Troubled Blood

“Who was the pearly king on the phone there? We could hear his cockney a mile off.”

“Guy called Shanker,” said Strike. “I’ve told you about him. My mum scraped him off the street one night when he’d been stabbed. He adopted us.”

Strike sipped his pint, wondering how Polworth and Shanker would get on, in the unlikely event of them ever meeting. He fancied they might end up punching each other. They seemed to Strike like pieces from entirely different jigsaw puzzles: no point of connection. At the mention of stabbing, Polworth had glanced at Jack, but lowering his pint Strike said,

“Don’t worry about him. He wants to be a Red Cap, like me and Ted.”

Jack beamed some more. He was having a great time.

“Can I try some of that beer?” he asked his uncle.

“Don’t push it,” said Strike.

“Look at this,” said Polworth, pointing at a page in the newspaper he’d picked up. “Westminster trying to bully the Scots, the bast—”

Strike cleared his throat. Jack giggled.

“Sorry,” said Polworth. “But come on. Telling them they can’t keep the pound if they vote for independence? ’Course they’ll keep the pound. It’s in everyone’s interests…”

He talked on for the next ten minutes about small nationalism, the obvious arguments for both Scottish and Cornish independence and the idiocy of those who opposed them, until Jack looked glazed and Strike, as a last resort, dragged the conversation back to football. Arsenal, as he’d foreseen, had lost to defending champions Bayern Munich, and he didn’t doubt the second leg would see them knocked out. He and Ted had watched the game together and done a good job of pretending they cared about the result. Strike permitted Polworth to pass censorious comment on the foul that had seen Szcz?esny sent off, and politics was mercifully dropped.

Strike thought about Polworth later that night, as he lay in the dark on the horsehair sofa again, unable to sleep. His tiredness now had a feverishness about it, exacerbated by the aching of his body, the perpetual strain of being here, in this overcrowded house, waiting for the tiny body upstairs to give up.

In this near fever state, a jumble of ideas circulated in Strike’s mind. He thought of categories and boundaries, of those we want to create and enforce, and those we seek to escape or destroy. He remembered the fanatic glint in Polworth’s eye as he argued for a harder boundary between his county and the rest of England. He fell asleep thinking about the spurious groupings of astrology, and dreamed of Leda, laying out her tarot cards in the Norfolk commune of long ago.

Strike was woken at five by his own aching body. Knowing that Ted would be awake soon, he got up and dressed, ready to take over the bedside vigil while his uncle ate breakfast.

Sure enough, hearing Strike’s footstep on the upstairs landing, Ted emerged from the bedroom in his dressing gown.

“Just made you tea,” whispered Strike. “It’s in the pot in the kitchen. I’ll sit with her for a bit.”

“You’re a good lad,” whispered Ted, clapping Strike on the arm. “She’s asleep now, but I had a little chat with her at four. Most she’s said for days.”

The talk with his wife seemed to have cheered him. He set off downstairs for his tea and Strike let himself quietly into the familiar room, taking up his position on the hard-backed chair beside Joan.

The wallpaper hadn’t been changed, so far as Strike knew, since Ted and Joan had moved into the house, their only home since he’d left the army, in the town where both had grown up. Ted and Joan seemed not to notice that the house had grown shabby over the decades: for all that Joan was meticulous about cleanliness, she’d equipped and decorated the house once and seemed never to have seen any need to do so again. The paper was decorated with small bunches of purple flowers, and Strike could remember tracing geometric shapes between them with his forefinger as a small child, when he climbed into bed with Ted and Joan early in the morning, when both were still sleepy and he wanted breakfast and a trip to the beach.

Twenty minutes after he’d sat down, Joan opened her eyes and looked at Strike so blankly that he thought she didn’t know him.

“It’s me, Joan,” he said quietly, moving his chair a little closer to her bed and switching on the lamp, with its fringed shade. “Corm. Ted’s having breakfast.”

Joan smiled. Her hand was a tiny claw, now. The fingers twitched. Strike took it into his own. She said something he couldn’t hear, and he lowered his large head to her face.

“What did you say?”

“… you’re… good man.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” muttered Strike.

He held her hand in a light clasp, scared of putting pressure on it. The arcus senilis outlining the irises of her pale eyes made the blue seem more faded than ever. He thought of all the times he could have visited, and hadn’t. All those missed opportunities to call. All those times he’d forgotten her birthday.

“… helping people…”

She peered up at him and then, making a supreme effort, she whispered,

“I’m proud of you.”

He wanted to speak, but something was blocking his throat. After a few seconds, he saw her eyelids drooping.

“I love you, Joan.”

The words came out so hoarsely they were almost inaudible, but he thought she smiled as she sank back into a sleep from which she was never to wake.



45



Of auncient time there was a springing well,

From which fast trickled forth a siluer flood,

Full of great vertues, and for med’cine good.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Robin was still at the office when Strike called that evening with the news that Joan had died.

“I’m sorry about this, but I think I’m going to have to stay down here until we get this funeral sorted,” said Strike. “There’s a lot to do and Ted’s in pieces.”

He’d just shared Joan’s plan for her funeral with Ted and Lucy, thereby reducing both of them to sobs at the kitchen table. Ted’s tears were for the poignancy of his wife making arrangements for his own comfort and relief, as she’d done for the fifty years of their marriage, and for the news that she’d wanted, at the end, to enter the sea and wait for him there. In Lucy’s case, the sobs were for the lost possibility of a grave she’d hoped to visit and tend. Lucy filled her days with voluntary obligations: they gave purpose and form to a life she was determined would never be like her flighty biological mother’s.

“No problem,” Robin reassured him. “We’re coping fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Completely sure.”

“There’s a backlog at the crematorium, because of the floods,” said Strike. “Funeral’s penciled in for March the third.”

This was the day Robin was planning to spend in Leamington Spa, so she could attend the opening of Paul Satchwell’s exhibition. She didn’t tell Strike this: she could tell that he had limited mental capacity right now for anything other than Joan, and his life in Cornwall.

“Don’t worry,” she repeated. “I’m so sorry, Cormoran,” she added.

“Thanks,” said Strike. “I’d forgotten what it’s like. Planning a funeral. I’ve already had to referee one argument.”

After he’d shared Joan’s plans for her send-off, and Lucy and Ted had mopped up their tears, Ted had suggested they ask mourners for donations to the Macmillan Cancer Support in lieu of flowers.

“… but Lucy says Joan would’ve wanted flowers,” Strike told Robin. “I’ve suggested we say either. Ted says that’ll mean people do both and they can’t afford it, but fuck it. Lucy’s right. Joan would want flowers, and as many as possible. That’s how she always judged other people’s funerals.”

After they’d bidden each other goodbye, Robin sat for a while at the partners’ desk, wondering whether it would be appropriate for the agency to send flowers to Strike’s aunt’s funeral. She’d never met Joan: she worried that it would seem odd, or intrusive, to send condolences. She remembered how, when she’d offered to pick Strike up from Joan’s house in St. Mawes the previous summer, he’d quickly cut her off, erecting, as ever, a firm boundary between Robin and his personal life.