Single men in suits were filling their baskets and trolleys with ready meals. Professional women hurried past, grabbing pasta that would be quick to cook for the family. An exhausted-looking young mother with a tiny baby screaming in its buggy wove around the aisles like a groggy moth, unable to focus, a single bag of carrots in her basket. Robin moved slowly up and down the aisles, feeling oddly jumpy. There was nobody there who resembled the man in black motorcycle leathers, nobody who might be lurking, fantasizing about cutting off Robin’s legs… cutting off my legs…

“Excuse me!” said a cross middle-aged woman trying to reach the sausages. Robin apologized and moved aside, surprised to find that she was holding a pack of chicken thighs. Throwing it into her trolley, she hurried off to the other end of the supermarket where, among the wines and spirits, she found relative quiet. Here she pulled out her mobile and called Strike. He answered on the second ring.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course—”

“Where are you?”

“Waitrose.”

A short, balding man was perusing the shelf of sherry just behind Robin, his eyes level with her breasts. When she moved aside, he moved with her. Robin glared; he blushed and moved away.

“Well, you should be OK in Waitrose.”

“Mm,” said Robin, her eyes on the bald man’s retreating back. “Listen, this might be nothing, but I’ve just remembered: we’ve had a couple of weird letters in the last few months.”

“Nutter letters?”

“Don’t start.”

Robin always protested at this blanket term. They had attracted a significant increase in oddball correspondence since Strike had solved his second high-profile murder case. The most coherent of the writers simply asked for money, on the assumption that Strike was now immensely rich. Then came those who had strange personal grudges that they wished Strike to avenge, those whose waking hours seemed devoted to proving outlandish theories, those whose needs and wishes were so inchoate and rambling that the only message they conveyed was mental illness, and finally (“Now these seem nutty,” Robin had said) a sprinkling of people, both male and female, who seemed to find Strike attractive.

“Addressed to you?” Strike asked, suddenly serious.

“No, you.”

She could hear him moving around his flat as they talked. Perhaps he was going out with Elin tonight. He never talked about the relationship. If Elin had not dropped by the office one day, Robin doubted that she would have known that she existed—perhaps not until he turned up for work one day wearing a wedding ring.

“What did they say?” asked Strike.

“Well, one of them was from a girl who wanted to cut off her own leg. She was asking for advice.”

“Say that again?”

“She wanted to cut off her own leg,” Robin enunciated clearly, and a woman choosing a bottle of rosé nearby threw her a startled look.

“Jesus Christ,” muttered Strike. “And I’m not allowed to call them nutters. You think she managed it and thought I’d like to know?”

“I thought a letter like that might be relevant,” said Robin repressively. “Some people do want to cut bits of themselves off, it’s a recognized phenomenon, it’s called… not ‘being a nutter,’” she added, correctly anticipating him, and he laughed. “And there was another one, from a person who signed with their initials: a long letter, they went on and on about your leg and how they wanted to make it up to you.”

“If they were trying to make it up to me you’d think they would’ve sent a man’s leg. I’d look pretty bloody stupid—”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t joke. I don’t know how you can.”

“I don’t know how you can’t,” he said, but kindly.

She heard a very familiar scraping noise followed by a sonorous clang.

“You’re looking in the nutter drawer!”

“I don’t think you should call it the ‘nutter drawer,’ Robin. Bit disrespectful to our mentally ill—”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, smiling against her will, and hung up on his laughter.

The fatigue she had been fighting all day washed over her anew as she ambled around the supermarket. It was deciding what to eat that was effortful; she would have found it quite soothing merely to shop from a list that somebody else had prepared. Like the working mothers seeking anything quick to cook, Robin gave up and chose a lot of pasta. Queuing at the checkout, she found herself right behind the young woman whose baby had at last exhausted itself and now slept as though dead, fists flung out, eyes tight shut.

“Cute,” said Robin, who felt the girl needed encouragement.

“When he’s asleep,” the mother replied with a weak smile.

By the time Robin had let herself in at home she was truly exhausted. To her surprise, Matthew was standing waiting for her in the narrow hall.

“I shopped!” he said when he saw the four bulging shopping bags in her hands and she heard his disappointment that the grand gesture had been undermined. “I sent you a text that I was going to Waitrose!”

“Must’ve missed it,” said Robin. “Sorry.”

She had probably been on the phone to Strike. They might even have been there at the same time, but of course she had spent half her visit skulking among the wine and spirits.

Matthew walked forward, arms outstretched, and pulled her into a hug with what she could not help but feel was infuriating magnanimity. Even so, she had to admit that he looked, as always, wonderfully handsome in his dark suit, his thick tawny hair swept back off his forehead.

“It must’ve been scary,” he murmured, his breath warm in her hair.

“It was,” she said, wrapping her arms around his waist.

They ate pasta in peace, without a single mention of Sarah Shadlock, Strike or Jacques Burger. The furious ambition of that morning, to make Matthew acknowledge that it had been Sarah, not she, who had voiced admiration of curly hair, had burned out. Robin felt that she was being rewarded for her mature forbearance when Matthew said apologetically:

“I’m going to have to do a bit of work after dinner.”

“No problem,” said Robin. “I wanted an early night anyway.”

She took a low-calorie hot chocolate and a copy of Grazia to bed with her, but she could not concentrate. After ten minutes, she got up and fetched her laptop, took it back to bed with her and Googled Jeff Whittaker.

She had read the Wikipedia entry before, during one of her guilty trawls through Strike’s past, but now she read with greater attention. It started with a familiar disclaimer:

This article has multiple issues.

This article needs additional citations for verification.

This article possibly contains original research.

Jeff Whittaker

Jeff Whittaker (b.1969) is a musician best known for his marriage to 1970s supergroupie Leda Strike, whom he was charged with killing in 1994.[1] Whittaker is a grandson of diplomat Sir Randolph Whittaker KCMB DSO.

Early Life

Whittaker was raised by his grandparents. His teenage mother, Patricia Whittaker, was schizophrenic.[citation needed] Whittaker never knew who his father was.[citation needed] He was expelled from Gordonstoun School after drawing a knife on a member of staff.[citation needed] He claims that his grandfather locked him in a shed for three days following his expulsion, a charge his grandfather denies.[2] Whittaker ran away from home and lived rough for a period during his teens. He also claims to have worked as a gravedigger.[citation needed]

Musical Career

Whittaker played guitar and wrote lyrics for a succession of thrash metal bands in the late 80s and early 90s, including Restorative Art, Devilheart and Necromantic.[3][4]

Personal Life

In 1991 Whittaker met Leda Strike, ex-girlfriend of Jonny Rokeby and Rick Fantoni, who was working for the record company considering signing Necromantic.[citation needed] Whittaker and Strike were married in 1992. In Decembe

r of that year she gave birth to a son, Switch LaVey Bloom Whittaker.[5] In 1993 Whittaker was sacked from Necromantic due to his drug abuse.[citation needed]

When Leda Whittaker died of a heroin overdose in 1994, Whittaker was charged with her murder. He was found not guilty.[6][7][8][9]

In 1995 Whittaker was re-arrested for assault and attempted kidnap of his son, who was in the custody of Whittaker’s grandparents. He received a suspended jail sentence for the assault on his grandfather.[citation needed]

In 1998 Whittaker threatened a coworker with a knife and received a three-month jail sentence.[10][11]

In 2002 Whittaker was jailed for preventing the lawful burial of a body. Karen Abraham, with whom he had been living, was found to have died of heart failure, but Whittaker had kept her body in their shared flat for a month.[12][13][14]

In 2005 Whittaker was jailed for dealing crack cocaine.[15]

Robin read the page twice. Her concentration was poor tonight. Information seemed to slide off the surface of her mind, failing to be absorbed. Parts of Whittaker’s history stood out, glaringly strange. Why would anyone conceal a corpse for a month? Had Whittaker feared that he would be charged with murder again, or was there some other reason? Bodies, limbs, pieces of dead flesh… She sipped the hot chocolate and grimaced. It tasted of flavored dust; in the pressure she felt to be slim in her wedding dress, she had forsworn chocolate in its true form for a month now.

She replaced the mug on her bedside cabinet, returned her fingers to the keyboard and searched for images of Jeff Whittaker trial.

A matrix of photographs filled the screen, showing two different Whittakers, photographed eight years apart and entering and exiting two different courts.

The young Whittaker accused of murdering his wife wore dreadlocks tied back in a ponytail. He had a certain seedy glamour in his black suit and tie, tall enough to see over the heads of most of the photographers crowding around him. His cheekbones were high, his skin sallow and his large eyes set unusually far apart: the kind of eyes that might have belonged to an opium-crazed poet, or a heretic priest.

The Whittaker who had been accused of preventing another woman’s burial had lost his vagrant handsomeness. He was heavier, with a brutal crew cut and a beard. Only the wide-set eyes were unchanged, and the aura of unapologetic arrogance.

Robin scrolled slowly down through the photographs. Soon the pictures of what she thought of as “Strike’s Whittaker” became interspersed with pictures of other Whittakers who had been in trials. A cherubic-looking African-American called Jeff Whittaker had taken his neighbor to court for allowing his dog to repeatedly foul his lawn.

Why did Strike think his ex-stepfather (she found it odd to think of him in those terms, as he was only five years older than Strike) would have sent him the leg? She wondered when Strike had last seen the man he thought had murdered his mother. There was so much she did not know about her boss. He did not like to talk about his past.

Robin’s fingers slid back to the keys and typed Eric Bloom.

The first thing that occurred to her, staring at the pictures of the leather-clad seventies rocker, was that he had Strike’s exact hair: dense, dark and curly. This reminded her of Jacques Burger and Sarah Shadlock, which did nothing to improve her mood. She turned her attention to the other two men whom Strike had mentioned as possible suspects, but she could not remember what their names had been. Donald something? And a funny name beginning with B… Her memory was usually excellent. Strike often complimented her on it. Why couldn’t she remember?

On the other hand, would it matter if she could? There was little you could do on a laptop to find two men who might be anywhere. Robin had not worked for a detective agency for this long without being perfectly aware that those who used pseudonyms, lived rough, favored squats, rented their accommodation or did not add their names to electoral rolls could easily fall through the wide mesh of Directory Enquiries.

After sitting in thought for several more minutes, and with a sense that she was somehow betraying her boss, Robin typed Leda Strike into the search box and then, feeling guiltier than ever, naked.

The picture was black and white. The young Leda posed with her arms over her head, a long cloud of dark hair falling down over her breasts. Even in the thumbnail version, Robin could make out an arch of curly script set above the dark triangle of pubic hair. Squinting slightly, as though rendering the image a little fuzzy somehow mitigated her actions, Robin brought up the full-sized picture. She did not want to have to zoom in and nor did she need to. The words Mistress of were clearly legible.

The bathroom fan whirred into life next door. With a guilty start, Robin shut down the page she had been viewing. Matthew had lately developed a habit of borrowing her laptop and a few weeks previously she had caught him reading her emails to Strike. With this in mind, she reopened the web page, cleared her browsing history, brought up her settings and, after a moment’s consideration, changed her password to DontFearTheReaper. That would scupper him.

As she slid out of bed to go and throw the hot chocolate down the kitchen sink it occurred to Robin that she had not bothered to look up any details about Terence “Digger” Malley. Of course, the police would be far better placed than she or Strike to find a London gangster.

Doesn’t matter, though, she thought sleepily, heading back to the bedroom. It isn’t Malley.

7

Good to Feel Hungry

Of course, if he’d had the sense he was born with—that had been a favorite phrase of his mother’s, vicious bitch that she’d been (You haven’t got the sense you were born with, have you, you stupid little bastard?)—if he’d had the sense he was born with, he wouldn’t have followed The Secretary the very day after handing her the leg. Only it had been difficult to resist the temptation when he did not know when he would next have a chance. The urge to tail her again had grown upon him in the night, to see what she looked like now that she had opened his present.

From tomorrow, his freedom would be severely curtailed, because It would be home and It required his attention when It was around. Keeping It happy was very important, not least because It earned the money. Stupid and ugly and grateful for affection, It had barely noticed that It was keeping him.

Once he’d seen It off to work that morning he had hurried out of the house to wait for The Secretary at her home station, which had been a smart decision, because she hadn’t gone to the office at all. He had thought the arrival of the leg might disrupt her routine and he had been right. He was nearly always right.

He knew how to follow people. At some points today he had been wearing a beanie hat, at others he had been bareheaded. He had stripped to his T-shirt, then worn his jacket and then his jacket turned inside out, sunglasses on, sunglasses off.

The Secretary’s value to him—over and above the value any female had to him, if he could get her alone—was in what he was going to do, through her, to Strike. His ambition to be avenged on Strike—permanently, brutally avenged—had grown in him until it became the central ambition of his life. He had always been this way. If someone crossed him they were marked and at some point, whenever opportunity presented itself, even if it took years, they would get theirs. Cormoran Strike had done him more harm than any other human being ever, and he was going to pay a just price.

He had lost track of Strike for several years and then an explosion of publicity had revealed the bastard: celebrated, heroic. This was the status he had always wanted, had craved. It had been like drinking acid, choking down the fawning articles about the cunt, but he had devoured everything he could, because you needed to know your target if you wanted to cause maximum damage. He intended to inflict as much pain on Cormoran Strike as was—not humanly possible, because he knew himself to be something more than human—as was superhumanly possible. It would go way beyond a knife in the ribs in the dark. No, Strike’s punishment was going to be slower and stranger, frightening, tortuous and finally devastating.

Nobod

y would ever know he’d done it; why should they? He’d escaped without detection three times now: three women dead and nobody had a clue who’d done it. This knowledge enabled him to read today’s Metro without the slightest trace of fear; to feel only pride and satisfaction at the hysterical accounts of the severed leg, to savor the whiff of fear and confusion that rose from each story, the bleating incomprehension of the sheep-like masses who scent a wolf.

All he needed now was for The Secretary to take one short walk down a deserted stretch of road… but London throbbed and teemed with people all day long and here he was, frustrated and wary, watching her as he hung around the London School of Economics.

She was tracking someone too, and it was easy to see who that was. Her target had bright platinum hair extensions and led The Secretary, midafternoon, all the way back to Tottenham Court Road.

The Secretary disappeared inside a pub opposite the lap-dancing club into which her mark had gone. He debated following her inside, but she seemed dangerously watchful today, so he entered a cheap Japanese restaurant with plate-glass windows opposite the pub, took a table near the window and waited for her to emerge.

It would happen, he told himself, staring through his shades into the busy road. He would get her. He had to hold on to that thought, because this evening he was going to have to return to It and the half-life, the lie-life, that allowed the real Him to walk and breathe in secret.

The smeared and dusty London window reflected his naked expression, stripped of the civilized coating he wore to beguile the women who had fallen prey to his charm and his knives. To the surface had risen the creature that lived within, the creature that wanted nothing except to establish its dominance.