Troubled Blood

Strike’s phone rang. He glanced down: Barclay could wait, he decided, and muted it.

Three-quarters of an hour later, the taxi dropped them at the end of Denmark Street, with a takeaway curry and a couple of clinking bottles. Once upstairs, Robin repaired to the toilet on the landing, where she washed dried blood from her nostrils and chin with a wad of wet toilet paper. Two increasingly swollen, red-purplish mounds containing her eyes looked back at her out of the cracked mirror. A blue bruise was spreading over her forehead.

Inside the office, Strike, who’d normally have eaten the curry straight out of the foil tray it had come in, had brought out mis-matched plates, knives and forks, then, because Robin wanted a strong drink, went upstairs to his flat where he had a bottle of his favorite whisky. There was a small freezer compartment in his fridge, where he kept ice packs for his stump in addition to an ice tray. The cubes within this had been there for over a year, because although Strike enjoyed the odd drink of spirits, he generally preferred beer. About to leave the flat with the ice tray, he had second thoughts, and doubled back for one of the ice packs, as well.

“Thank you,” muttered Robin, when Strike reappeared, accepting the proffered ice pack. She was sitting in Pat’s seat, behind the desk where she’d once answered the phone, where Strike had laid out the curry and plates. “And you’d better re-do next week’s rota,” she added, applying the ice pack gingerly to her left eye first, “because there isn’t a concealer in the world that’s going to cover up this mess. I’m not going to have much chance of going unnoticed on surveillance with two black eyes.”

“Robin,” said Strike yet again, “I’m so fucking sorry. I was a tit, I just… What d’you want, vodka, whisky—?”

“Whisky,” she said. “On the rocks.”

Strike poured both of them a triple measure.

“I’m sorry,” he said, yet again, while Robin took a welcome gulp of Scotch, then began helping herself to curry. Strike sat down on the fake leather sofa opposite the desk. “Hurting you’s the last thing—there’s no excuse for—I saw red, I lost it. My father’s other kids have been pestering me for months to go to that fucking party,” said Strike, running his hand through the thick, curly hair that never looked disarranged. He felt she was owed the whole story now: the reason, if not the excuse, that he’d fucked up so badly. “They wanted us to get a group photo taken together for a present. Then Al tells me Rokeby’s got prostate cancer—which doesn’t seem to have prevented him having four hundred mates over for a good old knees-up… I ripped up the invitation without registering where the thing was being held. I should’ve realized Oakden was up to something, I took my eye off the ball, and—”

He downed half his drink in one.

“There’s no excuse for trying to punch him, but everything—these last few months—Rokeby rang me in February. First time ever. Tried to bribe me into meeting him.”

“He tried to bribe you?” said Robin, pressing the ice pack to her other eye, remembering the shouted “go fuck yourself” from the inner office, on Valentine’s Day.

“As good as,” said Strike. “He said he was open to suggestions for helping me out… well, it’s forty years too fucking late for that.”

Strike downed the rest of his whisky, reached for the bottle and poured the same again into his glass.

“When did you last see him?” Robin asked.

“When I was eighteen. I’ve met him twice,” Strike said. “First time was when I was a kid. My mother tried to ambush him with me, outside a recording studio.”

He’d only ever told Charlotte this. Her family was at least as dysfunctional and peculiar as his own, riven with scenes that to other people might’ve been epoch defining—“it was a month before Daddy torched Mummy’s portrait in the hall, and the paneling caught fire, and the fire brigade came, and we all had to be evacuated via the upstairs windows”—but to the Campbells were so normalized they seemed routine.

“I thought he wanted to see me,” said Strike. The shock of what he’d done to Robin, and the whisky scorching his throat, had liberated memories he usually kept locked up tight inside him. “I was seven. I was so fucking excited. I wanted to look smart, so he’d be—so he’d be proud of me. Told my mum to put me in my best trousers. We got outside this studio—my mother had music industry contacts, someone had tipped her off he was going to be there—and they wouldn’t let us in. I thought there’d been some mistake. The bloke on the door obviously didn’t realize my dad wanted to see me.”

Strike drank again. The curry lay cooling between them.

“My mother kicked off. They were threatening her when the band’s manager got out of his car behind us. He knew who my mother was and he didn’t want a public scene. He took us inside, into a room away from the studio.

“The manager tried to tell her it was a dumb move, turning up. If she wanted more money, she should go through lawyers. That’s when I realized my father hadn’t invited us at all. She was just trying to force her way in. I started crying,” said Strike roughly. “Just wanted to go…

“And then, while my mother and Rokeby’s manager are going at it hammer and tongs, Rokeby walks in. He heard shouting on the way back from the bathroom. Probably just done a line; I realized that later. He was already wound up when he came in the room.

“And I tried to smile,” said Strike. “Snot all over my face. I didn’t want him to think I was a whiner. I’d been imagining a hug. ‘There you are, at last.’ But he looked at me like I was nothing. Some fan’s kid, in too-short trousers. My trousers were always too fucking short… I grew too fast…

“Then he clocked my mother, and he twigged. They started rowing. I can’t remember everything they said. I was a kid. The gist was how dare she butt in, she had his lawyer’s contact details, he was paying enough, it was her problem if she pissed it all away, and then he said, ‘This was a fucking accident.’ I thought he meant, he’d come to the studio accidentally or something. But then he looked at me, and I realized, he meant me. I was the accident.”

“Oh God, Cormoran,” said Robin quietly.

“Well,” said Strike, “you’ve got to give him points for honesty. He walked out. We went home.

“For a while afterward, I held out a bit of hope he’d regretted what he’d said. It was hard to let go of the idea he wanted to see me, deep down. But nothing.”

While the sun was far from setting, the room was becoming steadily darker. The high buildings of Denmark Street cast the outer office into shadow at this time of the evening, and neither detective had turned on the interior lights.

“Second time we met,” said Strike, “I made an appointment with his management. I was eighteen. Just got into Oxford. We hadn’t touched any of Rokeby’s money for years. They’d been back to court to put restrictions on what my mother could do with it, because she was a nightmare with cash, just threw it away. Anyway, unbeknownst to me, my aunt and uncle had informed Rokeby I’d got into Oxford. My mother got a letter saying he had no obligations to me now I’d turned eighteen, but reminding her I could use the money that had been accumulating in the bank account.

“I arranged to see him at his manager’s office. He was there with his long-time lawyer, Peter Gillespie. Got a smile off Rokeby this time. Well, I was off his hands financially now, but old enough to talk to the press. Oxford had clearly been a bit of a shock to him. He’d probably hoped, with a background like mine, I’d slide quietly out of sight forever.

“He congratulated me on getting into Oxford and said I had a nice little nest egg all built up now, because my mother hadn’t spent any of it for six, seven years.

“I told him,” said Strike, “to stick his fucking money up his arse and set fire to it. Then I walked out.

“Self-righteous little prick, I was. Didn’t occur to me that Ted and Joan were going to have to stump up if Rokeby didn’t, which is what they did… I only realized that later. But I didn’t take their money long. After my mother died, midway through my second year, I left Oxford and enlisted.”

“Didn’t he contact you after your mum died?” asked Robin quietly.

“No,” said Strike, “or if he did, I never got it. He sent me a note when my leg got blown off. I’ll bet that put the fear of God into him, hearing I’d been blown up. Probably worried sick about what the press might make of it all.

“Once I was out of Selly Oak, he tried to give me the money again. He’d found out I was trying to start the agency. Charlotte’s friends knew a couple of his kids, which is how he got wind of it.”