked her. Linda entered the kitchen just as Robin was shoving it into the bin.

“Stupid bloody thing,” said Robin, catching her mother’s eye. “I’ve learned that lesson. Don’t run surveillance in long dresses.”

She spoke defiantly. I’m going back to work. This is temporary.

“You’re not supposed to be using that hand,” said her mother, ignoring the unspoken challenge. “The doctor said to rest and elevate it.”

Neither Matthew nor her mother liked her reading about the progress of the case in the press, which she did obsessively. Carver had refused to release her name. He said he did not want the media descending on her, but she and Strike both suspected that he was afraid that Strike’s continued presence in the story would give the press a delicious new twist: Carver versus Strike all over again.

“In fairness,” Strike said to Robin over the phone (she tried to limit herself to one call to him a day), “that’s the last bloody thing anyone needs. It won’t help catch the bastard.”

Robin said nothing. She was lying on her and Matthew’s bed with a number of newspapers that she had bought against Linda and Matthew’s wishes spread around her. Her eyes were fixed on a double-page spread in the Mirror, where the five supposed victims of the Shacklewell Ripper were again pictured in a row. A sixth black silhouette of a woman’s head and shoulders represented Robin. The legend beneath the silhouette read “26-year-old office worker, escaped.” Much was made of the fact that the 26-year-old office worker had managed to spray the killer with red ink during the attack. She was praised by a retired policewoman in a side column for her foresight in carrying such a device, and there was a separate feature on rape alarms over the page.

“You’ve really given up on it?” she asked.

“It’s not a question of giving up,” said Strike. She could hear him moving around the office, and she wished she were there, even if only making tea or answering emails. “I’m leaving it to the police. A serial killer’s out of our league, Robin. It always was.”

Robin was looking down at the gaunt face of the only other woman who had survived the killing spree. “Lila Monkton, prostitute.” Lila, too, knew what the killer’s pig-like breathing sounded like. He had cut off Lila’s fingers. Robin would only have a long scar on her arm. Her brain buzzed angrily in her skull. She felt guilty that she had got off so lightly.

“I wish there was something—”

“Drop it,” said Strike. He sounded angry, just like Matthew. “We’re done, Robin. I should never have sent you to Stephanie. I’ve let my grudge against Whittaker color my judgment ever since that leg arrived and it nearly got you—”

“Oh for God’s sake,” said Robin impatiently. “You didn’t try and kill me, he did. Let’s keep the blame where it belongs. You had good reason for thinking it was Whittaker—the lyrics. Anyway, that still leaves—”

“Carver’s looked into Laing and Brockbank and he doesn’t think there’s anything there. We’re staying out of it, Robin.”

Ten miles away in his office, Strike hoped that he was convincing her. He had not told Robin about the epiphany that had occurred to him after his encounter with the toddler outside the hospital. He had tried to contact Carver the following morning, but a subordinate had told him that Carver was too busy to take his call and advised him not to try again. Strike had insisted on telling the irritable and faintly aggressive subordinate what he had hoped to tell Carver. He would have bet his remaining leg that not a word of his message had been passed on.

The windows in Strike’s office were open. Hot June sunshine warmed the two rooms now devoid of clients and soon, perhaps, to be vacated due to an inability to afford the rent. Two-Times’s interest in the new lap-dancer had petered out. Strike had nothing to do. Like Robin, he yearned for action, but he did not tell her that. All he wanted was for her to heal and be safe.

“Police still in your street?”

“Yes,” she sighed.

Carver had placed a plainclothes officer in Hastings Road around the clock. Matthew and Linda took immense comfort in the fact that he was out there.

“Cormoran, listen. I know we can’t—”

“Robin, there’s no ‘we’ just now. There’s me, sitting on my arse with no work, and there’s you, staying at bloody home until that killer’s caught.”

“I wasn’t talking about the case,” she said. Her heart was banging hard and fast against her ribs again. She had to say it aloud, or she would burst. “There’s one thing we—you can do, then. Brockbank might not be the killer, but we know he’s a rapist. You could go to Alyssa

and warn her she’s living with—”

“Forget it,” said Strike’s voice harshly in her ear. “For the last fucking time, Robin, you can’t save everyone! He’s never been convicted! If we go blundering in there, Carver will string us up.”

There was a long silence.

“Are you crying?” Strike asked anxiously, because he thought her breathing had become ragged.

“No, I’m not crying,” said Robin truthfully.

An awful coldness had spread through her at Strike’s refusal to help the young girls living in Brockbank’s vicinity.

“I’d better go, it’s lunch,” she said, though nobody had called her.

“Look,” he said, “I get why you want—”

“Speak later,” she said and hung up.

There’s no “we” just now.

It had happened all over again. A man had come at her out of the darkness and had ripped from her not only her sense of safety, but her status. She had been a partner in a detective agency…

Or had she? There had never been a new contract. There had never been a pay rise. They had been so busy, so broke, that it had never occurred to her to ask for either. She had simply been delighted to think that that was how Strike saw her. Now even that was gone, perhaps temporarily, perhaps forever. There’s no “we” anymore.

Robin sat in thought for a few minutes, then got off the bed, the newspapers rustling. She approached the dressing table where the white shoebox sat, engraved with the silver words Jimmy Choo, reached out a hand and stroked the pristine surface of the cardboard.

The plan did not come to her like Strike’s epiphany outside the hospital, with the exhilarating force of flame. Instead it rose slowly, dark and dangerous, born of the hateful enforced passivity of the past week and out of ice-cold anger at Strike’s stubborn refusal to act. Strike, who was her friend, had joined the enemy’s ranks. He was a six-foot-three ex-boxer. He would never know what it was like to feel yourself small, weak and powerless. He would never understand what rape did to your feelings about your own body: to find yourself reduced to a thing, an object, a piece of fuckable meat.