“I don’t regret it,” she said. “He was raping—”

“Carver’s convinced I sent you. Brockbank’s vanished. You’ve driven him underground. How’re you going to feel if he decides he’d better cut the next one into pieces before she can blab?”

“Don’t you dare put that on me!” said Robin, her voice rising. “Don’t you dare! You’re the one who punched him when you went to arrest him! If you hadn’t hit him he might’ve gone down for Brittany!”

“That makes what you did right, does it?”

He refrained from shouting only because he could hear Matthew lurking in the hall, however quiet the accountant thought he was being.

“I’ve stopped Angel being abused and if that’s a bad thing to do—”

“You’ve driven my business off the edge of a fucking cliff,” said Strike in a quiet voice that stopped her in her tracks. “We were warned away from those suspects, from the whole investigation, but you went storming in and now Brockbank’s gone to ground. The press’ll be all over me for this. Carver’ll tell them I’ve fucked it all up. They’ll bury me. And even if you don’t give a shit about any of that,” said Strike, his face rigid with fury, “how about the fact the police have just found a connection between Kelsey’s church and the one in Brixton where Brockbank was attending?”

She looked stricken.

“I—I didn’t know—”

“Why wait for the facts?” asked Strike, his eyes dark shadows in the harsh overhead lighting. “Why not just blunder in and tip him off before the police can take him in?”

Appalled, Robin said nothing. Strike was looking at her now as though he never liked her, as though they had never shared any of the experiences that, to her, had constituted a bond like no other. She had been prepared for him to punch walls and cupboards again, even, in the heat of his anger, to—

“We’re finished,” said Strike.

He took some satisfaction from the shrinking movement she could not hide, from the sudden blanching of her face.

“You don’t—”

“I don’t mean it? You think I need a partner who won’t take instruction, who does what I’ve explicitly told her not to do, who makes me look like a trouble-making egotistical prick in front of the police and causes a murder suspect to disappear under the force’s nose?”

He said it in a single breath and Robin, who had taken a step backwards, knocked the England Ruby calendar off the wall with a rustle and thud she failed to hear, so loudly was the blood pounding in her ears. She thought she might faint. She had imagined him shouting “I ought to fire you!” but not once had she considered that he might actually do it, that everything she had done for him—the risks, the injuries, the insights and the inspirations, the long hours of discomfort and inconvenience—would be washed away, rendered negligible by this one act of well-intentioned disobedience. She could not even get enough breath into her lungs to argue, because his expression was such that she knew all she could expect was further icy condemnation of her actions and an exposition of how badly she had screwed up. The memory of Angel and Alyssa holding each other on the sofa, the reflection that Angel’s suffering was finished and that her mother believed and supported her, had comforted Robin through the hours of suspense during which she waited for this blow to fall. She had not dared tell Strike what she had done. Now she thought it might have been better if she had.

“What?” she said stupidly, because he had asked her something. The noises had been meaningless.

“Who was the man you took with you?”

“That’s none of your business,” she whispered after a short hesitation.

“They said he threatened Brockbank with a kni—Shanker!” said Strike, light dawning only now, and in that instant she saw a trace of the Strike she knew in the reanimated, infuriated face. “How the fuck did you get Shanker’s number?”

But she could not speak. Nothing mattered beside the fact that she was fired. She knew that Strike did not relent when he decided that a relationship had run its course. His girlfriend of sixteen years had never heard from him again after he had ended it, although Charlotte had tried to initiate contact since.

He was already leaving. She followed him into the hall on numb legs, feeling herself to be acting like a beaten dog who still slinks after the punisher, hoping desperately for forgiveness.

“Goodnight,” Strike called to Linda and Matthew, who had retreated into the sitting room.

“Cormoran,” Robin whispered.

“I’ll send your last month’s salary on,” he said without looking at her. “Quick and clean. Gross misconduct.”

The door closed behind him. She could hear his size fourteens moving away up the path. With a gasp, she began to cry. Linda and Matthew both came hurrying into the hall, but too late: Robin had fled to the bedroom, unable to face their relief and delight that, at last, she would have to give up her dream of being a detective.

56

When life’s scorned and damage done

To avenge, this is the pact.

Blue Öyster Cult, “Vengeance (The Pact)”

Half past four the following morning found Strike awake after virtually no sleep. His tongue ached from the amount of smoking he had done overnight at the Formica table in his kitchen, while contemplating the decimation of his business and his prospects. He could barely bring himself to think about Robin. Fine cracks, like those in thick ice during a thaw, were starting to appear in what had been implacable fury, but what lay beneath was scarcely less cold. He could understand the impulse to save the child—who couldn’t? Hadn’t he, as she had so injudiciously pointed out, knocked Brockbank out cold after viewing Brittany’s taped evidence?—but the thought of her heading off with Shanker, without telling him, and after Carver had warned them not to go anywhere near the suspects, made rage thunder through his veins all over again as he upended his cigarette pack and found it empty.

He pulled himself to his feet, picked up his keys and left the flat, still wearing the Italian suit in which he had dozed. The sun was coming up as he trudged down Charing Cross Road in a dawn that made everything look dusty and fragile, a gray light full of pale shadows. He bought cigarettes in a corner shop in Covent Garden and continued to walk, smoking and thinking.

After two hours spent walking the streets, Strike reached a decision about his next move. Heading back towards the office, he saw a waitress in a black dress unlocking the doors to the Caffè Vergnano 1882 on Charing Cross Road, realized how hungry he was and turned inside.

The small coffee shop smelled of warm wood and espresso. As Strike sank gratefully onto a hard oak chair he became uncomfortably aware that for the past thirteen hours he had smoked ceaselessly, slept in his clothes and eaten steak and drunk red wine without cleaning his teeth. The man in the reflection beside him looked crumpled and grimy. He tried not to give the young waitress any opportunity to smell his breath as he ordered a ham and cheese panini, a bottle of water and a double espresso.

As the copper-domed coffee maker on the counter hissed into life, Strike sank into a reverie, searching his conscience for a truthful answer to an uncomfortable question.

Was he any better than Carver? Was he contemplating a high-risk and dangerous course of action because he really thought it the only way to stop the killer? Or was he inclining to the higher-stakes option because he knew that if he brought it off—if he were the one to catch and incriminate the murderer—it would reverse all the damage done to his reputation and his business, restoring to him the luster of a man who succeeded where the Met failed? Was it, in short, necessity or ego that was driving him towards what many would say was a reckless and foolish measure?

The waitress set his sandwich and coffee in front of him and Strike began to eat with the glazed stare of a man too preoccupied even to taste what he was chewing.

This was as well-publicized a series of crimes as Strike had ever come into contact with: the police would currently be flooded with information an

d leads, all of which needed following up and none of which (Strike was prepared to bet) would lead anywhere near the real devious and successful killer.

He still had the option of trying to make contact with one of Carver’s superiors, although he was now in such poor odor with the police that he doubted he would be allowed direct speech with a superintendent, whose first loyalty would of course be to his own men. Trying to circumnavigate Carver would do nothing to diminish the impression that he was trying to undermine the head of the investigation.

What was more, Strike did not have evidence, merely a theory about where the evidence was. While there was a remote chance that somebody at the Met might take Strike seriously enough to go looking for what he promised they would find, Strike feared that further delay might cost another life.

He was surprised to find that he had finished his panini. Still extremely hungry, he ordered a second.

No, he thought, with sudden resolve, this is the way it’s got to be.

This animal needed to be stopped as soon as possible. It was time to get out ahead of him for the first time. However, as a sop to his conscience, as a proof to himself that he was motivated primarily by catching a killer rather than by glory, Strike took out his mobile again and called Detective Inspector Richard Anstis, his oldest acquaintance on the force. He was not on the best terms with Anstis these days, but Strike wanted to be certain in his own mind that he had done all he could to allow the Met the chance to do the job for him.

After a long pause, a foreign dialing tone sounded in his ear. Nobody picked up. Anstis was on holiday. Strike debated leaving a voicemail and decided against. Leaving such a message on Anstis’s phone when there was nothing the man could do would definitely ruin his holiday, and from what Strike knew of Anstis’s wife and three children, the man needed one.

Hanging up, he scrolled absentmindedly through his recent calls. Carver had not left his number. Robin’s name sat a few rows beneath. The sight of it stabbed the tired and desperate Strike to the heart because he was simultaneously furious with her and longing to talk to her. Setting the mobile resolutely back onto the table, he shoved his hand into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a pen and notebook.

Eating his second sandwich as fast as his first, Strike began to write a list.

1) Write to Carver.

This was partly a further sop to his own conscience and partly what he generally termed “arse-covering.” He doubted the ability of an email to find its way to Carver, whose direct address he did not have, through the tsunami of tip-offs now sure to be pouring into Scotland Yard. People were culturally disposed to take ink and paper seriously, especially when it had to be signed for: an old-fashioned letter, sent recorded delivery, would be sure to find its way to Carver’s desk. Strike would then have laid a trail just as the killer had done, demonstrating very clearly that he had tried every possible route to tell Carver how the killer might be stopped. This was likely to be useful when they all found themselves in court, which Strike did not doubt would happen whether or not the plan he had formulated, walking through the dawn in sleepy Covent Garden, was successful.

2) Gas canister (propane?)

3) Fluorescent jacket

4) Woman—who?

He paused, arguing with himself, scowling over the paper. After much thought, he reluctantly wrote:

5) Shanker

This meant that the next item had to be:

6) £500 (from where?)

And finally, after a further minute’s thought:

7) Advertise for Robin replacement.

57

Sole survivor, cursed with second sight,

Haunted savior, cried into the night.

Blue Öyster Cult, “Sole Survivor”

Four days passed. Numb with shock and misery, Robin at first hoped and even believed that Strike would call her, that he would regret what he had said to her, that he would realize what a mistake he had made. Linda had left, kind and supportive to the last, but, Robin suspected, secretly happy to think that Robin’s association with the detective had ended.

Matthew had expressed enormous sympathy in the face of Robin’s devastation. He said that Strike did not know how lucky he had been. He had enumerated for her all the things she had done for the detective, foremost of which was accepting a laughably small salary for unreasonably long hours. He reminded Robin that her status as partner in the agency had been entirely illusory, and totted up all the proofs of Strike’s lack of respect for her: the absence of a partnership agreement, the lack of overtime pay, the fact that she always seemed to be the one who made tea and went out to buy sandwiches.

A week previously, Robin would have defended Strike against all such accusations. She would have said that the nature of the work necessitated long hours, that the moment to demand a pay rise was not when the business was fighting for its very survival, that Strike made her mugs of tea quite as often as she made them for him. She might have added that Strike had spent money he could ill afford training her in surveillance and countersurveillance, and that it was unreasonable to expect him, as senior partner, sole investor and founding member of the agency, to place her on absolutely equal legal footing with himself.

Yet she said none of those things, because the last two words that Strike had spoken to her were with her every day like the sound of her own heartbeat: gross misconduct. The memory of Strike’s expression in that last moment helped her pretend that she saw things exactly as Matthew did, that her dominant emotion was anger, that the job which had meant everything to her could be easily replaced, that Strike had no integrity or moral sense if he could not appreciate that Angel’s safety trumped all other considerations. Robin had neither the will nor the energy to point out that Matthew had performed an abrupt volte-face on the last point, because he had been furious, initially, when he had found out that she had gone to Brockbank’s.

As the days went by without any contact from Strike, she felt unspoken pressure from her fiancé to pretend that the prospect of their wedding on Saturday not only made up for her recent sacking, but consumed all her thoughts. Having to fake excitement while he was present made Robin relieved to be alone during the day while Matthew worked. Every evening, before he returned, she deleted the search history on her laptop, so that he would not see that she was constantly looking for news about the Shacklewell Ripper online and—just as often—Googling Strike.

On the day before she and Matthew were due to leave for Masham, he arrived home holding a copy of the Sun, which was not his usual read.

“Why have you got that?”

Matthew hesitated before answering and Robin’s insides twisted.

“There hasn’t been another—?”

But she knew there had not been another killing: she had been following the news all day.

He opened the paper, folded it to a page about ten in, and handed it to her, his expression hard to read. Robin found herself staring at her own photograph. She was walking with her head down in the picture, dressed in her trench coat, leaving court after giving evidence at the well-publicized trial of the murderer of Owen Quine. Two smaller pictures were set into her own: one of Strike, looking hungover, the other of the spectacularly beautiful model whose killer they had worked together to catch. Beneath the photo spread were the words:

LANDRY DETECTIVE SEEKS NEW GIRL FRIDAY

Cormoran Strike, the detective who solved the murder cases of both supermodel Lula Landry and author Owen Quine, has parted company with glamorous assistant Robin Ellacott, 26.

The detective has placed an advertisement for the position online: “If you have a background in police or military investigative work and would like to pursue—

There were several more paragraphs, but Robin could not bear to read them. Instead, she looked at the byline, which was that of Dominic Culpepper, a journalist whom Strike knew personally. Possibly he had called Culpepper, who often badgered Strike for stories, and let him have this one, to make sure his need f

or a new assistant was disseminated as widely as possible.

Robin had not thought that she could feel any worse, but now she discovered that she had been mistaken. She really was sacked, after everything that she had done for him. She had been a disposable “Girl Friday,” an “assistant”—never a partner, never an equal—and now he was already looking for somebody with a background in the police or the military: somebody disciplined, someone who would take orders.

Rage gripped her; everything blurred, the hall, the newspaper, Matthew standing there trying to look sympathetic, and Robin had to physically resist the impulse to dive into the sitting room, where her mobile sat charging on a side table, and call Strike. She had thought of doing so many times in the last four days, but then it had been to ask—to beg—him to reconsider.

Not anymore. Now she wanted to shout at him, belittle him, accuse him of base ingratitude, hypocrisy, lack of honor—

Her burning eyes met Matthew’s and she saw, before he rearranged his expression, how delighted he was that Strike had put himself so dramatically in the wrong. Matthew, she could tell, had looked forward to showing her the newspaper. Her anguish was nothing compared to his ecstasy at her separation from Strike.

She turned away, heading for the kitchen, resolving that she would not shout at Matthew. If they rowed it would feel like a triumph for Strike. She refused to allow her ex-boss to sully her relationship with the man whom she had to—the man whom she wanted to marry in three days’ time. Clumsily dumping a saucepan of spaghetti into a colander, Robin spattered herself with boiling water and swore.

“Pasta again?” said Matthew.

“Yes,” said Robin coldly. “Is that a problem?”