“‘What?’” she repeated. “Fucking ‘what?’”

Robin swore far less often than Strike did. The damp night air, which felt icy on Strike’s sweaty face, was rapidly sobering him up. Robin appeared to be angry: angrier, in fact, than he’d ever seen her. But drink was still slowing his reactions, and nothing better occurred to him than to repeat,

“What?”

“You arrive late,” she said, “because of course you do, because when have you ever shown me the common fucking courtesy of turning up on time—”

“Wha—?” said Strike again, this time less because he was looking for information than in disbelief. She was the unique woman in his life who’d never tried to change him. This wasn’t the Robin he knew.

“You arrive rat-arsed, because of course you do, because what do I matter? It’s only Robin who’ll be embarrassed, and my flatmate, and my fam—”

“He wasn’t bothered,” Strike managed to say. His memories of the evening weren’t particularly distinct, but he was sure of that, at least: Max hadn’t minded him being drunk. Max had given him more booze. Max had laughed at a joke he’d made, which he couldn’t now remember. He liked Max.

“And then you launch an attack on my guests. And then,” said Robin, “you lay me open to having something I wanted to keep priv—to keep—”

Her eyes were suddenly wet, her fists clenched, her body rigid.

“—to keep private bandied about in a fucking argument, in front of strangers. Did it once occur—”

“Hang on,” said Strike, “I never—”

“—once occur to you that I might not want rape discussed, in front of people I barely know?”

“I never—”

“Why were you asking me whether I think SlutWalks are a good idea?”

“Well, obv’sly b’cause—”

“Did we need to talk about child rape over dinner?”

“I was making a p—”

“And then you walk out, and leave me to—”

“Well,” said Strike, “by the sounds of it, the sooner I left, the bett—”

“Better for you,” she said, advancing on him, her teeth bared: he’d never seen her like this before, “because you got to dump all your aggression at my house, then walk out and let me clean up your fucking mess, as per usual!”

“‘As per fucking usual?’” said Strike, eyebrows raised. “Wait a—”

“Now I’ve got to go back in there, and make it all right, soothe everyone’s feelings—”

“No, you haven’t,” Strike contradicted her. “Go to fucking bed if you—”

“It’s. What. I. DO!” shouted Robin, thumping herself hard on the sternum with each word. Shocked into silence, Strike stared at her. “Like I remember to say please and thank you to the secretary, when you don’t give a toss! Like I excuse your bad moods to other people when they get offended! Like I suck up a ton of shit on your behalf—”

“Whoa,” said Strike, pushing himself off the stationary car, and looking down at her from his full height. “Where’s all this—?”

“—and you can’t be fucking bothered, with all I do for you, to arrive sober for one dinner—”

“If you must know,” said Strike, temper rising anew from the ashes of his previous euphoria, “I was in the pub with Nick, who—”

“—whose wife just lost their baby! I know—and what the fuck was he doing in the pub with you, leaving her to—”

“She threw him out!” barked Strike. “Did she tell you that, during the Great Sisterhood Grievance Meeting? And I’m not going to apologize for wanting some fucking R&R after the week I’ve just had—”

“—whereas I don’t need R&R, do I? I haven’t forfeited half my annual leave—”

“How many times have I thanked you for covering for me when I’m in Corn—?”

“So what was with you being an arsehole to me this morning, when I was late for the first fucking time ever—”

“I’d had three and a half hours’ sleep—”

“You live over the bloody office!”

“Fuck this,” said Strike, throwing his cigarette down. He began to walk away from her, certain now of the direction to the Tube, thinking of the things he could have said: that it was guilt about the pressure he was putting on Robin that had kept him in London, when he should be in St. Mawes with his dying aunt; Jonny Rokeby on the phone that morning; and Nick’s tears in the pub, and the relief it had been to sit with an old mate and drink, and listen to someone else’s troubles instead of fret about his own.

“And don’t,” bellowed Robin from behind him, “buy me any more fucking flowers!”

“No danger of that!” yelled Strike over his shoulder, as he strode away into the darkness.

42

… his late fight

With Britomart, so sore did him offend,

That ryde he could not, till his hurts he did amend.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

When Strike woke on Saturday morning, with a thumping headache and a foul-tasting mouth, it took him a while to piece together exactly what had happened the previous evening. Aside from the memory of vomiting, which he felt he’d done far too much of lately, all he could at first recall were Kyle’s bright red face and Robin’s pinched white one.

But then, slowly, he reconstructed Robin’s complaints: arriving late and drunk, being rude to her brother and upsetting a dinner party by telling a couple of students what he considered home truths about the real world. He also thought there’d been mention of him being insufficiently touchy-feely with staff.

Gingerly, he got out of bed and, with the aid of the furniture, hopped his way to the bathroom and then into the shower.

As Strike washed, two separate impulses did battle within him. One was the urge to self-justify, which patted him on the back and awarded him a win for what he could remember of his argument with the students. The other was an innate honesty about his motives that forced him to recognize that his instant antagonism to Robin’s guests had been rooted in their resemblance to the kinds of people toward whom his mother would have instantly gravitated.

Leda Strike’s whole life had been a battle against constraint of any kind: going for a march in her underwear would have seemed to her just one more fabulous blow against limitations. Strike, who never forgot Leda’s generous heart or her ineradicable love of the underdog, was nevertheless clear-eyed about the fact her activism had mostly taken the form of enthusiastic exhibitionism. Not for Leda the tedious toil of door-to-door canvassing, the difficult business of compromise, or the painstaking work structural change entailed. Never a deep or critical thinker, she’d been a sucker for what Strike thought of as intellectual charlatans. The basis for her life’s philosophy, if such a word could be used for the loose collection of whims and kneejerk reactions she called beliefs, was that everything of which the bourgeoisie disapproved must be good and right. Naturally, she’d have sided with Kyle and Courtney in championing pornography and SlutWalks, and she’d have seen her son’s quibbles as something he must have picked up from her killjoy sister-in-law.

While Strike dried himself and put on his prosthesis, moving cautiously in deference to his throbbing head, the idea of phoning Robin occurred, only to be dismissed. His long-established habit, in the aftermath of a row with a woman, was to wait for her to make the next move, which he considered mere common sense. If she apologized, all well and good; if she wanted further discussion, there was a chance she’d be calmer after a spell of reflection; if she was still angry, it was simply masochistic to volunteer for further grief until she came looking for it. While Strike wasn’t in principle opposed to offering an unsolicited apology in the event that he felt himself to have been in the wrong, in practice his apologies tended to be delivered late, and only when it became clear that resolution would come no other way.